Thawing A.C. Nielsen--Sharing Ch 6

Today I'm sharing chapter six of "Thawing A.C. Nielsen! I hop 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 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 Six reveals what kind of business ExitStrategy is--a cryology venture! Frozen famous folks/celebs/multi-millionaires all hoping to be thawed out and their diseases cured by doctors of the future. Kate is totally shocked at first by this revelation of Mike's, but she begins to soften (why is revealed in a few chapters). I had to do a lot of research into the history of cryology starting back in the 1960s and read through a lot of the procedures that were used. Currently there are just a  few cryo labs still in business. Some of the cryology anecdotes in the chapter are, apparently, real!

They say write what you know--so you'll see some Chicago stuff here, some University of Illinois (where I got my bachelor's) engineering department stuff (all true) as well. 

The Winston House hotel is based on the real Palmer House in downtown Chicago, and Gloria Dunham is loosely based on the Norma Desmond character of Sunset Boulevard (not Norma Bates-haha! You''ll learn why room 525 means so much to Gloria way at the end of the book!

CHAPTER SIX

Kate arrived back at the Winston House on Friday morning. This time she was directed to take the elevator to the fifth-floor suites. She found room 525, took a deep breath, exhaled, then knocked on the door. In a few seconds it swung open and Franklin Burgess greeted her again. 

“Miss Pearson—Kate—so good to see you again!”

“Likewise, Mr. Burgess,” Kate responded.

“Oh my, she’s so young” came a crackly voice from across the way.

“Yes, she is, Gloria. That’s a good thing,” Mike assured her. “Kate, I’m so glad you are here. May I present Miss Gloria Dunham and her attorney, Mr. Randolph Morgan.”

Miss Dunham motioned for Kate to approach, then slowly reached out, barely grasping Kate’s hand. The whole process seemed odd—as if Kate were a lowly peon being presented to the Queen of England. Morgan, barely thirty-five, yet appearing world-weary, just nodded ever so slightly in Kate’s general direction.

“This room is gorgeous,” Kate remarked. “I’ve been to the lobby and ballrooms for a few meetings and events, but I’ve never seen the rooms here.”

“Yes, this is the only hotel I stay at while in Chicago,” Gloria said. “The rooms are not large, but they are of quality. This room, number 525, is my favorite—I always request it. I have many special memories of my times in this room.”

“Well, let’s get started,” Mike said. “I’ve ordered the little tray of coffee and pastries like last time, Kate. I know you enjoyed that.”

Kate took a moment to eyeball this Miss Dunham. Judging by the multitude of age spots and her crepe-paper skin, she must be at least ninety, Kate surmised. But look at those eyes—so blue, so piercing. The elegant clothes, the fine jewelry—yes, she looks wealthy.

“Kate,” Mike said, “your profile from the testing Wednesday came in. You passed with flying colors—no surprise. So let’s talk more about this job. We’ve already told you the starting salary and much of what we expect from you. Have you thought of any questions for us?”

“Well, I’d like to know what Dr. Saltieri was researching—specifically.”

“Wait, you haven’t told her what you do there yet, Mike? Franklin?” Morgan inquired, rolling his eyes. “Oh, this should be interesting.”

“Randolph, this is why we do things in stages,” Mike countered. “I’m sure we will have no problem. Kate, the research is centered on cryotechnology. We hinted that to you. You’ve already worked in this area with your cancer ablation studies, right?”

“Yes, of course.”

“And you know that doctors can revive people who have fallen into icy waters, even people whose hearts have stopped beating or slowed down to a faint pulse. That doctors at times will purposely place people into cryogenic comas, lowering the patient’s body temperature to slow damage from a severe trauma and allow themselves time to repair the body, yes?”

“Yes, I am familiar with all this.”

“And you may also be familiar with the fact that for many years it has been possible to freeze human organs—donor organs—and use them to help others, people who are desperately ill, correct?”

“Yes, I’ve been to labs that do that. In my senior year we visited one as part of a project.”

“Kate,” Mike said, making sure he had eye contact with her as he spoke, “ExitStrategy is a cryonics facility. We are the leading cryonics company in the country—the world, actually. And Dr. Saltieri was finalizing a revivification procedure for those patients under our care in our facility in Northbrook.”

“Cryonics? Cryonics, not cryogenics? Wait, you mean you freeze people? Oh my God, you freeze dead people?” Kate blurted out. She felt nauseated. Her heart began to race. She wanted to escape or hide somehow, or go into a fetal position.

