Cryo-Man (Cryo-Man series, #1) (8 page)

“Like I said, your chart was completely destroyed so your illness will always be a mystery,” he says. “But I’m fairly certain that whatever problems you had affected your body, not your mind. Plus, the electrical stimulus from your power core would probably destroy any of your brain’s infected cells.”

             
I’d feel much better if he knew this information for sure. But as I think back to my memory about dying, I recall my body feeling weak though my brain was sharp enough to dial CIFPOL and remind the boy about the importance of the mystery box. Hopefully this is a good sign that E is right and I don’t have to worry about disease still reaching my brain.

             
“Do you ever think about turning yourself into this?” I ask, gesturing down to my mechanical body. “Maybe you could teach me how to turn someone into this, into what
I’m
like. Maybe becoming a robot would stop the poison and biological modifiers or whatever from making you sicker. I know I don’t have experience with this stuff but I’m a fast learner and – ”

             
E shakes his head and holds up a hand to cut me off. He yawns again and heads down the hallway.

             
“Thank you for trying to help; I never expected someone out there would care about my health. And I do believe you’re smart enough to learn what I’ve done to keep you alive,” E says. “But that’s not my fate. I’ve lived my life, longer in fact than most of my kind. Besides, if K is still out there somewhere, she’d never take me back if I became a robot.”

             
E opens another door to a room I’ve yet to see. It’s mostly dark inside but enough red light filters in to show several sets of bunk beds pushed against the far wall. It’s no five-star hotel but it must be pretty nice for E considering his life in Robotropolis and his long journey across the country.

             
“Besides, while effects of the poison may have hit me hard at first, my body’s decomposition has slowed since I moved in here,” he says. “The medicines in the supply room are helping keep the worst of the sickness at bay, at least from my
important
organs.”

             
E chuckles at what must be his attempt at humor. Needless to say I don’t find it funny and neither does he once his laughter turns into more coughing.

             
“I just need rest,” he says once his coughing fit subsides. “I’ve been up, working, for a few days since you started to thaw. A few hours of sleep and I’ll feel like myself again.”

             
“Please, sleep as long as you need,” I say.

             
E nods and yawns as he heads for one of the bunk beds, upon which he collapses.

             
“I trust you to be careful here by yourself,” E says, his eyes already closing as his voice weakens. “Don’t get too close to the stairwell entrance to the surface but make sure you’re always on the watch for assassin bots. They haven’t wandered down here for months but wake me if you hear any strange noises.”

             
“I will,” I say, though the words no sooner come out of my mouth when I already hear the sounds of E’s gurgling snores.

I grab the door handle – a delicate movement much easier now that I feel sensation in my fingers – and slowly close the door, leaving E to rest. I look up and down both ends of the hallway, bathed in a dim reddish glow, and feel much more nervous about being here by myself.

CHAPTER EIGHT

             
With a robotic body fully charged and hours to kill alone, I have nothing to do but investigate more of the facility. Unfortunately, there’s not much else to see. A bunch of rooms are lined with bunk beds but very little else. If anyone stayed here before, they must’ve done a pretty good job packing up prior to leaving.

             
The most interesting place I discover seems to be some sort of control room. When I open the door to it, I expect another cramped space with antiquated bedroom furniture. Needless to say I’m surprised when I find a much larger room filled with not only equipment and big-screen monitors but also holographic images. I slowly approach the 3-dimensial images, amazed as they appear to float in the middle of the room. There are charts and graphs, power readings to electrical and cryonic systems I don’t understand. I remember computers when I was from but this technology seems way beyond my time.

             
A large safe sits haphazardly in the corner. It has a standard combination dial and appears out of place among the rest of the hi-tech equipment. I walk over to it and spin the dial a few times, tug lightly on the lever. Nothing happens. I wonder if I’m strong enough to yank the door off but there’s no reason to try. I return to one hologram that doesn’t display readings for any control system. This one merely has the word InfoNet revolving on its axis. I don’t ever remember hearing of InfoNet but it sounds like an Internet search engine. Desperate for more answers about a world I know little about, I raise my hands and try to touch it. Nothing. I don’t know if I’m using it incorrectly or if the computer system merely doesn’t respond to my mechanical hand. It’s frustrating to think of the wealth of possible information right in front of me that I just can’t access.

I want nothing more than to wake E so he can show me how it works but his rest is more important now than my curiosity. Still, I don’t try to walk any lighter as I pass his room in the hallway. Though I have no reason to eat, I end up at the supply room next, where I check out the stacks of food and study the names of medicine I’ve never heard of and couldn’t possibly pronounce. What I didn’t notice when E showed me this room were the empty cans and drained medical vials in the far corner, all of them stacked just as neatly as the ones not yet used. It’s funny (actually, funny may not be the best word) to see how neat E can be with garbage but so sloppy when it comes to human – and robotic – remains.
             

