Cryonic (6 page)

By the time Janet joined the fray, we had a regular party going. The youngest of the group, Janet died in twenty thirty-one at the age of thirty-eight. She'd worked as a chief nursing officer for a hospital system, and had signed up for cryonics because she wanted to see the future of medicine. Janet was visibly disappointed when I told them it was twenty forty-seven. I suppose the people at Restora who figured reanimation would be possible at the end of the century didn't count on the Chinese military developing the technology half a century sooner.

Janet was such a nice lady—a real spark plug. She got over her disappointment pretty quickly. And why shouldn't she? She had a second chance at life and didn't know she was a prisoner of the Chinese military. The three of them were all so happy to be alive. I couldn't spoil that. When they asked about the world, I told them I'd just been reanimated myself and didn't know much. I figured they'd have plenty of time for despair. Plus, I hated being a buzz kill. Lord knows Alex was plenty good at that. He'd be in soon enough to set them straight.

Or so I thought. No one came back to our room until people started getting sick. Elliott came down with it first. It was that same evening, a little while after we'd all fallen asleep. Elliott was moaning so loudly we all woke up. He said his arms and legs ached terribly. The machines near the bed must have sent data to the men in white coats because a couple of them came into the room shortly thereafter. They dismissed Elliott's pain as a side effect of being reanimated. Those two were clearly the incompetent members of the bunch. They didn't even bother to take a good look at him. The other men in white coats were probably too busy scheming how to make frozen soldiers to pay Elliott any attention.

The side effect explanation calmed Elliott down. We reminded him of the horrible burning sensation we all experienced upon being reanimated and postulated he was having some sort of after-effect from that. I lay awake for a couple of hours. In time, Elliott's grunts and groans subsided, and Janet and Barry fell asleep. I didn't see how I could possibly rally those three to rise against the Chinese. They seemed too complacent, too slow to question. I hoped Alex breaking the bad news to them would provide enough motivation to buck authority.

I was still lying there thinking when the tootling started. It was the oddest sound. Definitely not something I would associate with an alarm. I sat up in bed, and the lights in the room turned on. The noise was coming from the machinery near Elliott's bed. I rushed over. He'd taken a turn for the worse. He was barely conscious and sweating. His skin was puffed and clammy.

A man in a white coat came in robotically, unconcerned by the alarm. As soon as he saw Elliott draped across the bed like a wet rag, he did an immediate one eighty and headed out the door. He came back with the entire team of lemmings who rushed into the room behind the man in charge. He pulled the body-scanning device from his pocket, and it projected a hologram of Elliott. I looked over at Barry with a raised brow, hoping to recycle my
Star Wars
joke, but the grave look on his face shut me down. I felt bad for wanting to goof around while Elliott was gravely ill, but I knew the men in charge were about to work some magic on him. As the hologram scrolled through various perspectives of Elliott's innards, the men in white coats pensively grunted and pointed.

True to form, the man in charge shouted instructions at one of his minions who left the room and returned with a large metal pen. The man in charge took the pen and placed it against the side of Elliott's neck. It made a loud popping sound like the flashbulb of an old-fashioned camera. He looked at Elliott's face and grunted with self-approval. Then he tried to leave the room.

“Is Elliott going to be all right?” Barry asked.

The man in charge paused in the doorway and spun around on one leg to face Barry. “Mister Elliott has a viral infection.”

“What kind of virus?” Barry prodded.

“It is nothing for you to be concerned about. We can cure any virus quickly. You will see very soon.”

“But what does he have? He seems very sick—” Janet chimed in.

“No more questions!” the man in charge roared. He turned and left the room.

“He sure is a barrel of laughs,” Barry quipped.

“You ought to see him when he's really pissed.”

“Who is he?” Janet asked.

“Look guys, it's a long story. I mean, we can get some information in the morning. Let's get some rest. I'm sure Elliott will be fine.”

Later that evening Barry and Janet fell ill. At first I could hear them writhing in their beds, breathing heavily through their noses. Then they started moaning and grunting just like Elliott had.

One of the men in the white coats returned and gave them each a shot in the neck. He didn't speak any English so I couldn't get any answers out of him.

Being stuck in a room with three violently ill people made me antsy. I may not have had much to live for, but something visceral kicked in, a survival instinct if you will. It made me want to get the hell out of there.

I knew the door was locked, as it had been since my arrival. It always opened for Alex and the men in white coats without any discernible effort. I groped the walls and crawled across the floor in vain, hoping to find an activation switch. I got back into my bed, which suddenly felt like it was made of stone. I listened to them squirming beneath their sheets. Sleep was out of the question. I was trapped.

Alex arrived first thing in the morning. He must have thought I was still asleep because he went right to his work. I sat up and tried to attract his attention, but he ignored me.

“Al, hey Al.” Nothing. He had his back to me and tinkered away on the dials. He didn't seem concerned that I was living in a leper colony. “Alex!”

Alex looked over his shoulder. “Oh, good morning, Royce.”

“Where were you last night?”

“Me? I don't sleep here.”

“Listen, Al, you gotta tell me what's going on with these people. They're dropping like flies in here.”

“I don't want to scare you, but they're not entirely certain. They should be coming in shortly to have a look. Perhaps Dr. Feng will give you an update.”

“Dr. Feng?”

“He's the lead physician on the cryonics team.”

“The asshole?”

“Right. I have to run.” Alex headed out the door.

