EIGHT Suspension 1: Tourists at a Mutilation 118

NINE Suspension 2: Remember the Alamo 132

TEN An Adrenaline Junkie, the Cult at Ventureville, and Suspension 3: The Hammer and Chisel 138

ELEVEN Alcorian A-2032 158

TWELVE "That Guy Who Was Frozen" 175

PHOTO INSERT

THIRTEEN "Pay Up or Die" 205

FOURTEEN Hi, My Name's Larry and Tm a Whistle-Blower 214

FIFTEEN "He Killed Her" 239

SIXTEEN "For Your Crimes Against Cryonics You Will Die" 264

SEVENTEEN On the Run 277

EIGHTEEN Tcd's Last Wish 287

NINETEEN "We Will Get You You Will Pay" 304

TWENTY "When Will It End?" 335 Epilogue 343

Cast of Characters, 3S3 Glossary, 360 Acknowledgments, 367 About the Authors, 370 Notes, 371 Index, 389

INTRODUCTION

You're about to read a really bizarre story. I won't be able to explain all the things my colleagues at Alcor Life Extension Foundation did, or why I made all the decisions I did during the seven months I worked there. Some of those decisions, including why I first went to work at Alcor, may seem strange to you. As you'll read, though, I've been an adrenaline junkie most of my life and the job as clinical director for Alcor promised to be unlike anything I'd ever done before, and never boring for me. Boy, was I right about that.

At first, the idea of working at Alcor fit the bill perfectly. Although the important cryobiological research I was promised during my initial job interview never materialized, soon it didn't matter—the more I got to know my colleagues and the history of the place, the more immersed in it I became. Meanwhile, by slowly earning the trust of my eccentric coworkers, I became privy to many company secrets and was promoted to acting chief operating officer.

At some point, though, when I began to realize that really dark and possibly illegal things were being done at Alcor, I decided I owed it to everyone—the frozen Alcor "patients," their families, the surrounding community, even the hard-core Alcorians sincerely hoping for another life beyond this one—to document the abuses that were going on under the roof of that strange enterprise. I observed unconscionable environmental and animal experimentation practices. My complaints about apparent OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) and EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) infractions kept falling on deaf ears. Worse,

I soon began hearing persistent rumors about the suspicious, premature deaths of several Alcor members. So I began digging and have never quit.

I'd never before seen myself as a whistle-blower, but that does seem to be what I've become. I began copying Alcor documents and, later, recording conversations with my colleagues. Ultimately, I wore a wire every single day of my last three months there. I had to do this, and you'll read why I'd never imagined myself in that role, but I respect the truth, and people who aren't afraid to speak the truth, even to the powerful.

During my time at Alcor, and in the six years since I had to flee Scotts-dale, maintaining my self-respect by finding the truth and making it widely known have become, next to my wife and family, the most important things in my life. That's why I wanted to write and publish this book. Thank you for reading it.

LARRY JOHNSON July 1,2009

PROLOGUE

My wife and I were in the living room packing frantically, rushing to get out of town, when suddenly there was a thunderous pounding on the door. Beverly started screaming. I ran to the bedroom, grabbed my 9mm Beretta from under the bed, and rushed back to the living room. The banging was so powerful, the molding was breaking off from the wall; they were literally bashing their way in. I inched toward the door. Beverly was on the floor, crying hysterically, her hands over her ears. I put my eye to the peephole but the door was vibrating too violently for me to see who was there. Shouts came from the other side.

"Johnson, you motherfucking traitor! We'll get you, you son of a bitch!"

I backed up, aimed my gun at the door, shaking in its hinges, and screamed, "If you come through that door Til put a bullet through your head!" I meant it. At that moment, I really believed I was going to have to kill someone.

"You traitor, we'll kill you! You too, Beverly. You will both die!" The banging stopped. Footsteps ran down the outside stairs.

Beverly was crumpled in a heap on the floor, sobbing. I stood, trembling, looking down at my wife.

What have I done?

CARNAGE AND CHAOS IN SIN CITY

July 5, 2002, was just another day for me as a paramedic in Las Vegas.

I awoke at my usual five o'clock to the sound of the weatherman announcing that the outside temperature was already ninety-nine degrees. Still feeling the toll of yesterday's twelve-hour shift, I knew I was in for another long, hot day.

I showered in a flash and was quickly ready to leave home. Careful not to wake my wife, Beverly, I tiptoed outside, walked downstairs into the garage of our apartment building, and said good morning to the other love of my life: my Harley

One of my greatest pleasures is riding my Fat Boy Ever since I was nine years old I would hop on any kind of motorbike and roar through the desert to recharge my batteries. It was a perfect escape and helped me stay sane. I've always been happy to be left on my own, and there is nothing like the rush of freedom and solitude I feel when I ride.

During my early-morning rides, whatever was clogging my head would spread out, thin, and be swept away behind me. After cruising some of my favorite desolate desert roads, I chose a route that would take me up Las Vegas Boulevard, the Strip. I hopped off the 215 at the last exit before Interstate 15, down by the airport. There's something eerie about cruising the Strip at five or six in the morning. Somehow I felt like I was getting away with something, like I wasn't meant to be there, not at that time, and definitely not alone.

Frozen

At that time of the morning I might see the occasional hooker or random drunk stumbling along the sidewalk, but Las Vegas Boulevard itself was usually empty. I could cruise quietly or roar straight down its throat, depending on my mood. I was in little danger of getting sideswiped by a tourist in a rented minivan.

Of course, the casinos never closed, but at this time of morning they were at their quietest—slumbering giants shaking themselves awake, stretching open their jaws to swallow up every dollar from every sucker from every other town in America.

I could see the sun coming up while many of the casinos still had their lights on. There wasn't another soul around.

I passed Caesars Palace and saw the spot where two months earlier I had jumped on a guy who had attacked a cop, all three of us wrestling for the cop's gun. The guy was out of his mind on sherm—a cigarette or joint dipped in embalming fluid. The effect of smoking this popular street drug is said to be like that of the powerful stimulant PC P. It was a vicious struggle but the cop and I eventually subdued him. If he had gotten that gun, I probably would have ended up as no more than a stain on the Caesars Palace sidewalk.

Mount Charleston is a huge chunk of rock that rises out of the sand north of the Strip. This morning it shimmered with the reflection of the rising sun. Spectacular blues, oranges, and a battleship gray were dissolving into a soft purple. Even in the July heat, snow somehow survived on top of Mount Charleston. Whether or not it could be seen from the Strip depended on the previous winter's snowfall, but I had seen it up there myself, year-round, enduring even the desert heat in the protective shadows of the crags and cliffs. I always found that stubborn snow encouraging.

The ride was working its magic, as it usually did. I was being washed clean; the aches and pains from the previous day's shift were shding away. Seeing Mount Charleston in the distance never failed to refresh my spirit. It helped me prepare for whatever stresses the day would present—and there would be stresses.

It takes a certain type of person to be a paramedic. I've worked in half a dozen cities in the American Southwest and Texas. But in Las Vegas,

particularly, I'd witnessed some of the most disturbing human behavior on the planet.

rd had bits of my ear chewed off by crazed drug addicts who broke through their restraints in the back of an ambulance; scraped sick, homeless drunks off scorching asphalt in 110-degree heat, their charred skin sticking to the pavement; mopped high-diving, high-stakes losers off casino sidewalks; talked teenage rape victims off seventh-floor balconies, and run hundreds of calls to neighborhoods in which I otherwise would never have shown my face. More than once I'd hit the deck when automatic-weapon fire sprayed through my ambulance, bullets ripping the air over my head— gang members usually don't want their rivals to receive medical attention. Somehow I had always made it through the constant mayhem of shootouts, fistfights, knife fights, and ambulance crashes.

It was tough on my body, always carrying heavy gear or even heavier bodies. The emotional strain, though, was worse. Paramedics worked with pain and death every day. We developed mental calluses but still found ourselves continually surrounded by suffering, sorrow, and heart-wrenching loss. Sometimes I could help; sometimes I couldn't. Sometimes I saved a life; sometimes I watched a grown man scream hysterically in the street as his daughter died in his arms.

In Las Vegas, I was constantly wading through the seamier side of humanity. On good nights, I'd be stationed outside Caesars Palace and tourists would ask me to pose with them for pictures in front of the ambulance like I was Siegfried or Roy. Mostly, though, I responded to 911 calls in the tougher North Vegas neighborhoods, poor areas with a lot of gang violence that doesn't make it onto the TV news. Sadly, I worked with the worst people at their worst times.

We often arrived on a scene before the police. Protocol dictated that we did not rush in alone—it wasn't our responsibility to mix it up with gang members, and we didn't carry weapons. It wasn't easy, though, knowing that a bystander might be hurt and all we could do was park at a safe distance and wait for the cops. I'd scrunch down in my seat in case there were shots fired, roll my window down a crack, and wait for the all clear.

Frozen

In my experience, most paramedics burned out after around five years and switched jobs. I was then in my twenty-fifth year as a paramedic.

It must have been the excitement of not knowing what emergency I could be called to ft-om one minute to the next that had kept me in emergency medicine for five times longer than the average paramedic.

I admit it. IVe always been an adrenaline junkie.

When I arrived at work that morning of July 5, 2002,1 found my twenty-something-year-old partner, Steve, in the back of our ambulance with an IV in his arm, rehydrating himself after a night of Fourth of July debauchery. Most paramedics lived hard. Twelve-hour shifts were followed by late nights and early mornings of nurse-chasing down at the Emergency Room bar just off the Strip. We had our own hangout, the Las Vegas emergency medical community's equivalent of Cheers. Steve had a story to tell nearly every morning. He reminded me of myself back in the day.

There was a strong bond among paramedics, especially between partners. It was similar to that of firefighters, police, or maybe soldiers on the battlefield. You went through hell together, constantly on the lookout to protect each other. I loved that feeling of community and camaraderie. Watching Steve gobbling saline pills and sucking on an oxygen mask, though, reminded me of just how young I wasn t.

Optimistically, we tried to make it to McDonald's for a couple Egg Mc-Muffins before the daily pandemonium began, but like most mornings, the calls came in as soon as we hit the street. Just another day of carnage and chaos in Sin City.

Our third back-to-back morning call involved lugging a three-hundred-pound heart attack victim through the impossibly narrow confines of his mobile home. Struggling with his bulk, I noticed a membership brochure on the man's kitchen table for something called Alcor Life Extension Foundation.

Larry Johnson with Scott Baldyga

Later that morning, Steve and I heard the news over the radio in our ambulance: Ted Williams had died.

This really upset me. Ted Williams was one of my personal heroes. Even though I had grown up awfully far from Boston, his legendary baseball career had proven to me that with enough hard work and dedication, anything was possible. One of my childhood's prized possessions was a Little League Ted Williams baseball bat. I still have it, along with my Sears Ted Williams bicycle.

"Ted Williams?" Steve asked. "Who's that?"

"You're kidding," I said. "Ted Williams was one of the greatest hitters of all time. Not to mention an American war hero."

Steve shrugged.

I shook my head. "Man, am I that old?"

In December 2002,1 began looking for a new job in earnest.

After twenty-five years as a paramedic, I was really burnt out. My wife, Beverly, saw it. As much good as riding my Harley did, as good a shape as 1 was in, I was still a few years north of forty. I had always been told I looked young for my age. I'd even been accused of having a boy-next-door quality to me. Those days were behind me now, though. Like an athlete over forty, I was constantly sore. I knew in my bones that it was time to make a change.

I also wanted to live closer to my father. My mom and dad had divorced when I was very young. Even before my parents split up, my dad was either gone all day working for the phone company or gone all night working as a pianist. I had never had an opportunity to be around him much. My father was getting up there in age and if I was going to change careers I might as well change cities. Dad was now retired, remarried, and living in Phoenix. Dad's wife was a kind woman named Mary Jane. Unfortunately, she was also very sick and needed a lot of care at home. Dad loved her dearly and stayed by her side day after day.

Frozen

So I began the process of a change in careers. One field I was interested in was biotechnology research. I had to be realistic, though. Adrenaline had been a part of my daily routine for twenty-five years. How happy would I be sitting in a quiet lab every day watching liquids inside test tubes turn from green to blue? Yeah, I was burnt out from paramedicine but I still craved excitement. Only now I was searching for intellectual stimulation rather than the peculiar thrill of wrestling with sherm-crazed felons. My dream job, then, would be an exceptionally interesting biological research position—in Phoenix, close to my dad. A tall order, for sure.

A few weeks into my job search, I ran across an advertisement on Mon-ster.com looking for a paramedic or nurse to be a "team leader" for a company researching life extension via the cold-temperature sciences. This struck me as interesting. The company was called Alcor Life Extension Foundation.

That was the name of the company on the pamphlet I had seen the morning of Ted Williams's death. What a coincidence.

I hadn t followed the scandal surrounding Ted Williams's death too closely, but I did remember that there was some family squabbling about his final remains and I remembered something about him being frozen. I Googled Alcor and Ted Williams and sure enough—it seemed as if Ted Williams had been brought to Alcor.

Huh. What were the odds? I felt like the universe was telling me to look into this job.

Unlike most job ads, there was a phone number. Maybe they were really anxious to fill the position. I called and spoke to a man named Charles Piatt. In what sounded like a distinguished English accent, Charles asked, "Larry, have you heard of cryonics?"

"It has something to do with freezing organs for long-term storage, right?"

"Well, yes," Charles said. 'Alcor is a cold-temperature research facility located in the Phoenix suburb of Scottsdale, Arizona."

Wow, a research facility outside Phoenix!

"We work closely with our sister facility in Rancho Cucamonga, California, called Critical Care Research or 21st Century Medicine," Charles

said. "Together we develop and experiment with drugs and freezing procedures to preserve human organs in the hopes of one day reanimating our patients."

"Reanimating?"

"Yes. The goal of cryonics is bringing our patients back to life."

"Oh. Well, Charles, it sounds fascinating but Tm really more interested in mainstream biological research, like maybe the preservation of organs for transplants."

Undaunted, Charles told me that what they were doing at CCR in Ran-cho Cucamonga was right up my alley then. They were making great strides in cryobiological research, he said, particularly in freezing and unfreezing kidneys, hearts, livers, and corneas for transplants. This type of research was going to save lives. CCR was also working toward being able to freeze endangered plant species to combat extinction. And one of CCR's scientists was working on an ice-resistant concrete treatment to keep runways and roads bone dry during the worst ice storms, a real life-saving advancement if it worked. I had seen enough road accidents as a paramedic, enough people killed driving in icy conditions, to know how valuable that would be.

Plus, Charles told me, he was sure I'd be equally impressed with the groundbreaking work at Alcor itself. I should come to Scottsdale, Charles said. Alcor would fly me out. I could tour the facility and we would discuss Alcor's needs in detail. Right there on the phone, without even having seen my resume, Charles asked what would be a good date for me.

