The funny thing about cryonics is that you’ve no sense of time. None at all. Normally when you wake up from a night’s sleep or a nap, you’ve got some idea of what time it is. You know it’s the morning after the night you went to sleep.
When I woke up from my snooze in the nitrogen, I thought I’d just blinked my eyes. One moment I’d been falling into the cold, smoking cylinder, the next I was lying in a nice warm bed with brass knobs on the rails. There was a patchwork quilt on the bed. The room was cosy, with pictures of famous buildings on the walls: the Sydney Opera House, the Eiffel Tower, that old ruined coliseum in Rome where the lions ate the Christians. There were lace curtains on the window, fluttering in a warm breeze. I found I was wearing a new pair of flannel pyjamas, but my old clothes were placed neatly on a chair by the bed. Someone had washed and ironed them.
I had no idea where I was. But it didn’t look much like the future to me. I got dressed and went for a bit of an explore around the house. There was nothing very unusual about the place. The kitchen was just a normal kitchen with a gas stove and a refrigerator. In fact, some of the things looked a bit old fashioned. Upstairs there was a living room with a really ancient black and white television set. I switched it on. It took a bit of time to warm up. It seemed to be showing a film about the first moonwalk in the 1960s. You know, that bit with the flag and the astronaut hopping about. I thought for a terrible moment that I’d somehow been transported into the past. But that was impossible. It was just old footage.
Rachel came dancing into the living room. She was wearing a white, quilted dressing gown and bare feet. She looked as fit as a fiddle and very beautiful.
‘Hello, Spud,’ she said. ‘Where do you reckon we are?’
‘Dunno,’ I said. ‘I feel I’ve only been asleep for five minutes.’
‘Me too,’ she said. ‘Gazza’s still snoozing like a baby. What’s outside?’
We pulled up the floor length sash window and climbed out onto the upstairs verandah. We seemed to be in an old, sandstone terrace house. There was green iron lace under the railing. We leant on the railing and looked down into the street. It was an ordinary inner-city street. But there was a very odd mix of new cars, old vintage cars, BMX bikes, penny farthings. The street was made of cobblestones and had tram tracks down the middle. If this was the future, some of it looked pretty ancient. A cart and horse came clip-clopping down the street. The cart was being driven by a joker in old coachman’s uniform. He was wearing a silly three-cornered hat and waving a long whip. Above his head was a board with old-fashioned lettering: Ye Olde Rag and Bone Man. But there was no rotting pile of rag and bones on the back of the cart, just a party of kids sitting on straw. The kids were all in fancy dress: full-length frocks, daggy trousers with braces, old hats and bonnets, baseball hats, and footy jumpers. A tram came rumbling down the street. It too was full of kids in funny clothes. They all hung out of the windows and yelled and catcalled at the kids on the cart. The cart kids all whooped and pointed and fell about in the straw. You’d think the tram was the funniest thing they’d ever seen. Suddenly I noticed the horse — it was Staxa Fun.
‘Hey Staxa,’ I yelled. ‘Hey, Luis!’
Staxa turned his head and looked up at me and Rachel with a mournful grin, showing his huge teeth. Then he turned round and plodded on. The kids on the cart looked up too. They saw me and Rachel and waved and cheered. I waved back at them. They yelled out to us. They were talking English, but it sounded real odd.
‘You understand that?’ Rachel said to me.
‘A bit,’ I said. ‘I reckon they’re foreigners.’
‘I wouldn’t be so sure,’ Rachel said. ‘I reckon English is their mother tongue.’
‘Bulldust,’ I said.
‘Just look at that,’ she said and pointed at the disappearing cart.
We could now see the other side of the board that had said: Ye Olde Rag and Bone Man. In the same funny old-fashioned lettering it said:
Heritage City circa 2000
‘Bloody hell, Spud,’ Rachel said, ‘we’ve been in that nitrogen for thousands of years. We’re exhibits in a theme park.’