skonen_blades | Entries tagged with cryogenics

The priest wheezed on the other side of the confessional screen. It wasn’t uncommon. Cyrogenia malathusmia. Freezer lung, we called. Or the holy cough. Most people that traveled by cryo in the sleepships ended up with it. That meant that the priests had it.

“Forgive me, father, for I have sinned. It has been six weeks since my last confession.” I started. I heard the priest let out a rattling sigh and shift position.

The priests believed that transporters stripped a person of their soul. When a body is transported, it is completely destroyed and then reassembled on the other end. Technically, you die. All holy men only transported by cryoship. Popesicles, my dad called them.

“Twice I disobeyed my father this week and willfully looked the elder settler statues in the eye in the town’s main square. I have had wanton thoughts about two of the miners that came here for work. I was approached by the whorehouse manager and turned him down. He said he’d ask again on my fifteenth birthday. I was scared but also excited.”

I’ve never been anywhere except here. Newgodsville, Tantalina, Zeta-2KB7. A rock big enough for one town, my daddy used to say. Before he was killed in an evac when I was 8.

The priests wouldn’t hear the confessions of workers that were brought here by transporter which meant he didn’t hear a lot of people. We were far away from most systems but rich in tungsten ore. Mostly ‘porters with a few dollars to stake a claim came here, not sleepers. I’d heard that to get here, he’d been on one ship for nearly fifty years, sleeping in the cold. And I’d heard that this was his fifth posting. I’m not good at math but that meant he might be two hundred and fifty years old.

I found him handsome. That should have been part of my confession but I couldn’t ever tell him. That’s why I kept doing bad things so that I’d have to confess.

“I took the lord’s name in vain twice down by the river when I lost the washing. And I stole a toffee stick from the general store on my way here.”

Mustering up my courage, I stuck the toffee stick out and around the divider into his booth. After what seemed like half an hour, he took it. I heard him laugh on the other side of the screen and I heard him sigh as he put the toffee into his mouth.

“Thank you my child.” He said. “Say three hail marys and come back to see me whenever you want.”

Smiling, I pushed my curtain back and left the booth. I stepped into the green twilight of our never-dark night, Tantalina’s rings sweeping across the sky.

I skipped home.

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Tonight! Live and in person! A concert centuries in the making! Musicians from bygone eras playing their number one hits on Earth Prime at the Penndale Arena!

What most people don’t understand about musicians and comedians that tour all the time is that they crave the isolation, she thought as she woke up. They like the sense of detachment. Spending one night here, two nights there and then moving on is how they like it. Outwardly gregarious but inwardly private, they enjoy the rootless feeling of being constantly in transit.

They like to witness and entertain the world but when it comes to their own satisfaction, they prefer the pursuit of their art, not human contact.

The coagulant and accelerator worked their painful way through Janey Starr’s veins. She was one such musician. Janey was stirring to wakefulness after 87 years of sleep. Aside from touring the honky tonks, bars and dives of what was the United States when she went to sleep the last time, Janey Starr had two number one singles that had made her a large pile of money. Enough to go time-touring. Enough to do cryo-concerts. Enough to do popsicle gigs.

It was a pretty sweet deal. Go to sleep, wake up and everyone you knew is either dead or ancient. No baggage. All Janey had to do was a contract concert tour with other has-beens from back in the day, spend a hefty per diem in what she saw as the future, have a little vacation in the new world, and then go back to sleep to be woken up in another double-handful of decades to do the same thing. It was a lot like touring from small town to small town when she was younger except that it was through time.

It was a way to be permanently on the road and bringing her art to appreciative fans, even if it was more of the ironic retro museum type of appreciation.

When the pins and needles had stopped caressing her body, when her muscles twitched to life and she took her first gasping steps out of the cryotube and lit a cigarette from the fresh pack beside her new clothes, when she had her two whiskey shots and her baloney sandwich on sourdough as per the rider in contract, when she had picked up her guitar and tried out the fine motor control tests on the chords, only then did she notice the red envelope taped to the small desk in the middle of her waking chamber.

