James Halperin - The First Immortal

Max nodded.

“In fact,” Toby said moments later, “maybe you’d better go get a crash cart.”

She nodded again, and rushed out to find a nurse.

Now they were alone, just Toby and Ben, and Toby seemed to be at the cusp of decision; Ben could almost feel his friend’s mind at work.

“I hope you really want this,” Toby whispered. His hands were trembling as he carefully removed a syringe from his pocket and covertly injected the contents into the port on the IV pouch. “Goodbye, Ben. You will be missed.”

Even with his mind shutting down, Ben understood. Morphine .

Toby called Harvey Bacon and the rest of the Phoenix team inside. “His heart stopped beating. I’m calling him at one-fourteen P.M. Proceed.”

Approaching footsteps resounded from the hall. Bacon turned toward the door just as Toby was sneaking the empty syringe into his pocket. Bacon’s eyes rested briefly on the motion of Toby’s hand. Then Max returned to the room pushing a crash cart.

“We won’t need that now,” Toby said to her gently. “Ben’s gone.”

Max watched the cryonics team set to its task, as though she’d been expelled as a participant in her own life. Her face appeared shocked, saddened, emotionally repulsed, but professionally fascinated. Her eyes were simply following the activity of the team working over her father, as if her emotions had little meaning and all she could do was watch.

Then suddenly in darkness, Ben heard voices. Gary?

Ben felt himself rushing through a long tunnel, utterly serene and content. He saw a beautiful white light in the distance, and felt gladdened, eager to join with this loving light. The experience was nothing like his short-lived resignation to death in 1943; this time he welcomed it. The light beckoned him closer; he raced to meet it, no longer missing earthly existence or human flesh. He was not his parents’ child or even his children’s father; he was himself alone. At last.

He couldn’t yet see his wife, but somehow knew she was there, inside the light, waiting to welcome him for all eternity. Soon they would be rejoined. Forever. As the light grew nearer, the voices from earth became faint, disconnected, and ultimately irrelevant.

Out of breath, Gary hobbled into the ICU and saw Toby’s morose expression. “I’m too late, aren’t I?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Damn. Damn it all!”

Three cryonic technicians were coupling Ben to a heart-lung resuscitator and mechanical cardiopulmonary support device. Both functions were activated, and Ben’s circulation resumed. He began to breathe.

Oxygen and other nutrients would soon rekindle part of his brain.

“I order you to stop this immediately,” Max shouted. The three technicians, obviously used to such interference, ignored her.

“Sorry, Max,” Toby said. “Ben made an anatomical donation, willed his body to the Phoenix. I have no legal authority on the disposition of Ben’s remains, even if I disagreed with his wishes. Which I don’t.”

“But we’re his family,” Rebecca said.

“So am I,” Toby answered.

“Gary,” Jan said, “can’t we do something? They’re gonna freeze him, for chrissake!”

“Why are they doing that?” Gary asked, looking at Toby.

“It’s what he wanted. Cryonic suspension. He thought someday we might have the science to cure and revive him. He knew it was a longshot, but it was his life, wasn’t it?”

Gary nodded. He thought about his own years in medical school, his internship and residency and practice: precious time wasted trying to please his father instead of himself; a mistake he would never make again, nor wish on anyone else. That’s right, it was the man’s own life, and even in death, he alone should decide what to do with it.

The cryonic technicians administered various medications: Nimodipine, a slow calcium channel blocker to help reverse ischemia. Heparin, an anticoagulant to aid circulation. And a tonic of free radical inhibitors and other medications to minimize future ischemic brain damage. They began packing the body in ice.

“According to the technicians,” Toby explained to Gary, “every ten-degree drop in Celsius temperature cuts metabolic demand in half, which slows the loss of neurons.”

Gary watched intently, saying nothing. The technicians hovered over Ben, exchanging clipped phrases. Gary felt an unfamiliar emotion surface. He didn’t recognize it until, to his astonishment, he found himself fighting an impulse to raise his arm in salute.

Ben felt something tugging him back through the tunnel, away from the light, down from the ceiling. A powerful force, irresistible.

It made him angry.

He’d seen his darling Marge’s face and was at the verge of melding with the light surrounding her. Yet now he was back inside his body, sentient but unable to move regardless of exertion, aware of his breathing, feeling the pulse of the heart-lung machine through his arteries, and experiencing all other earthly pain, fear, and grief.

Damn! Must be alive again. How long had he been dead? Minutes? Days? Years?

He heard his daughters’ voices clearly, and Toby’s, and Gary’s. He wished he could tell them to send him back.

They argued his fate as if he no longer existed.

They were prepping him for the freezer, he realized. He must have been gone only moments. But they were right about one thing, he decided: He didn’t exist.

They were talking too fast, or perhaps his mind was operating at a reduced pace. His body felt simultaneously frozen and aflame. He expended no effort; even his breathing was performed by device. Thus the pain was endurable; real yet somehow apart from significance.

But dread overwhelmed him.

As long as he was alive, suicide was still an option. But once he was an ice cube, he couldn’t will himself to die, now could he? Why hadn’t he thought of that before?

The technicians began surgery. Ben was aware of them cutting the femoral vessels in his groin. They attached a blood pump, membrane oxygenator, and some kind of heat exchanger he’d never seen before. As Ben’s brain cooled, everything around him seemed to move with increasing velocity. By the time his body temperature had fallen to 90 degrees Fahrenheit, he was a snail surrounded by hyperactive hummingbirds.

Oh God, tell them to stop!

The cryonic technicians were now preparing Ben for the plane trip to the storage facility in Phoenix, Arizona, where he knew he would receive cryoprotective perfusion to minimize freezing injury to cells, and eventually be cooled to minus 196 degrees Celsius. First they would have to replace his blood with an organ preservation solution. Then they would place his body, packed in ice, into a shipping container for perhaps its final flight.

A sense of panic overtook him. Was he trapped here for generations with no possible escape? Had he made the ultimate mistake? Would he become like a Kafka character, paralyzed until the end of time?

Ben felt a scream surging from the core of himself; all the worse because he knew he could never give it voice. Perhaps it would quiver on the edge of his throat forever.

Then, like a rheostat diminishing the flow of current, his brain activity decelerated to below the critical level, the optic nerve concurrently deprived of blood flow. He experienced what seemed a brilliant, transcendent moment of astonishing lucidity, a moment isotropic with respect to time; an instant or an eternity.

For reasons unknown and unimportant to him, he recalled the words of Jean-Paul Sartre: “And I opened my heart to the benign indifference of the universe.” All at once Ben understood the wisdom of those words as no living man ever could.

The rheostat slipped into the range just a kiss above darkness.