He wondered how many girls would feel the same way. If he could get them to come over here, to his house, before he became actually feeble, he might win the pre-prom bet he’d made with Cody—number of girls and also number of times. He could go out the all-time winner.
“What are you smiling at?” she asked.
“I was thinking…what if you took off your clothes?”
“That’s not going to happen,” she said with a laugh.
He gave her his best flirty smile and asked, “Why not?”
Dahlia regarded him warily. “Don’t be gross.”
“Okay, you don’t have to take off your clothes. But what if you took off my clothes?”
“Are you actually using this situation to get girls?” She was incredulous and offended, but also—just a little bit—impressed.
“Not girls,” he said. “Just girl. You.” He gently took her hand. “It would make me feel alive. And it’s not, you know, contagious. And it’s…it’s you.”
He smiled up at her. Joking. But not joking. He wanted Dahlia to kiss him. He wanted to touch her without her pulling away. And he didn’t want anyone else. He could see the residual anger just under the surface in her eyes. She remembered that he had used her and lied to her. She understood that he was using her now. But…Dahlia understood him. That was the thing about Dahlia.
She stood up from the bed and walked to the door. He thought she was going to leave. Instead he heard her turn the lock, and a moment later she had come back to the bed.
* * *
His parents were hovering in the hall outside Jake’s bedroom door when Dahlia left. She slipped past them with a quiet, “Bye, Mr. and Mrs. Emmitt,” and they pretended to have no idea what she and Jake had just been up to. Or maybe it simply didn’t matter to them anymore—girlfriends, house rules, caution, all such things were becoming insignificant.
Jake stood in his doorway, sensing his whole body’s weight through his feet. How much longer would he be able to feel that? His parents stared at him without saying anything for what felt like a very awkward interval of time. At last, his father forced himself to speak.
“Jakey, we want to take you to Estonia.”
* * *
The rest of that conversation happened after the three of them had read aloud a single definition from the dictionary that stood on the living room shelf, next to the fireplace:
Cryonics: the practice of deep-freezing the bodies of people who have just died, in the hope that scientific advances may allow them to be revived in the future.
The words have just died were the catch. If you wanted to cheat death by being frozen in order to be unfrozen at some point in the distant future when the world was full of rainbows and lollipops and every sort of cancer had been vanquished by medically inclined fairy godmothers, you had to actually die first.
But that doesn’t make any sense! you say. Surely you should freeze yourself long before the cancer kills you. You should freeze yourself when your disease is still under some kind of control. It would be much easier to fight the cancer in that imaginary future if it hadn’t already destroyed you. This seems obvious. And yet, by law, it was not. Even though doctors in Singapore had successfully revived a young man who had voluntarily frozen himself for a year, and doctors in Poland had revived an elderly woman in the last stages of heart disease who had wanted to be preserved so that she and her husband could die together at a later date—despite these and dozens of other cases, the United States did not let anyone go into cryo-freeze who was not already dead.
And so, Estonia. Different laws entirely. Estonia, which had made it easy for people to come in for procedures that were a little out of the ordinary. Or a little dangerous. Or even, occasionally, a little bit fatal.
The three of them were sitting in the kitchen, where a bay window looked out on the whitecaps in the distance as the wind kicked up over the Pacific Ocean.
“There are three facilities that do this procedure, Jakey,” his father was saying.
“Dad, please. I’m not six years old. Jake.”
“Don’t snap at your father, Jake,” his mother said. “We’re trying to hold ourselves together.”
“It’s okay,” his father said, with a placating hand on his wife’s arm. His father, tan, a little weathered around the eyes, in a sweater that cost as much as an entry-level car. His mother, elegant and too young in the face for her actual age. They would get through this trying time together, Jake thought, and figure out how to live without him.
His father started again. “Jake, there’s a facility in Singapore, one in Dubai, and one in Estonia.” They looked at a map, where Estonia showed itself to be a small country right up against the northwestern edge of Russia. His mother opened a brochure over the kitchen counter, and together they scrolled through holographs of each step in the admissions process. Some of these were real videos of other patients. There was a highlights reel of patients speaking to the camera, giving their names, their diseases, and how long they thought they would be “asleep.” The videos of the later stages—of people waking up after having been frozen—were animations, not real footage because, of course, they hadn’t actually done any of the awakenings yet. But that magical future, according to the brochure, was just around the corner.
Jake’s parents were explaining the logic of choosing Estonia, but he wasn’t listening. He was watching the real videos of patients falling asleep, right before they were frozen. They looked okay. Eager, even. When you were facing certain death on one hand, any possibility of life came as a relief.
“But you might not be alive anymore when I wake up,” Jake said. He said it because it seemed the polite thing to say. His parents wanted to know that he cared about them and would miss them. Yet Jake already understood that the chances of waking up at all were incredibly slim, and if he did wake, they would be gone, everyone he knew would probably be gone. That was the choice: agony and death now or a quick good-bye and an unforeseeable future.
