Very excited! My new novel, Thawing A.C. Nielsen, is now up and available for "pre-sale" (just $2.99 for Kindle or other ebook format, then price goes up before the holidays) on Kindle here:
http://amzn.to/2bULRD1
Selling like crazy- please go to that link and consider ordering the ebook or at least sharing the info with other book enthusiasts! It's already hitting top 100 various genre lists on Amazon!
Newly posted there-- a 5-star review from one of the top reviewing companies! Until it goes "live for sale" there won't be any customer reviews or samples-- that happens Oct. 18th. There will also be a paperback version up soon. Check it out and please spread the word. I need all the publicity help I can get since I am not giving away my book to a mainstream publishing house!
I am wondering if any of you would consider reviewing the book. It will be released on Amazon/Kindle on October 18th. I need reviews from regular folks posted to amazon on the release day, if possible. You get a FREE pdf, word.doc or .mobi (Kindle ebook file) copy and plenty of time between now and mid-October to read it. Let me know, friends!
Today I'm sharing chapter twenty-one of "Thawing A.C. Nielsen". I hope you'll read it. I'm trying to share a chapter a day, although at some point I will have to take them all down as the book starts to go to press.
I am wondering if any of you would consider reviewing the book. It will be released on Amazon/Kindle on October 18th. I need reviews from regular folks posted to amazon on the release day, if possible. You get a FREE pdf, word.doc or .mobi (Kindle ebook file) copy and plenty of time between now and mid-October to read it. Let me know, friends!
Chapter 21- time to start thawing out MR T- the awesome guinea pig!!!
btw, Lives of a Cell is a really cool book, y'all!
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
October 2013
“What do you think, Amman? How does he look?”
“What you see is what you get, Kate. At least for now,” replied Dr. Amman Vishwanathan, the expert veterinarian Mike and Kate had hired to oversee the animal revivification project. “This Mr. T of yours isn’t quite ready for his next scene on The A-Team. But hey, nice of somebody to have shaved this guinea pig’s head, chest, and abdomen in advance for us, huh?”
“The shaving? That was me—last century!” Chrissy announced as she entered the exam room to join everyone else, put on a hair net, and washed her hands. “I wanted to give him a little Mohawk like his namesake, but Enzo said no.”
“Brownie points for you, Madame!” Amman said, giving a little salute. “Anyway, Kate, not much to tell right now. He’s damn cold and stiff, obviously. I’m used to guinea pigs squirming like crazy when I try to treat them.”
“Okay, Chrissy, document everything, all the usual parameters,” Kate said. “And remember to X-ray him, too. Listen, people, we want to continue to catch everything we do here on tape, so try to not block the cameras with your body as you proceed. Everyone besides Chrissy come back in thirty minutes.”
“So I’m curious.” Amman was eager to chat more with Kate, since they had hardly had any one-on-one time since he had arrived, “I’m sure you had other qualified candidates for this job. I didn’t ask you yet why you picked me.”
“They gave me five names. While I was being a responsible professional and checking you all out the usual way, my goofy roommate just looked for your names on YouTube.”
“Oh, I know where you’re going with this.”
“Yup. Over a million hits of you doing an emergency C-section on an elephant. I said right then and there—I want that guy! Besides, that Bollywood dance you and your assistant did as the credits rolled was awesome.”
“I didn’t post that thing, the Berlin Zoo community relations people did. It still seems weird that it went viral,” Amman said.
“Well, they made it into a heartwarming feel-good story. The mom okay and the baby delivered healthy—a total success. They didn’t show much blood and stuff, but I’m sure you must have been covered in it!”
“Yes, I was. By the way, I stayed a few extra days after the surgery and the mother elephant began recognizing me as a friend. When I went back six months later to see her and her baby, she came up to me and draped her trunk around me, hugging me. It was amazing.”
“Wow. Well, I’m glad you’re here—really glad.”
“Well, Kate, speaking of amazing, your protocol is epic.”
“We can call it epic when it’s proven itself. It won’t be long from now that you’re going to be here bringing our furry friend back to life. The protocol is the prep work to get you and Mr. T. into that final scenario.”
“Yup. I get to bat cleanup—bottom of the ninth.”
“That’s right, Amman. And I’m hoping we’ll have a happy little critter eating, pooping, sleeping, and happily wiggling his nose as he runs around with glee. Chrissy has already spent her own money on a cage, food, some toys. She loves animals.”
“Listen, I have to ask—I’ve been hearing conflicting stories. One guy I met said that your Dr. Saltieri killed himself, that he stepped in front of that truck on purpose. But that’s not right, is it?”
“Where did you hear that, Amman?”
“When I first got here last week I parked in the wrong lot and there was a guy from your neighboring business who pointed me over this way. He’s the one who said it. So he didn’t have the correct story, right? I heard your doc had Alzheimer’s and lung cancer. That’s tough.”
“Yes, he had both. He had been to Mexico looking at alternative cancer treatments. He started getting these ideas—pretty much obsessions—about putting himself in a tank of super-oxygenated water and slowing his heart rate and breathing rate to something like hibernation levels. Then, while he was floating in this tank there would be cancer-curing chemicals in the water solution, also vitamins and other things.”
“That’s wild.”
“You bet. He studied the hibernation of turtles, under the mud at about four degrees Celsius. Well, three point nine to be exact. He was probably going to propose doing all this, but he never got the chance. One night Dr. Saltieri wandered off in the cold, broke through some ice on a lake. These people saw him out there and rescued him. They were getting all his wet clothes off of him, but they turned their back for a second. Right then he started going back over the road, said he was going back to the lake to see his friends he called them, dolphins and turtles apparently. According to the police report I read, he must have been in shock the whole time. He hadn’t spoken a word to his rescuers until just then. A truck doing about sixty miles per hour hit him. He died instantly.”
