Where do you see yourself in ten years? (5)

What could possibly convince someone to do something so stupidly dangerous as subject themselves to cryogenic storage? Let's find out!

[Previous episodes: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4]

Don't you hate it when you're reading a novel, and it's a new chapter, and suddenly nothing makes sense? All the characters are acting strangely. “Aren't those two supposed to be vicious enemies?” you ask. Even the most basic facts of the story have changed. “I thought that guy was dead?” Was there a mistake at the printers, or a glitch in your e-reader? It can't be just that, because the narrative has switched from first person to third person. What the hell is going on here?

Then it dawns on you. Oh yeah. It's a flashback. And you haven't been told about it because the author is a pretentious pseudo-intellectual jerk.

So, just so that there's no confusion, I — I the author, not our highly strung protagonist — am letting you know that the following episode — the whole damn thing — is a flashback. I-the-author will be temporarily taking over.

It's no longer 2035, but instead 2027. Professor Brady Alexander is alive and well and if he had the time to take a thermometer reading, it would be entirely normal. If anything, perhaps a little high.

Alexander was on a plane, first class, failing to relax. While the people around him, most of them from the team of investors who had paid for the flight, enjoyed luxurious sleep in their meticulously designed cocoons, Alexander fretted over preparations for tomorrow's first live test of his revolutionary cryogenic storage system.

Anyone who saw this stocky balding man hunched over and furiously playing his laptop keyboard would be undecided whether he was deep in focussed concentration or wildly manic. If it was one of the flight attendants, they would likely vote for the latter; so far he had accepted every single offer of extra booze, and swigged down each with a handful of pills.

This would not bother them. They knew that there were at least three passengers on board with medical training.

It bothered Alexander. His heart condition, his nervous condition, and his bladder condition had all made him wonder whether he should attempt the ultimate public relations coup and subject himself to his own cryogenic storage system. Just think what medical miracles they could perform on him in fifty years!

Plus, there was absolutely no question that he would emerge as the most renowned person in the entire world. Imagine it! The genius scientific pioneer, frozen in a daring experiment, gone for half a century, all the world stirred into a frenzy of speculation and fear over whether he would successfully wake up, and now here he was back again, striding the world in triumph. It would be like if Einstein had been frozen in 1930 and revived in 1980. Old Albert would have been so stupendously, impossibly, unprecedentedly famous that he could have single-handedly instructed world peace, ended global poverty and misery, and been given a starring cameo in Return of the Jedi.

It was hard to resist.

On the other hand: could he trust anyone to revive him? The technology did not worry him; that could only get better. The economics and politics did not worry him; the companies signed on to this project were rock solid, and that new treaty between the US, Europe, Russia, China and India had begun a new era of guaranteed global stability.

The problem was the people.

He loved his team and they loved him. They were like family. They were fiercely loyal to him. But he was not naive. His team was great because he made them that way. He nurtured them. Those little rivalries he planted, those carrots of potential promotions and conference junkets and lead-author roles, those sticks of stern discussions and stinging public reprimands and late-night phone calls. Without his constant maintenance, just how long would they last?

No-one knew he was thinking of freezing himself. The official plan was to choose one of his research team. They had all been competing for the job for months; without their frenzied desperate efforts to impress him there was no way the test would have been ready on time.  

Did it bother him that three senior researchers, five post-doctoral researchers, six technicians, and at least ten PhD students were all uncertain whether they were about to effectively end their lives tomorrow? No. It didn't. But, to be fair, there was no sign it was worrying them, either. They were too busy preparing the experiment, and being the most impressive and dependable and reward-worthy workers they could possibly be.

Alexander, on the other hand, had made sure everything was in order, just in case he did decide to take the plunge. As the plane came in to land, and he threw back another glass of champagne, he couldn't help thinking what a historically dramatic gesture it would be.

But what was the point of universal adulation, if you weren't awake to experience it?

These were the difficult decisions great leaders had to make.

He still had time. He was scheduled to announce his final decision at group meeting tomorrow morning at 10am. The experiment, and attendant media circus, would begin at 4pm.

After the plane landed a convoy of cars took Alexander and his investors and headed for the coast. For the next few hours he was preoccupied schmoozing his fat cat friends. These faux-informal meetings were priceless, and wonderful for the ego, but exhausting. When they reached the town he declined an invitation to dinner, and instead demonstrated his peerless leadership qualities by opting to join his research team at the pub instead.

“Why aren't you all working?” he maybe joked as he breezed over to their table.

They all started to get up, but he waved them back down with a chuckle. “You need another round of drinks first!” A cheer rose up, and the carousing continued. There was now a delicate question, for each of the students and postdocs and technicians, on judging how long to stay, and when was the right moment to announce that they needed to get back to the lab. This was an experienced team — the best! — and they got it exactly right. Ninety minutes later there remained only Alexander and his two deputies, Stubbs and Janssen.

Both did an exceptional job at hiding their desperation to know which of them would be chosen tomorrow.

Alexander was a professional, and gave away nothing. Just as they were dreading that he would order another drink he sprung to his feet and announced, “All right! I still have a night of paperwork ahead of me.”

They dutifully responded, “And we need to finish preparations in the lab.”

When he entered the taxi to take him home Alexander still had no idea who he would choose the next day.

He was leaning towards Stubbs, who had been with him longest, and had never once said an unkind word about him, even in the private emails that Alexander had hacked.

But still: wasn't such peerless devotion in itself suspicious? Surely Stubbs must be thinking of the glory he would keep for himself, in fifty years' time, when Alexander was assuredly long gone? Could he really be trusted to maintain Alexander's scientific legacy, or would history be rewritten to give all of the credit to Stubbs? As the last man standing, wasn't that inevitable?

Assuming he was standing. Assuming that it did not require five more attempts and an equal number of noble sacrifices to get this damn thing working. Wasn't that, really, the most likely outcome, despite what all the tests said?

All of this sloshed around in his mind, just as the food and the booze and the meds sloshed around in his belly, while the taxi roared up the winding road out of the town and up the hill to his home. The mixing must have worked, because by the time he closed his front door he had decided what he would do.

The “night of paperwork” was always a myth. Sleepless nights were for his subordinates. There were only seven minutes between when he paid the taxi driver and started to snore.

* * *

At 10am the next morning he breezed into his daily group meeting. There were 28 people seated behind desks in the meeting room. Stubbs was waiting at the desk at the front, ready with Alexander's morning coffee and pastry and the latest notes on the final tests.

“All good?”

“See for yourself!” Stubbs beamed and handed over the notes.

Alexander flipped through them as he gulped down his coffee. “Excellent!” He nodded to Stubbs, who took a seat.

He turned to his team and began the triumphant little speech he had prepared while walking down the corridor. A great day for science and he couldn't have done it without them and all that guff.

He only got one minute in, however, before the drug took hold, and Stubbs and Janssen leaped forward to catch him before he fell.

Stubbs checked his vitals. “His body is virtually pickled in alcohol. I'm not sure we need to freeze him at all. Is the deep fake video ready?”

“I'll cue it up now,” said Janssen.

Once Alexander was installed temporarily on a trolley, they sat back and watched the recording of him announcing his bold decision to be the subject of his own experiment. They cheered and laughed at the preposterous script they had written for him.

Stubbs was nervous that it was too over the top, and the media and investors and general public would recognise it as an obvious parody of a deluded egomaniac. But of course they lapped it up, and the experiment went entirely according to plan. 

---

Have I really gone to all the trouble of relating this thrilling flashback, just to let him die when he wakes up in 2035? Maybe. Read Part 6 to find out!

(Oh yeah — the flashback is over.)