“Dad, Dad, are you all right?”
Someone grabbed me and dragged me from the plane onto the ground.
“Talk to me, Dad, please!”
The blurry apparition above me pulled back far enough that I could make out Colt’s face. Tears streamed down Colt’s bloodstained cheeks as he struggled to perform chest compressions on me. A thin smile washed across my lips as I slipped away.
2.
The blood surged through my body, filling the narrow reaches of craggy capillaries that had long lain dormant. I awoke to an intense burning and itching as nerve endings sprang to life violently beneath my leather dry skin. A group of wooden Asian men in pressed ivory lab coats stood around the bed. They shared observations with one another in short powerful bursts of Chinese. I was in too much pain to react to their repressed enthusiasm.
“Can you hear me? Do you hear me, Mister Brooyear?” one of the men asked, flicking a flashlight on and off into each of my eyes.
I struggled to move. My body twitched like a seizure, sending a burning sensation deep into my muscles. This spasm further excited the men who leaned over me and watched my eyes dance about. The pain grew excruciating. I felt as if I was burning alive. A hoarse guttural yell erupted from deep inside. The men leapt back nervously. The man with the flashlight barked an order. Another man pulled a syringe from his pocket and injected the contents into one of the many tubes protruding from my body. Four agonizing seconds later, I lost consciousness.
3.
I awoke comfortably a few days later in a stark room that was blindingly white from floor to ceiling. Roughly the size of a three-car garage, the room was far too large for its contents—several pieces of unfamiliar medical equipment and the bed I lay in. A sizeable pane of observation glass separated the room from the outside hallway. I sat up and rubbed my eyes. My skin felt moist and supple. I was surprised I could move my arms back and forth with scarcely a hint of soreness. I was dressed in a shiny, metallic gown that was loose and soft.
The door opened with a loud beep, and a short Caucasian guy in blue scrubs walked in. He looked to be in his early thirties. His large brown cow eyes matched his frumpy chestnut hair, and his puffy cheeks overpowered his small, flat chin.
“How does it feel to be alive?” the man asked.
“Never known anything different.”
“Sense of humor intact.” The man smiled at me and leaned awkwardly against the bed.
“What’s so funny about that?”
“You know, you have never known anything different . . .”
“What are you trying to say? Did I have to be resuscitated after the plane crash or something?”
“Oh, OK, now I understand.” The man’s cheerful expression turned serious, but I wasn’t sure why. He sat down at the foot of the bed.
“Your name is Royce, right?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m Alex.”
“Nice to meet you, Alex. Now are you going to tell me what in the hell happened to me?”
“I can tell you what I know about your case. If you need more information than that, I suppose you can try speaking with the doctors.”
“So you’re not a doctor?”
“No. I’m a technician.”
“What kind of technician?”
“Cryogenics.”
I didn’t like hearing that word. I lost focus and found myself staring right through Alex.
“Do you realize you signed up for cryopreservation?”
I nodded slightly.
“You died after a plane crash. You suffered a heart attack.”
“But I’m not dead.”
“Not anymore. We brought you back to life.”
“Are you serious?”
“Absolutely. You were frozen for . . .” Alex stared at the ceiling while he performed the math in his head, “a good thirty-five years.”
“Holy . . .” My thoughts evaporated, and the room started spinning. Then it hit me. I looked at Alex and burst into hysterical laughter.
“You son of a bitch!” I gave Alex a playful shove on the shoulder. “You’re fucking with me, aren’t you? Who put you up to this? Was it Gary? That guy never misses an opportunity to bust my balls over wanting to get frozen.”
I looked around the room. “That bastard really went all out.” I pinched the front of my gown and lifted the fabric toward Alex. “I mean, look at this thing!”
The men in the white coats now stood outside in the hallway. As soon as Alex saw them, his expression turned dire and his voice stern. “This is not a practical joke.”
“Come on, man. I’ve been through a lot. Just let me see my wife and son.”
“Listen to me. When they come in here, do not tell them what I told you. I’m not even supposed to be talking to you. Just do everything they say, and you’ll be fine.”
I rolled my eyes.
“Just do what they say, all right? I’ll come back later. I promise.”
Alex jumped up and started to fiddle with the machine next to my bed. He shuffled out with his head down as soon as the men in the white coats entered the room. At first, they stood near the doorway and marveled like I was some kind of exotic animal. One man pointed at me and shared an observation that sent the group into a flurry of debate. They repeated this dumbfounding cycle multiple times before approaching me.
“Feeling better, Mister Brooyear?” the man with the flashlight asked. The others deferred to him.
“Better than when?”
“The last time we saw you, of course.”
“Yes, you could say that. Seeing as how I’m no longer on fire.”
My irritation vexed the man in charge. “Yes, an unfortunate complication of reanimation. A small price to pay for being alive, wouldn’t you agree?”
“Not so sure about that. I mean, I didn’t go to medical school or anything, but I never heard of anyone burning alive just because they had a heart attack.”
“Mister Brooyear—”
“Royce. You can call me Royce.”
