Read by Tony Bell
Shortly after he turns thirty-five, Tony decides to have his head frozen after he dies. Frozen isn’t the right word. Vitrified is the word, but he’s not really sure what that means. His whole body would have been preferable, but it is too expensive. Besides, he is confident the future scientists will be able to regrow his body using the cells from his head, like a seed grows a tree, or else he will be granted a robotic body with titanium bones and wiry sinews, like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator, the T-800, but with a human brain.
He doesn’t tell his wife, partly because he knows she will think he is crazy and partly because when he thinks about the future he doesn’t really see her. He sees hoverboards and flying cars and underwater cities and 3D video billboards showing Japanese women applying cherry-red lipstick. What he doesn’t see is his wife or his two children or a semi-detached house in Guildford with black mould on the bathroom ceiling and a dishwasher that gets clogged up with pieces of pasta every few weeks. And besides, his marriage vows said ‘till death us do part’.
Doctor's orders, he says.
I'm not a doctor, Angus says.
Once he’s declared dead, the team will get to work. They’ll take him in a special ambulance to a warehouse outside Milton Keynes where his blood will be replaced with medical-grade anti-freeze. Then his head will be detached from his body and dunked in liquid nitrogen until science has caught up with him.
There is a stack of documents to read and forms to fill in. Tony looks each one up and down as if he already has the super-fast reading skills he will no doubt have in the future, like his eyes are scanners that take nanoseconds to process each page.
He scratches his autograph into the last of the many boxes and goes in for a high-five. We’re both going to live forever, he says. Angus nods and meets Tony’s palm following a slight pause. I can't believe it's so cheap, Tony says. Why isn't everyone doing this?
One thing, Angus says. You must make sure your head is not damaged when you pass. So try to avoid dying in a car crash, or a plane crash, or falling into a piece of industrial machinery. And whatever happens, don’t get lost at sea.
Mental note, Tony says, do not get lost at sea.
After he signs the contract with Frozen Futures, Tony starts to look at life differently. What’s the point in lowering his salt intake when the future people can fix him? Why stop smoking when he’ll get new lungs? What’s the point in saving for that once-in-a-lifetime trip to Tokyo? Imagine how much cooler the city will be in the year 3000.
Also – sod the vacuuming. He says to his wife: sod the vacuuming! But she doesn’t understand. She is disturbed by his newfound happiness. She must suspect he is having an affair, he thinks, and then he mutters to himself: I am having an affair, an affair with the future, a tryst with immortality! He snickers to himself as he runs the Dyson up and down the living room carpet, the machine rattling like a power drill as it sucks up a child’s toy.
It’s a few weeks before his wife sees the bracelet. She asks him what it’s for and he tells her. She looks shocked, then perplexed. He watches her reaction and imagines himself as the cyborg he will someday become, his banal human vision replaced by a heads-up display with various charts and graphs showing key data about his surroundings, perhaps a crosshair centred on his wife’s face and a flashing sign identifying her as HOSTILE.
Tony and his wife separate soon after, and as the years go by the kids stop calling and he stops calling them. But it doesn't matter, he knows he has eternity to find someone new, to have a whole new family. He’ll have infinity chances to do it all again. And in the future, people will finally understand him. He will finally feel like he belongs.
It happens twenty years after he signed up to Frozen Futures. He’s doing some Christmas shopping and it’s tiring him out. He’s been up and down the high street taking things off shelves then putting them back, taking things off shelves then putting them back. It hits him in a toy shop. He’s buying for a grandchild he’s never met.
Do kids still like Buzz Lightyear?
Can you still buy Buzz Lightyear?
Why is he obsessing about Buzz Lightyear?
He collapses onto the polished floor of the toy store. He drops his shopping bags and grabs his left shoulder. His arm feels numb. Someone is squeezing on his ribcage with a vice. So this is it – to infinity and bey ...
In truth, it’s a bit like an orgasm. A very lonely orgasm.
*
There’s no great gap in his subjective experience, no feeling of waking from a long sleep. It’s just like two ends of a film reel sewn rudely together. He can’t see anything at first, but then his vision starts to return. It begins with coloured blotches, red and yellow smudges, blooming in and out in the dark. They spread and join up, but there are no lines, no definition. It's like turning the brightness up too high on a television, the world is filtered out with light. But gradually it begins to settle, and he sees a tiled floor and two pairs of human legs. Why is his head on the floor? Er, guys, he wants to say, what am I doing on the floor?