She opened it:

October 20th, 2144

Dear Janey Starr (nee Alice Winthrope)

Further to a shareholder’s/publicity meeting held on January 16th, 2137, we regretfully confirm that your employment with us is terminated from October 20th, 2144 with immediate effect.
This is due to your position having to be made redundant, and in no way reflects your performance of your job, which has been entirely satisfactory/excellent.

The last ‘Legends of Yesteryear’ concert was not entirely sold out and as you know, popular music has continued to evolve as the decades go by. In a ranking of longevity popularity, you have come to be on the bottom of the list. We’ve had to add higher-grossing artists to the top of the bill and remove the least popular acts from the bottom. (see attached studies and lists in appendix 1) That was you and three others. The other three are not from your time frame so their names will not be familiar to you. It’s a testament to your talent that you’ve lasted as long as you have with us.

As stated in the minutes of the meeting (included here), the terms of your redundancy are as follows.
A payment to the order of 800 NWD dollars adjusted for deflation (see appendix 2a for your time frame equivalent). An iStar credit rating boost of 11 per cent (see appendix 2b for your time frame equivalent). Class 4 mating, smoking, and drinking privileges. (see appendix 2c for your time frame equivalent). Free access to your savings from your initial investments with your original bank. (see appendix 3 for changes to your bank’s interest rates and company holdings during your storage).

Don’t hesitate to get in touch with us for a letter of reference. Please vacate this cryochamber immediately. Make sure to take all your personal belongings. Temporary housing and employment options will be provided for you for one month.

A representative will be waiting outside the chamber for you. Have an enjoyable life.

Yours sincerely

Acquisition Entertainment Star Services Incorporated

Well, though Janey Starr, it’s not the first time I’ve hit the ground running. All I need to do now was write some new hit songs and sing them. Find a few bars close to where I live and show them my stuff.

She stubbed out her cigarette not knowing that the pack in her chamber was the last pack in existence. She felt the taste of whiskey in her mouth not knowing that there was no alcohol like it left on Earth. She left with her backpack full of six outfits not knowing that matter converters could create any clothing she desired now. She strapped her guitar to her back not knowing that all music was created with brainwaves these days.

It was time for a comeback tour.

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Bringing the sleepers out of cold storage was always a difficult process.

The actual thawing out was almost fault-free. That was no problem. The problem was the emotional and psychological fallout that happened when they tried to join in with the new society.

The old ones, the ones that were dying of cancer or whatever disease was incurable at the time, are the ones that adjust with a minimum of fuss. The fact that they’re now alive is the most important thing to them. Everything’s gravy after that. They can be rejuvenated, shunted into new skin that suits the environment, and put to work. They don’t care that everyone they know is dead or that this new future is an alien place. It’s an adventure for them.

Suicide rates for them only hover around sixty per cent.

It’s the idealists that we hate, the ones that voluntarily went under, going the only direction in time that was available to them. There were a lot of people in the past that believed that they were born in the wrong century. They believed that they would have been way happier in the middle ages or on a starship sometime in the future. They were usually meek assistant managers in retail stores or online-warrior data-entry drones not at home with their own egos.

These are the ones we have the most trouble with.

They immediately demand to see who’s in charge. They want to see the future. They want to see the planet. They want to see the space ships. They want to taste the cool future food. They want. They want. They want.

They didn’t have what it took to enjoy life to the fullest in their era so they expect it to be different here. When they’re shown their cell after being taken out of the Awakening Compound, they start to complain. When they’re put into the new body construct that can withstand the vacuum and the solar radiation, they complain more. When they’re told that they need to work, they complain loudly.

When they’re told what happens if they don’t stop complaining, they stop complaining.

They usually only last a few months before cutting their tethers and hopping out into space, dying silently if we’re lucky, sobbing into their intercoms on widecast if we’re not. In the last twenty decades, only two have lasted more than a year. They have no compunction about throwing their life away after the Big Disappointment.