“Well, there you have it, Mike. She’s obviously shocked, now what?” Morgan shook his head in disapproval.

“Kate, yes that’s what we do,” Mike began explaining. “But at our company we’re scientists, not crackpots. And think about it—over the centuries, how have people defined death? It’s changed drastically over time. First it was defined as lack of breathing or lack of a heartbeat. That was death. For a long time now we have been reviving people who have fallen into icy waters, like I said, or who have been electrocuted. We restart their hearts, don’t we? On the other hand, we sometimes, again, as I already stated, purposely stop people’s hearts to do surgery on them. Did we kill them, Kate? No, not by today’s standard. But what are our criteria for declaring death right now—today? There isn’t anything close to exact agreement on the topic today, is there? What separates life and death has never been well defined and the line between the two is more indistinct now than it has ever been, won’t you agree?”

Woody Allen being brought back to life out of cryonic deepfreeze (the comedy Sleepers, 1973)

 

 

 

 

“Yes, that is true, I guess,” Kate admitted faintly. Yet despite Mike’s finely crafted words, she still felt awful and very panicky. Her heart was still pounding, her palms sweating.

“Kate, what if we could give hope to people stricken with terrible diseases—give them a fighting chance? Help them survive far enough into a future society where there is a cure for their disease—for cancer, for ALS, for MS, for muscular dystrophy, for all the terrible diseases that claim people far too soon. Also, what if we didn’t have to let our greatest minds disappear into the void? Think of the work geniuses like an Einstein or a Hawking could do if they could live again in the future.”

“I don’t know, I really don’t know… I’m shocked right now,” Kate murmured. “I’ll be okay, just let me sit here. You can keep talking, I suppose.”

“You can make a dash for the door if you like, Miss Pearson,” Morgan offered with a sly look on his face. “I don’t think anyone here is spry enough to tackle you and hold you here against your will.”

“Randolph!” Gloria yelled, shaking her cane.

“Sorry, ma’am,” he muttered nonchalantly. He actually had seemed far more concerned about the pipe he was trying to light than the conversation going on in the room.

“Look, Mike,” Gloria said, “look, she’s a strong girl. She’ll be fine. Go ahead, continue.”

“So, Kate,” Mike began again, “what do you know about cryonics? Probably you have vague knowledge of its history and its practices. What you have to understand is that when cryonics came about in the 1970s it was considered speculative at best. And that’s reasonable, since yes, anyone or anything can be frozen using liquid nitrogen. I could freeze a tree stump if I wanted to, but then what? Let’s say, instead, that we cryo someone who has cancer, wait twenty-five or fifty years, and doctors of the future have devised a way to revive them and fix what killed them. Most people think it simply can’t be done. But what about the people who see the glass as half-full. Perhaps it can be done—and that’s the thing, there has always been that perhaps out there, the idea floating around in the minds of dreamers, I suppose.”

“Mike, you’re waxing particularly poetic today, which is well and fine, I suppose,” Franklin said. “But Kate needs to know the other issues that were going on in the early days, don’t you think?”

“Yes, Franklin,” Mike agreed, “you’re right. Kate, besides a few firms with healthy agendas, there were money grubbers—hacks who started up primitive cryo labs just to cash in, asking for people’s money and freezing them any which way, sometimes even just freezing their chopped-off heads if the client didn’t have enough money to cryo their whole body.”

“Like Ted Williams, the famous baseball player,” Franklin interjected. “I met him once. Rather conceited fellow. His head is in a cryo facility in Arizona. Ghoulish to the max.”

“Wait, can I just get up and use the bathroom for a moment?” Kate asked. “I need to splash some water on my face.”

“Of course, Miss Pearson,” Gloria answered. “It’s down to the right.”

Kate entered the bathroom, shut and locked the door. Now what do I do? The dream job is more like a nightmare. A frozen, subzero nightmare—ugh. Do I stay and listen, or just get the heck out? Oh, my God, this can’t be real. Kate used the toilet and then splashed water on her face and the back of her neck. It felt very good, calming her. Finally she rejoined the others.

“Kate, glad you’re back,” Mike said. “The pastries have arrived. What can we get you?”

“Nothing for now. But I’m feeling a little better. I’m ready to listen to more.” She took note that Mike was doing almost all the talking. He’s the one in charge, obviously.