That conversation with the distinguished-sounding Mr. Piatt sparked my interest, so I decided to go online and research recent work in the cold-temperature sciences. What I found was amazing. Much like bold discoveries that have been made in quantum mechanics, advances in the cold-temperature sciences were challenging accepted views of reality. The behavior of certain metals at extremely low temperatures contradicted the very laws of physics! At super-cold temperatures, scientists were discovering, some elements were sliding around without any friction at all. Matter acted in ways it simply shouldn't. I found this fascinating.

Frozen

The practical applications included improved hospital machines, fuel for the space shuttle, food preservation, organ and embryo storage, scalpels that cut without drav^ing blood, superior fire retardants, and new plans for fusion energy plants. Cryobiologists were even bringing children to the infertile. And as Charles had mentioned, doctors were now able to perform lifesaving organ transplants that were previously impossible.

Clicking from Web page to Web page, I learned that cryogenics, a branch of physics, was the study of low temperatures themselves and how they affected materials. Cryobiology was the study of the effects of low temperatures on biological matter or organisms, and cryonics was the application of these cold-temperature sciences with the intention of freezing people or animals in the hopes of one day reviving them.

It was that "reviving" bit that was sticking in my craw.

I visited Alcor's Web site. The front page seemed to me heavy on the marketing, like it was meant to entice the average browser to look past the fantastic, science fiction aura surrounding cryonics, which at first sure sounded implausible. I decided to cut to the chase and found the Web page that listed Alcor's board of advisors. If they had any "legitimate" scientists involved, I figured, maybe it wasn't completely far-fetched.

Man, was I in for a shock. When I read the credentials of the people on Alcor's list of scientific advisors and conference speakers, I was astounded.

They included MIT and UCLA professors, research scientists from UC Berkeley and Cambridge, and JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) and NASA advisors. The ranks of Alcor's scientific advisors included Marvin Minsky of the MIT Media Lab and the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, and Ralph Merkle, one of the top people in robotics and nanotechnology research.

Stem cell researcher Michael D. West, one of the leading figures in modern biotech, had recently spoken at the Alcor Conference on Extreme Life Extension in November 2002, as had artificial intelligence pioneer Ray Kurzweil, who, I read, had won the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize, the world's largest cash award in invention and innovation. Kurzweil had also received the 1999 National Medal of Technology, the nation's highest honor in technology, from President Bill Clinton in a White House ceremony. Another luminary who had spoken at that Alcor conference, Gregory Ben-ford, was an advisor to both the U.S. Department of Energy and the White House Council on Space Policy, as well as a science fiction author who

had won the Nebula and John W. Campbell Awards, and the 1990 United Nations Medal in Literature. Yet another speaker—and Alcor advisor— was Aubrey de Grey of the University of Cambridge, one of the world's leading researchers on anti-aging. These people were all at the top of their fields. I was hugely impressed.

There sure were a lot of world-famous scientists a hell of a lot smarter than me lending their names and reputations to Alcor. And the cryobio-logical research I could be part of at CCR seemed both thrilling and important. Okay, I thought, Td visit Alcor, and withhold any judgment on the mysterious cryonics part of the job until I had seen the place. All in all, I thought, what a lively, exciting, rewarding field to be a part of

TWO

JUST ANOTHER RESEARCH FACILITY OUTSIDE PHOENIX

In the United States of 2003, the days of breezing into an airport thirty minutes before departure were over. My flight to Phoenix was scheduled to leave at 10:15 a.m. Seven in the morning found me already arriving at the airport. This was a Saturday, only a few days after New Year's Day, and even sixteen months after the horror of 9/11, security at Las Vegas's Mc-Carran Airport was very tight.

In the terminal, ft"ustrated people queued up in long lines. Open your luggage. Empty your carry-on. Take off your belt, take off your shoes, lift up your arms, step over there.

It took me two hours to get through check-in and the various security procedures. This put me at the Southwest Airlines gate an hour before the departure time for my flight to Phoenix. Young National Guardsmen were everywhere with combat boots and Ml6s.

Flying has never bothered me. For six years during the 1990s I worked as a flight paramedic for a large emergency helicopter service based out of the Methodist Medical Center in the Oak Cliff area of Dallas, Texas. That's where the movie theater is where Lee Harvey Oswald hid out after shooting JFK. It's also the hometown of my favorite guitarist, Stevie Ray Vaughan. Eventually I became flight program director for another Dallas helicopter service. I have responded to hundreds of calls as a helicopter paramedic, maybe a thousand. I was the chief flight paramedic at Waco,

Texas, called in by the ATF to chopper out injured agents during the Branch Davidian siege. I've had my share of bumpy rides.

And, flying Southwest was far safer than riding my Harley down half the streets in North Vegas. Still, I was anxious.

Forget about the German shepherds and teenage guardsmen with automatic weapons inside the airport—I was nervous before I even left home. I'm not real good at job interviews. I can take charge of a bloody accident scene with body parts strewn across a ft*eeway, but put me in a chair and start asking me about my accomplishments and hobbies and I start stuttering and sweating.

The cold-temperature sciences may very well be a lively and exciting field to be a part of, but I have seen corpses "down" in the Nevada desert for hours that had more color in their faces than Charles Piatt's did. He was sickly looking with sunken eyes and a yellow discoloration to his skin. He also trembled constantly. The paramedic in me registered that this man wasn't getting all the nutrients he needed. Charles Piatt seemed like a hepatitis-positive fish whose gills were flapping their last gasps on land.

A crudely drawn sign quivered in Charles's jaundiced hands. The words resembled my name enough for me to recognize it, but the sign looked like it had been scribbled by a disturbed, messy child.

Charles's eyes darted around, as if on the lookout for danger. He turned slowly, the way a man twenty years older would, and introduced a man he was with as "our chief financial officer and vice president, Michael Riskin."

If meeting Charles Piatt made me want to run and fetch the man a wheelchair and an IV, meeting Michael Riskin made me want to run and fetch a cop. Riskin was just about the sleaziest-looking person I had ever met. He easily could have made a living bouncing around the various Law &■ Order and CSI shows playing "Criminal #1."

Riskin seemed older than Piatt, between sixty and sixty-five. He was of medium height, with a spare tire around his belly. His hair was greasy black streaked with gray, his face coarse and covered in pockmarks. I'm a

big Rolling Stones fan and it struck me that Michael Riskin looked a bit like Keith Richards, only rougher. Riskin out-Keithed Keith, if that's possible.

Though respectively sickly and greasy looking, Charles Piatt and Michael Riskin both greeted me with warm smiles and were very pleasant. I've learned not to judge people based on their appearances. Both men wanted me to feel welcome and comfortable, and I appreciated that.

They led me outside the Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport to the Alcor vehicle, a late-1990s Chevy Suburban. I noticed a Boston Red Sox license plate on the front bumper. Interesting. That was Ted Williams's team.

Charles took the wheel, while Riskin sat in the passenger seat. As a driver, passenger, or bouncing body in the back, I'd gone off the road in a rocketing ambulance a few times. I'd crash-landed inside stalled helicopters that fell out of the sky like bricks. It took a lot to scare me, but still, no experience inside a moving vehicle had terrified me as much as that car ride with Charles Piatt! Before we even left the parking lot, Charles was driving like a maniac. He drove way too fast, his hands—and thus the wheel and the whole car—vibrated and jerked as we raced along.

I kept my silence. First impressions and all. I felt I couldn't just say, "Hi, I'm here for the job and, by the way, why are you driving like a lunatic?"

In the passenger seat, Riskin was perfectly calm. I couldn't believe it. Maybe he was so used to driving with Charles he was completely desensitized. We made an odd threesome: Charles, tearing the hell out of the road and trembling like a ninety-year-old palsy sufferer; Riskin, serenely gazing out the passenger window; and me in the backseat, hanging on for dear life, trying to remember the last time I went to church.

Charles made light, how-was-your-flight chitchat. Camelback Mountain was inching by. I talked about my dad living near Phoenix and how much I loved the landscape, how much I wanted to live there. It was true. I did love the Phoenix area, especially north of the city.

Charles went on and on about how glad they were to see me and how they needed a professional like me to help Alcor interact with hospital staff and other medical professionals.

After twenty white-knuckled minutes of high-speed near misses, we arrived at the Alcor facility in Scottsdale. Overall, Phoenix is very pretty

and clean, but Scottsdale is like the Beverly Hills of Phoenix—even prettier, even cleaner. There's a lot of money in Scottsdale.

Alcor's facility was located in a huge industrial park southeast of the small Scottsdale Airport, nestled between light-industrial businesses that didn't need walk-in traffic to survive, like the furniture reupholsterer on one side. There was uniformity in the single-story architecture, anonymity in the stucco facades. The only feature that distinguished one front from the next was which particular shade of soft blue, rusty red, or adobe orange each was painted.

Alcor's front was light blue, with tidy desert landscaping composed of rocks, gravel, short prickly shrubs, and lonely cactus plants. In fact, Alcor's building at 7895 East Acoma Drive was, if anything, special in that it was not special at all. From the outside, it was just another business.

The main front door was glass, darkened to the point of being opaque. On the upper right-hand corner of the building, printed in dark blue letters, was the simple word 'Alcor." If I didn't know what Alcor stood for, I wouldn't have had the foggiest idea what went on behind that dark door.

I wasn't the only one thankful that our drive was over. Charles became noticeably relaxed as we walked up the concrete path and approached the door. He and Riskin both seemed relieved to be back at home base.

Charles pulled out a set of keys to unlock the door. He may have been calmer than he was back in the airport, but his hands were still trembling as if he had just downed a triple shot of espresso.

I noticed two cameras perched in high corners of the building, aimed down at the front yard. As Charles opened the door, a buzzer went off.

No one's going to sneak up on these fellows, I thought.

I followed them into the building and noticed a couple of rows of eight-by-ten photographs mounted on the wall to my left. There were probably twenty of them in total, some in color, others in black and white. I asked Charles about the pictures.

He told me these were some of the people in cryonic suspension here at Alcor. Unlike most Alcor members, these were allowing Alcor to disclose their identities for the purposes of publicity and recruitment.

The reality of what Alcor did struck me. These people's bodies were frozen, somewhere in this building, in the hopes of one day being revived. What kind of people signed up for that? I studied the pictures.

Many of the photos were of smiling, pleasant-looking elderly people. Some were old wedding pictures. Others were yellowing portraits of military men in uniform. One young man with long, curly hair was holding a bass guitar. Charles pointed him out as if he was famous, but I didn t know the name: Randall Robertson. Charles told me Randall had suffered from several illnesses after contracting AIDS from a blood transfusion.

Beneath each photograph was a brass plate engraved with dates, like on a tombstone: "1962-1998" and such. Underneath those numbers were the words "First Life Cycle."

I asked Charles what that meant.

Charles smiled and explained that Alcor did not consider these people dead; they had simply finished their first life cycle. Now Alcor was looking after them until they could be reanimated into their second life cycle. They weren't deceased, they were merely suspended. Alcor referred to them as patients.

Each brass plate also had the letter 'A" engraved on it, followed by a four-digit number, such as 'A-2051."

Once a person was awarded full membership at Alcor, Charles said, he or she was assigned one of those A-numbers. The A stood for Alcor. The following four digits were the cryonics equivalent of a social security number. Charles indicated that the number would follow the person around for hundreds of years. Most Alcorians, as he called them, valued their privacy. Those who did not wish their names to be made public were referred to only by their A-number.

One of the pictures was of a very severe-looking Middle Eastern man whose name was listed as FM 2030.

I asked Charles what FM stood for.

"Futureman," Charles said. "That's his name. Futureman thought he'd be reanimated by the year 2030 so he could enjoy his one hundredth birthday Hence the number."

But something had caught my eye on top of the short divider wall in front of me. At first it looked like a trophy but then... Cool! I thought. An Emmy Award!

I went straight for it. I had never seen one in person and wanted to check it out. It had been awarded to a Dick Clair for writing on The Carol Burnett Show in 1978.

Charles smiled paternally, like he took vicarious pleasure in Dick's accomplishment. I looked over at Riskin. He also flashed me a proud smile. Charles said Alcor was looking after Dick's Emmy Award until the day he would reanimate and reclaim it.

Noticing the impression the Emmy Award had on me, Charles started rattling off a list of what he claimed were celebrity Alcor members, including Larry Flynt and his late wife, Althea, casino zillionaire Don Laugh-lin, and Walter Matthau's son, Charlie; Timothy Leary had been a member until just before his death; Peter Sellers and Walt Disney had both expressed interest to Alcor's cryonic predecessors; and, Charles claimed, Michael Jackson had made contact with Alcor as well. That was quite a lineup.

The Emmy was blanketed in a layer of dust, and I thought. You might want to clean that off before Dick reanimates. There was a fax machine and Xerox copier behind the short divider wall, and the only spots on those machines not covered in dust were the buttons, which were smudgy with black fingerprints. I noticed stacks of teetering boxes in the corners of the room. I left my handprints in the dust next to the Emmy as I turned away from the divider wall.

Riskin excused himself and disappeared down a hallway Charles led me to a small glass table in the middle of the lobby We sat down opposite each other.

Charles told me that Alcor was very protective about its procedures. Other cryonics organizations were jealous, he said, and would love to get their hands on Alcor's secret formulas. The less "outsiders" knew about what went on inside Alcor, the better. I was being given a very unique opportunity, Charles told me.

Charles outlined the history of Alcor to me, elaborating on the techniques they used to cryo-protect their patients. I was struck by how well spoken Charles was on the subject of cryonics. In this area, he seemed like a real smart guy.

I was distracted, though, by the clutter on the tabletop. In particular, my eye was drawn to a Domino's Pizza box sitting on the table between us. It was too early for lunch, so unless folks around Alcor ordered pizza for breakfast, that box had been sitting there overnight at least. The glass table-

top was fingerprint city, covered with crumbs, dust, and greasy smudges. I didn't see any napkins. Instead, there were several computer magazines smeared with tomato sauce, scattered willy-nilly around the table.

It's a good thing their-patients are dead before they get wheeled in, I mused, half expecting to see a cockroach saunter across the table picking pep-peroni out of its teeth. Charles didn't excuse the mess. There was no quick, embarrassed expression of "Sorry, but we're awfully busy around here." So this must be S.O.P. No big deal, though. I chalked it up to these guys' being the absentminded genius types.

Riskin entered the lobby with another man trailing behind him. I stood up as Riskin introduced me to 'Alcor's president and CEO, Dr. Jerry Lemler."

A little short and a little pudgy, Jerry had thin, graying hair and a thick, graying beard that hung three or four inches below his chin. He wore dark-framed glasses and appeared to be in his early fifties. With his eyes cast down over his belly and toward the floor, Jerry Lemler greeted me with a very timid "Hello."

