Chris Adrian - The New World

Mr. Flanagan had a plan, which he and his wife described to Jane in a series of shouting emails over the next two weeks, each message filled with citations of supportive cases, and links to obscure Internet chambers where people murmured against Polaris and cryonics and longevitists and immortalists and futurists and even the very idea of the future itself. Wanda sent Jane frequent (sometimes hourly) supplemental updates on the research. It was Wanda who found the online support group for cryonics widows called the Penelope Project and strongly encouraged Jane to join. Look , she wrote, a group for people just like you .

Jane had a look, but didn’t stay long. It seemed merely to be a forum for women to congratulate one another on being lonely and depressed. She lurked invisibly for a while in the chat room, waiting for someone to be angry about what had happened to them all, but the five visible members were having only a very measured and passionless conversation about their grief work. When she couldn’t stand it anymore, Jane announced herself with a post: Polaris is a monster. When the others ignored her, she tried again a few minutes later: Polaris is a fucking monster!

Clytemnestra111 responded: Hey language Polyxena3! This is a sacred space!

Jane wrote: Sorry but they are monsters you know. Don’t you think they are monsters?

Clytemnestra replied, Bottled-up sadness is the only monster , and then the rest of them followed:

Helen22 said: You never mind them honey.

Iphigenia7 said: There’s nothing you can do about them.

Andromache57 said: They’re just a red herring in your grief work.

Cassandra99 said: Andromache you mean a McGuffin.

Andromache57 said: I mean a red herring.

Clytemnestra111 said: They’re a distraction. We all fled into anger at one time or another, but that just keeps you from feeling how you feel.

Jane wrote: I know how I feel.

And Clytemnestra wrote: But do you feel how you feel?

I hate them , Jane wrote.

Helen wrote: Honey, it sounds like you’re ready for some Grief Work 101.

I don’t need Grief Work 101, Jane wrote. I need my husband’s head returned to me.

Grief Work is Good Work , Helen wrote. It’s not them you hate. It’s yourself. It’s your own grief you hate.

I hate them!!!Jane wrote, practically typing with her fists. And I hate you too. There were a few beats of silence in the room. Jane’s cursor was throbbing.

They always lash out in the beginning , Clytemnestra wrote.

Amen , wrote Helen.

Just give her some time , wrote Cassandra. I was like that at first. Wasn’t I like that?

You were totally like that, wrote Andromache, and Jane wrote, I’m still here. But they wouldn’t talk to her anymore, only about her, and before long the conversation had settled back into its original course, which was concerned only with holding fragile memories and cherishing lost moments and traveling metaphorically back in time to put all those shared moments that were your life together to rest like babies. You mean put them down like sick cats? Jane wrote, and then Or smother them like babies? and finally Or set them adrift like elderly Eskimos? Then she got locked out of the chat room because too many of the members had sent her a frown.

Mr. Flanagan wrote several times a day about his evolving legal plan, which Jane ever only partially understood. He told her that she didn’t have to concern herself with the three organizations who might be willing to file briefs of amicus curiae, or whether he could apply her suit as a mass action even if no one else joined her in her complaints, or whether Polaris, in as little as six months, could be served with a double-inverse injunction preventing them from freezing new heads, at which point he would have them just where he wanted them, and then he and Jane, and every other wife or husband or mother or father or sister or brother or lover or very close friend who had lost some beloved body to their gruesome experimentations, could start to really make them pay .

All Jane had to do, he told her, was stay connected to her anger and grief, which meant remaining acutely aware of how Polaris was ruining her life , and interfering with the natural course of her grieving , and causing her mental suffering . In doing that, she would generate the soul of their case, and so her mantra, until their day came in court, must now be document, document, document. Wanda gave her a journal — not a book but a secure Web address with a word-processing app featuring a triply redundant save feature that printed Jane’s entries automatically every morning in Flanagan’s office. Wanda locked the pages in a fireproof safe, and though she said she wouldn’t read them, she did. “ ‘Always together,’ ” Wanda quoted breathlessly, the first time she called to tell Jane she wasn’t meeting her quota of journal entries. “ ‘Never apart.’ That’s lovely. That’s mental anguish! We are going to destroy the jury with this.”

“It’s just our vows,” Jane said. “What we promised. The promise he broke.”

“You mean what they took away ,” Wanda said. “What they did. I’m not saying they murdered your marriage but it’s almost that bad. It’s negligent marriage homicide. It’s heartslaughter. So this is great, honey. You’re doing great. We just need more, more more!”

Her husband added that they needed mountains of hard subjective data that would overwhelm the judge and jury, leaving them no choice but to find in Jane’s favor. To that end he gave Jane a button she was supposed to push at any time of the day or night when she felt mental hardship on account of Polaris taking Jim’s head away and freezing it and refusing to give it back to her. The button talked to a base station in the foyer, which talked through the phone lines to a computer in Flanagan’s office, which kept an endless virtual ticker tape of data points like a heart monitor. At first Jane just held it down rigidly for hours at a time, which prompted a call from Wanda to say she was confusing the computer. She praised Jane for recording her constant mental anguish, and recommended that Jane instead just push the button as fast as she could. Jane called back when both her thumbs were exhausted and sore. Flanagan got on the phone to say a repetitive motion injury would only help their case.

Almost three weeks after their first meeting, just as Jane was thinking seriously about going back to work, and trying to figure out where to keep a mental-anguish receiver at the hospital so it would be in range of the button, Flanagan asked to meet again. “I’m onto something,” he told her, “but I think we should talk about it face to face.” She could feel him winking through the phone. “It’s big . It’s enough to make you push the other button. The good button, if you know what I mean.”

“The happy button?”

“The ‘we’re going to win’ button,” he said. “Sleep well tonight. And don’t talk to whatshisface!” He ended all their conversations that way, though Jane didn’t need to be reminded not to call Brian after Flanagan had told her even one more word to him might compromise their case. Brian — or some Polaris autobot — texted every morning, but she never replied, and she never answered her phone, or listened to the messages, when Brian called every evening just after dinnertime.