The Freezer (Genesis Endeavor Book 1) (13 page)

Teague shook his head, “Same problem, you see, the issue we
have isn’t in each fertile man being able to spread his seed, it is in the
variety of DNA. Multiplying one fertile man doesn’t add to the gene pool, so
again his value to the community would be nullified, and hence a waste of
resources.”

He let that hang in the air for a few heartbeats, then said,
“Now, shall we go see where you were born?”

The room was substantially larger than Jack had expected. He
had to blink a few times before his eyes adjusted to the brighter, more natural
light. The walls, ceiling, and floor in this room were all painted white in
stark contrast to the raw concrete on the rest of the level. Large machines
made it difficult to judge the scale of the room, which at first glance appeared
to be about fifty feet square. Teague walked over to one of the machines,
looked at a glowing panel, tapped a few buttons, and then headed closer to the
center of the room.

The room layout was simple, really. There were four massive
machines, one in each corner, and in the middle was two large desks, a few
pieces of unidentifiable equipment, and some workbenches. On one of the
workbenches was an apparatus that Jack could only assume was a complicated
chemistry set. The four large machines reminded him of a large distillery he
once visited; wide upright cylinders with pipes and other bits of equipment
attached around the sides in a seemingly random fashion. As he walked past the
two flanking the door, he realized that they were far larger than he first
thought. Easily over ten feet tall and twenty or twenty-five feet across, his
earlier estimate of the size of the room was way off. With ten feet of empty
space around each machine, and the large desks, workbenches, and other
equipment taking even more room between them, the room had to be at least one
hundred feet long in each direction and not a single supporting column anywhere.
Jack’s experience in building underground bunkers told him this just wasn’t
possible, at least not with the technology he had available in 1966

Teague stopped in the middle of the room, spread his arms
and said “This is it. Four artificial wombs. We call them tanks, and that one
over there,” he said pointing to the machine to Jack’s right, “was yours.” Teague
paused for effect, then continued, “It took about eight weeks to get you to the
age you are now. Currently we have four buns in the oven, three men and a
woman. The next will be ready in a week. Do you want to see him?” Jack nodded. They
walked over to the far left hand tank and he pushed some buttons on the panel. A
window, about two feet square, went from black to clear, showing a red tinted
liquid behind it. Teague pressed a few more buttons and the water began to
glow, brighter and brighter until Jack could see a body about the size of a
nine year old child in the murky water. There was a tube running from the edge
of the tank wall that ended in the child’s mouth. The body twitched a couple
times and Jack jumped back, the hair on his neck standing up.

“Jesus Doc, that is creepy. I didn’t expect him to move.” Teague
smiled and pressed a few more buttons. The light dimmed and the window went
back to flat black. “Why is there a tube in his mouth and not his belly?” Jack
was no doctor, and his only point of reference here was remembering his baby
girl coming into the world, the doctor handing him a scissor and telling him to
cut the umbilical cord.

“After he grew to the equivalent of nine months old, his
body told him it was time to start breathing, so we had to disengage the
umbilical cord and put a tube in his throat that would provide him with air and
food. The tube also delivers chemicals that essentially force the memories we
scanned from his old brain to grow in the new one. The murky water he is
floating in is a catalyst that uses careful mixtures of hormones, steroids,
vitamins, minerals, and some special types of bacteria to force his body to
age. The accelerated aging process causes his body to generate a lot of heat,
and the water temperature is about ten degrees below normal to keep him from
overheating and expiring.”

Jack just nodded slowly, feigning understanding. “That’s, um,
pretty cool, doc.” He tried to sound enthusiastic, but Teague seemed to sense
both his disinterest and discomfort and steered them toward the door.

They exited the room and took another turn down the hall to
a similar door. “Behind this door is an identical chamber to the last one. We
are working on building four more tanks, so we can increase the rebirth rate of
the subjects in the cryogenic facility. There are a few key components that we
need, however, and they have been difficult to acquire.” He didn’t go into more
detail but Jack made a mental note to expand on that at a later date.