Some time later, as Jake was staring out the kitchen window, he became aware that his father had stopped speaking. He found them both looking at him, waiting to hear what he would say.
The decision was easier than he had anticipated.
“Yeah, let’s do it,” he said.
The question was when. But again, this was easier to decide than Jake had thought it would be. His body was still strong and tan and it looked perfect, even if it was rotting under the skin. He could wait until near the end, or he could go right now—those were the two ends of the spectrum. After a long walk and a good dinner, he and his parents chose to do it now.
A week after that sunlit afternoon, Jake and his father were on a plane to Estonia. Jake had said good-bye to no one. His impending sleep, or temporary death, or whatever you wanted to call it, didn’t seem true as long as he told none of his friends. He would let his parents do that later. Or never. It was up to them. What did he care? He’d be dead or living without them in some other time.
6. RAILS
Stop staring, you proklyatyy rab, you cursed slave! Jake told himself. It’s not like you’ve never seen trains before. Act natural.
But he hadn’t ever seen trains like these. Sure, Jake had been on a spaceship twice. He had walked in the world of blinding sun and terrifying shadow of the asteroid mines, hurtling through dead space at twenty-five miles a second. But he had seen nothing else of the rest of the world since he was reanimated.
The train station was run-down, grimy where floors met walls and in the creases of the stairs, graffitied anywhere paint would stick. The walkways were mottled with old chewing gum and dark tobacco stains. And yet it was magnificent. As they entered the station on the main floor, the platforms were a hanging latticework above them beneath a great glass dome. At ground level were the old trains, the sort Jake recognized, though even
these were sleeker, quieter, almost floating on their tracks as they pulled to a stop or began gliding away. Above were trains that could hardly lay claim to that name. They were hovering capsules in translucent pneumatic tubes, like the ancient office-building mail systems in the old movies his mother and father liked to watch. The capsules shuttled past in every direction, an elegant dance through the air. And there were slots all around the outer walls for air vehicles to land. (“For auto-drones,” Kostya whispered to him.) A few empty drones were parked here and there, shining metal insects with folded wings—grounded because of the snowstorm, Jake guessed.
Despite the snow, Jake caught a glimpse through the canopy of a dark blimp floating by.
“They clean the air in cities, and they’re piloted by convicts,” Kostya whispered. “They are not surveillance, so stop staring!” He nudged Jake with an elbow.
Kostya showed no amazement at their surroundings. He had never been frozen. This world they were in, it was Kostya’s world, and he had a hard time remembering that Jake was from another time.
“Going east, we will take the donkey cart,” Yulia said in Russian, directing them toward the older trains on the main floor. The station was busy, though not overly crowded. The interior was brightly lit, providing a stark contrast with the snowy night outside. Jake pulled his hat down lower as he saw passersby watching him. Was the artificial texture of his face noticeable? Or was he attracting attention because he’d been gaping? He bent closer to Kostya as they walked.
Now that Jake was looking for them, he saw convicts everywhere. Along the dark streets on the way to the station there had been more garbage collectors and some others Yulia had called electricians who had been crawling around an opening in the street, their bodies mounted to rolling pallets that could be fed down into the works beneath the pavement, their arms and fingers incorporated into complicated tool rigs. Here in the station, there was another electrician maneuvering beneath one of the upper platforms where he (or she) worked silently with the lighting system.
“Don’t stare,” Kostya whispered again. “I told you about convicts.”
But he’d hardly mentioned them to Jake. Kostya had told him so little about Russia, and Jake had asked even less, because the topic had been painful for his friend. They’d spent most of their time together trying to make each other laugh.
Yulia bought tickets at a kiosk, using all the coins they’d given her and more from her own pockets, so the purchase wouldn’t be associated with her own credit, Jake assumed. This provided Jake and Kostya with a private moment.
“Why is she with us?” Jake whispered. “She’s so confusing! Is she going to turn us in?”
Kostya shook his head. “She could have done that already. Several times.”
“Then why? I—I basically attacked her. Why would she help us?”
“Don’t laugh, but I think…I think because you’re American,” Kostya whispered. “Americans for us—it’s like meeting someone who lives at the bottom of the ocean or on the moon. Of course you want to know more, you want to talk more—”
“Platform twelve,” Yulia said brightly as she returned with the tickets. Her cheer faded a moment later when she saw a trio of police officers striding through the main station area. Yulia stared pointedly at the ground as they walked toward the platform. “Are they looking at us?”
“No, be calm,” Kostya said. “They are only patrolling.” But he had adopted the same posture, staring at his feet, shuffling along, and Jake followed suit.
