A cryonic shame

Billy woke up drenched and frightened. His eyes were wide open and staring and his mouth was stretched into a silent scream. He couldn’t move, he lay stiff and soaking, filled with dread.

He’d had the dream again only this time much worse. He tried to rouse himself but, with a sinking feeling, felt himself twanged back down into the nightmare.

This had been going on for several months. At first it was just an awareness of being somewhere else. Somewhere unfamiliar and uncomfortable. A place of foreboding where he was just a thing.

Gradually, he’d been able to identify his surroundings as a laboratory, but he no longer felt as if he was the thing. But he felt drawn to it. He used to watch as the thing was experimented upon by excited and callous scientists.

They’d been getting frustrated just lately as if the early success of their efforts had somehow been replaced by increasingly poor results. So they had conducted harsher and harsher experiments on the thing, including electric shock treatments.

These were a last resort and a result of one of the more eccentric of the team suggesting that they all take a leaf out of Frankenstein’s book.

Prior to that the thing had been subjected to thawing out techniques. One of Billy’s first nightmares had been painful. He’d felt the horrible burning sensations of a freezing cold body being gradually warmed up. It was after a few of those nightmares that he’d stopped being the thing and had stood by quietly observing until he was terrified back into his own body.

And now, here he was again after briefly waking up in his own bed. Standing watching as the thing on the table was jolted awake. Momentarily he identified with it. Momentarily the scientists screeched with delight. They’d woken their creature, but then failure again as it slumped back lifeless.

Billy woke up again in a worse state than before. He’d be late for work, the nightmare had gripped him way past his usual waking time.

Slowly he rose and dressed, unable to shake off the terrible feelings from the dream. Slowly he went about his work. Slowly his boss realised that Billy wasn’t firing on all cylinders so fired him from his job.

Billy suffered. He’d lost his job so had nothing to think about all day. He’d lost his sleep because he had too much on his mind all night.

Fit for not very much he started to look for work that wouldn’t tax him too much and was lucky to find a night job. It involved mopping floors so ought to wear him out enough that he could sleep all day.

The first few nights were uneventful and Billy managed to get his sleep during the day, but he’d started to feel uneasy at his place of work. He wouldn’t have chosen to work there ordinarily, but he’d been drawn to their ad in the local paper. Mopping floors at the cryonics establishment seemed to have a lure beyond the satisfaction that a job well done might have given him.

Billy was a good worker and impressed the boss, who didn’t always find it easy to get workers. A lot of people found something creepy about the place and didn’t want to spend their nights toiling around the frozen bodies, especially now that attempts were being made to wake some of them up.

Times were getting hard and all those people who had so trustingly had themselves frozen in the late 20th century were being subjected to the rudest of awakenings.

There had been no medical advances to cure the very sick and the techniques for reviving them were crude, to say the least. But the money was running out. It cost a lot to maintain cryonically frozen bodies and there wasn’t much interest in it any more.

It hadn’t just gone out of fashion, all but the most desperate could see it for the scam it was. There had been a lot of ‘awakenings’ and ‘new ageism’ and people were more inclined to see death as a big adventure for their souls and didn’t fancy having a sick and frozen body to come back to.

After the first flush of enthusiasm for being frozen people had started to realise the financial burden they’d be placing on their families. Seriously, how could they expect the next three of four generations to keep up the payments after their millions of dollars had been used up?

Particularly generations of descendants who might have had to struggle to make ends meet because great, great grand-dad had squandered his fortune to keep his tired old body preserved.

Billy heard a conversation between some late visitors. One of them had been bemoaning the fact that great, great grandma couldn’t have had the good sense to lock great, great grand-dad in the deep freeze when he’d died. They were sure the bills for the power to the freezer would have been cheaper than this cryonics mullarkey.

Billy went about his business, keeping the reception area clean. His boss approached him and asked if he’d like a promotion, to start right away. Billy, his head full of ideas of frozen geriatrics, absentmindedly agreed.

Next thing, he found himself somewhere eerily familiar. He’d gone up to the laboratory to clean and started to recognize one of the corridors. It resembled the one in his dream. The one he used to try and run down to escape from the thing on the table.

Only now, instead of offering hope and a way out, it seemed to usher him in. right into his nightmare.

Too late to run, he caught the attention of one of the scientists who asked him to come in and do what he had to do. Billy walked in with his mop and bucket, effecting a swagger. He was awake, with all his faculties, he was in control now. He only had to do his job and get out.

The scientists carried on as if he wasn’t there, talking about their project. It wasn’t a secret. No-one these days cared if they thawed out a few of the bodies, whether they could cure them or not. Energy was getting harder to come by and the less used to preserve long dead rich people the better.

The long-ago rich weren’t very well thought of now. It had become common knowledge how they’d fleeced the populace to secure their riches and their ‘immortality’ so if anyone thought about the ethics of waking them up at all, before there was a cure for their illness or old age well, it wasn’t something they dwelled on.

In fact there had been a small movement suggesting that politicians be the first to be awoken. The scientists who just wanted permission to get on with the job agreed to unfreeze anyone the public demanded.

Some of the tabloids gleefully reported on how this or that once-famous corpse had responded to the unfreezing process. Well, it wasn’t rocket science. Any fool could see that if you were going to freeze someone in the hope of reviving them later, then you should do it before they died.