My grandfather used to tell me you can judge a man's character by his handshake. If that was true, Alcor president and CEO Dr. Jerry Lemler might have been the weakest man alive.

Charles cut short the small talk, suggesting we begin my tour of the facility. Riskin agreed and the two boxed Lemler right out of our little tour group. Trailing behind the three of us now, Lemler quietly suggested that maybe we could all grab lunch before they took me back to the airport. Without looking back, Charles said, "Maybe, if we have time, Jerry."

It was clear to me that these two didn't respect or like Lemler and that they sure didn't want him accompanying us on the tour. The stiff arm to Lemler was so well choreographed, I thought, that Piatt and Riskin must have done it to him before. If Lemler noticed the slight, he didn't speak up.

Charles led me down a hallway, then another, deep into the belly of Alcor. The facility was large and I quickly became disoriented. Charles began the tour by showing me the Alcor operating room. The OR was square, about twenty-five feet per side. The walls were painted a clinical white. It looked like a t3rpical small surgical suite except for the hard white

plastic mortician's table crouched in the middle of the room where a standard operating table would normally be. That seemed appropriate, since this was a room dedicated to operating on, well, dead people. Unlike standard operating tables, mortician's tables have high walls on both sides to funnel blood down and away from the body during autopsies. Two large surgical lights towered above. They were harsh, where-were-you-on-the-night-of-August-16th-type lights. As I stood at the foot of the mortician s table, I glanced to my left and noticed several roller pumps commonly used in hospital surgical suites to pump blood or medicine through the body.

To the immediate left of the mortician s table was a clear box made of what looked like Plexiglas, about two-and-a-half feet square. Clear piping led away from it, down to a large tank of liquid nitrogen. Inside the box was a piece of metal hardware I recognized as a halo, which physicians use to stabilize patients with neck injuries. The patient's head is placed inside the halo, and then screws are tightened to the point where they make contact with the skull, immobilizing the head and stabilizing the neck. It looks like a medieval torture device but is very effective.

What puzzled me about this particular halo was that it was embedded inside the small Plexiglas box. Where does the rest of the patient go? I asked Charles about the setup. He told me it was their cephalic isolation box.

"Cephalic, as in cephalon?" I asked.

Charles nodded. Most patients wished to have only their heads cryo-suspended, Charles said, so Alcor hired a retired local surgeon to come in and decapitate them. Then the head, or cephalon, was placed into that Plexiglas box and perfused with a special formula of drugs while liquid nitrogen was simultaneously pumped in. This began the cooling process.

A httle macabre to be sure, but I thought it was fascinating. That cephalic isolation box was ingenious. I asked who had designed it.

It wasn't only Charles's hands that trembled. Now his lips were twitching. The way Charles next said, "our facilities engineer, Hugh Hixon," was enough to suggest there wasn't much love lost between Charles and Hixon.

Looking at that box, though, I could tell this Hugh Hixon guy was one heck of a creative engineer. To envision the design of that box, amass

the unrelated parts, build it, and then actually make it work—that was brilliant.

My appreciation of Hugh Hixon's work seemed to speed up Charles's tour. Apart from the door we had entered, there were three others leading out of the OR. One led down a short hallway to a restroom, another led to a small storeroom, and the third led to the lab area.

Given the state of the front reception area, I opted not to visit Alcor's bathroom. I told Charles I didn t have to "hit the cephalon" just yet, but he didn't laugh.

Trembling, Charles broke out his keys once more and unlocked the storeroom door. Its shelves were packed full with hospital supplies. In fact, Alcor seemed better stocked than many major hospital emergency rooms I had worked in. Apparently, money wasn t an issue where supplies were concerned. There was everything in there from sutures to syringes, needles to scalpels. I recognized a vaginal speculum on one of the shelves, an instrument used by gynecologists. I couldn t imagine why they needed one of those at Alcor. There were also intravenous solutions with use-by dates that, curiously, had expired years before.

We entered what Alcor called the dry lab. Like the front lobby, the dry lab was cluttered with cardboard boxes. Whatever—Einstein was a slob, right? Black plastic Pelican storage cases, popular among campers and sur-vivalists because they are watertight and sturdy, were stacked to the ceiling.

Charles told me they stored all of their transport team equipment in the Pelican cases. I asked if I could look inside. Charles appeared happy that I was taking an interest.

He chose one and opened it. Inside were at least fifty ziplock bags filled with vials of drugs. The bags were numbered with a red marker, "1,2, 3," etc. When I asked Charles why the bags were numbered this way he told me that most of their emergency transport team members were volunteers. These were the people who went to hospitals and homes when Alcor members had deanimated, to begin the suspension process. Though they were all dedicated Alcorians, Charles said, they were not trained medical personnel. He joked that most of them had no idea how to pronounce the names of the drugs in those baggies, never mind what they were used for.

Alcor had found it easier to simply label the bags and instruct the volunteers to inject the drugs in numerical order. Meanwhile, Riskin was poking around the insides of the Pelican case quizzically. It was obvious that he, like the average Alcor volunteer, did not know much about the contents.

I examined several of these baggies. Oddly, I noticed that all of the drugs were expired, just like the intravenous solutions back in the storeroom. I thought to myself, / wonder if the FDA or DBA would have a problem with these drugs being expired. Then again, these drugs are being administered into the deceased, so — but wait, if Alcor considers their patients to be alive, shouldn't they provide drugs that haven't expired and thus lost their potency^

It was a wild circle of logic. I wondered which government agencies oversaw these types of organizations. Frankly, the frontiers-of-science mystique really intrigued me. Somehow, despite all the oddities I was encountering, and a few early alarm bells, I was sort of digging this place.

We made our way through another door into the wet lab. There was a large restaurant-style sink divided into three basins with a water sprayer dangling over it. Opposite the silver sink were several industrial-size refrigerators with stainless-steel doors. Everything was sheathed in reflective metal, very futuristic looking.

Charles opened one of the refrigerators and said this was where Alcor kept its temperature-sensitive drugs. I stuck my head into the cold. Again, most of the drugs were expired. 1 also noticed several metal trays full of a drug called Diprivan. (Coincidentally, this was the same drug that early press reports said was found in Michael Jackson s home afer his death in June 2009.)

Diprivan is a milky white liquid usually kept in twenty-milliliter glass containers. It is a sedative-hypnotic agent. It puts someone out but not totally out, sedating them and at the same time clouding their memory so they don t remember anything. But what does a company whose patients are already pronounced dead by the time they get them into their OR need with a drug that sedates them and then fogs their memory? As Charles was shutting the refrigerator door, something else caught my eye.

"Wait," 1 said. "Why do you have that?"

Charles closed the refrigerator door, muttering something about pharmacology being out of his element. Riskin seemed to be intently studying

his shoes. I had made Charles nervous and now I was sensing that he was by nature a paranoid person. I didn't want to push it, but I remained curious about what I had seen.

The drug I had noticed was called Vecuronium, a muscle-skeletal paralytic, another powerful drug used by physicians, especially anesthesiologists, as well as senior paramedics. In the field, Vecuronium is indicated for patients who need to be intubated. That's when a tube is placed directly into the trachea to help a patient breathe. When Vecuronium is administered, the patient becomes paralyzed within seconds. This allows the physician or paramedic to intubate the trachea without the patient choking, gagging, vomiting, and fighting like hell to the point of endangering himself As you can imagine, being intubated while conscious is a horrific experience. The drugs used as paralytics must be highly potent.

In the wrong hands, though. Vecuronium is deadly During my tenure as a paramedic I had had to administer Vecuronium to dozens of patients and it scared me sick every time. If you inject someone with Vecuronium and then do not have the equipment and training to breathe for them immediately, youVe killed them.

The fact that Alcor stored sedatives was curious, but—^paralytics? What would a company that deals with dead people need with drugs that will stop a patient from breathing within seconds of being administered?

Charles turned to me, clasping his hands together in a trembling image of prayer, and asked, "Would you like to see where we keep our patients?"

It was the icing on the cake. So to speak. Isn't that what everyone on this tour really wanted to see? Step this way to the coolers, folks! Just past the gift shop.

We walked back through the OR, past a set of wall lockers, down a hallway, and arrived at a door. This place was a maze. Charles flipped on a light and announced that we were standing in the Cool-Down Bay. There was a large ice machine against the wall. That made sense.

Charles explained that after a patient's head was removed, perfused with Alcor's cryo-protectant chemicals, and initially cooled in the OR's cephalic isolation box, they drilled two burr holes into the skull and slid in microphones to monitor the brain with a computer rig they called the Crackphone. A hook-type handle was installed into the neck for easier

handling—from that point on they carried the patient's head around, upside down, like a bowling-ball bag.

The head was then lugged into the Cool-Down Bay and lowered into a waist-high cylindrical cooling tank called the LR-40. They used duct tape to seal the LR-40's hd, and then liquid nitrogen was pumped in for the cool-down to -321 Fahrenheit.

Before I could ask about the ominous-sounding Crackphone, Charles fumbled with his keys once more and unlocked the gray door at the opposite end of the room. I noticed another camera overhead, pointing down at the door.

"Here it is,'' Charles announced. "The Patient Care Bay. This is where the patients reside."

I have never in my life been the jumpy type but I almost went through the damn ceiling when I heard the thin, shrill voice call out from beyond the door.

"Who's there?"

"It's Charles. And I'm not alone."

Charles walked through the door. I followed. As I entered the Patient Care Bay, a figure appeared. I would have believed it if I were told right then that one of Alcor's patients had reanimated and was making a break for it.

Dr. R. Michael Perry was skinny. Malnutrition skinny. He reminded me of pictures I'd seen of POWs. He had his arms crossed in front of him, hugging himself, long fingers clutching bony elbows. His hair stood out at odd angles, unkempt and messy. Together with his rumpled, dirty clothes, Mike Perry gave me the impression that he had just gotten out of bed.

It was hard to estimate Mike's true height because he stood slumped over due to his hunched back. It seemed a little too perfect, a little too "Igor," but it was the God's honest truth that Mike Perry, the Alcor employee who looked after the frozen patients, was hunchbacked.

Introducing us, Charles told me that Mike was a mathematician and held multiple degrees, including a PhD in computer science. He was, Charles smilingly said, a genius.

Despite the praise, Mike just lowered his head and scurried out of the room, mumbling. I will say, for an emaciated brainiac who walked with his arms folded, Mike made good time. He was unnaturally fast and stealthy, like a lab rat that was successfully endowed with superhuman intelligence and then picked the lock on the cage. Mike was, to say the least, an eccentric guy.

As the muttering trailed off down the hallway, Charles told me Mike's title was "Caretaker of the Patient Care Bay"

I spotted a blue container on the right side of the room that resembled a big freezer chest. Mostly, though, it looked like something Dr. Frankenstein would have kept in his basement to lock up his failed experiments.

The chest was wrapped in a thick, padded chain with a heavy padlock. A confusion of wires snaked out from under its lid and ran down to some sort of electronic hub, which in turn was connected to a computer. The computer monitor displayed a graph with straight lines running through it, like an electrocardiogram monitor. Attached to one of the wires coming out of the freezer chest was a pale yellow tag with 'A-1949" written on it in black marker. I recalled the A-numbers I had seen under the photos on the Alcor Wall of Fame. Actually, another A-number had been blackened out with a magic marker and A-1949 had been written beneath the crossed-out number. Recycling the tags identifying their patients' heads? I thought. They must have one damn thrifty comptroller!

I asked Charles about the container. Placing one hand on the computer monitor and leaning up against the table in frustration, Charles sighed. He explained that the CryoStar was a high-tech intermediate-temperature storage unit where patients' heads were sometimes stored midway through the freezing process. The CryoStar was intended to afford extra-careful protection while a head underwent drastic drops in temperature.

The CryoStar was giving them problems, though. Charles explained that it was designed to maintain a constant temperature down around -126 degrees Celsius (-196 degrees Fahrenheit). This was supposed to limit cracking the patient's brain, but the CryoStar was malfunctioning, randomly fluctuating plus or minus 10 degrees. Relatively speaking, this was a huge temperature swing.

"Sorry, Charles, did you say 'cracking the patient's brain'?"

"Unfortunately, that happens," Charles said. "There are two heads in the CryoStar right now," he continued. One had been a close personal friend of his. The other was patient A-1949.

'And over here, Larry, are the dewars." Charles turned my attention to a half-dozen tall, shiny metal canisters lining the left side of the room. They were highly polished reflective steel, standing more than ten feet tall and about five feet in diameter. I saw my face mirrored in them, all skewed and unreal, like in a fun-house mirror. Each sported a giant Alcor logo. The dewars looked like something out of a 1980s science fiction movie. Charles was reverential as he discussed them; the way he gushed over them, they were evidently the pride and joy of Alcor. I looked around for Riskin, to note his attitude toward the tall silver tubes, but he had disappeared.

Charles went into great detail about the dewars. I learned that the name originated with Sir James Dewar, the nineteenth-century Scottish chemist and physicist best known for his work with low-temperature phenomena. He was a professor of experimental natural philosophy at the University of Cambridge, England, in 1875, and then professor of chemistry at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in 1877, where he was appointed director of the Davy-Faraday Research Laboratory. Wow, it was as if Charles had swallowed a memory chip. He had this tour spiel down cold.

The dewar bottle was a container for storing extremely hot or cold substances. It consisted of two flasks, one inside the other, separated by a vacuum. The vacuum greatly reduced the transfer of heat, preventing a temperature change. The walls were usually made of glass because it was a poor conductor of heat, and its surfaces were lined with reflective metal to reduce the transfer of heat by radiation. Sir James's containers were most famously used in the distilling of Scotch whisky. Alcor, however, put them to quite a different use.

Bizarre as this seems now in the retelling, I learned that at Alcor, each dewar housed either four whole-body patients or a combination of whole bodies and severed heads. At the time, I was simply fascinated by the engineering behind it. Charles explained that before being placed in a dewar, a full-body patient was deposited into a sleeping bag and then suspended upside down in a pod made of sheet metal. The pod was about seven feet

tall and wedge-shaped, made to a measurement one-fourth of the inside diameter of a dewar. If one stood on a ladder and looked straight down onto a dewar with the lid off, Charles said, you would see the tops of four triangular pods, "like looking down on a pizza with four slices." I had to chuckle at Charles's metaphor; it must have been deep-dish pizza.

The reason whole-body patients were placed upside down was to help protect their brains. If something catastrophic happened and there was a massive liquid nitrogen leak, the patients' heads would be the last things exposed. Made sense.

I asked how many suspended patients they had in total. Charles told me the number was in the fifties. They had designed this room very carefully. The south wall was two feet thick, concrete reinforced with steel.