The thought of corpses – human and robot alike – makes me nervous but I find myself heading toward the other room E showed me during the facility tour. I slowly open the door to destroyed robots and stand in the doorway for quite some time, just staring. At first it looks like nothing more than a pile of twisted metal; it still amazes me that E was able to drag the massive mechanical carcasses in here. But the longer I spend looking at the robots, the clearer I see their individual bodies, some of them missing parts that are now attached to
my
body. Regardless of the wires shoved into my brain and electrical impulses feeding my mind, guilt is one emotion I feel as strongly as ever. I realize it makes no sense to feel remorse for machines; I doubt I ever felt bad when a toaster oven or television stopped working. But I feel an odd sense of kinship with these robots, a connection with the empty hunks of metal and circuitry. E seems to have destroyed them so easily, which leaves me wondering one thing, irrational though it may be.

Could he do the same to me? The answer to that is obvious so the bigger question is
would
he? He seems to genuinely care about me, though could he be more concerned about me as a scientific experiment instead of as a person (or robot or hybrid or whatever he considers me)? I’ve already upset him once so I’ll have to be more careful what I say, careful not to give him any more reason to add me to the scrap heap.

I shake my head and push negative thoughts about E from my mind. I suddenly feel another level of guilt, this one for doubting him. He saved my life,
gave
me life when CIFPOL workers abandoned me and the rest of their frozen patients they swore to protect. Though the destroyed robots may have bodies similar to mine, it’s my
mind
that will always give me more in common with E.

I leave that room and peer in the direction of the cryonics room, the frozen crypt. I head in the other direction and don’t stop until I reach a bend in the hallway I’ve yet to encounter. I look around the corner and see a single fluorescent bulb still working, sort of. It blinks ominously above the door at the end of the hallway. I never would’ve been able to see so far away had E not added extra electrical stimulus to the part of my brain controlling vision. Now I have no trouble reading the single word on the door’s small sign.

Stairwell. I walk slowly toward the door but don’t get too close; E’s warning to stay away from the exit echoes in my mind, though it gets quieter with each passing second. I look closely for any kind of noxious gas seeping in through the doors but see nothing of the sort. With each step I take, my courage grows, as well as my curiosity. I stop for a moment and see elevator doors just before the stairwell. The doors are broken and a small part of the destroyed elevator protrudes from them. The elevator obviously crashed at some point but so much dirt and dust covers the floor in front of it that I doubt anyone has walked this far for a long time.

I continue until I reach the stairwell doors, several questions spinning in my mind. How far up do the stairs go? What is the world really like out there? I’m afraid of that answer yet interested at the same time. E painted a very bleak portrait of the war-ravaged world but can it really be as bad as he claims?

Could it really hurt to take a quick peek? I check that my helmet is on tight –
air
tight – before putting my mechanical hand against the door handle. All it would take is a little push and my curiosity could be satiated…but I must not do it. Am I crazy for coming this close to ignoring E’s warning? Could he have damaged my ability to understand common sense with all that prodding inside my brain? It’s a miracle I survived this long; I can’t blow my chance at living by ignoring his warnings. Besides, I couldn’t imagine how disappointed he’d be if I went to the surface and came back with my face looking like his.

As the hours slowly tick by, I wander the hallway restlessly, ending up in the same rooms, looking at the same things over and over. I continue to avoid the largest room in the facility for fear of what I know is inside. But the rest of the place is relatively empty, leaving me little else to do. As much as I hate the thought of the cryonics room, I know it holds the most for me to see. I’d like to think I can avoid it forever but I’m kidding myself if I believe that’ll happen.

“No point delaying the inevitable,” I say aloud, my robotic voice echoing in the empty facility.

I walk slowly toward the frozen room and stop in front of the doors, looking back with the hope of seeing E awake, coming to find me to show me how the computers work. But the hallway is as empty as it’s been for hours so I push open the door and walk in.

Freezing smoke hangs heavy in the air. I’m extra careful as I creep across the icy floor. I don’t want to go too far into the room – get too close to the dissected cadavers – but I have to get used to them at some point. I step through the fog until I glimpse the blond woman’s head on the floor. Seeing body parts scattered about is still disturbing but knowing more of E’s past at least makes it more understandable why he seems so callous with the deceased.