The man in charge gave me a caustic smile. “Yes . . . Royce.” His tone was acerbic. “Your demeanor is precisely what I would expect in an American from your era. Indeed, you did not study medicine. You were a capitalist, were you not?”
“Still am. Aren’t we all?” My comment spawned sideways glances and laughter from the men in the ivory coats.
“Well then, it appears that you will have to rely on the care we provide. And you are in remarkable condition for a man who has been cryopreserved for nearly forty years.” He looked at his minions. They nodded in approval. “Your vital signs are perfect, and we were able to return your skin’s elasticity. How does it feel, your skin?”
“Ya, about this whole charade you’ve got going on here. Don’t you think it’s a little much?”
“I know nothing about this charade you speak of,” the man in charge bellowed.
He and his cohort seemed confused and even offended by my comment. This confused me.
“Look, dude, I’m not buying it. I know I haven’t been frozen and brought back to life.”
“This is not a game, Mister Brooyear. You are a zenith of scientific discovery. You are the first cryonic ever to be successfully reanimated. Schoolchildren millennia from now will learn your name.”
The dramatic bullshit he was feeding me only strengthened my resolve that this nightmare was all just an elaborate prank. “So you say I was dead for four decades, and you brought me back to life. What year does that make this?”
“Two thousand forty-seven.”
“Ok, Doc. If it’s twenty forty-seven, then where are all the cool gizmos? Show me a flying car.”
“A what?” One of the other men whispered in the man in charge’s ear. “Uh, now I understand, Mister Brooyear.”
“Royce.”
“You want me to prove to you that this is the future, Royce?”
I nodded.
The man in charge reached into the pocket of his lab coat and
pulled out a small metallic cylinder, the size of an AA battery. He pointed the cylinder at me, and it emitted a three-dimensional hologram of an anatomical male.
“You see this, Mister Brooyear? This is an image of you. I can see every aspect of your anatomy. You see this? This is your skin. Now, this, this is your skeletal structure. You broke your right femur as an adolescent, did you not?”
I nodded. He adjusted the position of his index finger on the cylinder, and the hologram displayed my internal organs.
“Here is your heart, and these are your coronary arteries.” The image zoomed in on an artery and passed right through the arterial wall. The perspective was amazing, and the image crystal clear. It was as if we were cruising along inside my artery. “See how they are free of plaque? When we corrected your condition, we gave you a fresh start.” He adjusted the perspective. “Now look here, you know what this is?”
“Looks like a lung.”
“Correct. You see this dense mass here? You have a small hamartoma.”
“Terrific. So why didn’t you use your super science to take that thing out?”
“You are a smart one. The tumor is benign. It will not be causing you any difficulties.” He shut the hologram down with a look of pure satisfaction and returned it to his pocket. He stared at me and folded his arms. “You did not have anything like that in twenty ten, now did you?”
“Actually, doc, I’m not impressed. I saw one of those things in Star Wars.”
He reeled back. A minion gasped audibly, and others shook their heads. The man who had explained the flying car reference leaned in deferentially toward the man in charge to explain Star Wars. He was furious. He reminded me of a cartoon character who was about to boil over and shoot steam from his ears. Pushing his buttons was a real treat. I leaned back comfortably against my pillow.
“You want to see something special, do you?”
He barked orders at the history buff who scurried out of the room. The man in charge stood there stoically. It made me uneasy to see how quickly he’d grown calm.
The history buff burst back into the room holding a scalpel and a handheld device that looked like a credit card reader. He handed them to the man in charge who nodded at the others. They held me down. He stepped on a lever on the floor. Wide plastic straps lashed out from beneath the bed and wrapped around my shoulders, waist, and knees to pin me to the mattress. He stretched a rubber surgical glove over each hand slowly and deliberately.
“I am going to show you something that you will never forget.” He took the scalpel from the history buff and placed it gingerly on the thickest part of my right forearm.
“What are you doing?” I screamed.
“Welcome to the future,” he said with a caustic smile.
I watched in horror as he pushed on the scalpel until it punctured the skin. A stream of blood ran down my elbow onto the bleached bed sheet. I felt a surge of adrenaline and struggled violently to free myself from the straps. It was useless.
“Please, no, no. Stop!” I pleaded.
He didn’t even look up. He dragged the scalpel down the length of my forearm, stopping just above the wrist. The arm pulled apart on either side of the blade, exposing white pustules of fat above thick sinewy braids of muscle tissue. Blood spilled from both sides of the incision and pooled on the mattress before dripping to the floor.
He returned the scalpel to the history buff, who passed him the mysterious handheld device. With nervous apprehension, my bulging eyeballs followed every move he made. They felt as if they might leap out of their sockets to try and stop him. He placed the device at the top of the wound. The device whirred and buzzed, and I felt a tingling against my skin. He tapped buttons. It let out a loud beep, and he pushed the device slowly along the wound site, just as he had moments before with the scalpel. I thought I was hallucinating. The wound trailing the machine closed and completely healed. When it reached my wrist, he turned the machine off and pulled it away. The only evidence of the trauma was a light, slightly elevated scar, much like what you’d expect to see after years of healing. The physical pain that remained was insignificant, but the emotional scars were deep. I released the tension from my muscles and lay there in silence, paying no heed to my captors.