We have a joke. We say that there’s a reason why it’s called ‘cry’ogenics. That always makes us laugh. It helps us not to feel cruel when they start wailing and sniffling. It helps us not to feel like murderers just for waking them up.

Life’s a disappointing one-way trip. It’s an immutable law for the universe. Even in the future, there’s no exception to that rule. These fools thought it would be better down the line. My heart used to go out to them but not any more.

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Ghosts are real.

We were looking for a different kind of energy when we saw the old lady in the middle of the laboratory. The other scientists and I were trying to invent a scanner that would detect dark matter at an atomic level. We turned the machine on and scanned our test quarters. Halfway through the machine’s humming sweep of the room, the old lady appeared.

She looked like you’d expect. Checkered dress, hair in a bun, around 80 years old. She was just standing in the corner doing nothing. Dave screamed like a seven year old girl and dropped his test tubes.

The next five years are a blur. The invention was kept a secret. The lady was identified as Gladys Norbrother from Palm Springs. She had died in the early 1900s. Further research was done. We figured out how to localize her energy field and transport her. We scanned her head specifically and found that by identifying what parts of her spectral brain were showing the most activity we could read her mind. The only problem was that she was senile and on top of that she was in a dream state.

We found other ghosts. We read their minds as well. Even the younger ghosts had impenetrable dense images going through their minds that made no sense.

It wasn’t until my Jessica died that a breakthrough was reached. She was my wife. I think this is the point in time where I officially lost all of my friends and became known as a mad scientist. When the cancer had advanced to a point beyond curing, we cryogenically froze her and put her in a fridge coffin in the research sub basement.

One night when I was drunk, I scanned the room with the dark matter scanner and there she was standing beside the frozen bed her body was lying on. I screamed and passed out. She was still there when I woke. I had sobered up a little bit by this point and the scientist in me took over. I did what we did to the other patients. The speakers nearly exploded. The input was exponentially higher since she was technically alive. She was more here that the other faded spirits we had examined. I got the same shuffled dazzle of images and sensory impressions that we had received from the other experiments except for one crucial difference.

I could sort of understand what they meant.

There was the house she grew up in. There was a flash of the miscarriage. There was an entire minute and a half of the afternoon before we got married. There was a house I had never seen but I think it was her father on the porch. This was all mixed in with a hundred abstract things I didn’t recognize but knowing her as well as I did, it was like I could sort of guess what she was feeling. Like when she said she didn’t want to talk but I knew she did. It was all intuitive.

I knew what she was saying. She wasn’t scared.

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When I died, I had my head stored in a cryogenic storage container.

Last week, my granddaughter had me unfrozen. I feel like a caveman.

My granddaughter is over three hundred years old and is on her fifth body. A female one this time. I was given a new body as well. The effort needed to cure my old body was more than just growing me a new one from scratch. I’m 27 now and in great shape. So is everyone else. This is a city of super heroes. It’s taking a lot out of me to not be terrified of falling over.

The gravity is lower here. We’re not on earth. According to the records they’ve let me access, Earth disappeared over fifty years ago. A weapon was created during a war and the result folded earth away in a whole other pocket dimension. It was a hard time for humanity. It was like having a parent die.

But the needs of the everyday soon intruded and life moved on.

I was left in a will to my son. He took me with him to the new world. I should be thankful to him for that. A young man allowed only a few things leaving to the new frontier and he takes his father’s head just in case. I’m flattered that I was one of his prize possessions. I wonder what kind of comfort my frozen head could give him.

A cruel irony, then, that he’s dead now and I’m back to life. They’ve let me read about his life. He settled here well and gave birth to my grand-daughter. He died soon after.

He did not want to be frozen. I wonder about that. He lugged me around everywhere and then opted not to be frozen himself. We’d be shaking hands right now if he had chosen that path. It confuses me and hurts me a little. I don’t know why he did that.

They say that they’ll let me out in a while. My grand daughter has promised to take me to a few of the sex clubs and high rises. I’m nervous. I don’t think I’ll ever fully adapt to this society and everyone’s technically immortal now. I have forever to adjust.

There’s a knock at the door.

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