The Ups and Downs of Being Dead

Acknowledgments

To Kristen Weber, my editor: thanks once again for your
patient, but firm direction.

To my sons, William and Taylor, my proofreading husband
Bill, my family and friends: thanks for your love and support. I could not have
finished this without you. (Well, and the chocolate.)

To Ben Best at the Cryonics Institute in Michigan: thank you
for allowing me to attend your annual meeting. I was truly inspired by your
members, and deeply honored to meet Robert Ettinger, Father of Cryonics, and
author of
The Prospect of Immortality
.

And to Mike Darwin: Are you still out there?

Robert’s legs buckled, refusing to support him. He gripped
the back of an armchair, a muted blue and beige plaid no doubt intended to
sooth visitors during their death vigil. His body swayed like a drunken
teenager on his first binge. The walls of the room seemed to be tilting.

The plaid design of the chair blurred in and out of focus,
heightening his dizziness. Unable to raise his head to escape the wavering
lines, Robert closed his eyes.

Just a moment ago, searing pain had racked his body. He’d stiffened
every muscle to endure that latest wave of torture. But now as he hovered in
the corner of the hospice room, his body was pleasantly numb.

“On my count, one-two-
three
.”

A voice seemed to be commanding Robert to do something.
Straighten up? Snap out of it? He pried his heavy eyelids open.

Across the room, two staffers in white lab coats gripped the
lifeless arms and legs of Robert’s body and lowered it into what looked like a
white plastic coffin. The feeling of disconnect intensified. Robert raised his
right hand in front of his face, turning it to view both sides. It sure seemed
like he was standing in the corner.

The petite blonde running the show was Anne. She wasn’t part
of the hospice staff. She was here strictly for retrieval.

Her assistant was a burly jock with hairy arms and sloping
shoulders, the muscle of the operation. While the jock wheeled a big cooler of
ice closer to Robert’s body in the white coffin, Anne started an IV, then
twisted open the port on a bag of fluid suspended on a pole. The fluid was for
damage control, Robert had been told. If the blood didn’t continue to flow
freely through the brain, too much calcium built up, neurons got damaged, free
radicals went wild, blah, blah, blah. Robert couldn’t remember all he’d been
told about the procedure, but basically the fluid was supposed to keep a lot of
damage from happening to his body during transport.

He tried to massage his temples with his fingertips, but got
no relief from the muddle in his head. He’d just been whispering something to
Anne when all the bells and beepers went off.

It was about the smell in the room. The necrotic stench of
cancer was everywhere, a permanent odor in his nose that he could almost taste.
He’d been wondering why someone on the staff hadn’t noticed and at least
sprayed some kind of deodorizer or opened a window to freshen the air. Now he
couldn’t smell anything.

Anne nestled Robert’s head into a separate compartment of
the plastic coffin, taking extra care to ease the neck into a recess similar to
the one used by the shampoo girl at the salon where Robert used to get his hair
styled.

Robert glanced at the clock on the bedside table. 8:35AM.
Amanda was probably still sleeping, with that goofy chin strap cinched up tight
to ward off sagging jowls, and her lotion-slathered hands tucked into her
special gloves. She’d refused to come to the hospice. Instead, she‘d made one
last stab at making him feel like a moron for doing this.

The clacking of ice distracted Robert, and he moved closer
to watch Anne shovel the frozen cubes around his head until his face was
covered. Then she fitted a white plastic lid in place and clamped it shut. Fear
lurched in Robert’s belly again.

As Anne worked, the jock fastened an apparatus across the
white coffin at chest level. The contraption looked like a motor from an ice
cream maker, only instead of locking a paddle into the underside of the motor,
the guy popped in a big suction cup. With a rubber-gloved hand, he smeared
clear goo onto Robert’s lifeless chest, and then started what was called ‘the
thumper’.

When the suction cup pressed down on the chest, it forced
the heart of the dearly departed to circulate thinned blood through dead
arteries, and when the suction cup pulled up, it expanded the chest, drawing
air into non-functioning lungs. They called it cardio-pulmonary support. CPS,
not CPR. There would be no resuscitation today.

Once both staffers completed their tasks, they piled blue
ice packs around the torso and limbs. Anne checked her watch. “Let’s roll.”

Unlocking the wheels, the jock steered the white coffin out
of the hospice room. The steady suck and woosh of the thumper reverberated down
the short hallway to double doors that slid open automatically. Anne stepped
into the back of the ambulance to guide the box, while the jock shoved the
human ice chest inside. Robert climbed aboard, and heard the doors bang shut
behind him.