He stood above my head. He methodically removed his gloves, tugging at each finger in a cadence that punctuated his comment. “Tell me, Mister Brooyear, did you enjoy your flying car?”
When I failed to respond, he knelt and whispered into my ear, “I want you to understand something, Mister Brooyear; I can return you to your prior state just as easily as I brought you out of it. Think of this the next time you are feeling clever.”
He stood up, and the men in the white coats left the room.
4.
The men left me strapped to the bed for several hours. The room was absolutely silent as I lay there contemplating my predicament. I was quick to come to terms with the facts that I had thus far refused to allow—I had, indeed, died the night of the plane crash and been brought back to life. When I signed up to be cryogenically frozen, I was too busy living to give it much thought. I figured on the odd chance cryogenics did somehow work, coming back to life would be a lot of fun. It’d be exciting. Bonus time. This was nothing of the sort.
The door’s harsh signal broke my concentration. It was Alex, and his raspy voice put me at ease.
“Oh, no. What did they do to you?”
I wasn’t sure where to begin. Alex stepped on the pedal, and the straps retreated beneath the bed.
“I wish you had listened to me. You do not want to push their buttons. They want me to get some solid food in you and get you moving around a bit. You up for it?”
I nodded solemnly, sat up, and slid my legs over the edge of the bed. Vertigo kicked in immediately. I clutched the mattress with both hands to keep from falling over. Alex grabbed me by the shoulders and helped me get my feet on the floor. As I stood and Alex helped me take my first tentative steps, my balance was off, but my legs felt strong. As we worked our way out into the hallway, the dizziness subsided, and walking felt downright normal.
“What on earth did they do to me to get me like this? Shouldn’t my muscles be weak from all those years as a human popsicle?”
“Fascinating, isn’t it?” Alex replied.
“It is, but how’d they do it?”
“Oh, I’m not privy to all the details of their work, but it was likely a combination of activated tissue regeneration and transplants. There are some amazing technologies for healing the body these days.”
Alex led me down the hallway. Just like my room, the corridor was bleak. There were no windows, no pictures on the wall, not even signs on the doors. Everyone I saw was Asian, and they all wore the same blank expression and attire as the men in white coats. There was a small sitting room at the end of the hallway with a table and chairs and a large vending machine. Its video screen broken up into nine squares, each containing an image of a plated noodle dish.
“What do you like?” Alex asked.
I pointed at the center image. It was a plate of shredded pork with garlic sprouts on a fluffy bed of noodles. “That pork?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll take it.”
Alex placed his hand on a sensor on the side of the machine. It scanned his fingerprints. The computerized female voice replied, “Welcome, Alex Carter.”
Alex touched the image of my dish, and the machine whirred. The whirring was joined by a loud hissing sound. Several seconds later, a pane of tinted glass slid open beneath the display and out slid the steaming hot dish, complete with chopsticks. The pork was plump and moist, the garlic sprouts a bright shade of green, and the noodles thick. It smelled delicious.
“This is organic, right?” I asked playfully. Alex looked confused.
I sighed and sat at the table. “Supposed to be a joke,” I muttered under my breath. I grabbed the food with the chopsticks and shoveled a bite into my mouth. The dish was bursting with flavor. “Oh
my God, this is good.” My eyes rolled up. It was the first pleasure I’d felt since coming back to life.
Alex watched me intently. He looked like he had something to say but was holding back.
“So where’s all the other people you guys Frankensteined?” I asked through a mouthful of food.
“You are the first successful reanimation.”
“Atta boy, Al. You finally got one of my jokes.”
“Everyone knows Frankenstein.”
“So they do, Al. So they do.” I paused to swallow. “Why me?”
“The circumstances surrounding your death were ideal for reanimation. Your passenger performed CPR until paramedics arrived. They did the same all the way to the hospital. You were DOA, but the passenger notified Restora and the cryonics team was already there waiting. They initiated Active-Compression-Decompression-High-Impulse CPR—”
“Hold on there, Rainman. What did they do to me?”
“The procedures were not explained to you when you signed up for cryopreservation?”
“Sure, sure, they explained it, but that doesn’t mean I remember everything. All I know is I had a better shot if I was in one piece and they got to me while I was still fresh.”
“That is precisely what happened. The Active-Compression-Decompression-High-Impulse CPR maintained ninety percent arterial oxygen saturation until—”
I put down my chopsticks and folded my arms before exhaling deeply through my nose.
“Fine. You had as much oxygen in your blood as you would if you were flying in an airplane. This ensured that you were biologically viable when cryopreservation was initiated.”
“That passenger you mentioned—that’s my son. Is he still alive? I need to know where he is.” I leaned forward.
“I’m sorry. I don’t. After you mentioned him and your wife this morning, I went through all of your files to see if any information about them remained. It was all deleted.”
I leapt up from the table. “What do you mean it was deleted? What the fuck is wrong with you people?”
Alex was too alarmed to speak. I started pacing about the tiny room. “I was told they would keep in contact with any surviving family—no matter how much time passed—so that I could be with them.”