Wake Me In The Future (31 page)

‘I know, but it’s me Helen,’ I managed to say through my tears; ‘I can’t give you what you’ve always wanted.’

She held my face in her hands, wiped away my tears with her thumbs, and looked into my eyes. ‘We talked about this possibility when I didn’t get pregnant; we agreed it wouldn’t matter if it was either one, or both of us, that couldn’t have children. Don’t feel guilty about this Richard, we’ve got each other and I love you more than anything in the world, and I’ll never stop.’

‘It’s different when you actually know it’s you though Helen, I can’t help thinking I am not a complete man.’

‘I know, that’s got to be a natural thing to think, I suppose I’d have similar feelings if it had been me,’ she brushed my hair aside and gave me a peck on the lips, ‘but you know that's not true. We’ll get through this together, okay?’

We fell into each others arms where, if either of us had possessed the power, we’d have stayed forever.

We discounted adoption after IVF treatment failed, and Helen avoided the subject of a surrogate father. Maybe she thought this would be like rubbing salt into my wounds. I decided if she didn’t mention it I’d never raise it, and she never did.

Our interest in science and science fiction had led us to talk about the possibilities of future treatment from stem cell research and cloning, but after a while we seemed to stop talking about it and just accept the inevitability of it all.

Although I never told her, I did think of it often, and it was at those times that I became overwhelmed by the blow to our hopes and dreams. My wife’s soul had been crushed and although I’d do anything to give her the baby she so desperately wanted there was just nothing that I could do. So on those occasions I locked the door of my office, put my head in my hands, and cried.

After we’d retired I’d mentioned cloning again. ‘It’ll never happen in our lifetimes,’ she said, ‘and besides we’re far too old now.’

‘What if our lifetimes were longer and we were younger,’ I said.

‘What are you talking about? She looked at me as if I'd gone crazy.

‘Have you ever thought about being frozen when you’re dead?’

She laughed, ‘You mean like Walt Disney?’

‘Yeah, that’s right; Cryogenics, its becoming popular now, and I reckon if our investments keep growing we could afford it.’

‘I thought I was the one with the wacky ideas Richard, there’s no guarantee with this is there?’

‘No, but look at it this way. We’ve got no kids to leave our money to, and if we die and get buried that’s definitely the end. We’re gone for good. We’ll be stone dead. It’s not as if either of us believes in an afterlife.’ I continued, ‘But if we get frozen, then at least there’s a chance, even one in a billion, billion, trillion is a better chance than none at all.’

I knew I’d overdone it on that last bit, ‘And,’ I said, ‘if it worked, we could be together in a better world, a world where we’d be able to have the family we’ve always wanted,’ I looked at her expectantly as she looked thoughtfully over my shoulder. ‘..And we’d be together for a whole new life.’

There was silence as she thought about it. My breathing laboured in expectation.

‘Alright’ she finally sighed, there’s no harm in looking into it is there.’

I gave her a big grin, ‘I’ve already got lots of literature for you to read and I’ve downloaded material from the Internet.’

‘I’d expect nothing less from you Richard Green,’ she said grinning back at me.

We joined the Balcor Life Extension Foundation on the recommendation of friends. And after undertaking extensive research about the company on the Internet, we handed over our money. Shortly afterwards we received our lockets which we proudly wore around our necks and which contained the information to inform the medical profession what to do when we were declared legally dead. We also made friends with other like minded people through a networking site on the Internet.

Most of our existing friends accepted our decision, as they had similar interests or just accepted, along with our families, that we were both barking mad. Helen's mother quoted the often used colloquialism, and started to refer to us as a couple of ‘
daft bats.
’

It became a private joke for us to whisper to each other before going to sleep, ‘darling, wake me in the future.’

As the years progressed so did technology and stem cell research began to offer new opportunities to many young couples who found themselves in our position. This at least gave us increased hope that if a future society could bring us back, it would probably be able to offer us the thing we most wanted.

However, by the time we’d lived well into our retirement, we truly began to fear for the state of any future human society. Most of Helen’s crazy predictions had come to pass and were no longer considered extreme. The majority of the population had succumbed to the ‘King’s New Clothes’ psychological tactics of the interested parties of capitalism; from those who could afford to bombard the public with messages designed to enforce their desired views, and had the money to buy the support of greedy and corrupt politicians.

The world’s wealth was concentrating into fewer and fewer hands and more and more of the population of the planet laboured to support this shift. Cultures were clashing and fanatics had turned to terrorism, tipping societies into ever extreme policies. The twin towers, Iraq and Afghanistan, the Korean War that bought China and Russia up against each other. Then Iran carried out what they’d threatened to do for years and blew Tel Aviv off the face of the Earth, the nuclear fallout poisoning many of their Arab neighbours and throwing the world into turmoil.

And the Internet, like so many other inventions, had been used for good and evil; from global democratisation and the downfall of oppressive regimes everywhere, to the proliferation of child abuse and desensitisation of the public to pornography, extreme violence and cruelty.

There were some things that gave hope though, like the Global Information Tax which allowed universally free access to all content while rewarding the makers and owners of it based on its use. This satisfied both the big corporates, that had been obsessing over what they considered the theft of their property, and the new generations that saw information as theirs as of right.

And for people like Helen, the blocking technologies that were being developed were a glimmer of hope for the future; for they had the potential to force makers of content to develop new models of business. Because, as the public started to gain the ability to stop any exposure to advertising or content that they didn’t want to see, companies were having to produce advertising suitable to be ‘called up' only at the request of the customer.

And makers of media content were beginning to talk about ways to modify what they produced to ‘penetrate’ the blocking systems, to achieve greater exposure and hence get a larger share of the information tax.

