Javier sleeps surrounded by machines, ventilating his lungs, drip-feeding his veins, stimulating his brain stem with gentle sound waves, committing each heartbeat to memory on some deep electromagnetic abacus. For millennia, Ursula thinks, our wayward, lonely race has been dreaming of an entity that would cherish our existence enough to number our heartbeats, and here it is, of sorts. Perhaps the day is not far off when we’ll have machines capable of counting our good deeds; capable of sensing when we’re in a down sort of mood and stepping in to show us, with full-color flow charts, precisely how special we are; capable of loving each of us more perfectly than we’ve ever succeeded in loving one another, or ourselves.
He is brain-dead, the doctors say. Ursula knows it isn’t true, though. His poor, foolish brain is just overtaxed; he’s resting it.
The amount of frostbite, they say, was minimal. He may lose a few toes, nothing more.
It always happens on the upswing, they say. Not during the depression but after, when the energy is there to make the plan and carry it out.
His letter to her was not a suicide note, or so he insisted in the letter itself. It was a set of instructions for his body to be cryonically preserved. He had made all the arrangements, and all she had to do was call the enclosed phone number, and the cryonics people would rush to the scene, pack him in dry ice, and whisk him off to their facility, where, after carefully removing his fluids and filling him with antifreeze, they would store him in a tank of liquid nitrogen. He explained to her in the note that the process was very scientific, that he was not crazy, and that he had requested to be revived in five hundred years, by which point he was certain the Lite Age would be ancient history and his own more hopeful predictions for humanity would have been realized. He had not been wrong, he assured her, just a little premature, a little ahead of his time.
The other contents of the box were for Eeven, he wrote—just some little things he’d picked up with his last unmaxed credit card.
Last, he wanted her to know that he hadn’t abandoned her, that he’d purchased a cryonics plan for her as well. He wanted her to live out a long and happy life in this time and then to die of old age and have herself frozen. Her tank would go right next to his, and when the day came they would be revived together, and the future technicians would reverse her aging, and the two of them would emerge from the facility together, hand in hand, into a whole new lifetime of brightness and joy. He was praying she would follow these instructions, he said, because that way it would be only an instant before he’d see her again.
The first time she read the letter was in the ambulance, and she couldn’t even think about it. The second time she was sitting here alone with him, and she cried for hours. Not only because she saw how much he loved her—though this alone would have been enough—but also because the thought of going through the pain of living a whole other life not only didn’t appeal to her but actually horrified her. Even in his attempt to kill himself Javier had displayed more love for life than she herself had ever felt. She had pretty much always equated living with suffering, and now for the first time she fully felt how wrong this was, and how sad. Given a dozen lives, a hundred, a thousand, she’d probably never appreciate a single one. She’d probably drive poor Javier to misery and self-destruction every time around.
There are no windows in the intensive care unit, but Ursula can tell from the increased bustling of the ward that it’s probably late morning. The light from the hall casts shadows on the curtain pulled across Javier’s little space, and Ursula watches them pass: the briskly moving shapes of nurses, the lazy, fluid shapes of orderlies pushing carts, the sagging, shuffling shapes of visiting family members. She wishes he would wake up. She’s pretty sure she’s ready to start loving life now. Once he wakes up—any minute now, she’s sure—she thinks it won’t be so very hard any longer. In the half darkness she keeps thinking she sees his eyes flutter, his mouth move. She leans over and puts her ear to his lips, listening to the sound of his breath, waiting for him to speak.
A short, squarish silhouette looms larger on the curtain. A hand appears and pulls a bit of it aside, revealing the florid face of a nurse Ursula recognizes from yesterday.
“Ms. Van Urden,” she says. “I was wondering if you are related to Ivy Van Urden?”
It would be simplest to lie, but the nurse’s tone suggests something more than mere curiosity.
“She’s my sister,” she says, straightening out.
“I thought so, maybe. You look so much alike. The reason I asked is she’s on the morning news. She’s got a bomb. It’s on TV in the waiting room.”