James Halperin - The First Immortal

Robert Witter, tallest of the three terrorists, slapped his hand against the palm-dimension measurement surface and gazed into the corneal scanner. An optical calculator scrutinized his ID badge, then verified that he was indeed the same Robert Witter who’d been an employee of the Phoenix for nearly two years. Barry Lomax and Edward Zambetti, however, had only visited a few times, always during regular business hours. But that didn’t matter. As long as they were with Witter, the off-site warning correlation wouldn’t activate.

It was 1:37 A.M., and the next shift wasn’t scheduled to arrive until eight. Plenty of time to thaw the brains of every one of these rich pricks, Witter thought. Too bad they couldn’t get at the other 62,000 in this place; that would really have gotten their fucking attention.

He ushered his two comrades through a chain of hallways and automated security procedures, arriving at the only dormantory to which his recent promotion to cryogenic technician now granted him twenty-four-hour access. Technology installed after the mid-1990s was far more reliable, and never required emergency repair. But this particular room domiciled a more primitive system that still preserved 510 of the earliest patients; every Phoenix full-body suspension prior to August 1994, including Alice and Benjamin Smith.

“Most of these fuckers paid at least a hundred grand apiece,” Lomax had told Witter the previous week, “and that was back when a hundred grand would buy a hell of a lot more than a Hypercar. Hmm. In fact $100,000 was a small fortune in today’s money. Perfect!”

The AudioVids were beaming a permanent record of these activities to the central storage computers, but it would be days before the embryonic artificial intelligence module would have time to deduce what Witter and his accomplices had done. Human technicians at the Phoenix would no doubt discover the actions of the three men long before the AI could. Still, the three would eventually be caught and convicted; that was a virtual certainty.

Witter reset the thermostat to increase the room’s temperature from 70 degrees F to 99. Then he punched a series of codes to override the thermocouples monitoring each canister.

As they inspected the equipment, Lomax considered the implications of the crime they planned to commit. All class twos and threes, he figured. Not a single predeath preservation, and it was doubtful any of their brains had even been vitrified. The three of them were unarmed, and were not even getting paid. They might do serious jail time, but even if their attorneys were dolts, none of them would get life sentences. And their own cryo-rights seemed in no jeopardy.

All three men considered themselves heroic, and a small but vocal minority of Americans would have agreed. Lomax and Witter were motivated by progressive politics. After all, why should the dying poor, those to whom life had dealt the worst hands, lose all hope of a future? Who was to say that the lives of the wealthy were more valuable than those of the destitute? So what if the affluent tended to be smarter and more productive; after the doctors of the future overhauled the poor, they might no longer be captive of genetic limitations. All brains might well be raised to genius caliber, and equally worthy of salvage. The rich had already partaken disproportionately from life’s banquet, so maybe the poor were more deserving.

The third man, Zambetti, was also attracted to this undertaking as a matter of conscience, but his reasons were more spiritual. He was Catholic, and the Pope had stated unequivocally, “Life and death are matters that should be determined only by God.” Zambetti’s mission was to free the souls of 509 of these frozen cadavers. Only one would remain frozen, in deference to the wishes of his allies-of-the-moment, two men whose sincerity and commitment he’d come to admire.

The men disconnected the units and began drilling two-inch holes in the casings to insert microwave thawing devices. MTDs were neither powerful nor long-lasting, but would be consistent enough to heat each suspendee’s head up to approximately normal body temperature during the twelve minutes each unit could function before burnout.

Zambetti began drilling through double hulls of steel and the two-inch vacuum layer between them.

The Phoenix had always stored its full-body suspendees head down as an added safeguard, so the brain would be the last organ to thaw in case of a leak. The drilling had to be done within six inches of the floor or the specially treated liquid nitrogen would quickly refreeze the heads. “Soft-nite,” now used by every leading cryonics organization, wouldn’t evaporate nearly as fast as pure LN2, but would freeze anything immersed in it much faster.

They’d been assured that oxygen masks would be unnecessary with soft-nite, since it boiled more slowly, but all three donned them anyway. No sense taking chances. Vaporous fluid began flowing onto the concrete floor and seeping into drainage vents.

The room was already 88 degrees; the men, sweating profusely, were becoming languid.

“Don’t let your feet get near any of that stuff,” Lomax warned. “These were the best boots we could find, but nothing’ll protect you against soft-nite. Your toes’ll break right off. If you get in deep enough, your feet’ll shatter, too, like glass hitting concrete.”

Witter nodded. He’d never seen it happen, but had heard enough stories.

Lomax scanned the room looking for one suspendee in particular: Senator George Crane’s grandfather. Locating the canister, he marked it with a cross of red ceramic tape.

After all, my father had argued relentlessly on behalf of government-subsidized suspensions for the indigent; the only senator who’d cared enough to fight for the little guy. Now he was dead; reduced to ashes on August 17, 2015, when Basque separatists had SAM’ed a Concorde 11, killing all 966 passengers and crew, including Senator and Mrs. George J. Crane.

They would spare this Benjamin Franklin Smith.

They were political activists, Lomax reminded himself. Not thugs.

Digital titanium drills could pierce the canisters in seconds, and the MTDs would begin thawing the heads instantly. Only about an hour would be required to complete their work.

Suddenly Zambetti noticed a nameplate. “Uh-oh!”

“What is it?” Lomax ran in panic toward his co-conspirator.

“You think Alice Franklin Smith is related to Crane, too?” Stupid question. Of course she was! It had been ten minutes since he’d drilled her canister, and the soft-nite was already drained. “Guess I should’ve read the name first.”

“Shit! Didn’t know about her,” Lomax said. “Jesus, Witter, couldn’t you have checked the records, for chrissake?”

Zambetti tolerated Lomax’s lapse into blasphemy. He figured it was partly his own fault.

“Sorry” Witter called from halfway across the cavernous room. “Never even thought of it.”

“Can you get more soft-nite?”

“Not without calling in for it, and the remote security guys’d hafta release it manually. They’ll ask questions.” Witter thought a moment. “Got some binder that’ll hold it in, though. Least it’s supposed to.”

“Okay, quick!”

Witter fished the platinum-laced putty out of his instrument cylinder. Lomax snatched it from him, raced to Alice Smith’s canister, and set to work.

“No, not that way,” Witter shouted as the canister tottered, soft-nite squirting from the hole Lomax was trying to repair. “Watch out!”

Lomax managed to halt the flow, but not before the stream of soft-nite glanced off the top of his right hand. He jerked back in panic, barely tapping his hand against the side of the canister.

His thumb and index finger as well as the top two-thirds of the middle finger snapped cleanly off and fell to the floor, shattering.