21

It felt like a dream. No—a nightmare. As though he were drugged, he tried to move parts of his body only to have them barely respond. But each attempt at speaking seemed to return some level of progress, along with feeling in his lips.

The two people in front of him were still blurry, but he could now see enough detail to note the woman being noticeably younger than the man, who was intently watching him through a set of large, square-rimmed eyeglasses.

“Can you see how many fingers I’m holding up?” asked the woman.

Instead of replying, John glanced down and found his right hand. With prolonged movements, he extended two fingers.

“Very good,” said Dr. Souza, returning her attention to his face. “And you can hear me okay?”

The shouting in his head continued to fade. “Yeesss.” After several seconds of looking about the room, he asked, “Wheeerre?”

“You’re in a hospital,” she replied. “And just regaining consciousness. So, let’s take things slow?”

He nodded weakly.

“John, we want you to close your eyes and try to concentrate. We’d like to test some things.”

He did as she said.

“Let’s start with your right hand. Show us how many fingers you can move.”


Rachel was jubilant. As was Williams, standing beside her in the elevator as it ascended to Basement 1.

He was recovering well. Not quite as quickly as they’d hoped, but not far off. His cogitative presence was almost normal now, lucid and communicative, and with improving levels of dexterity.

Moving limbs was one thing, but touching fingers, especially in sequence, was big. It required a complex neural-motor-mechanical process that most humans took for granted. Dexterous manipulation was far more complicated than people realized. The act of simply tapping a fingertip, or holding an egg, set off a complex pattern of muscle coordination from brain to hand that stimulated all seven muscles in each finger, demonstrating that some of the simplest physical tasks were actually quite complicated. And why biomechanical engineers still could not artificially replicate the same level of dexterity even after decades of trying.

But for medical doctors, the hands provided wonderfully simple tests in validating successful signaling on different neurophysical levels at once. An area that she and Williams had been concerned with should too many of those nerves be damaged in the thawing process.

Now it seemed—at least for the time being—that those particular neuropathways were working correctly. Leaving at least Rachel hopeful that the rest of the pathways might have fared similarly.

She turned to Williams, who was lost in his own thoughts, absently watching the buttons illuminate on the panel in front of him.

“He’s still sleeping a lot.”

The older man nodded. “Not surprising. The same thing happens to coma patients when they come out.”

The elevator slowed and softly lurched to a stop before a bell chimed and the doors opened. Rachel stepped out and turned back briefly to Williams, who looked at his watch.

“It’s nine thirty now,” he said. “I’ll be back in six hours or so to switch off. Say three thirty. You going to be okay here?”

She winked. “I have plenty of coffee. Besides, I don’t think I could sleep right now if I wanted to.”

With that, the older doctor smiled and let the elevator doors close between them.

Less than a minute later, Rachel entered her own lab and was greeted by a darkened room, illuminated by a single fluorescent tube affixed overhead to the far wall, casting a contained curtain of light over the glass refrigerator and nearby stainless-steel sink while leaving the rest of the lab in shadows.

On the opposite side of the room, near the door, was her desk, its smooth metal edges muted in the dim light. Her computer remained idle, displaying the screensaver’s artificial fish floating, or rather “swimming,” noiselessly across the dark face of the monitor.

Rachel gingerly tiptoed to her desk, trying to avoid waking the caged animals in the next room. Sitting down, she moved the mouse, and her screen burst to life in a bright glow.

After letting her eyes adjust, she expanded one of the files she’d been looking at, which was still open. The file displayed a colorful graph of the motor testing she and Williams had just completed and uploaded, along with the results.

Not bad for just five days in.

A thought occurred to her, and she began typing, bringing up the early test results of the other animals and adding them to the larger graph. They appeared as new plot points and lines across the screen. Not surprisingly, they produced similar patterns.

She scrutinized the comparisons for a long time before finally checking her watch and rising from her chair. Quietly, she stepped out of view from the sleeping animals to the large sink and, next to it, her coffee machine.

A few minutes later, she poured a third of the steaming coffee into a mug and returned the pot to the warmer. Sipping and contemplating.

They were finally out of danger. All vitals were stable, and they now just waited to ensure the entire GI tract was healthy. At which point they would try removing the IV. If all major organs appeared functional, even with the damaged areas observed, they would try to ambulate.

She couldn’t stop thinking that even with so many patches of damaged tissue, the whole thing was simply … miraculous. They had managed to accomplish the impossible. Something no one else ever had done in all of human history. Something she still couldn’t tell anybody.

A look of deep satisfaction appeared on her face. Not from arrogance but from giddiness. Yet still wrapped in a veil of disbelief. Not just for what it meant but for what came next. Williams was right. The implications were enormous. Win or lose.

And thankfully, they’d won.

She took another sip of coffee and then padded back toward her desk. She noted the animals again as she passed, which prompted her to stop and enter their room.

All were sleeping on small beds or beneath blankets. The cages grew smaller and smaller in size until she reached the far end, checking on each in turn.

She suddenly froze.

Without her body moving, her eyes returned and stared for several seconds through the thin wire mesh at one of the three mice. In their own cages, all three were lying on their sides in their bedding of wood shavings.

But only two of the tiny bellies were moving.