Pod 530217-A
On Thursday, I am killing Mx. Clark.
Officially, I’m discontinuing account no. 530217 and overseeing the disposal of the contents of pod 530217-A, the only pod associated with the aforementioned account. I am signing the papers required to execute the discontinuation, transporting the contents to the incinerator in the basement of Cryonics Inc. and then delivering the urn to the disposal station. I am doing this because the payee of account no. 530217, namely the descendant of Mx. Clark, has elected not to extend the subscription of account no. 530217 for the preservation of the contents of pod 530217-A, namely Mx. Clark, and has also elected not to receive the remains for interment.
Unofficially, I am killing Mx. Clark, a 51-year-old legal secretary with a family history of cancer who consented to have themself placed in cryopreservation because they genuinely believed that someday they would wake up in a world where cancer no longer exists. I am doing it because their great-great-grandchild, an ill-payed food service worker, has at last become unable to afford keeping their ancestor in what I have firmly come to believe is nothing more than a glorified freezer.
In the file associated with the pod, it says that Mx. Clark’s favorite dish is pork schnitzel with sparkling rosé, and that they enjoy bossa-nova. That is really all it says.
As a child, I spent countless hours among the rows of pods. I would pick a playmate from among them and sit next to them, telling stories. I can’t remember anymore if I actually believed they could hear me or if I just wanted company when my parents were working and my siblings were too adolescent to play with me. I read their files, once I learned to read, so I could speak to them about the things they cared about. The files taught me about classical music, about early 21st century soap operas, about astronomy. Every month there was a new activity. I begged my parents to let me try snowboarding, crochet, juggling, parkour, programming, stamp collecting...
At night, lying in bed in our apartment at the top floor of the facility, waiting for sleep to settle over my mind, I saw them before my inner eye, waking up and rising from their pods, reunited with their families decades or centuries after death. That part of it, I know I believed.
At school, I was “Freezer-kid”. I didn’t mind, not really. The taunts didn’t bite as much as the loneliness did. My best friend Kara wasn’t allowed to visit me at home. When we were thirteen, she came to visit anyway, and I snuck her down into the storage rooms. She stood amid all the pods, among all my childhood friends, and cried. She never asked to visit after that. It was around then that my heart slowly started breaking.
By then, I suspect my parents’ hearts had already broken clean in half. Cryonics Inc. has been a family business for over a hundred years. Once, it stood at the forefront of an industry which brought hope in a time when it was sorely needed, but that hope has dwindled as new technologies have risen up to overshadow it. Cloning, android avatars that allow people to leave their physical body safely at home, brain-uploads—these have all chipped away at the legacy that Cryonics Inc. was supposed to be for me and my siblings, for my hypothetical children.
Last year, someone learned how to upload a consciousness not into a cloud or an android, but into a VR-space. Debate still rages about whether existing only in VR can really be called living, but nevertheless clients flock to the technology.
But it isn’t the competing technologies that are slowly ruining us, not really. My ancestors loaded their fortune onto a sinking ship, it just took a few generations until this was evident. The crass truth is that the science just isn’t there. Even after all these years, we haven’t found a safe way to revive those frozen in cryonic sleep.
When I was little, my parents would offer clients whose pod subscriptions had expired—and whose families had not claimed their bodies—to researchers experimenting with new methods of revival. I still remember how the phone would ring, how my mother would say into the receiver that she understood. How quiet the house got for a day or two every time it just didn’t work. Eventually, the requests for test subjects stopped coming. The scientific community agreed that revival simply wasn't possible. Since then, the pods have been emptying slowly, one-by-one. No new clients have signed up in over fifteen years. My siblings never came back from college, and my parents have long since moved, leaving me in charge. My father wrings his hands over the phone, lamenting the future he didn’t manage to give me.
The first time I executed a cancellation on my own, I cried all the way from the incinerator to the disposal unit, tears spilling onto the urn. The second time, I turned to the biography file instead, deciding that a stranger’s joy was a better send-off than a stranger’s tears. That night, I had penne ala arabiata for the first time and tried my hand at macrame in honor of a retired history teacher who’d suffered a traumatic heart attack. This became my custom—enjoy their life to mark their death.
On Thursday, I am killing Mx. Clark. Once the urn containing their remains has been disposed of, I will go back to my apartment at the top floor of the facility. There, a bottle of sparkling rosé will be waiting for me in the refrigerator together with a ready-to-fry pork schnitzel, potato wedges, and peas. I‘ll play bossa-nova on the old record player I bought last summer at a yard sale.
I won’t cry for Mx. Clark while I have their last meal, or while I lay on the sofa and let the music and the alcohol fill my senses.
I’ll cry for Mx. Clark when I go to bed that night, pull the covers up to my chin, and remember those nights long ago when I believed with my whole unbroken heart that one day they would come back to life.
© 2021 Emma Lindhagen
About the Author
Born and raised in Stockholm, Sweden, Emma Lindhagen is a queer speculative fiction writer. They have self-published three novellas as well as myriad flash fiction pieces on their website.
When they aren’t writing, Emma enjoys making lists and trying to learn a slightly unrealistic number of new languages. Emma has a penchant for tea, whiskey, chocolate, bubble baths, the color purple and the music of Leonard Cohen. They currently live in Stockholm with a long-time partner.