What was the point, really, of freezing a body after the soul had left it? All you would be freezing would be an empty shell. If you ever animated it all you’d have would be a soul-less zombie.

So, politicians first up then. No quibble about freezing them before the soul had left. Either they never had one to start with or they’d sold it long ago to the devil. Same thing with the mega-rich.

Billy was just about to leave the laboratory having mopped the floor scrupulously when one of the scientists opened a large drawer. Startled by the noise, Billy looked round and was confronted with his nightmare. Lying there was the thing. Only now Billy could get a good look at it.

A male body with a shaven head. Marks all over it from the electrical shock treatment. Inert and with a tortured look on it’s face, mouth open as if screaming.

One of the scientists called him over, jovially offering him a place round the table to see the next experiment. He could see Billy’s fascination and wanted to share the excitement. They had new tricks to try tonight and even a scientist likes to show-off from time to time.

Billy steeled himself to watch, he kept thinking that if he could just ride this out he would be rid of his nightmares forever. And so he watched and watched and kept watching at each attempt to revive the corpse, until he fainted.

The corpse groaned, it sat up. The scientists jumped and cheered, here at last was the success they’d been waiting for.

They forgot about Billy unconscious on the floor, but the corpse saw him. It left the table and shook him awake. Billy’s eyes flew open and he found himself staring into the face of the recently animated dead man. The dead man, eyes still wide open, slumped to the floor.

The scientists were intrigued. Their corpse hadn’t been a doctor or, as far as they knew, a particularly sensitive person during his life, yet here he was showing concern for a man who had fainted in his presence.

Then, of course, reality hit them and they realised that their corpse was lifeless again. Disappointed and frustrated they poked him a few more times. Billy picked himself up and went home.

He couldn’t sleep, all day he tossed and turned. We was both dreading and looking forward to his night-shift. He’d lived his nightmare and survived. The thing had shown concern for him. He started to feel concern for the thing.

That night, as soon as he arrived for work, he was sent straight up to the laboratory. The scientists wanted him about when they tried to revive their corpse. They had wondered if it was something about Billy himself that had persuaded it to wake up.

Billy steeled himself. He wasn’t brave but his compassion for the thing had over-ridden his distaste for the project.

The corpse was wheeled out, a bit worse for wear. Obviously the scientists had been a bit enthusiastic in their efforts to revive it again after Billy had left.

Touched by the sight of it Billy reached out. He felt the cold dead arm and stroked it then he put his hand over its heart. He put his other hand to the burnt, shaven head. Billy started to see images, images of another life - the corpse’s life.

Billy sank into a deep faint and was laid out on the floor by the scientists. The corpse got off the table and put one hand on Billy’s heart and the other to his head. The corpse started to see images, images of Billy’s life. The corpse sobbed.

Billy came round to find himself under an inanimate corpse with a tear-streaked face. He struggled to his feet and went home. Home to more nightmares.

In these dreams he found his memories and those of the corpse inter-woven. He found himself in the laboratory, haunting it looking for the drawer containing the corpse.

On his next night shift he couldn’t stop himself rushing to the laboratory. He was excited to find the body already laid out on the table and the scientists waiting for him. They stood back to let him lay his hands on the dead man.

They thought now that somehow Billy had the power to raise the dead. They weren’t religious men, but felt that here, in their cleaner, was a miracle-worker. They’d already talked to Billy’s boss about having access to him later. They had a few experiments in mind.

Billy became one with the corpse and re-lived the final moments from its life. He knew how it had died and felt the hope that the idea of the cryonic preservation had given it. He saw some of its relatives round the death-bead and heard their complaints about the cost of the freezing.

They were distant relatives, the dead man wasn’t close to anyone in his life. All he had were his riches and the unrelenting idea that he could come back in the future to enjoy them. His wealth was the last thing he thought about as he died.

Billy tried to come back into himself, but the pull of the corpse’s memories was too strong for him and to his horror and amazement he found himself following the journey of the soul after it had left the body.

He found himself in a sort of purgatory, reliving the events of the life. A life of greed and malice. Loneliness and the pursuit of material things. He felt the soul reflect on its choices in that life and then decide to come back as a humbler person, someone who might have to struggle a bit and so round out his being.

Billy came back to himself. He hadn’t animated the corpse this time, but was filled with an awareness of its life and feelings that he was anxious to impart to the scientists.

They listened politely, but all the time had their eyes on the corpse on the table. They needed a living dead body to justify their research and their wages, not a load of waffle about the afterlife from Billy.

Just as Billy was finishing his tale one of them prodded the corpse with an electrode and immediately it woke up. It sat up just as Billy passed out. The corpse looked at Billy and recognised him.

It realised that for Billy to live it would have to be completely dead. Something it could never be with all these scientists constantly re-animating it. The corpse took hold of the electrodes and gave a severe and fatal shock to one of them. It menaced the others who fled the laboratory. Then the corpse gave itself the almightiest shock it could manage and screamed as it burnt to a crisp. Completely un-revivable now.

And the soul of the dead man went straight back into Billy, its home. Billy walked out of the laboratory a free man. There would be no-one trying to revive his old body now and he could concentrate on making something of himself again now that the nightmares had stopped.

Very interesting story of reincarnation and technology.

good read