Euphoria settled over him, a giddiness that begged for
giggles. It was over: the chemo that left him weak and nauseous, the pain that
no amount of drugs could eliminate, those phony tears Amanda always managed to
conjure up at the clinic, even the alarming clumps of his hair snagged in his
comb. Done. Finished.

But not dead. Like Alex Darden had said, “You won’t be
deceased, Robert. You’ll be cryonically preserved.”

Geez, he hoped this worked.

Without sirens or flashing lights, the ambulance turned into
a non-descript industrial park at the edge of town, and drove to the back where
the Cryonics Center sat unobtrusively between a custom plastics fabricator and
a commercial printing shop. Robert had intentionally arranged to spend his
final days at the hospice across town so he could be transported quickly to the
center.

As he’d lain in a morphine haze waiting for the cancer to
finish him off, he’d deluded himself with fantasies that Alex Darden would come
to the hospice to sit at his bedside. Even that morning, as Robert felt his
life slipping away, he’d kept an eye on the door, willing Alex to appear.

Now that the pain and delirium had faded, Robert understood
his obsession with seeing Alex one last time. He’d wanted the reassurance that
he was doing the right thing. In hindsight, he was damn lucky their paths had
crossed a year ago.

They were both flying to Atlanta. Robert was heading home.
Alex was on his way to a lecture at Georgia Tech. No sooner had Alex buckled
his seat belt, than he had his laptop out, clicking away at the keyboard, his
knee bouncing, his head nodding as though he were deep in conversation.

He seemed totally oblivious to passengers shuffling by on
their way to coach, and to Robert, who sat sipping the scotch he’d requested
the moment he stepped on board.

Out of the corner of his eye, Robert glimpsed pictures of
dissected animals and what looked like frozen organs on Alex’s laptop. When a
picture of a naked man on a stainless steel gurney popped onto the screen,
Robert choked on his cocktail.

With feigned surprise, Alex raised his head and flashed a
smile at Robert. He reminded Robert of Freddie Mercury from Queen with his
dark, bushy mustache and toothy grin.

“Didn’t mean to shock you,” Alex had said. “I guess I’ve
become immune to all this.”

“What are you?” Robert asked. “A coroner?”

“No. Actually, I’m a cryoengineer. I’m on my way to Georgia
Tech to discuss molecular nanotechnology.”

All it took was Robert’s clueless expression to keep Alex
going. “With nanotechnology, we’ll be able to build and repair anything, cure
cancer, reverse aging, even teach the body to re-grow a limb.”

By this time, Alex was projecting to anyone in first class
interested in listening. “But the most exciting application is revival of a
preserved human. We’ll be able to bring back the dead.”

The old man across the aisle was the first to jump into the
conversation. “Like Ted Williams.”

“Exactly!” Alex beamed as he scanned the seats nearby to see
who else was eavesdropping. Then he leaned out into the aisle, toward the old
man. “You might be surprised at the number of scientists and VIP’s who have
already signed up to be cryonically preserved.”

“I don’t get it, though,” the old man said. “Won’t Ted
Williams be too old to play baseball when he comes back?”

“No!” Alex’s voice carried all the way up to the flight
attendant who was preparing to give her preflight demonstration. Her head
snapped up to see if she had a disturbance on her hands. But most of the
passengers in first class were engrossed in Alex’s impromptu presentation.

“If we can rebuild tissue and repair failing organs,’ Alex
said, “Mr. Williams can potentially have a whole new career sometime in the
future.”

At that point, Robert had turned to the window to watch as
the airplane taxied to the runways. He’d heard rumors of Einstein’s brain in a
freezer somewhere. Walt Disney, too. It all sounded like a get-rich-quick
scheme designed to separate suckers from their retirement funds.

But the gentleman across the aisle was really pumping Alex
for information. No doubt, the old man felt the hands of time around his neck
and was willing to consider any option. It sounded like a good idea for a
science fiction movie.

“How long before you can bring these people back?” the old
man asked.

“The simple truth is, we don’t know.” Alex let his statement
hang in the air for just a second. “We do know that we have to be able to work
on the atomic or molecular level, and currently we don’t have that technology.
Like Ralph Merkle says, with our present technology, we’re basically trying to
build Lego castles wearing boxing gloves. But someday we’ll be able to
reassemble cells and tissues one molecule at a time.”

An announcement from the captain instructed the flight
attendants to take their seats, and the airplane streaked down the runway. But
the moment the plane leveled off, Alex reeled his audience back in. He leaned
into the aisle to address everyone.

“Remember back in the sixties when they first built
computers that took up a whole room? If you’d asked one of those guys, ‘How
soon will I be able to carry a computer around in my pocket?’, he would have
looked at you like you were crazy! Then he would have said the same thing as
me. ‘I don’t know’.”