“The truck driver—was he okay?”
“Yes, thankfully. Poor guy. He had no chance to swerve and avoid hitting Dr. Saltieri, it happened so fast.”
“So you combined some of these crazy ideas Saltieri had with your own, huh? That’s a pretty fantastic mashup, Kate!”
“Well, all along I had been thinking that just thawing someone out and then zapping their heart wasn’t going to work. I mean, it’s too simple. No way could it be as easy as grabbing a pizza out of the freezer and slapping it into the microwave, right? Enzo and Mike, or any cryo lab out there drove so much moisture out of these bodies just to keep ice from expanding and causing damage—how could anyone expect essentially freeze-dried folks to come back to life when the time came? I was stumped. I had literally nothing. Then I had a moment of discovery, an epiphany while my roommate was playing a piece on her violin. I realized that I could adapt one of Enzo’s alternative anticancer ideas—float the patient in a vitamin-enriched liquid environment, gradually hydrating and warming them. Plus a liquid environment can be controlled with more subtlety than what we could do in air, right? And they’re kind of like in their mother’s womb, sort of cradled in amniotic fluid all over again, get it? I started sketching out ideas and it all seemed to make sense. And by aiming initially at four point two degrees Celsius, which is just a little higher than Dr. Saltieri’s hibernating turtles’ body temperature, there’s no chance of any early decomposition. We aim for that temperature and then continue on, quicker at the end.”
“This sounds amazing, Kate. New ideas. Bravo!” Amman declared, scribbling down some notes for himself.
“There’s more. My most radical idea, which I admit may mean nothing—all through the process we pulse sound waves at the rate a maternal heart would be beating. Of course for a guinea pig that will be faster than a human. I have this hunch that cells and organs know they’re alive in a sense. I believe that they are at least partially sentient and can recognize the mother organism, and the most obvious stimulation we can give the cells is sound waves mimicking maternal heartbeats. As we try to revive the patient, that maternal heartbeat will be there constantly, and as we reach the last stages the stimulus will be especially important, uplifting the unconscious brain toward consciousness, awareness, and hopefully, full function. I got that uplift idea from the sci-fi book I showed you that Saltieri was obsessed by. Yes, I know it sounds new-agey crazy, but I’m doing it anyway. And then you enter the stage.”
“It’s brilliant, Kate. You’re quite the free-thinker.”
“Amman, do you know the book Lives of a Cell by Lewis Thomas? It’s a book I read over and over as a teenager. That book inspired me to become a biologist. Living cells, whether you’re exploring their reality or thinking metaphysically, are smarter, more connected to each other, and more aware than we give them credit for.”
“Extremely interesting. I can see why you were hired for this job. And yes, I know the book. If this works you’ll have page one headline news.”
“Thank you, Amman. Of course we won’t be telling anyone just yet. Our real goal is to revive humans, of course. There are some other interesting details. I believe Dr. Saltieri thought he could learn to breathe underwater, that or breathe ultraoxygenated water somehow. There were some scribbles that by doing this, more of the cancer medicine could get into his lungs and effect a cure. Weird.”
“May I join the conversation,” Norm asked, reentering the operating room.
“Sure,” Kate said. “So, Norm, when you opened the pod, the inner one, what the heck was that?”
“That was pressurized helium. Did you like the little whoosh sound, or did it freak you out?”
“Yes, it totally freaked me out,” Kate admitted, “and then the little vapor cloud hanging over Mr. T? For a second I thought it was his soul escaping from us. I’m like ‘Mr. T don’t go, we’re here to save you!’ Yeah, it was weird. Then I said to myself, stop thinking negative thoughts, you dummy.”
Amman laughed. “You remind me of my grandmother back in New Delhi, Kate. She’s so superstitious. When I laugh at her for it, she hits me. She’s a tiny woman, but she packs a wallop!”
“Okay, Chrissy’s done, folks are back. Here we go.” Kate checked her watch, then turned toward the main camera and spoke slowly and clearly, reading from a script she had prepared:
“This is Katherine Pearson at ExitStrategy. The time is 10:43 a.m. October 21, 2013. We shall now proceed with our next step. Dr. Amman Vishwanathan is now placing a flotation device on the subject to keep his head above the water line so that fluid does not enter his lungs. In a moment, he will place the subject into the solution tank. The tank holds one hundred gallons of a special vitamin-enriched solution. The exact chemical composition of this saline solution is recorded in our files. The temperature is four point two degrees Celsius.”
Kate paused while Amman lowered Mr. T. into the tank, adjusting the flotation device. Then she continued reading her script:
“The subject will remain in the tank for roughly seventy-two hours. The body temperature will rise slowly toward the temperature of the tank. Data leads are already attached to the subject’s skin. At the forty-eight-hour mark, assuming we have sufficient warming of the body, special catheter devices will be installed through the urethra. These dual-purpose devices will provide temperature readings as well as deliver small amounts of extra warmth to the kidneys. We expect that proper kidney function may be a challenge, according to Dr. Amman Vishwanathan. We will also make small incisions in the abdomen to place heating devices there. Thus over the final twenty-four hours the conduction warming through the skin will be accompanied by internal warming of the core abdominal organs. Sound waves mimicking the sound in utero of a mother guinea pig’s heartbeat will pulse constantly throughout the revivification process. In addition to the data collected electronically, the subject will be monitored around the clock by a staff member. This is the end of this portion of the procedure.”
Kate folded up her script and everyone came over to shake her hand. There were no hugs yet. That would happen later, assuming success.
“And now we wait,” Chrissy said.
“Yes. And now we wait,” Kate echoed.
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