"These walls were built," Charles said, "so that no one could drive a car through them, in case someone tried to break in to harm or steal the patients."

I asked about the smaller, squat silver tank on the back wall.

This was the Neuro Vault, Charles explained. After they lifted the patient's fully cooled head from the LR-40 cooling tank, they placed it into a stainless-steel container called a Neuro Can (it looked like a lobster pot to me), and that pot was placed inside the Neuro Vault for temporary storage. The dewars were the final destination for long-term storage, but it was better to open them as infrequently as possible, Charles said. It was a big, delicate job opening the dewars. There was a crane permanently mounted on the roof to muscle those big canisters around. Heads were stored in the Neuro Vault until they absolutely had to open a dewar. Charles said they also stored samples of their patients' DNA in the Neuro Vault, as well as some cat and dog heads.

"Cat and dog heads?"

"Some members want to have their pets with them when they are reanimated into their next life cycle," Charles said. Charles wasn't sure, but he thought there was a monkey brain in there, too,

"So," Charles said, clapping his hands together, "that's the tour. Hungry for lunch?"

Charles had zero perspective on exactly how funny that question sounded. After twenty-five years as a paramedic, I didn't exactly have a

weak stomach where body parts were concerned. The casual way Charles talked about all this, though, was just plain odd. Still, I was impressed with his knowledge and dedication to cryonics.

Lead on, Charles, I thought. Decapitated TV writers and monkey brains always perk up my appetite!

As we left the Patient Care Bay, I noticed Mike Perry hugging himself and watching me from underneath the camera in the neighboring Cool-Down Bay. At some point during Charles's explanation of the dewars, Perry must have crept back in there to study me.

Charles noticed and said, "Mike is real protective of our patients." I followed Charles through many twists and turns, back to the front lobby. On my own, I was sure I would have had a hard time finding the way out. Riskin and Lemler were silently waiting at the table still adorned with the empty pizza box. I looked over at the wall of pictures. Those pleasant folks were in the dewars now, residing between animations. I looked at bassist Randall Robertson. For some reason I pictured an Alcor technician shaving oflf those long, curly locks. They'd do that, right? Before they chopped off his head? Otherwise, I figured his hair would have shattered when it was brought down to -321 degrees Fahrenheit.

At lunch we talked about my background as a paramedic. Jerry Lemler was very interested in hearing about basic emergency medicine techniques. Charles and Riskin were more interested in hearing about my experiences as chief helicopter paramedic at Waco during the siege of the Branch Davidian complex. People usually shook their heads in horror and disbelief when I told stories about the Waco siege. Charles Piatt and Michael Riskin had a different attitude, though. They told me they admired the Branch Davidians for holding fast to their beliefs and standing up to the U.S. government.

I had held the brains of ATF officers in my hand, American heroes who took fifty-caliber rounds to the head from fanatical cult members ready to kill and die for their messianic leader. I had dealt with the Davidians firsthand, zealots who considered themselves prisoners of war, including their poor brainwashed children. After encountering the Branch Davidians personally, I didn't find anything in them to admire or emulate. I told Riskin and Piatt exactly that. They nodded solemnly and said they respected my feelings.

Charles wanted to hear my thoughts on how to organize the Alcor emergency teams into more professional groups. They seemed aware they all gave off an odd sense to outsiders. That's where they seemed to hope rd come in. They needed someone like me, as a bridge to the mainstream medical community.

First of all, I suggested they change the title of the job—transport team leader—they were interviewing me for. I told them that hospital personnel weren't familiar with the title, and it would give them pause. Better to call the job director of clinical services. Every hospital and ambulance company had a job with this title. It was a title doctors and nurses in an ICU would understand.

"Done," Jerry said. The other two nodded their heads.

Next I asked if the volunteers had any sort of uniform or name tags identifying them as Alcor employees. In order to work in the medical community you really need to look the part. By nature, hospital administrators are a hard-boiled, suspicious lot. They see a lot of shenanigans. You can't walk into a hospital wearing street clothes, carrying all kinds of equipment, and then ask to take possession of a deceased patient you are not even related to. You will not get a warm reception. In fact, with all the recent fears of terrorism and with babies being stolen out of nurseries, I told them, hospitals were now monitored more closely than ever.

Piatt told me they had already thought of that. Alcor volunteers, he said, have made name tags that read "Organ Recovery Team."

I sat back in my chair in disbelief Lemler and Riskin kept right on eating. "You can't do that!" I said.

In no uncertain terms, I told them they were going to get into a lot of trouble. That was misrepresentation, plain and simple. Organ recovery teams were trained professionals with a wide range of licenses and certifications. That would be like me walking into a hospital with a name tag reading "Larry Johnson, MD." I didn't go to school for that; I didn't earn that. If ICU nurses struck up a conversation with these cryonicists, they would figure out pretty quickly they were not real organ recovery personnel. Dressing up your volunteers to look professional is one thing. Misrepresentation is something else, and completely wrong. If Alcor's volunteers were caught impersonating an organ recovery team, I told them, they wouldn't be allowed into another hospital in the country. Period.

The three of them looked at each other, shocked, not knowing what to say. Finally, Jerry stammered something about that's exactly why they needed someone like me at Alcor, someone who knew how to interact with the medical community.

Okay, I thought, so at least they do want to clean up their act, professionally speaking.

Charles changed the subject. If I took the job, he explained, I would be free to pursue my own interests in cold-temperature research with their sister facility. Critical Care Research, in Rancho Cucamonga, California. That sounded fantastic to me. I told them that was probably the biggest reason I was interested in the job. Jerry told me I would have all of CCR's resources at my disposal, and plenty of time to participate in their current projects, or pursue my own research. I thought about that road treatment for ice storms. It sounded like awfully fulfilling work.

I would also be asked to train Alcor volunteers on emergency medical procedures, Charles said, and I'd assist their emergency response teams, transporting patients from their place of deanimation to the Alcor facility. I'd help prepare the bodies, administering drugs and assisting in the washout procedure in which the member's blood was replaced by Alcor's cryo-preservant chemicals. Then I would lend a hand in the OR during the final phases of cryo-suspension. I was intrigued, actually, wondering what all this really entailed.

"I guess more than a director of clinical services, Td be a 'paramedic to the dead/" I joked.

They all stopped chewing. "Oh no, Larry," Jerry Lemler said. "Those patients aren't dead. They're deanimated. Awaiting their second life cycle."

On the way to the airport, Charles flat-out asked me for a commitment. Just like that.

I already knew they were offering an employment and pay package just about equal to what I was used to as a paramedic—^but without the daily physical pounding. I told Charles the truth. Alcor was definitely new, exciting, and fascinating—thus extremely appealing to a guy like me—^but I would have to talk it over with Beverly. We pulled up to the curb at Sky Harbor Airport. I leaned across the seat, took hold of Charles's shivering yellow trout of a hand, and told him I would call him later. He said he'd be looking forward to it. Without looking back, I shut the door and walked into the terminal. Once inside that airport, damn if I didn't just sprint to the nearest bar and order a vodka martini.

My brain was buzzing. The unhealthy look of the Alcorians stuck out to me, from the trembling COO to the hunchbacked Keeper of the Dead. Patients. Life Cycles. Deanimation. A-1949. The heads in the CryoStar, the bodies in the dewars, the DNA samples in the Neuro Vault—floating on top of the cat heads and monkey brains. The cephalic isolation box. Fractured brains and Crackphones. The dust, the pizza box, the paralytic drugs, the vaginal speculum. Vaginal speculum?

Man, what a day!

As soon as I got home I grabbed Beverly, rushed her to one of our favorite restaurants, and blabbed about my Scottsdale adventure for two hours straight. Bev let me get it all out with only the occasional intelligent question. She's a great listener, one of the many things I have always loved

about her. As I relived the day's events with her, I realized how^ excited I was by the prospect of working at Alcor: pioneering research on the furthest edge of modern biotech with brilliant—albeit eccentric—colleagues.

During a pause in my story, Beverly said, "You're really excited about this. And it sounds like maybe this is another type of adrenaline rush for you. Maybe you're trading the danger and excitement of paramedicine for this strange, fascinating world of cryonics."

I smiled at her. She knew me. She was right. "Is that bad?" I asked.

Beverly laughed and said, "At this point, anything that gets you off the street as a paramedic is okay with me."

They were some strange birds, these Alcorians. But bizarre as they were, what if they were really onto something? I mean, we're talking about immortality. They told me I would be free to pursue my own research. They had all these world-leading scientists from MIT, Cambridge, and UC Berkeley advising them, even a scientific advisor to the White House, all of them publicly supporting Alcor. And they certainly were well equipped and well funded. Sure, they were messy and disorganized— and isolated—^but that's why they were looking to hire someone like me. Honestly, the more I thought about it, the more intriguing it became. It was the only job I had run across that just might fill my need for excitement. It was electric.

Best of all, though, Alcor was right outside Phoenix, literally a few miles from where my dad lived. That part of it was almost too good to be true.

I asked Beverly what I should do. She laughed again.

"As if anyone could ever tell you what to do." Bev smiled. "It's your call, Larry. But you know, in my book, any change right now would be a good change. I hate seeing you so beat-up all the time. And you know how much I love Phoenix."

We sat in silence for a moment.

"Still," Beverly said, "it's your decision. Whatever you decide, I'm behind you."

Early the next morning, after reading through the fine print of Alcor's job offer, I fired up my Harley and took a good, long ride through the desert. My head cleared but the excitement remained. When I got home, Beverly asked what I had decided. I smiled at her and shouted, "What the hell!" By living in Las Vegas we had learned to gamble. We'd spin the wheel and see what happened. Beverly was even happier than I thought she would be. We danced around the kitchen, feeling like a couple of teenagers. We did it—we were leaving Las Vegas, on our way to a new beginning. Hey, if nothing else, it sure wouldn't be boring!

THREE

WELCOME TO ALCOR

Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

—SUSAN ERTZ, AUTHOR, Anger in the Sky

'Alcor? Aren t they the ones that freeze people?"

Our new apartment manager was a no-nonsense, middle-age woman. Beverly and I liked her a lot.

"Well, yes, it's called cryonics," I said.

"What will you be doing there, exactly?" She squinted at me past the cigarette in her mouth.

"Research," I told her. She raised an eyebrow at that, so I added, "Just playing with test tubes. Nothing too creepy. I won t be mucking around with the corpses or anything. Ha-ha. Ha."

I hadn't anticipated how "normal" people would react to hearing that I worked at Alcor. I guessed I'd get used to it. Plus, I haven't exactly always needed the approval of strangers to make me feel like I was doing the right thing. I had spent most of my life in New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas: I'll do my thing, you do your thing, live 'n' let live, don't tread on each other.

For his part, my dad didn't waste any time taking advantage of Beverly and me being in town. He came over to our place the day we arrived and then spent the entire weekend with us, with the exception of

going home now and then to tend to his wife. My dad's second wife, Mary Jane, was very ill and couldn't leave home much. He never complained about taking care of her—I knew he loved Mary Jane dearly— but I could tell he was both comforted and delighted to have Bev and me living so close to him. Beverly got on great with Mary Jane. Maybe, I thought, we could help take some of the strain off my dad.

Dad took me aside that first day and said, "Larry, one of the biggest regrets in my life is not being able to spend much time with you when you were growing up."

"I feel the same way. Dad," I said. "But now that can change."

Dad smiled. "We got a lot of time to make up for."

We hugged each other. It was a really nice moment. Dad had brought a guitar over to our apartment. He's a fantastic musician. In between helping us unpack boxes. Dad would pick up the guitar and sing us a song. Who knew unpacking could be fun?

Bev was equally excited to be living in the Phoenix area. Each time we had visited my father in the past, Beverly had gone on for a week afterward about how clean and pretty Phoenix was. She was going to love this.

Our two-bedroom apartment was in North Scottsdale near the Princess Resort, on the north side of the Scottsdale Airport, about two miles from Alcor, maybe a ten-minute drive. It is hard to live anywhere in Scottsdale without being close to a golf course. North Scottsdale is a haven for wealthy retired couples. Although Beverly and I were far from retirement age, and even farther from wealthy, the area appealed to us because it was quiet and well kept. Our apartment was modest but comfortable.

On the morning of January 26, several days after our move, I sat down at my computer with my usual cup of coffee. Beverly continued to unpack the endless stacks of cardboard boxes. Following my morning routine of checking my e-mail, I decided to look around on the Internet for more information about Alcor.

Before my tour and job interview, when I had researched Alcor, I had been immediately taken with the cryobiology side at CCR, and impressed

by the scientists on Alcor's board of advisors. After the tour, I was so excited by the prospect of living close to my dad, and intrigued with the fascinating things I had seen inside Alcor, that I hadn't dug any deeper for more on Alcor.

Nowadays people often ask me why I went to work there in the first place. Looking back, maybe I wouldVe hesitated had I been exposed to the weirder side of cryonics—if anything couldVe been weirder than that tour. To me, though, the science and creative engineering were fascinating. How close to actually being able to do all this were they? Where did science meet fiction? How did Hugh Hixon concoct those brilliant machines? What if we really could be reawakened and see what things are like a couple hundred years ft-om now? And, I imagined, what if one day it could be possible to "cryonically suspend" and actually save patients like those who had died on me so tragically in the street? That was awfully exciting to me.

And, the truth is, daily life as a paramedic had sucked me right back in as soon as I returned to Vegas ft-om Scottsdale. When I thought about Alcor during those quick three weeks before Beverly and I moved, I put that new and exciting job opportunity up against feeling terribly burnt out as a paramedic. I hated the look in Beverly's eye when my back would spasm, when I would give her curt answers about how my day on the ambulance was. Alcor was a lifeline out of that grind in Vegas. Lots of people would have been grossed out by the reality of cryonic procedures, but that kind of stuff" rarely bothered me. Td worked with that kind of physical, anatomical reality all my adult life.

Plus, IVe always been impulsive. As Beverly had guessed, Alcor implicitly held out the promise to fulfill my need for high levels of daily excitement. It was sort of like going to work at a high-tech circus, but with the added hope of a real contribution to modern medicine via the promise of mainstream cryobiological research at CCR. As a teenager, I didn't always check to see how deep a narrow gorge was before I jumped it on a motorcycle. I suppose that that recklessness has always been a blessing and a curse for me. It's helped me save lives but it's also gotten me into trouble.

One of the first things I found while Googling Alcor that morning was a Web site called CryoNet.org, an online bulletin board for cryonicists. I

found postings dating back to the 1980s. There was everything from nerdy pseudoscientific babble debating cryonic suspension techniques to lengthy descriptions of what these lonely people had had for breakfast to head-freezing jokes to name-calling accounts of arguments with morticians and cryobiologists. Some were intelligent and well-written; some were infantile and defensive. Others were dov^nnright shocking, revealing some cry-onicists to be troubled, paranoid people. One posting read:

. . . just as the animal whose smell is wrong is savagely bitten and forced away, so too do we cryonicists feel the cruel slings and arrows of humanity.

