James Axler – Freedom Lost

Mildred stood, gesturing toward the units housed inside the glassed-in area.

“At some point in time, the power here must’ve gone off-line. I’d say it happened within days after the bombs fell. Could’ve been a fluke, but my guess is a techie took particular offense at being left behind to die in the brave new world once the bombs actually started falling, and he or she sabotaged the chambers. Once the damage was done, he turned the systems back on to cover his actions, or perhaps a fail-safe device came online and reactivated. Either way, the end result was the same. I suppose, in retrospect, I should be grateful the same thing didn’t happen to me.”

“Hell of a way to die,” Ryan said, peering inside the sterile room. “You think you’re going to take a long nap and pull a cheat and, boom, you die a second time in your sleep.”

“Well, no matter how you look at it, half of them were dead the minute the war broke out,” Mildred replied enigmatically. Ryan turned to look at her. “How so?”

“Doc, you were asking about those smaller containers, the barrel-shaped ones?”

“Yes. What is the concept behind those?” he replied.

“In those casks are twelve more cryo subjects.”

“I don’t get you,” Ryan said, perplexed. “The twelve smaller tanks held human heads, Ryan, awaiting possible future transplant onto new bodies.”

Chapter Seven

Mildred sat in the swivel chair behind the main comp bank and began to type at the keyboard once more, pausing only to move the mouse to click onto new screens of information.

“You know what they used to call freezies back in my day?” she mused aloud. “The ‘frozen chosen.’ Like you were saying, Ryan, we were the ones lucky enough to cheat death and waggle our fingers bye-bye at man’s final frontier. We were being put on ice to await the coming of the new technologies, capable of saving our dying asses.”

A screen blinked and a set of tiny speakers beeped, indicating the search of the data bank Mildred has asked for was finished.

“No wonder health care was so expensive in my day,” she said. “Most of the people in that room who underwent the cryo process weren’t even sick. I’m talking about the ones with bodies, not the headless horsemen. I see three senators, a governor, four millionaires and some other names and rankings I don’t recognize here listed as being put into the program within hours after skydark.” Doc slowly shook his head. “More madness.”

“Not true,” Mildred replied. “You forget, Doc. I was one of the whitecoats involved in cryo research. Cryonics was a complex, controversial medical procedure that stored either the whole body or just the head of a clinically dead person in liquid nitrogen, at a temperature of minus 196 degrees Celsius. After the big chill, a suspension team prepared the body for its icy descent into a large Dewar flask, where it was stored until time for revival. Doing so took some effort to mount.”

Mildred turned from the screen and ran her fingers through her long beaded hair. She looked very sad as she started to remember, and to speak.

“We were all mavericks in cryo research back then, driven by an insatiable urge to stop time and restart it on a schedule we dictated, not the predetermined one set by fate or nature. Looking back, I guess I was considered one of the tamer practitioners. Others, like Saul Kent, one of the founders of the Cryonics Society of New York, had his own mother decapitated and frozen in the hope that she could be reanimated sometime in the future.”

“Geez, he chopped off his own mom’s head?” Dean asked. “Gross.”

“Who better? I mean, let’s face it. The prospect of immortality inspires the unusual. He loved his mother, she loved her son, ergo, she willed her body to science and upon her death, he decided to test his theories. If it had worked out, he could have saved her life. Brought her back from death as we understood it.”

“I cannot help but comment that all of this sounds most grotesque, Dr. Wyeth,” Doc said with an exaggerated shudder. “The removal of the head and brains and dropping them into cold storage puts me in the mind of the most outlandish of Lovecraftian horror.”