As they headed further down the hall, Jack looked at the
list of questions on his pad and said, “So when I talked to Tiny earlier, he
remembered events just hours before he died. How come is it I lost nearly a
whole year of my memory?” Knowing he had lived another year beyond his memory
was like a thorn in his side. Even amidst the chaos of questions in his head,
the need to learn what happened was difficult to ignore.

“Well, you remember when I told you that you were the oldest
one there that we had revived?” Jack nodded. “In the sixties and seventies,
when they went to freeze a body, they simply replaced the blood with some
alcohols and then put it in the freezer. Every so often, over the next couple
decades, they would try to revive one of the corpses, and in their failures,
they learned it was harder to freeze a cell without damaging it than they had
originally anticipated. Did you ever have a pipe burst from freezing?” Jack
lived in Montana; it seemed like a rhetorical question, so he didn’t answer. “Your
cells are filled with water just as a pipe, and when frozen, they tend to
explode. The stuff they put in the bodies back then helped but if the body were
put in too cold of an environment it would completely destroy the cells.

“By the nineties, they had come up with some chemicals that
were really good at keeping that from happening. We attempted to save a couple
of the older bodies we found, but it was no use. Their brains were just too
badly damaged to get any memories, and the results were not desirable. You were
the first one from your generation we were able to recover. It was a stroke of
luck, really, or fate, if you believe that.”

“What made me different from the others?”

“I think it was the chemicals your doctors used when trying
to fight the cancer. Chemotherapy was pretty new when you were at the Mayo
Clinic, and something they pumped into you toward the end really ended up
helping to preserve your cells. It is surprising that it didn’t kill you, to be
honest.”

The irony of it was not lost on Jack, and he knew he would
have to come to terms with this information in time. He didn’t ponder this
long, however, simply because he also now had a hint of what might have
happened in his last year. “So I ended up going to Minnesota to try treatment? Mae
must have done a good job convincing me.” Jack couldn’t see himself voluntarily
going through experimental treatment, especially if he knew if would just make
him sick. Mae was probably the only one he would have listened to, and he hoped
he had thanked her for it, especially now that he was here as a result.

“According to your death records, yes, you spent the last
few months in the cancer ward, and when the results were not quite what they
had hoped for, you checked out and left for home. It was not long after that
you, uh, passed.” Teague said it as if he didn’t want to get into the details,
but this was exactly the kind of information Jack was after.

“Come on, Teague this is important to me, what else do you
know of my last year?”

Teague spread his hands, shrugging. “Not much. Most of the
information I had was medical history. You were the first subject at the
facility, and apparently they didn’t have a computer for storing the records
yet, so they stored your paper file with your body. There might be something
more personal left behind, but I never got anything other than the medical
records.”

“So what’s the chance I will get to go back there and have a
look for myself?” The idea that there might be something left behind that could
fill in the blanks sent a small measure of relief through him.

“About one hundred percent, actually.” Jack was caught off
guard by the response. He had expected some spiel about the dangers of the
wasteland, or maybe that he wasn’t physically prepared yet to venture out. “You
are already scheduled to go out with a small crew tomorrow. Uh, if you feel up
to it that is.”

“Of course!” He felt like a school kid that was just handed
the keys to a new motorcycle and told to have fun. The thought of getting
outside to see what had become of the area he once called home was exciting. An
alarm went off in his head, though, and he pulled up his guard quickly. In a
more cautious voice, he asked, “Why were you planning to send me there? What
haven’t you told me?”

They had reached a large door, and Teague pressed a button
next to it. There was a faint ding and the doors opened. It was an elevator, a
really large one too. As they stepped on, Teague said, “I figured you would
want to get out, and we really want to evaluate your ability in the field.” As
he pressed a button on his datapad, the doors closed and Teague put on a half-smile.
“Did you really think you were going to wander around here all day wearing
casual clothes and fornicating with the women?”

