“Yeah, but you’re old,” Dean protested.
“Not as old as you think, young man.”
Mildred grinned at Dean. “In a discussion like we’re having, the idea of beating death does sound promising. It’s when you start putting such ideas into motion that people get nervous. The world was different in my time. In the mid-1960s, cryonics advocates were a small fringe group. The structure of some organizations was rocked by scandal, sometimes at the hands of incompetent people and equipment, and other times because of sensational media coverage.”
“Media?” the boy asked.
“Newspapers. Video. Tabloids. The media. They broke all of the news stories that made people nervous stories such as how in the early days of the programs, scientists were having to make do with storing bodies in the surplus wingtip fuel tanks of Air Force jets. No big deal, until it got out that the tanks weren’t ‘one size fits all,’ and when they had people too obese to fit, they’d chainsaw their arms off and stick them in that way.”
Mildred paused, looking lost and far away for a moment. “After my father’s murder by immolation at the hands of those Klansmen, I wonderedcould cryonics have preserved him until such a time as miraculous regenerative processes would be the norm? I’m sure he might have seen it as an abomination, but I’ve always wondered. I suppose that curiosity is what continued to carry me into the field. I wanted to go beyond theories and tests. I wanted to be one of the new, innovative thinkers blazing onto new ground”
“So, what happened?” J.B. asked. “Why did the cryo program go the way of mat-trans units and Operation Chronos and Overproject Whisper and all of the other subtly named covert government projects?”
Mildred chuckled bitterly. “Believe it or not, what really, truly, undeniably saved the program was government interest and involvement. If the average hardworking American believed cryonic suspension to be the stuff of bad science-fiction novels, so much the better. Grants and equipment were available to the right doctors, and my own profile was high for a number of reasons.”
“How so?”
Mildred counted down the list on her fingers “I was a woman, I was black, my theories made sense and I was a former Olympic medalist. You couldn’t ask for a more suitable candidate. Once I was in the door, I soon discovered that organizations such as the American Cryonics Society and the Alcor Life Extension Foundation were all smoke screens. Only a few dozen people were listed officially as “being frozen” at the end of the year 2000, with a waiting list of hundreds wanting to join the program.”
“We all know that’s a crock,” Dean interjected.
“Of course. In actuality the number stretched into the thousands, with chambers and preparations being made for thousands more in case of war. Cryonic suspension was expensive, too. Only the rich and the powerfulor the very importantgot a seat in the freeze chambers. I made it because of my research and because of the woman who operated on me pulling some strings. She was my friend, and she didn’t want me to die on an operating table.”
“So there could be an untold number of freezies waiting to be discovered?” Krysty asked.
“Yeah. I imagine some high-muck-a-muck couldn’t resist the idea of a cryo version of Noah’s Ark, which means any and all living creatures up to skydark may be safely tucked away somewhere sleeping.”
“How much jack are we talking to freeze somebody?” Ryan asked, his own fascination coming into play. Some of what she was telling the others wasn’t unfamiliar to him after what he’d seen going on the Black Hills laboratories of the Anthill. In those frigid chambers, he’d held conversations with men dressed in business suits with wag coolant for blood.
The woman thought for a moment. “Seems like I recall the official public price as being something along the lines of one hundred twenty-five thousand dollars for a whole-body suspension or, in the case of just wanting to preserve the head in a procedure called neuropreservation, that was around fifty thousand dollars. Pricey, and beyond most people’s means.”
Mildred stopped talking and stood. There was nothing much else to say.