But he can't speak. He doesn't have a mouth. Then he hears a beep, and he feels a sudden urge to pick up dirt. It’s a weird feeling, not one he's had before, but despite having something like freedom of thought he really doesn’t have freedom of movement. The desire to pick up dirt is forced, not a matter of personal choice. He rolls forward on what he realises are a number of small rotatable wheels. The bare legs part and he trundles past them, sucking up a couple of grains of rice and flakes of human dermis with some high-powered suction hoses connected to whatever it is that’s holding up his head.
It’s not until he reaches the opposite side of the room and comes face to face with a metal cabinet that he fully accepts his new reality. Looking at his reflection he sees he has been parted from his head: there is just a brain in a glass dome sitting atop a plastic base unit. There are wires and electrodes streaming out of his cerebrum, and although he has no real desire to do it, he feels an irresistible urge to make that cabinet shine like the burning heart of the sun.
Over the next few days, these urges become stronger. Tony tries to fight them, but they’re impossible to resist. He has a huge array of hoses and brushes at his disposal, and he puts them to work sucking up dirt from even the narrowest of nooks. He doesn’t enjoy it, but he can’t help doing it. All he sees of the people around him are their legs. He attempts to run into them, just to make a connection, but he always swerves out of the way no matter how hard he tries.
He thinks about ways to communicate – obviously these people don’t know what they’ve got trundling around on their floors. They think he's brain-dead, a vegetable – just some kind of organic computer. They don’t realise he is alive down there. If they knew, he’d have that new body of his and be living the life. He’d be a global phenomenon. He’d be basking in the warmth of his accumulated wealth and fending off those future chicas with a pole, this mysterious man from the past. If only they knew, they’d set him free. He is not property, he's people. But, meanwhile, there’s a grain of rice over there – fetch!
As the days pass, he develops more control over his new body. He is able to choose when to use the crevice tool and when to use the dusting brush, he develops a sense of when his dirt reservoir is approaching capacity. He stops in front of one of his human captors and tries some crude sign language with his main suction hose and the extension wand, but the stranger above him merely clucks and moves away.
He returns to his charging station despondent, sits in the dark and lets his mind wander. He doesn’t sleep any more, but his brain approaches a state of unfocused consciousness that is not dissimilar. He feels himself floating up towards the ceiling, and then he is flying over a forest of neon, above a skyscraper canopy that penetrates the clouds. He flies on, and the city drops away and is replaced by the winding streets and boxy semi-detacheds of English suburbia. He floats towards the back garden of one of the houses, sees a metal loveseat and a corner rockery, and he realises this is the house he lived in with his wife and children, the place he used to call home. He is flying in through the open back door when the charging station emits a loud beep – full battery – and he is back to his wakeful state.
He feels overcome with grief but cannot cry. Instead, his metal body shakes violently with the suppressed emotion and several flakes of dust and dirt are flung back out of his hoses. This gives him an idea – and with it a sudden surge of hope. He trundles over to a clean patch of floor and concentrates on trying to force his suction hoses into reverse. It is difficult, everything about his new body resists him, but he keeps pushing. He feels the strain as if he were lifting a heavy weight, but then a column of detritus shoots from his mechanical body. He writes the word HELP in the dust, the letters joined together like skywriting, and then he sits and waits.
Some hours later, the lights come on and legs appear. A series of high chirrups follows, like bird song, and two hands reach down and lift him from the floor. He is carried by a tall, slender body wrapped in some kind of silver toga, and placed on a high surface. A monstrous face looms before him – human, but only just. The skin is translucent, the eyes are as big as golf balls, it is entirely hairless. It looms at him, this face, and warbles incomprehensibly, some kind of glowing tool clasped in its spidery fingers. His captor shakes its head and removes the glass dome covering Tony’s brain.
Tony doesn’t feel anything as the whirring tool is driven into him. Segments of his brain are sliced off and a column of white smoke rises from the pared flesh. Tony thinks of his wife and he thinks of his children, and a moment after that he can think of nothing at all.
(c) Rhys Timson, 2019
Rhys Timson is a writer who lives in London. His stories have been published by 3:AM, Litro, Popshot and The London Magazine, among other places.
Evening Standard Award nominee for A Man for All Seasons, Tony Bell has performed all over the world with award-winning all-male Shakespeare company, Propeller, playing Bottom, Feste, Autolycus and Tranio. TV includes Coronation Street, Holby City, Midsomer Murders, EastEnders & The Bill. He is also a radio and voiceover artist.
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