Mainstream media would surely become less extreme and shift back to what it was in its earlier years. Especially now that people had started to reclaim control of their passive senses, and control the choice of what they were exposed to?

That was the world that we’d left behind. And we’d prayed to the God we didn’t believe in, that the society we were hoping to wake in would be one that had learned from its past and its many mistakes.

Chapter 33
- The Procedure

After Helen died,
I'd continued to live in the house that
we'd
made our home, and almost a decade past without her, before I became terminally ill and moved near to the facility that was going to undertake the procedure. Thankfully the practice had become more popular and a centre had opened in the UK, allowing my family and friends to visit and be with me at the end.

And I’d been considered an ideal candidate for preservation by Balcor. Being on the premises I’d have the best chance there was, enabling them to take advantage of the gap between being declared legally dead - which could only be done after someone’s heart had stopped - and when the brain was considered to die. Those precious minutes would allow circulation to my brain to be restored, giving it the best possible chance to cope with the procedure.

Many cryonics patients who opted to be preserved, or ‘Frozen’, as it was commonly referred to by the general public, only underwent the procedure many hours after they’d died and pinned their hopes on future technologies reversing any damage that the brain had suffered.

We ‘
Cryogens’
, as we’d been named, had virtually elevated our beliefs to a religion. We wore our lockets with as much pride as Christians wore their crucifixes, and I think it’s safe to say that some of my fellow Cryogens did just as much preaching. The gradual advances in reviving lower life forms after suspension, had given our cause a small sense of respectability. Especially as the space agencies around the world had been talking of using the technology to send humans to recently discovered planets far off in space.

Even the possibility of considerable damage to the brain didn’t dent our belief in the abilities of a future generation to revive us in perfect condition. It truly had become a religion with science as God and the promise of an artificially achieved heaven.

No, there was absolutely nothing you could say, or show, to devout followers of science like us, that would ever cause us to lose our faith, not even the footage of the procedure that awaited our bodies after death.

However, when I'd died I’d been blissfully unaware of my body being placed in the grey metal bath of ice water which rapidly dropped its temperature, before the blood circulation was artificially restored to enable protective medication to be passed through my veins. This was to help the most vital organ, my brain, have the maximum chance to survive the procedure.

Nor had I been aware when the blood was then drained from my body and washed away by a cocktail of chemicals, before gradually being replaced with a cryoprotectant solution; allowing my bodily tissue to vitrify instead of freezing, preserving me at the temperatures the procedure required. It was known that the formation of any ice in the cells during this phase could cause cellular damage, which would be infinitely more difficult to repair by any future technologies.

When Helen had undergone the process they’d used liquid nitrogen at -196 degrees Celsius to preserve the bodies, but for me, they would use a new vapour phase procedure that allowed preservation at a higher temperature, that further reduced the possibility of the formation of the deadly ice. The process was constantly improving and gradually gaining wider acceptance amongst an ever increasing minority as a possible way of cheating death.

But death had taken my body, and when the technicians were done, it was placed inside a cryogenic suspension container, besides the one holding my wife, and there it was expected to stay, until the time had come to attempt its resurrection.

What we’d not considered was the growing indifference of a future population, who could extend their own lives by other means and would become uninterested in a long forgotten few.

It had certainly never crossed our minds that no one would ever try to revive us.

That was the measure of our belief, and that was how Helen and I had reached this place. She had been preserved for nine years before I joined her on her journey. The empty darkness had swallowed me up, but not before I’d been able to whisper to the vision of her smiling face that hovered before me.

‘Darling, wake me in the future.’

Chapter 34
- Rescue

As the days passed the solitude of my incarceration invited in more memories from my first life, and with precious little else to keep them out I found most of my time spent laying on my cot and narrating episodes of my past to myself, in an effort to fix them more firmly in my mind. I was quite surprised how much I remembered; it was like seeing old friends you’ve not seen for years and feeling like it was only yesterday that you’d last met. Perhaps memories are there all the time; it's just the process of recall that fails. Whatever the truth, I was finding them all waiting for me now, in the shadows, just like those old friends, eager to be called forward. It felt like the most constructive way of passing my time, after all, there was precious little else to distract me, other than the bowl of food that appeared each morning and the odd occasion when I received an update from Jon.

But as each day crept by, and brought me nearer to the day of my so called ‘
execution’,
my anxiety and stress levels began to build to the point of escape velocity. At this rate even my new body would have to react in some way and I wondered if I’d just freeze, like the PC I used to own. I hoped someone would re-boot me if I did.

On the sixth morning I was woken by a strange noise like an old fashioned coffee percolator, and when I looked across the room, the floor, about four feet away from the opposite wall, was moving! It was actually morphing like so much of the material that made up this new world could. This time what seemed to be bars from out of the floor rose quickly before me. They soon merged with the ceiling and I wondered why a wall of bars had separated the room. But I didn’t have to consider it for long.

Ramoon walked through a door that had appeared on the opposite side of the room and stood on the other side of the bars. He glanced over at me and said, ‘I just wanted to deliver the news to you in person Richard. The day for you to be 'reborn' has been set for tomorrow. You’ll be no more danger to my plan, and once we’ve captured what’s left of the resistance then there’ll be no more to take their place,’ His eyes knitted together as he emphasised his next words, ‘I am going to make sure of that.’

He took a breath and stepped forward, and the wall of bars moved with him, towards me.

‘What’s even more amusing is that none of you even know what you’re fighting for, you believe our motivation for wanting you Cryogens out of the way is because we dislike what’s left of the original human race, and don’t want to share our future with an insignificant amount of survivors, constantly reminding us of what we truly are.’