In response to this, a man named Michael Darwin had posted a piece he titled "The Lone Wolf" Darwin wrote:

I kill dogs and I hurt them. It is my job and I was made to do it. To do it well I have had to love them, and to know them better and deeper than most men ever know each other. I respect them more than I do most humans, and IVe loved more of them than I have human beings. . . . And, like it or not, being at odds with the mainstream can kill you. I am a homosexual, an atheist, a manic depressive, possess an aesthetic sense and worldview most people find unbearable, and am brilliant at sensing the softest, most vulnerable part in a person and using that to cause enormous pain.

Michael Darwin didn't sound like much fun at parties—or someone I'd ask to dog-sit for me. I knew cryonics drew fringe people but this Darwin guy and some of the others sounded awfully disturbed. The most surprising thing, though, was the sheer number of postings. There were thousands of them, and this was only on a single Web site. I found a similar site called Cryonics Cafe. I remember thinking these people seemed to have no lives outside of cryonics.

Oh well. Couldn't be any worse than dealing with Branch Davidians and North Vegas gangbangers.

Three days later, I was out of bed by five and ready for my first day of work at Alcor. Charles had called me earlier in the week and told me that he would be driving down to Phoenix from his home in northern Arizona to join me on my first day He asked me to be at Alcor between nine and ten.

I arrived at Alcor at precisely nine o'clock. In a strip of commercial storefronts, Alcor was located on the far right as I faced the building. Relative to its industrial park neighbors, Alcor occupied a very large space, taking up what would normally have rented as three separate properties. On the left, its closest neighbor was the furniture reupholsterer. On the far right, a twenty-foot-wide asphalt driveway and parking area led around to the rear of the building.

The only other vehicle in the front parking lot was the Chevy Suburban sporting the Boston Red Sox license plate. Since that vehicle belonged to the company itself, I figured I had been first to arrive at work this morning. I tried the front door anyway. It was locked. I settled back in my truck to wait, a ZZ Top CD keeping me company.

Within minutes, a small sedan pulled into the parking lot. The driver was a young woman in her mid-twenties with a very pretty face. I wasn't sure what color her hair was at first because she was wearing a crash helmet. It was a white plastic bicycle helmet. She didn't see me. As I watched, she turned off her car and removed the helmet, placing it on the seat next to her. Then she exited her car, shook out long brown hair that fell to her slim waist, and marched quickly across the parking lot toward the front door. She had a runner's build and in fact rushed along as if she were being chased, moving in straight lines and turning sharply on her heels like a robot set to fast-forward. The young woman unlocked the door and disappeared into the Alcor facility

The whole helmet thing had caught me off guard. As I sat there, wondering what the heck she was doing wearing a bicycle helmet while driving her car, I missed the opportunity to introduce myself—and to get inside my new place of employment.

Now that I knew someone was in there, I decided to try the front door again. As I approached, I was struck again with the quiet anonymity of

Alcor's building. Anything could be going on in there and who would know it? That simple word, Alcor, on the front of the building made it sound more like a power tool distributor or aluminum siding manufacturer than a place where they'd lop off someone's head and drop it into a vat of liquid nitrogen. I chuckled at that thought. This was going to take some getting used to.

The door was still locked. Knock-knock. No answer. Knock-knock-knock. The young woman seemed to have been completely swallowed up inside. I knocked a little louder. Then I banged. Then I started feeling foolish.

I looked up at the two cameras I had noticed during my tour. I waved at them, pointed at myself, pointed at the front door, and waited, but still, nothing.

I looked down the driveway on the right-hand side of the building. Bordering the asphalt was a thin landscaped area, maybe five feet wide. High, scraggly bushes were planted so close together that you couldn't see through them. They were there for privacy, I assumed, but didn't seem long for this world.

I walked down the driveway to the rear of the building. There was another parking lot back there, much smaller than the front lot. The back of Alcor's building was primed for deliveries with a large metal roll-up door serving as a loading dock. To the left of this was a back door with a placard reading: "NOTICE—CHEMICAL HAZARD."

The small parking lot was shaped like a shallow bowl so that rainwater would flow into a drain at the center. A discoloration on the asphalt caught my eye. It was a trail of chalky white residue, originating right outside Alcor's back door and terminating at the storm drain. I could see similar drains behind several neighboring businesses down the strip, but the only one with a residue trail was the one outside Alcor's back door.

Whatever the ghostly stuff was, it had apparently been borne by a liquid, and most of it had flowed down the drain. It didn't take Sherlock Holmes to deduce that someone had taken a step out Alcor's back door and upended a large quantity of liquid that carried the white stuff in it.

I decided not to bang on the back door, partly because it would be an odd way to greet a new colleague, by sneaking around the back of the

building, and partly because I didn't want to get that chalky stuff on my shoes. I returned to the front entrance.

Back at the dark glass door, I cupped my hands and peered inside. I could just make out the eight-by-ten photographs I had seen during my initial visit. There was Futureman, staring at me from Alcor's Wall of Fame, stoically waiting for the year 2030.

A shadow congealed and approached. As the spectral figure drew near, I recognized Mike Perry, Alcor's hunchbacked patient caretaker. All the knocking in the world hadn't drawn anyone out but once I started snooping around, Mike materialized. I motioned for him to unlock the door. It took a moment for him to recognize me. He cracked the door a few inches and stood there, squinting. Once again, Mike's hair looked as if he had just woken up. His frayed clothes reminded me of the hand-me-downs hospitals kept on hand to give to the homeless after a night of sobering up in the ER.

"Good morning, Mike," I said. "I'm Larry Johnson. I hope you remember me. Today's my first day at Alcor and Charles Piatt told me he'd meet me here around nine o'clock."

Without a word, Mike stepped backward. He watched my every move as I walked by him and sat down at the small table in the lobby. Just as on my earlier visit, an empty Domino's Pizza box lay atop the table. Again, greasy fingerprints were smudged across the glass tabletop and stray science magazines. I wondered if this was the same mess or a recurring one. I looked up for Mike, half ready to question him about it, but he had vanished. I noticed yet another video camera high up in a corner. They sure were serious about security at Alcor. Although Mike had disappeared, I had the feeling I wasn't alone. I'd have sworn someone was watching the camera feed at that exact moment.

At 9:30 a.m. someone else finally arrived. It wasn't easy to see who it was because of my angle to the door, but sure enough, when the person fumbled with his keys to unlock the front door, I figured it was Charles.

Smiling, Charles said in his English accent, "Larry, I am so glad to see you are here."

He still had that cold and clammy handshake I remembered from our first meeting. Under his arm he carried a beat-up khaki travel bag a little smaller than a human head.

Charles smiled again and repeated, "Yes, I am so glad to see you are here."

I followed Charles deeper into the building, down a hallway I hadn t seen during my tour three weeks earlier. We entered a closet with a desk crammed into it. Charles sat his khaki bag down, squeezed behind the desk, and told me this was his office.

Filing cabinets lined a few of the walls, making the tiny room feel even smaller, and there were metal shelves on the other walls, messily crowded with office supplies. Charles shared his tiny room with a small army of Wite-Out bottles, hundreds of pens and pencils, dozens of staplers, and piles upon piles of cryonics literature. Alcor pamphlets spilled off the shelves and pooled on the floor. More stacks of Alcor's ubiquitous cardboard boxes were teetering in every corner. Like the rest of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation facility, this room was a wreck.

A computer monitor covered in dust sat on a shelf, its screen divided into four quadrants. Two of the views were of Alcor's front yard—closed-circuit feeds from the two cameras I had seen outside. The other two quadrants showed high-angled shots of interior hallways and doors. Cables ran from the screen down to an oversized video recording machine.

Charles motioned toward the door. "Come on, Larry, Til show you where your office is." I had barely enough room to turn around. Great, I thought, chuckling to myself The COO already has dihs on the hroom closet, so what does the clinical director get? A bathroom stalU

Most of the lights in the building were still off, so Charles flicked switches as we walked down a hallway. On the left-hand side of the corridor I noticed a cubicle office with a small desk and computer facing the open door. The computer was off, the room's occupant not at work yet.

We came to a large open area with two desks, many tall filing cabinets, and more of the brown cardboard boxes stacked everywhere. The walls were a clinical off-white and the floor was covered in what looked like dirty gray tiles.

"Here we are," Charles said. "This will be your new office. It used to be our marketing area."

"Charles," I asked, "how do you market something like cryonics to the average person who might find it, well, a little bizarre?"

Larry Johnson with Scott Baldyga

Charles laughed good-naturedly and mimicked a call: "Hi there, Mr. Peters, my name is Charles and please don't hang up because I'd like to talk to you this morning about a unique opportunity to freeze your head!"

1 thought that was pretty funny. I immediately liked the way Charles was able to poke fun at the strangeness surrounding cryonics. I also appreciated the fact, as I interpreted it, that he was trying to put me at ease.

"Good question!" Charles continued. "Let me know if you have any ideas. Our marketing department did not last long at all. Not every idea around here is brilliant."

I peeked into one of the cardboard boxes. Sure enough, it was filled with promotional merchandise. There were rulers, notebooks, and pencils stamped with the slanty, futuristic-looking Alcor logo, along with faux leather binders, T-shirts, sweatshirts, you name it. I saw coffee mugs printed with an image of a burning phoenix rising up from the ashes over the slogan, Alcor: If you can't heat 'em, outlive 'em.

My Alcor promotional binder with the signature slanted logo.

One thing I really liked about the room was that it had nice big windows and a clear glass door facing the street. Desert landscaping always made me feel at home. Even beuer, when I rode my Harley to work, I would be able to keep an eye on it through that window.

Like cops, paramedics develop a sort of sixth sense as a result of years and years of working in dangerous neighborhoods. As I was looking out through the clear glass door. I got the feeling someone else was in the room. I turned and sure enough, there was Mike Perr}^ standing in the corridor, quietly Kstening to our conversation. He held a large transparent plastic bowl and was stirring something in it that looked like green Cool Whip. I smiled at him. Mike swallowed a spoonful of the creamy green stuflF, mumbled a few unintelligible words, and shuffled off.

"Charles," I said, "is Mike all right? I mean . . . um ..."

Charles sighed. After ten minutes at .Alcor 1 was already questioning the resident oddities. "I know what you mean, Larry, but Mike is fine," Charles said. "Like most cryonicists, he's just a little off center."

"What's that he's eating?" I asked.

"Mike is very health conscious," Charles said. "Preserving the body for cryonic suspension is of utmost importance to us all. The healthier we are at the time of our deanimation in this life cycle, the better our chances for a successful reanimation in the next. You won t find many Alcorian smokers," he cited as an example. "For some of us," Charles continued, "that means a special diet and lots of supplements. That green concoction is Mike's homemade vegetable mix. It's the only thing he eats. I'm not sure if he makes it from scratch or gets it from Saul Kent's vitamin company, but he says it provides him with all the nutrients and vitamins he needs."

Saul Kent, I knew from the Alcor Web site, was one of the directors of my new company. He also sold \dtamins through his "Life Extension Foundation," separate from Alcor.

By the looks of him, though, I thought Mike could use a little variety in his diet.

"You'll get used to it," Charles said. "You'll get used to Mike."

"1 am so glad to see you are here." Now it was Alcor's president and CEO, Dr. Jerr\^ Lemler, standing in the doorway addressing me in his meek little voice. It didn't escape me that Jerr\- greeted me with the exact same

words as Charles had. I got the feeling Charles and Jerry weren't sure I was going to show up at Alcor that first day. Maybe there was a company pool going. From the way these two were acting, it seemed like the smart money might have been against me.

Jerry held out his hand and, unlike the first time we had met, this time he made eye contact. "Come see me as soon as you get settled in, Larry. IVe got something very exciting for you to get started on." Jerry winked at me. Then he looked at Charles, lowered his head, and marched out of the room. Jerry certainly seemed more relaxed with me than he had the first time we met.

Charles put a box down and shook his head. "There he goes. President Jerry. Off to pick the lint from his navel and then bill Alcor for tweezer rental."

"Excuse me, Charles?" I said. I knew from the way Charles and Riskin had excluded Jerry from my initial tour that they worked around him, but in my professional experience, insulting a superior like this—especially to a new employee on his first day—was bizarre.

"Never mind." Charles smiled. "You'll form your own opinions about the Alcor officers soon enough."

Charles would have been quick to admit that he was not much good at physical labor. In truth, I felt like I was dragging Charles's added body weight along with the furniture he was helping me shuffle around. But he did his best and we chatted pleasantly. Charles seemed to take a paternal attitude toward me right from the start. I felt like he was looking for someone to take under his wing.

Panting from a few minutes' exertion, Charles said, "I bet Joe Hovey is here by now. Joe is our fmancial comptroller and accounting manager as well as a former vice president. Why don't you find him and get your paperwork started, Larry."

"Okay, Charles, will do." I think Charles mostly wanted a break from struggling with filing cabinets.

If this man goes dowfiy do not try to catdi htm. That's \^-hat the pxaramedic in me thou^it the minute I walked into Joe Ho\-ey s office. A balding, seriously overwei^t man around sixty years of age. Joe was a cardiac arrest waiting to happen.

Joe was an Alcor old-timer in charge of all financial transactions. He was the company's treasurer and secretary and, from time to time, a vice piesideiit. As I filled out federal and state tax withholding forms, Joe asked about mv new apartment, how my move went, and how my ^Kife was doing. Joe was friendly enough, but I was struck by the strange. fake-io\ial tone of \T>icc he used. He smiled the whole time I was in his office, but that smile seemed to be painted on. Like a down's gnu. his e^es didn't come along for the ride. Immediately I got the feeling that Joe was used to saying something more pleasant than what he was diinking. Combiiied ^i^-ith the faa that he must have packed about 350 pounds onto a five-foot-five frame, the \^iiole effea was quite unsettling.

"We try to go out to lunch together every Friday." Joe smiled. "Of course, you're invited this Friday if you'd like to come.'

"That'd be great. Joe, thanks."

Joe told me I'd be getting drug tested and that he'd be asking me for a urine sample soon. That would be fine with me. I told him. I had nothing to hide.

Charles was waiting for me back in my office area. As we continued rearranging the room, Charies's hands ne\-er stopped trembling. \^Tiene\-er he went to pick something up he'd just about juggle it.

Soon a sixtyish-looking gentleman \'^-ith ^^te hair and thick glasses entered the room. He was ^-earing khaki pants and a matching khaki button-do^^TL short-sleeve shirt.