I want to turn and run away from the dead woman but I can’t help feeling responsible for knocking over the table and breaking her body. She would’ve stayed dead regardless but I have a greater appreciation than ever for respecting a person’s body once it’s no longer useful. I wish there were a place I could bury her but I’m not going to throw her into an empty room like she’s another broken robot. Instead, I kneel next to her body and carefully slide my arms beneath her, careful not to be too rough and break her even more. She doesn’t weigh very much – or I’m a lot stronger than I realize. The only place I can put her is back into the empty cryo-chamber where she was once kept, where she was promised to be kept safe until a cure could be found for whatever disease she suffered from. I put her head in last, holding it lightly, glad to have better control of my hands but disturbed that I have enough feeling to sense her frozen skull against my pincer-like fingers.

              My body feels no sense of cold but my brain still registers a shiver once the woman’s body is gone. A clear plastic slot adjacent to her cryo-chamber is now empty; it’s the perfect size to hold a folder. I scan the floor and begin to gather dozens of pages that once made up her medical report. I shove them hastily into a manila folder. The order of the pages no longer matters. After placing the bulging folder back into its slot, I take a few steps back and nearly slip on ice.

             
I don’t take a few steps away before stopping and turning back to her chamber, staring at the wad of papers sticking out of her medical chart. In some ways I want to forget her, completely wipe her existence from my memory. But I can’t do that. With two giant strides, I reach her folder and pull it from the slot on the wall.

             
Her name was Alexis Witt, thirty-three years old at the time of her cryostasis in the year 2240. I can’t say for certain what year was my last but I’m certain it was several centuries before that. The woman’s folder is extensive but the section with the most information revolves around the disease that led her to being frozen. According to the chart, Huntington’s Disease presented in Miss Witt much earlier than usual cases of the degenerative neurological disorder. Her symptoms – uncontrollable movements, the degradation of normal motor functions, seizures, loss of memory and cognitive abilities – deteriorated at a quicker rate than many HD patients. At the time, doctors were close to perfecting a procedure known as NRT (Neurological Replacement Therapy) and Miss Witt received several suggestions from top doctors to admit herself for early level cryostasis.

             
Reading this spurs my mind back to my lone memory, back to my dying moments when I was in a hurry to have the young boy call CIFPOL. Obviously I can tell that my time spent with the boy was important, that I never wanted it to end. But I have a deep-seeded feeling that I
had
to wait for death until I could be cryogenically frozen, that early level cryostasis was never an option for me. E told me I was one of the earliest inhabitants at the Cryonics Institute so there must’ve been major rule changes in the few hundred years between my death and Miss Witt’s early cryostasis.

             
Unfortunately, subsequent pages in her medical folder show why she remained frozen until now. At the time of cryostasis, notes in the file state that the cure for Huntington’s seemed very close. But for several years following 2240, notes detail how NRT proved a failure, how different techniques were attempted but also ultimately failed. A woman who expected to be frozen only a short time – a woman who must’ve been full of hope for being cured one day – ended up a Popsicle for countless years, never to awaken again. This thought makes me even more grateful to E.

             
I flip through the rest of the pages in the folder. Miss Witt had a list of several bank accounts at her disposal for when she was supposed to be brought back; there’s an extensive family tree that appears to be updated for several hundred years after her cryostasis (eventually, the tree abruptly stops); last is a detailed biography, including photographs of her with family and friends, records of where she lived and went to school and worked. The final page appears handwritten, a letter to Miss Witt. At the bottom of the page, I see that she signed it herself, that she’d written the note to herself describing why she chose this path for her life.

             
I can only assume that the extensive bio must’ve been meant for Miss Witt’s benefit, that CIFPOL must’ve realized a certain degree of memory loss came with their freezing – and more specifically
unfreezing
– process. I begin to read the letter but stop after the first few sentences. It’s very personal and touching, heartfelt; I don’t feel comfortable intruding upon this woman’s innermost thoughts that she meant only for herself.

             
I return the pages to her folder and place it back in the slot near her cryo-chamber, her final resting spot. It’s depressing to think she’ll never have a chance to read her words or know what happened to her, though I suppose plenty of people die without knowing. But most of all, reading so much in her report – learning so much about her past and her family – makes me long for my own folder, makes me even more upset to think how I’ll never have a chance to learn where I came from or who I left behind.

             
I sigh, or at least I would’ve sighed if I had lungs to push air out of. I don’t know how much time I spent reading the woman’s report but when I look back across the cryo-room, there’s no sign of E. I move on to the next group of body parts, the next empty cryo-chamber. I don’t look closely enough at the parts to figure out if all of them are from the same person; I figure it doesn’t matter at this point. It’s not long before the floor is clear of frozen corpses. I feel much better about being in here. But I can’t pass a medical folder without stopping to read it. I learn the fates of dozens of people, learn about countless diseases I’ve never heard of before. Most of these people were put into cryostasis within a few hundred years of Miss Witt, centuries after me. The rows of cryo-chambers stretch high above ground level so I wonder how far away from my time those patients originated.