When they reached platform twelve, Jake thought he saw the officers pause to scan the crowds. Yulia tugged him along until they were past the overhanging station roof and were standing in the snow and wind, where no other travelers wanted to be. She glanced back and sighed.
“Police are gone,” she told them.
She was shivering in the snowy air, hunching down low in her coat’s collar. Jake and Kostya, who didn’t feel the slightest chill, who had withstood a world of cold and hot far more severe than anything Earth had to offer, crowded in next to the Russian girl to keep her warm.
“You don’t have to stay with us,” Jake said. “You can give us the tickets and go home.”
Yulia laughed. “You think you can get on this train by yourselves and make it all the way east?” she asked them in Russian. “You’ll take off your coats and hats inside, or you will attract attention for keeping them on so long. It takes all day to get to the end of the line. You look human, but not human enough for so many hours with people staring at you.” She switched back to English and whispered, “They will see you are not right.”
“The police?”
“Anyone!” She continued in Russian, apparently deciding it was the safer choice in this public place: “And we turn in convicts. That’s how we get more of them.” She nodded at a high platform visible from where they stood. On the underside of the platform, two electrician convicts were digging about in the wiring beneath ceiling tiles.
“It’s true,” Kostya agreed reluctantly. “We will be obvious without help.”
“You’re…you’re coming onto the train with us, then?” Jake asked.
“I have school on Friday afternoon. I must be back by then.”
“What day is it now?” Jake asked.
“Wednesday. So good timing. And maybe you will be inspiration for my end-of-term paper.”
Jake and Kostya shared a look, and Kostya mouthed, American. How strange had things become in America, then, for her to find him so interesting?
“Estonia is part of Russia now,” she said, cutting into his thoughts, “so your parents chose wrong place. Bad luck.”
“You’ve told me only pieces of the story,” Kostya said. That was true. They had avoided the topic, until recently. “I want to hear it too.”
* * *
Yulia, still shivering in her heavy coat, prodded Jake: “Your parents choose Estonia. Then Russia choose Estonia. And many other countries also—even so far west as Germany.” She looked to Kostya for confirmation and he nodded.
“Did they invade those countries?” Jake asked. “Was there a war?”
“Kind of,” said Kostya.
“You know what Cold War is? Between Soviets and America?” Yulia asked him, whispering, since she’d asked in English, in consideration of his limited vocabulary.
“Yeah, I think so.” He hadn’t dozed through all of his history classes in high school; occasionally he’d paid a little bit of attention.
“This was Genome War. Kind of a philosophical war. What is okay to do to people and what is not.” She gestured to Jake’s body, which was completely covered, but which she had seen naked a short while ago.
“This is okay in Russia,” Jake said quietly, gesturing down at himself and then at Kostya. “But not in America?”
Yulia shook her head. “I don’t know anymore what they do in America. But not this. They change DNA, change their bodies. Biologically. Anything you want. At least, this is what we hear. Russians stay pure but make machines like them.” She shot a glance at the convicts above. “And you.”
“Not so many people died in this war,” Kostya said, “but alliances changed, and politics. Even who we can communicate with changed.”
“When you got to Estonia, they freeze you?” Yulia asked.
Far down the tracks, visible now through the swirling snow, were the headlights of their train. It glided toward them, a gleaming silver mass, as bright as the heavy snowflakes when the station lights fell upon it.
The platform was filling up, even out here where they were exposed to the elements. Yulia angled herself so she was blocking the view any passerby might have of her two strange companions. With their faces hidden, they were just three young people huddling close for warmth.
When Jake didn’t answer Yulia’s ques
tion, she asked, “It hurts, being frozen?”
“No, not really,” he said.
7. SLEEP
Going to sleep wasn’t painless, but it wasn’t too bad. All in all Jake decided the vids in the brochure had been pretty honest.
Estonia was a country clinging to its medieval identity, despite the smattering of modern buildings in the city where he and his father landed. It was wintertime and the sloped roofs and church spires were heavy with snow. Like gingerbread houses, Jake thought. Peaceful. This was, in a way, the beginning of a fairy tale.
It was only as the plane touched down that it occurred to him that this would be the last plane flight he ever took—or the last, at least, in this particular lifetime.
His mother had stayed home because she didn’t want to make it harder on him, having her around in tears. Jake had been privately relieved. His father kept up a steady stream of commentary as the car took them to the intake center. “Do you see the castle across the river? Did you notice they’ve gone completely driverless here? I read that it was mandated in the city centers in most of Eastern Europe. Look, another castle—no, it’s a church.”
“Dad,” Jake muttered, his forehead against the window. “I really don’t give a shit. I’m not moving here. I’m just here to replace my blood with antifreeze and go to sleep.”
“Sorry. I didn’t want it to feel like we were driving, you know, off a cliff or something.”
Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful Page 16