"Look at that," Charles said sarcastically "Only ten a.m. and already Hu^ has punched in. Good morning. Hug^ Larry this is Alcor's facilities engineer and senior board member Hugji Hixon. Hu^ meet Larry Johnson, our new rliniral director."

"It's a pleasure to meet you, Hugh," I said, extending my arm and walking toward him. "I remember you're the man behind the design of the cephalic isolation box. That device is just brilliant."

Hugh paused, staring down at my hand over the top of his glasses. With his head aimed at the ground, Hugh said, "Ah . . . um . . . er . . . "

I stood there with my hand outstretched like a fool and eventually lowered it. Hugh didn't shake my hand; he really didn't seem to know what to do.

Charles stepped in. "Hugh here has degrees in chemistry and biochemistry," Charles said. "He's been with Alcor for over twenty years and has participated in more than forty-five cryo-suspensions." Hugh shuffled his feet as Charles continued. "Before that, Hugh was in the Air Force and retired as a captain. He was a munitions officer, so careful, Larry, Hugh knows how to blow things up."

"Shut up, Piatt," Hugh said. Then, still without looking me in the eye, Hugh said, "Um, okay," and left the room.

"It'll be like that for you today," Charles told me. "You're the first Alcor executive or director who's not also an Alcor member, signed up for cry-onic suspension. They'll all want to check you out today."

Charles excused himself to make some phone calls. I decided to check in with Jerry Lemler to see about the project he had winked at me about.

As I left my office area, half looking for Jerry's office and half just exploring, I passed that little cubicle office on the left side of the hallway again. This time the computer was turned on and whoever had been using it evidently had no qualms about looking at pornography at work. It wasn't just nude women, it was very X-rated. Close-up, deep stuff. But there was no one in the room. I quickly moved past.

As I walked the corridors, looking around, I realized that boxes were piled in the corners of nearly every room in the building. Either they ordered far more supplies than they ever needed, or they simply weren't good about unpacking. I came to an office that had a small, skinny window next

to the door running from the floor to the ceiling. The lights were off inside, so when I glanced through the little window, I was surprised to see a female figure inside. There in the middle of the dark office, standing completely still, was the pretty young woman I had seen earlier in the parking lot, the crash-helmet girl. She had her head tilted back as if she were looking at the ceiling. I ruled out prayer. Nobody at Alcor seemed religious about anything but cryonics. From the robotic way she had moved that morning, I wouldn't have been surprised to learn that the young lady was downloading data straight from a satellite, into her brain.

I felt a little like a voyeur, so I moved on and found Jerry's office on the opposite side of the hall from Helmet Girl. I knocked.

"Come on in, Larry," Jerry said through the closed door. Maybe Jerry didn't get many visitors.

Jerry didn't get up as I entered. In fact, he was sitting with his back to me. After a moment, he swung around in his chair dramatically, a warm smile on his face. He didn't appear to be working on anything back there. I think the swivel-chair swoop maneuver was executed strictly for effect, a sort of "And"—swoosh—"heeere's Jerry!" He seemed to be playing Ed McMahon to his own Johnny Carson.

Jerry made a grand, sweeping motion with his hand. "Have a seat, Larry," he said.

Now that we were in his office, Jerry acted much more confident and comfortable than he had been earlier. His desk was typical scatterbrain-scientist. Papers were strewn ever)rwhere, pens, pamphlets, scribbled-in notebooks. There was a forest of megavitamin bottles, probably twenty bottles of Saul Kent's Life Extension Foundation supplements, scattered across the desk. As we spoke, Jerry picked up various bottles and swallowed handfuls of pills. With that kind of volume, I doubted if he even needed real meals to fill his stomach.

Most people have pictures of their loved ones on their desk. Jerry's desk was crowded with pictures of himself: Jerry, eyes flashing and fist raised, speaking from behind a podium. Jerry, arms crossed in a white lab coat, posing in front of the dewars, chin high and eyes glaring down at the camera, the film all grainy and dramatic.

Jerry followed my eyes and said, "That picture is from an interview I gave to GQ magazine." I noticed a letter on the desk. Jerry signed his name: "Sooner AND Later, Jerry Lemler."

There were framed covers of books that Jerry had self-published. One prominent picture on his desk was a shot of Jerry standing in a scrubby-looking desert locale. He was dressed in khakis, a stereotypical "White Man in Africa" costume.

After what he probably considered a long enough time for me to drink in his office, Jerry told me there was a pet project of his that he wanted me to work on. He started by saying there were currently six hundred Alcor members signed up for suspension.

"Six hundred and twenty," I interrupted, recalling the number Charles had told me.

A darkening look flashed across Jerry's face. Lesson number one: Jerry didn't like to be corrected.

"Sure, Larry, to be precise, there are 620, yes. But the point is, I like to be as prepared as possible. There's something I've always wanted done around here but no one was ever qualified to do it until now. Until you."

Jerry smiled, as if he took personal pride in my qualifications. Then came an uncomfortable pause. Lesson number two: Jerry liked to be thanked.

"Thanks, Jerry," I said. "I'll do my best. What do you have in mind?"

"I want you to write me up a Patient Assessment Report," Jerry said. "I want you to assess our current members in terms of when we can expect them to finish their first life cycles. This is for the sake of Alcor's emergency preparedness. We need to know which cities need fuUy trained volunteer teams the soonest. Your report will have very serious repercussions as to where we store our equipment and initiate volunteer training programs."

Jerry Lemler, president of Alcor Life Extension, my new boss, and an MD to boot, had given me my first assignment as director of clinical services. He wanted me to take a hard look at the Alcor members signed up for cryo-suspension and, utilizing my medical expertise, come up with a report of who, in order, would kick the bucket first.

"You want me to predict the dates of death for 620 people?"

Jerry smiled paternally, as if correcting a child's guess that two plus two equaled five.

"Larry, you need to remember, what you call death, we call the end of the first life cycle. What you call death, we consider a temporary condition, a handicap. Those of us with the foresight to commit ourselves to cryonic suspension will be reborn fifty, a hundred, maybe a thousand years from now. There will be a second life, Larry, there's no doubt about it. You're going to have to start thinking in these terms. It's not death, it's deanimation."

"But that's impossible!" I interrupted. Jerry's smile drooped.

"No, Jerry, I don't mean cryonics is impossible, I just mean this Patient Assessment. Not even the most experienced doctor on the planet could estimate the date of death of one single patient, never mind chart 620 in order of—deanimation. A physician can examine someone and estimate they've only got a few months to live and then ten years later they're still alive and kicking. I've seen it happen with my own eyes."

Lesson number three: Don't contradict Jerry.

"Thanks for coming in, Larry," he said, rising from his chair. "Off you go. I have complete faith in your abilities. I'm sure you'll do your best."

"Plus," he said right before he shut the door, "it's something I want."

Patient Assessment. Predicting people's deaths. I might as well use tarot cards.

As I trod slowly down the hall wondering how to start my new job as a death psychic, I noticed Mike Perry watching me from a doorway, stirring his bowl of green Cool Whip veggie mix. Hugh Hixon entered the hallway from an office a little ahead of me, took a few steps, and disappeared into the same room Mike Perry was in. As I continued walking, I recognized the little office Hugh had just exited as the one I had passed earlier with the pornography on the computer. I guessed it must have been Hugh's office.

Mike slinked backward and out of sight. They lowered their voices as I approached. A sharp, rotten smell pierced my nose.

I entered Alcor's kitchen. Mike was standing across from Hugh. The whispering stopped.

"Hi, Mike. Hi, Hugh," I said.

Mike was staring down into his bowl without a word, stirring, stirring. Hugh proved the keener conversationalist of the two.

"Er, uh . . . hello," Hugh said.

I opened a few of the cupboards as an excuse for being there. I saw some coffee mugs and tuna cans. Then I opened the refrigerator. Big mistake. I'd noticed that the whole kitchen had a biting, foul odor to it. Evidently, the refrigerator was ground zero.

It was disgusting. There was food in there that had to be months old, items that had turned colors they were never meant to be. There was a clear container of Mike Perry's creamy green veggie whip. They actually use this refrigerator for food storage? I thought. The fact that Mike could eat that health mix after it had been seemingly laid siege by burgeoning colonies of germs was a testament to the contradictory nature of these eccentric geniuses. It was like plucking a beautiful apple off a tree, polishing it, and then dipping it in dog poop before eating it. I started wondering about the unhealthy appearance of my coworkers and figured it might trace back to this fridge, a sort of Typhoid Mary of kitchen appliances.

I don't remember what I said to Mike and Hugh after that; I just got the heck out of there. Right then I decided I would eat lunch out every single day I was there. For sure, I was never going to put a single thing into that refrigerator.

Charles spent much of that first day with me, answering my questions and eagerly volunteering his opinions on my new colleagues. For instance, the young lady with the helmet, Charles told me—the same woman I had seen with her chin raised to the ceiling in the dark office—was Jennifer Chapman, Alcor's director of membership services. I came to think of her as Alcor's "Head Hunter." Jennifer was responsible for assisting applicants with their Alcor memberships.

Charles explained to me that Jennifer had a unique paranoia of driving or riding as a passenger in a motor vehicle. Because a brain injury would diminish the possibility of having what Alcor considered a successful cryo-suspension, Jennifer wore a bicycle helmet every moment she was inside a car. As a paramedic who had been on the scene of hundreds of traffic accidents, I never had the heart to tell Jennifer exactly how much good that little plastic and Styrofoam helmet would do her in a high-speed wreck. To each their own placebo.

Well, at least I had been right about one thing: This place was not going to be boring.

I came home that first night to find Beverly absolutely glowing. She told me all about the great shops she had found. Today had been bathroom day. She had been out all afternoon buying leopard-spotted towels and zebra-striped candles, as she's quite fond of animal prints. Somehow, don't ask me how, she made it all work together tastefully. Sitting in our bathroom was now a very furry experience.

Beverly is a strong and loving woman despite having had some hard times in her life. She was raised by her mother and grandmother because her dad drank a lot and left when she was young. Bev wasn't exactly inspired from a young age to trust men in general and it is only through the strength of her character and her ability to rise above that we have such a great relationship. Our marriage is very important to each of us. Bev's also a very talented visual artist and, like many artists, a sensitive person.

We'd never had lots of money, but things were safe and stable. Now, even though I was making the same money at Alcor that I had made as a paramedic, we had left Vegas behind. We were living in a pretty resort town in a nice apartment. To Beverly, it was the closest thing to living the American dream she had ever enjoyed. I think all these factors combined in Beverly to make it very important to her that our apartment be a sanctuary, a stable, comfortable home. Judging by our new fuzzy bathroom, she was rising to the occasion.

Just like back in Vegas, I had told Beverly she could work if she wanted, or not. It was her choice. I was making just enough to pay the bills and I wanted her to be happy. I knew her, though. She'd settle in and within a few months get restless and go out and find a job. For now, she was having a ball redecorating and she sure had a knack for it. It gave me real joy to see her so excited. She had never looked happier.

FOUR

ACCLIMATING

In those first few weeks, I was continually confronted with the fact that a lot of infighting went on at Alcor. Even though my colleagues seemed wary of me as an outsider, that didn't stop them from dropping insults and catty remarks about each other in front of me. Charles was the worst.

I got the feeling that Charles was trying to enlist me as a lieutenant in his unending wars with Hugh Hixon, Jerry Lemler, and just about everyone else at Alcor. It seemed to me that these people spent more than half their time scheming against each other in an endless power struggle over who really ran the show at Alcor. I soon concluded that there were well-defmed camps with very precise lines drawn among them. Charles was right in the center of the fray, but everyone else chose sides, too. Evidently, different factions seized control now and then. Charles told me there was always a new president taking over, or about to take over, backed by some loose alliance of Alcor's officers, board members, and scientific advisors. I discovered there was so much internal squabbling that a name had been coined for all this backbiting: the CryoWars.

Charles was especially eager to dish out embarrassing information on Jerry Lemler. Jerry had dropped out of high school to become a folk singer, Charles told me, and was then part of a Simon and Garfunkel-rype duo in New York. That career didn't last long, though. Jerry later admitted to me that he wasn't much of a singer. I learned he was also the former world record holder in the video game Arkanoid.

Charles raised his eyebrows to me once during my first weeks at Alcor and said I should ask Jerry about the time he assisted in an exorcism.

"Jerry desperately wants to be remembered for something," Charles added. "Anything. It doesn't matter what it is, he just wants to go down in history, to be published, to be somebody."

In comparison to Lemler, Hugh Hixon mostly kept his head down when dealing with people outside of Alcor's inner circle. And he was a creature of habit. I say this because I noticed that Hugh wore the same matching khaki outfit every day Underneath he wore the same ratty T-shirt and always had a distinct whiff about him of someone who urgently needed a shower. Hugh gave Mike Perry a solid run for "Rankest Cryonicist of the Year."

And yet, to me Hugh was probably the most interesting person at Alcor, and undeniably a true engineering genius. I was able to engage him in conversation a few times during those first few weeks, mostly about the cryonic suspension contraptions he had invented. Even though Hugh spoke slowly and quietly, choosing every word carefully, he was often difficult to follow in conversation due to his vast knowledge and sheer brilliance.

I could tell that Hugh loved talking shop but, like his colleagues, he seemed distrustful of me. He wanted to ease into getting to know me, assessing the threat I represented. As Charles had said, I was the only director there not signed up to be frozen, and thus someone to be wary of To say my coworkers were a closed group was an understatement.

I was also intrigued by Jennifer Chapman. When Jennifer arrived at work each day, after removing her bicycle helmet and leaving it in her car, I noticed that she walked straight to her office and closed her door, usually without a word to anyone. Jennifer's office was the only clean room in the building. With time, I realized it was normal for her to have the lights off in there, and she always kept her door shut. I would walk by Jennifer's office a couple times per day just to check and, sure enough, about half the time she would be in there, in the dark, staring silently up at the ceiling.

Jennifer's job was mainly to answer the phone and talk people into signing up as Alcor members. She was probably in action about five minutes every day. Still, with the exception of going to the restroom or fax ma-

chine, she never left her office. Most of the time, she had her lunch delivered bv local restaurants, or by a man who I learned was her husband.

Smilin' Joe Hovey also rarely left his office. We didn't go out to lunch as a group that first Friday, as Joe had mentioned we might lin fact, in the seven months I worked at .AJcor. we went out as a group only once). And Joe never did come and ask me to take a drug test.