I looked across the room at my three companions. They lay on their backs in their beds in dead silence. I could see Janet and Barry's abdomens rising with each breath, but Elliott's was not. I stepped slowly toward Elliott's bed to have a look. Elliott looked hideous. His vapid skin had a charcoal gray undertone punctuated by black hemorrhagic blotches. His throat was covered with large blistering sores. Some oozed a milky fluid that trickled down his neck. His
eyes were closed, and I couldn't hear him breathing. I was afraid he was dead. I moved in closer to see if he was breathing. I turned my head so my ear was beside Elliott's mouth and I could look up at the rest of his face. I felt a gentle burst of cold air from Elliott's nose. At least he was alive.

His eyelids lifted slowly, revealing deep crimson orbs. I jumped back from the bed. The whites of his eyes were filled with blood. Elliott didn't react. I don't think he even knew I was there. He just stared at the ceiling, motionless. I stood there breathing heavily, chuckling to myself for having been so squeamish.

Barry and Janet weren't looking much better. Their skin had begun taking on the charcoal tone, and fresh volcanic sores erupted from their necks. While I stood there looking at the three of them, I felt alone. My new companions were not going to make it. There would be no mutiny. No cryonic uprising. It was just me against the world, once again.

I was thrilled when Dr. Feng finally barged into the room. If there was any hope for them, he was it. The doctors poked and prodded the sick. For more than an hour, they debated and obsessed over the imagery produced by their holograms.

Alex came in next holding a cherry red instrument the size of a soda can. He handed the device to Dr. Feng who used it to generate a hologram of Elliott's brain. The men in the white coats oohd and ahhd at the image projected. To me it looked like any other brain. Dr. Feng frowned and sat down on the edge of Elliott's bed.

Alex worked his way over toward me.

“What's happening?”

At first he spoke under his breath and feigned checking on my machines. “They are really, really sick. The doctors don't know how to stop it.”

“Thanks, genius. You don't need grad school to see that.”

Ambushed yet again by my sarcasm, Alex whipped his head in my direction.

“It's something they've never seen before. Some sort of variola virus.”

“Tell Feng to give them some antibiotics.”

Alex rolled his eyes. He looked over his shoulder. The men in the white coats were too focused on their work to pay us any attention. He loosened up a little.

“Are you serious?”

“Sorry,
doctor
.”

“Look, this is something very serious. Shhh, shhh, hold on a second—” Alex paused.

“You speak Chinese?” I whispered, as if that would somehow allow him to listen to me and still hear them.

“Shhhhh! Just a minute. Let me listen.” Alex hung on their every word. “The virus is eating away at their brains. It has specialized prions that are selectively destroying the areas responsible for higher-order thinking.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means the lights are on, but nobody is home.”

“How did you pick all that up?”

“It's what the doctors are saying.”

“You speak Chinese?”

“Of course I speak Chinese. I've been living under their rule for ten years. If you don't pick it up, you don't do so well around here. Wait a minute, something else is going on.”

The men in white coats were gathered around Elliott, and two were locked in an intense argument. They called Alex over. He fiddled with the dials on the machine and explained something to the group. The entire group began debating. Alex slipped out from the middle of the fracas and came back over to me.

“What is that all about?”

“His oxygen levels are so low that they thought something was wrong with the machine. I've never seen anything like it. I can't believe he isn't—” A long shrill beep from the same machine interrupted him.

It was a sound I'd heard before. Elliott was flatlining. The men in white coats panicked. They tried desperately to revive him, but it was no use. Then Janet's machine went off. The entire team save two men ran to her bedside. They
weren't working on Janet for two minutes when Barry's machine went off. Half the men at Janet's bedside ran to work on Barry. It was complete chaos.

Alex ran over to help with Barry, though he kind of just muddled about waiting for instructions from the men in white coats. The doctors gave up trying to revive Elliot and joined the efforts at reviving Barry and Janet. Several minutes passed while I sat in my bed watching the bedlam. I was mostly watching the men in white coats working on Barry. His bed was adjacent to Elliott's, and it looked like they were going to give up on him as well. That's when I noticed something moving in my periphery. Elliott's arm rose slowly from the mattress

“Hey look, look, he's still alive!” I yelled across the room. I pointed and gestured maniacally in Elliott's direction. No one paid me any attention.

The same arm reached over and grabbed hold of one of the men in white coats. Elliott pulled the man backwards until he fell on top of him and then he wrapped his other arm around the man and held him tight. Once Elliott had a good hold on him, he took a vicious bite out of the man's neck. I ran over to Elliott's bed on instinct, more for Elliott's sake than anything. If he wanted to maul our captors, that was fine with me, I just wanted to make sure they didn't retaliate.

The doctors ran to their colleague's aid. He screamed and flailed, kicking his legs in the air as he struggled to break free from Elliott's grasp. Blood came gushing forth from his jugular in rhythmic pulses, splashing on the men's lab coats. As soon as they got the victim loose, they held Elliott down and activated the restraint system, which held Elliott firmly in place. Alex froze in horror.

Elliott looked mental. A thick glaze dulled his eyes, and his pupils were hyper-dilated. He was taking hurried shallow breaths, and strained to lift his head as high off the mattress as the restraints would allow. Saliva gathered around the perimeter of his mouth, and anytime someone came near he groaned at them and gnashed his teeth.

“You! Back to your bed!” Dr. Feng barked. He pointed toward my bed.

When I didn't move quickly enough, he and the other doctors grabbed me by the arms and pulled me down onto the mattress. Dr. Feng stomped on the pedal that activated my restraints.

“Perhaps now you'll stay where you belong,” Dr. Feng hissed.