Jack spotted the misdirection but decided now was not the
time to get into an argument. He smiled and said, “No, of course not, but I
figured you would ease me into some responsibilities. It sounds like you
already decided I was going to be a soldier for you.” It was not a question and
Jack didn’t expect an answer. He didn’t get one.

Changing back to the original subject, Teague said, “So your
brain was in decent shape, enough to bring you back anyway, but there was some
damage to your memory areas. The older memories tend to be planted deeper in
the brain, with the newer memories closer to the surface. The deeper parts of
your brain didn’t suffer as much damage as the outsides. Thankfully we only
cared about the memories – there were a couple parts of your brain that were in
pretty bad shape. The problem we had was that the cancer therapy, combined with
the cell damage from freezing, made it difficult to tell exactly when you died,
from a standpoint of the memory center of your brain. So we sort of guessed.”

“You guessed?” That surprised Jack, and even made him a bit
angry. “What would have happened if you guessed wrong?”

“If we guessed in the wrong direction, you would not have
survived the awakening. If we guessed in the other direction, you would simply
remember less than you do.” At least he was being honest about it.

“Did I lose anything else? Were there other parts of my
memory that were damaged?” He hadn’t thought about this before, but suddenly it
was a question that had deep implications.

Teague looked uncomfortable. “Jack I wish I could tell you
that everything was fine, but the fact is there was some damage to all parts of
your brain. I can’t answer this completely at this point because there is
simply no way to know what affect, if any, this had on your memories. It is not
a perfect science. Each brain is a little different, and while we can make
educated guesses at what part of your life is stored where, the fact is your
brain is way more complex than you can imagine. It is possible you are missing
vast parts of your memory, and possible that your brain has filled in the holes
based on information surrounding it as well as other memories. You might not remember
meeting a particular person, but you still know them from other memories and
can recall their name. You know you met them because you knew them, so your
brain has filled in the missing parts that can be derived from other memories. What
affect this has had on your personality is impossible to say. I didn’t know you
before, so I can’t tell you how different of a person you are then you were
before you died.”

This may not be what Jack wanted to hear, but at least it
sounded like Teague was being honest about it and not hiding anything. “So, I
might be missing memories but I won’t really know it?”

“Not any more than if you simply forgot something, or are
even blocking it to avoid dealing with it. A particular battle in the war you
fought in, for example. You might remember fighting in it, but maybe not the
details. It doesn’t change who you are by not remembering.”

It made sense, although Jack was far from an expert. He
sometimes forgot people’s names, but it never meant that he didn’t know them or
couldn’t remember why he knew them. At the same time it made him wonder what he
had forgotten, or if it was the reason he felt different than he remembered. “Doc,
I have to ask this: I have felt a little… disconnected from my former self. In
particular, certain feelings I remember having before I died, I don’t really
have any more. It is a bit distressing. Is this a result of the damaged parts?”

Teague thought it over before answering, “It is difficult to
say. I have gone through the process and have never felt the kind of
disconnection with my former self that you are talking about, but then I have
never been in the same situation you have been in. The people you remember are
long past gone, so knowing they have been dead for centuries could create a
disconnect from them. On top of this, you lost roughly a year of your life, and
just as it is possible to remember something differently than it really
happened, your brain could have edited those memories in that last year of your
life. You don’t have the new memories to back up the changes though, so it
could cause some of the disconnection you are talking about as well. It could
also be that you are missing some key memories that gave you the feelings you
remember, but now that you don’t have them you don’t feel the same way. On top
of all of this, feelings, emotions, and love are not things that are only
fueled by memories, there are pathways and receptors that are created during
the hormonal and chemical reactions when we interact with other people, and
those don’t get recreated when we inject the memories. I wish I had a more
definitive answer for you, but there are so many variables at play. I just don’t
know.”