Jerr\- Lemler's Patient .Assessment death list became my bus^-v^'ork in those early days at .\lcor. I needed to start somewhere, so I began, logically enough, with the oldest members. I asked myself. 'What causes people to die:'"

.Ailments. . . accidents ... 1 took the nvent}' oldest Mcor members and sent them a questionnaire: Do you have any heart problems? Have you ever had a stroke? Wliat prescription medications do you take? After they mailed it back I called them with more questions. I expanded on the original uvent}' members and kept gathering data. .After further talks with JerrA". I devised a priorit\' list and placed members in one of three categories. ""Categor}' A' was for .Alcor members most likely to die in the coming year. "B" was for those who probably had a few good years left, and ■'C ' was for .Alconans who were still ver}* well-animated.

Like ever}- other .Aicor employee, my daily inbox wasn't exactly packed. My most important responsibilit}* was to jump into action during cn'onic suspensions by communicating \\'ith hospital and medical staff, and then lendiQg a hand during surgerA: .Alcor averaged onlv a few suspensions per year. So for the vast majont}- of the time. I was there to tn* to improve procedures and train .Alcor emplovees and volunteers in emergencv medical procedures. Those training sessions were few and far between. I was really only as busy as I chose to be.

I hated to be idle, though. To familianze myself with the company's lingo. I leafed through back issues of .Aicor's regular publication. Cryonics magazine, and read postings on the crvonics Internet bulletin boards. There were lots of puns. ''The Cure for the Common Cold." "The Ultimate

Recycling." "rm practicing for my neuro-suspension by eating ice cream really fast."

I read a poem by Jerry Lemler printed in an issue of Cryonics magazine spoofing "'Twas the Night Before Christmas," called "Twas the Night of My Suspension." It was all about Jerry's future cryo-suspension and included:

"The ice had been gathered/ By a skinny pack of elves/ Who had lugged in the chests/ In spite of themselves/ ... So, they loaded me up/ And the blanket was chilly/ 'You haven't felt nothin' yet!' / Said the plump man, dressed silly."

I noticed, leafing through the Cryonics magazines, that many Alcor employees had a tendency to capitalize the compound "cryo-" words they liked to coin, such as Cryo Wars and CryoStar. I think they felt those words looked cooler, more sci-fi that way, not to mention more important. And all of them capitalized their job titles every time they used them in print.

During my ample downtime, I also read Alcor's membership handbook, titled Alcor Life Extension Foundation: An Introduction, which Jerry had rewritten before I arrived at Alcor. To dedicated Alcorians, it was one part immortality instruction manual, one part Bible. In Jerry's mind, it was one of the things he would be remembered for.

Charles lambasted Jerry's handbook in memos, calling Jerry an atrocious writer, then accusing him of plagiarism. To be sure, there was definitely some pure Jerry Lemler in that handbook.

Jerry wrote as if he slept with an SAT study guide under his pillow, though he didn't talk like that. It seemed Jerry's first priority in writing was to portray himself as intelligent and well-read.

At the end of his second chapter, Jerry wrote, "Perhaps the late Poet Laureate of the United States, the most honorable Robert Frost, captured best the essence of the vital decision we have before us in his poem 'The Road Not Taken.'" Jerry then reprinted the entire poem.

Two pages later, Jerry quoted Emily Dickinson ("I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died") and Dylan Thomas ("Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night"). Then, about seventy pages later, he reprinted the Thomas and Frost poems yet again when he quoted the entire eulogy given by an Al-corian at an "Alcor Life Extension Foundation First Life Cycle Ceremony"

(Alcor's version of a wake). The Alcorian delivering that eulogy? Jerry Lemler himself.

He titled one section of the handbook "Can the Twain Meet? (According to Mark)." Chapter tides included "You Only Go Around Twice," "The Iceman Cometh—Back," "Act Two Will Begin—After a Brief Intermission," "Next to Last Rites," and my personal favorite, "How Dead Is That Doorknob?"

The puns kept coming as Jerry wrote, "Remaining indecisive leads precisely to remains—and they are yours!"

Then Jerry described Robert Kennedy as having the 'grave responsibility" of overseeing JFK's funeral services. That was, as puns go, unforgivable. This was not a good use of my time.

I investigated the storerooms, familiarizing myself with and inventorying Alcor's surgical supplies. There were vast stores of things I couldn't imagine Alcor ever using, piles of first-aid kits, bandages, and all sorts of other supplies that were most commonly used on the living. Toward the end of my first week I discovered shelves crammed with expensive microscopes that looked like they had never been used. They were still wrapped in plastic. One that looked especially pricey had a little "UCLA" sticker on it.

I had picked another curiosity up off" a shelf when a voice behind me said, "Looks like something Hugh Hixon might use on Mike Perry in the middle of a lonely night."

I turned to see a tall, thirt}'-something-year-old man smirking at me. He was hugging himself, rocking back and forth slightly.

"I certainly hope not," I said. "It's a vaginal speculum, a gynecological tool."

"Christ! I'm probably more right than I thought, then." When he smiled it seemed like he had too many teeth in his mouth. "I'm Mathew Sullivan," he said, "director of suspension readiness." With his dark, w^a\y hair, big teeth, and catty voice, Mathew struck me as a young, effeminate Tom Selleck. He didn't offer his hand, just kept rocking back and forth.

"Hi. I'm Larrv^ Johnson, your new clinical director."

"I know. We have more directors than Hollywood. We have almost as many directors as we have vice presidents. Give it a month. Our board will make you a vice president. VP of gynecological tools."

"I've been called worse," I said.

"Yeah, but then they'll ask you to take a pay cut." Mathew squeezed himself tighter and laughed a high-pitched, rapid-fire "ha-ha-ha."

"I've read your resume," Mathew continued. "Pretty impressive. One of five paramedics in the country to be flight director at a major city hospital. Keynote speaker at national emergency medical conferences. They really hire you to teach doctors about emergency medical techniques you've pioneered out in the field?"

"You should hear my Elvis impersonation," I said.

Mathew rat-a-tatted that squealy laugh again. Then suddenly his eyes darted around like he'd just realized how close the confines of the storeroom were. I could see it in his eyes—the walls were closing in.

"Good luck with your little inventory," Mathew said, his eyes flitting to my clipboard. As he was leaving, he stabbed out his finger and said, "Don't forget those."

I turned and followed his finger. There, underneath the shelf where the vaginal speculum had been, were two butt plugs. These things were sometimes used in hospital procedures, to avoid patients making a mess, but the ones in the storeroom were definitely not medical issue. They were big and black, manufactured by the Doc Johnson sex toy company.

Mathew Sullivan's jittery, machine-gun laughter ricocheted down the haU.

There were some things in Alcor's inventory more baffling than butt plugs, though. In my twenty-five years around hospitals and ambulances, paralytic drugs were always strictly controlled. An institution wouldn't want just anybody getting their hands on them. As a paramedic and ambulance company clinical director I'd been responsible for keeping tabs on highly regulated and controlled drugs, as well as making sure none of them was

expired. I could only assume that the DEA was well aware of what was in Alcor's storerooms and refrigerators. The fact that Alcor's paralytic and anesthetic drugs were all expired and not locked up made me very uncomfortable. But then I figured, very few people at Alcor really had access to them and, well, at least those drugs would only ever be injected into dead people.

I didn't know what the situation was with Alcor and government regulation, but the idea that the company was just winging it with no regulatory supervision at all seemed somehow out of the question.

I found that Alcor had loads of Diprivan, the creamy-looking sedative I had seen in the refrigerator during my initial tour with Charles Piatt. Diprivan is moderately priced, not the most expensive, but not the cheapest sedative either. There are other drugs that can be used in place of Diprivan that cost less and achieve much the same effect, so why would the company spend more than it had to on a drug being injected into someone who, to put it lightly, wouldn't know the difference?

But then—why did Alcor store Diprivan at all? Why would anyone need to sedate a corpse?

And then darker questions arose in my mind: Why did they have all these paralytics? Why keep drugs on hand to immobilize dead people? Jerry Lemler was a medical doctor as well as the president and CEO. I asked him why Alcor stored paralytics.

"We store paralytics?" Jerry said. "We don't use paralytics, do we? You should ask Joe Hovey He would have a record of their purchase."

Joe's eyes narrowed on me while the corners of his chin pulled up into a tight smile. "Gosh, Larry. I can't tell you. I sure don't remember buying them."

Charles usually had all the answers. I found him in his closet office writing an e-mail to Hugh. His fingers were stabbing at the computer keyboard testily. Charles was obviously really letting Hugh have it in the e-mail.

"I don't know, Larry," Charles said. "Hugh's in charge of the labs. He claims to know them inside and out. God knows he has a fit whenever anyone pokes his nose around in there. You should ask Hugh."

So I went and asked Hugh. He lowered his head and hesitated before answering, peering at me over the top of his glasses. "Uh, you'll have to ask Mathew Sullivan. He's in charge of stocking the drugs," Hugh said.

At the mention of paralytics, Mathew grew fidgety. "Larry, drugs aren't my specialty. You should ask Charles. Or Hugh. Or Lemler. Sorry, but I have some calls to make."

I discovered Mike Perry's nest during those first few weeks. Next door to the Patient Care Bay, inside the Cool-Down Bay, there were some un-painted wooden stairs leading upward. At the top of the stairs was a door, and behind that door was Mike's makeshift office. In the future, if I didn't see Mike around, I could usually find him up there. He never strayed far from the Patient Care Bay. He took his job as patient caretaker very seriously.

Mike's office was a little attic space that also housed Alcor's computer servers. He had converted the rest of it into his personal writing area. Mike loved to write. He published books on cryonics and always seemed to be in the process of writing another. His space was overflowing with hundreds of old books: math, science, science fiction, philosophy, nutrition, medical textbooks, survivalist manuals, stacks and stacks of health and life extension magazines, everything the zealous cryonicist author might need to refer to. Almost as numerous as the reference books were Mike's own handwritten notebooks. They were everywhere. I couldn't believe one man could write so much. And there were huge amounts of loose pages scattered around the place, blanketing everything, each page covered with Mike's tiny, messy handwriting on both sides. He wrote as small as a typewriter and probably fit ten average handwritten pages onto one page. His desk was like a New England yard during autumn in serious need of raking.

Underneath the clutter on the old, rickety desk, I could make out the shape of a computer. There were also dozens of tall, grubby bottles of Saul Kent's Life Extension Foundation supplements and vitamins. I didn't stay in the room very long, though, as I felt like I was trespassing. Besides, the place just smelled funky.

Overall, Alcor was very dirty. I never could tell if the floor tiles were originally gray or just filthy. One day, as an experiment, I took an empty pizza box off the table in the front lobby and threw it away Sure enough, there it was again the next morning, as if reanimated.

Tm pretty low maintenance and it wasn't a big deal, but between the pizza boxes and the overall dirtiness, it was curious that they called themselves a medical research facility and considered their patients to be alive, yet their reception area looked like a frat house kitchen the morning after homecoming.

Scottsdale is desert and there is lots of dust. You have to keep up with it because the desert will keep trying to reclaim your land. Alcor simply wasn t kept well. As clinical director, I felt partially responsible for ensuring there was a clean working environment. It wasn't really my job but, like everyone else there, I had time on my hands. I thought the most logical person to start questioning about the cleaning procedures would be Alcor's lead volunteer, Jerry Searcy.

Crotchety old Jerry was an ornament at Alcor. You could usually find him asleep in the lobby, snoring in the chair by the front door. As a volunteer, Jerry Searcy pretty much did scut work and didn't get paid for it: faxing, copying, tidying up, running errands. Although he wasn't really a mean person, he was very negative. Every other word was "goddamn."

Most people at Alcor were antigovernment, especially Jerry Lemler and Charles Piatt, but there was sheer rage on Jerry Searcy's face whenever he talked about the government. Searcy hated the government to the point where I thought he might do something stupid. I wouldn't have been surprised to have turned on the TV and heard that Jerry had just blown up some federal building. A few weeks into my job I had already started antagonizing Jerry simply for amusement. "Hey, Jerry, you see how in the news today they're cracking down on unlicensed firearms all over Arizona?" That'd just set him right off.

"Goddamn it, what's that goddamn federal government doing now to limit my freedoms as a goddamn American?" Of course, I'd been talking about the state government, but I didn't want to spoil his fun.

Unfortunately, Jerry Searcy wasn't able to answer my cleaning question. "What? Cleaning? I don't know anything about no goddamn cleaning."

I moved on to Jessica Sikes, Jerry Lemler's daughter and administrative assistant. When I approached her, she was busy playing a video game on her computer. I asked her who was supposed to clean up around Alcor.

Without taking her eyes off the screen, Jessica droned, "I have no clue."

I asked Paula Lemler, Jerry's wife, but she didn't know either. Paula had the title of special projects coordinator, but it seemed to me that she pretty much drew a paycheck as Jerry's typist. Why he needed both a typist and a secretary, I didn't know. I never did see Jerry's wife or daughter do much work. Jessica's husband, James Sikes, was Alcor's IT guy, in charge of the servers and computers. I couldn't understand how they needed a full-time tech guy for the dozen or so computers around the place. James was never around that much but presumably that never stopped him from cashing his paycheck. Paula didn't punch in every day either, but I'd say Jessica was probably there more than she wasn't. Jerry's wife was paid either on retainer or as a contractor, I'm not sure which. Jerry's daughter and son-in-law were paid as full-time Alcor employees.

Finally, though, Charles had the answer. He told me Jerry had hired an office cleaning service to come in once a week and mop the floors and empty the trash. Then Charles complained about Jerry's choice in cleaning companies.

Eventually, I saw the cleaning people a few of the late nights I spent at Alcor. I heard Charles and Jerry argue about them more often than I actually saw them. Like most problems at Alcor, it was talked about, fought over, memos were written, e-mails fired off, and then nothing was ever done about it. Whatever those cleaning people did, it wasn't nearly enough to keep the gray floor tiles clean—or the walls, or the business machines, or Dick Clair's Emmy Award.

Sometimes I'd think about the bone saws, the decapitations, the lackadaisical OR procedures, the chemicals, the science experiments growing in the fridge, the less than hygienic personal habits of some of the employees, and I'd wonder about the chemical makeup of all that dust floating around Alcor, coating the walls, the floors, the pizza boxes, the kitchen, my office.

The liquid nitrogen inside the dewars and LR-40 head-storage freezer needed to be replenished because some naturally evaporated and vented into the outside air. But what else was escaping into the air, hitching a ride on those vented gases? Dust is supposed to be ninety-something percent human skin. The question at Alcor was: Whose skin were we talking about here?

Beverly continued setting up our new life in Scottsdale. After the response to the name Alcor from our landlady, we decided just to tell people I worked "in medical research." When Beverly went to the bank to open up our accounts, that's what she told them. She used the same line when applying for our auto insurance. When folks happened to ask her who my employer was, she would say, "Critical Care Research." We had discussed that too. Some people in Scottsdale knew of Alcor, but no one seemed to know of its sister company, CCR. It was a white lie but I figured it would avoid embarrassment. My wife is normally a very direct person; she will tell you exactly what's on her mind. I knew it made her uncomfortable to fib but I thought it was for the best.

Beverly and I went for long rides on my Harley every chance we could. It was great. Each of those first few weekends we'd pack a lunch, hop on the bike, and ride. We picnicked by a beautiful little lake we found about an hour north of home, and explored the two-lane highways in and out of Phoenix. And of course, we visited with my dad a few times each week.

Half the time he'd come over to our place to watch TV after his wife had fallen asleep; the other half we'd go over to their apartment and visit with Mary Jane. At his place, my dad would entertain us on the piano. At our place, he'd play the guitar for me while I grilled up some steaks. It felt great, growing closer to my dad. I looked forward to the months and years ahead of getting to know him better.

Things at work grew odder by the day, but the most important thing was that Beverly and I were still thrilled to be in Arizona.

I attended my first monthly Alcor board meeting.

Next to my office area was a little break room with a microwave and coflfee machine, and beyond that was the boardroom, with a wide conference table seating about six per side. Because Alcor was a nonprofit company, board meetings were open to the public.

Chairs were brought in, lining the walls, and Alcor volunteers and members filled up the chairs. There was food available, salads and other healthy stuff, but most of the attendees didn't touch it. Some brought little baggies filled with organic carrot sticks and the like. The room got real crowded, chock-full of future immortals.

The board of directors itself looked like a panel of social misfits. Every one of them seemed to be an Alcor ex-president and each was geekier than the last. The man who stuck out the most was Carlos Mondragon. Carlos was spooky looking, with sunken cheeks and dark, beady eyes that seemed to never stop following me. Like most Alcorians, he was skinny to the point of being undernourished, but Mondragon had a particularly big head that didn't fit the rest of his stick figure, two-dimensional body. Carlos reminded me of one of those fish that live in the darkest depths and grow two eyes on the same side of their heads. Always watching, staring, as if he never blinked.

One Alcor member likewise struck me as particularly unique at that first meeting. He was wearing a tight silk long-sleeve shirt with puffy cuffs and silver glitter all over it. It was as if Liberace had beaten out John Travolta for the lead role in Saturday Night Fever. From Charles's previous description of this Alcorian, I recognized him immediately as Rick Potvin. Charles had already told me that, apart from being a throwback to the seventies, Rick was a musician from Canada who had moved to Scottsdale for the sole purpose of living fifteen minutes away from Alcor's dewars, which he believed w^ould be handy when he deanimated. Rick had a job selling pianos in Phoenix but his real life's work was snooping around Alcor as a wannabe journalist.

Rick hosted online bulletin boards for cryonicists, including the one I had found called Cryonics Cafe. He attended every one of Alcor's board

meetings, Charles had told me, and would scribble notes furiously, then race home and start typing articles for his Web sites. Rick was prolific. Many cryonicists didn't like him because they considered him such a busybody. His sites sometimes read like online cryonics tabloids. And Rick was always promoting conspiracy theories. Some of them were pretty farfetched, but sometimes, Charles had admitted to me. Rick got it right. Every once in a while Rick would shut down his bulletin boards after writing something particularly juicy. When the Web sites went back online a few hours or days later, his accusatory, negative postings about Alcor officers or leading members would be mysteriously absent.

It got pretty heated between Rick and Alcor at times, Charles had explained. An anonymous Alcorian once posted a remark on his site to the effect of "You shouldn't piss off the people who are going to be taking care of you during and after your suspension. Rick." Rick sparred back and forth with the Alcorians who threatened him online. They called themselves the Group of Six and considered themselves the protectors of hard-core cryonicists. Rick would call them spineless for remaining anonymous and claimed he was just trying to tell it like it was. The outcome of these exchanges was always the same, though, with Rick deleting his postings that dug a little too deep.

The board meeting was called to order. Jerry Lemler enthroned himself at the head of the table, as if holding court. You could tell he loved these meetings. Jerry introduced me to everyone in the room. Charles Piatt praised the work I had done so far. I thanked them and said how fascinating my new job was. That was true.

I could feel the eyes on me, though. Some of them were very unhappy I was in the room at all. Carlos's eyes, especially, bore into me. The unspoken message was, "You don't belong here, you nonmember, and believe me, I'm watching you!"

Jerry told the group he was setting me to work on Project Future-bound. This was news to me. Lemler liked giving fancy names to his dreamchildren. Project Futurebound, he explained, involved me contacting paramedics overseas and setting up emergency response teams in every country on the globe. Jerry cited my resume and professional manner and declared he had high hopes for Project Futurebound.

Whoa, I thought. I'm supposed to get on the phone and convince medics in Portugal to inject dead people with heparin against their controlling physician's protocob?

It surprised me that no one stood up and told Jerry what a dumb idea this was. Instead, they nodded their heads in approval. These were the true believers, I realized, some of the most dedicated cryonicists in the world. They were completely serious about creating strategies that would spread cryonics across the planet.

Alcor's Keith Richards-like CFO, Michael Riskin, addressed the gathering next. He told everyone that Alcor was not doing well financially, and he began blaming his predecessor. Alcor, he said, was still paying for the mistakes of the past. Riskin was very animated and angry

I gathered from what he was saying that in the early days, no one at Alcor had thought of including inflation in their calculations of the costs of suspending their members. They had charged some early members a total of $27,000 in advance for a neuro-suspension that now in 2003 had a sticker price of $50,000. Many of those members who had prepaid back in the 1970s were still animated. Many of them might be pedaling their first life cycles for another twenty or thirty years to come. In these cases, when they finally deanimated, their suspensions would cost Alcor three, maybe four times as much as the company had been paid.

Even worse, apparently Alcor had no financial wizard who was cleverly investing the money all this time. Somehow this company whose business was selling the future had forgotten to factor in inflation or, it seemed, to try to gain the highest possible interest on the early down payments it had received. I thought about the disorganization in the Alcor corporate structure and the runaround I got whenever I asked, "Who is responsible for such and such?" I pondered how no one seemed to know anyone else's job responsibilities. Most incredible, no one really seemed to be in charge at Alcor. I wondered who was really the boss at Alcor, but such a clear hierarchy seemed to be lacking.

After complaining about Alcor's previous mismanagement for a few minutes, Riskin introduced an idea he had recently come up with regarding Alcorian life insurance policies.

Alcor members paid flat fees for their cryonic suspensions, as well as yearly dues, but they also bought life insurance policies naming Alcor as the beneficiary. This was to help pay for patients' long-term storage. There was an Alcorian insurance agent by the name of Rudy Hoffrnan who set it all up.

Since life insurance premiums were less expensive for younger people, Riskin explained, this should be an incentive they could use in recruiting young Alcor members. Riskin addressed Jennifer Chapman, encouraging her to spend some time in the coming month aggressively pursuing potential members still in their teens and twenties, telling them their insurance premiums would be much less expensive for the rest of their lives if they signed up now, rather than ten or twenty years from now He told Jennifer to let them know that if they signed up now, it would cost them something like $15 a month in perpetuity as opposed to, say, $60.

Again, everyone seemed to agree that this was a great idea. If you truly believed in cryonics, if you believed it was the way to everlasting life, you probably would not have had any problems with a little aggressive marketing. If they signed up young or old, what would be the difference? After all, you'd be helping people conquer death and live forever. The ends justified the means. Still, it left a sour taste in my mouth that they would target teenagers.

Then Riskin brought up an item of business involving an Alcor member's cat. As I had learned from Charles during my initial tour, there were several cat and dog heads suspended at Alcor, as well as a monkey brain. Some members believed that their pets might be able to be reanimated at the same time as their own second awakening. These animals had been decapitated and frozen back when Alcor was located in Riverside, California. These animal parts, along with the human bodies and heads, were transported to Scottsdale during Alcor's exodus from California to Arizona (they had run an overnight convoy to avoid the desert heat of the day).

Someone had recently approached Riskin regarding the price of a pet suspension. Alcor hadn't done a pet suspension in years and, as always, the officers were trying to increase profit by upping prices and cutting

costs. So Riskin asked what the true cost of a feline neuro-suspension would be.

"Well, I know sixteen cat heads will fit into a single Neuro Can," Mathew Sullivan said. "Adult cats, that is."

From there, Mathew went on about volume displacement of cat heads and the current cost of liquid nitrogen. They talked about pursuing more pet suspensions and the money it could bring in. Someone mentioned his parakeet. Everyone paid close attention as they crunched the numbers, everyone except Mike Perry. He looked bored. I glanced at his notebook. Mike was working out differential equations the way most people doodle. Differential equations!

Before long they had come up with Alcor's new price for cat decapitations. The number was high enough to satisfy Riskin.

When the meeting was adjourned, the Alcor volunteers and local members filed out of the room but the company officers and board members remained seated. Jerry Lemler motioned me to stay Riskin got up, shut the door, and announced the names of several Alcorians he was taking off the active member list for nonpayment of their dues.

After each public board meeting was finished, Alcor higher-ups shut the door and convened what they literally referred to as the "secret board meeting." Lemler, Riskin, Joe Hovey, and Hugh Hixon were all clear to me about these meetings during future conversations I had with them—the issues discussed during the secret board meetings were ones they didn't want made public. It was convenient to hold these discussions immediately after the regular meetings. This was how Alcor's hierarchy discussed the delicate issues they didn t want others to overhear and still fulfilled the requirement of a nonprofit organization, holding public board meetings.

After the secret board meeting, I went straight to Mathew's office. Mathew hugged himself tightly when I entered, not comfortable with me yet, but I had to ask.

"Mathew, how do you know sixteen cat heads can fit in one of those pots?"

"Well," he said, "a long time ago I took the size of the average cat's head, calculated how much area it would displace as a sphere, then did some mathematics, given the size of the Neuro Cans and the dewars and how many cans fit inside a dewar. Along with the space it takes up, we need to also consider the amount of liquid nitrogen needed to cool that volume displaced by a typical cat head ..."

"So you never actually shoved sixteen cat heads into one of those pots?"

He laughed that nervous laugh. "No, no, that's the kind of thing you might have expected during the Mike Darwin days, or something they might do over at CCR," he said, "but me, I just do the math."

I walked back toward my office. The thing that was still baking my noodle was how Mathew had whipped the numbers right off the top of his head at the meeting. Sixteen cats on a dead man's chest ... yo-ho-ho and ice the man down.

It made sense that he had already calculated how^ many cat heads would fit inside one pot. As "Director of Suspension Readiness," part of his gig was figuring out how much money could be squeezed out of lopping the heads off cats. Anytime you think you have an outrageous job, just think of Mathew Sullivan in his office, bent over his calculator, hugging himself, figuring out how many disembodied kitty heads would fit in a lobster pot.

As I walked back to my office area, I thought about how uncomfortable Mathew had seemed to have me in his office. And then there was the feeling I had picked up fi"om some of the board members at the meeting: outright hostility. So far, everyone but Charles and Jerry had been very cold to me. Charles wanted me under his wing and Jerry simply liked talking about himself to anyone who would listen. As a group, though, these Al-corians were distant, reclusive, emotionless, and secretive. To most of them I was a grudging necessity, an outsider not to be trusted. Oh well, I was happy to be left alone. And maybe I could break through with some of them a little bit. Either way, I knew Td be all right.

When I returned to my office area, Michael Riskin was waiting for me. Similar to Jerry Lemler's Project Futurebound and Patient Assessment

Report, he had a pet project for me. Like all hard-core cryonicists, Riskin's number one goal in life was to prepare for the moment of his death. Beyond keeping the body clean and healthy, this entailed making sure there was an Alcor volunteer team nearby that would be ready to jump into action as soon as he stopped breathing. Riskin, though, refined this concern to an art form of paranoid obsession. He lived in Orange County, California, and visited Alcor only once every two weeks. He was absolutely consumed with having the Los Angeles-area response team up to snufF in order to be prepared for his own death, transport to Alcor, and lickety-split cryo-suspension.

This was a personal concern more than a corporate one. He told me to spare no expense on supplies for the L.A. team. He would consider it a personal favor if I would pay particular attention to their training.

Thinking back to my initial visit to Alcor, it made sense why Riskin was so calm during that nerve-racking drive with Charles from the airport to the Alcor facility. When it came to driving with Charles, Riskin must have figured, what the hell, he was close to Alcor, a lot closer than when he was at home in Orange County. That was probably the best time for him to buy the farm, riding with Charles just minutes away from Alcor's scalpels, Crackphones, and liquid nitrogen.

As Riskin left my office, he said, "Larry, you need to think very seriously about becoming an Alcor member. I say this for your own good. Dues are waived for Alcor employees. Normally, the only other cost is the monthly premium on the life insurance policy, but I don't want you to even worry about that. I want you happy, Larry. How well you train and equip the response teams is directly related to how successful every Alcor member's cryo-suspension will be. I want your mind clear. I feel so strongly about this that if you do decide to join up, I will have the company pay your insurance premiums too. It won't cost you a penny. I want you to think about that."

"Thanks, Michael. That's very kind of you," I said. "I'll give it some serious thought."

He winked at me. Then he asked me to e-mail him a schedule of when I'd be training the Southern California teams on new procedures.

FIVE

TURNING HAMBURGER BACK INTO A COW

I'm Dr. Nero, your Orientation Advisor. I'm here to supervise the initial phase of your assimilation into society, the society that will take care of your needs and desires more efficiently than any you might have thought possible. Now you get a good rest and next week you'll begin a new life.

—FROM WOODY ALLEN'S FILM SLEEPER

Han Solo did it. Buck Rogers did it. Sly Stallone did it in Demolition Man. Austin Powers and his nemesis, Dr. Evil, both did it. All were "cryogeni-cally" frozen and successfully revived. In the case of cryonics, though, truth was stranger than Hollywood, and it all went back to frog sperm.

In 1947, physics professor Robert Ettinger, the man who would later become known as the father of cryonics, was laid up with leg injuries suffered during World War II. Ettinger did a lot of reading. He found information about French scientists successfully freezing and thawing frog sperm and it started him thinking. If we could freeze men who were deathly ill and suspend their animation in a semipermanent biostasis, we could then thaw them out in the future when medical science had advanced to the point that it could cure what ailed them.

Ettinger put his thoughts on paper. It didn't gain much attention for years until the Doubleday publishing company found a revised edition of

Ettinger's manifesto and sent it to science fiction giant Isaac Asimov. Asi-mov told the editors at Doubleday the concept was sound and Ettinger's The Prospect of Immortality was published in 1964.

We ve all heard stories of children who fall through the ice and are brought back to life hours later. Paramedics have a saying: "You're not dead until you're warm and dead." Nature has its own cryonicists. Bears hibernate. There is a North American tree frog that releases a natural antifreeze chemical into its own bloodstream so that it can be frozen all winter, then reanimates itself in the spring.