“Kate,” he continued, “back in the early days CBC News did an exposé accusing cryonics labs of being complete scams, hauling in big money while just creating ‘corpsecicles,’ a term they coined for the report, and that it was all pseudoscience. Honestly, what they uncovered when they visited a few firms was appalling. There were practices that couldn’t be defended. The damage from this report was so overwhelming that many companies folded in a short amount of time and no new companies started up after that point—with one notable exception—our company, founded by Franklin, Dr. Saltieri, and me.”

“And so when was that, Mr. Burgess?” Kate asked, trying to respect him enough to listen and engage, instead of sitting blankly in a fog. She could tell the two Burgess men were passionate and highly intelligent and really didn’t seem crazy. She felt she owed it to them to hear their story.

“We started up a while after I left General Motors and Frigidaire,” Mike continued. “I had met Dr. Saltieri and we both developed an interest in this field. We had the expertise, and surprisingly to me, were able to develop the capital to go into business. My training was in engineering and he was an internationally respected medical professor. We enlisted Franklin here to find our first clients. Franklin was a well-known character actor in Hollywood for years and knows literally everyone in the business there, including our Miss Dunham. We didn’t have to wait long to have interested, wealthy clients, especially the Hollywood types. In fact, thanks to Franklin’s charm and connections we never had to solicit business—clients found us.”

“So ExitStrategy, it’s your plan for when you die? Close a window and open a door, or close a door and open a window, like whatever you said the other day?” Kate asked Franklin.

“Precisely!” he said. “Kate, we’re totally under the radar. All that bad publicity hurt companies who started up way before we did. Most people, including the press, still don’t know we exist. We have no website—nothing—but the right clients still find us. It’s word of mouth among the elite. Signage for our power-generating facility is what people see when they visit and step through our front door. They don’t get much farther than that entry and a conference room. They have no idea we’re doing something else, too. That is, unless they’ve contacted us about being an ExitStrategy client.”

“Sounds very cloak and dagger,” Kate said.

“Correct,” Mike said. “And over the years that we’ve been successfully operating a truly scientific facility, bad things happened to our remaining competitors. One cryo firm went bankrupt—fortunately another facility took over the clients. Another one had a serious power failure; all their liquid nitrogen tanks failed. Terrible. It was days before they had their tanks functional again. What do you say to the client families in that situation? ‘Oops, sorry!’? That’s another reason we wash our hands of those people—all the corpsecicle creators.”

“So what specifically makes you different?” Kate asked. “You’ve piqued my interest a bit and I think I’ve gotten over my initial shock. Whew, I was not prepared for that, I have to say. Are you doing something different to store people? And did you hint that Dr. Saltieri had an actual plan to revive these people?”

“Yes and yes would be the answers,” Randolph Morgan interrupted. “Yes, they are doing something different. Radically different in the intake and storage realm. And yes, Mike firmly believes he can bring people back to life sometime.” Morgan puffed on his pipe as he dragged a chair over so he could sit directly in front of Kate. “Here’s where we stand right now, Miss Pearson. I must insist, as Miss Dunham’s attorney, that you tell us if we should proceed with this interview process or if you may wish to exit now. We have no intention of divulging further proprietary information just to satisfy your schoolgirl curiosity. We need to know if you have possibly overcome your initial outrage and may be seriously interested in this employment opportunity. Does that sound fair to you?”

“Yes, we can proceed—and yes, I was shocked at first,” Kate explained. “I’m sorry I reacted that way. Go ahead, Mr. Burgess, either Mr. Burgess.”

“That sounds wonderful, Kate,” Franklin said. “And let’s make it easier on you, call us by our first names from now on, eh?”

“That would be nice. So, the question left hanging—what makes your company different?”

“Well, look at that!” Mike exclaimed. “Sometimes it pays to have a lawyer in the room to focus people’s thoughts and motivations. Kate, Saltieri and I decided that maybe the press was right. Who’s to say that someone frozen down to liquid nitrogen temperature could ever be revived? And, let’s ask you now, what kinds of problems would max-freezing create? Think about it from your expertise area.”

“Well, on the cellular level, any decent amount of water within or between molecules would expand and crack everything. There might be massive damage. That’s what I would say on a first pass.”

“Exactly,” Mike agreed. “So I invented a way to avoid using liquid nitrogen and the ridiculously low temperature it would naturally dictate. I invented something new around 1985—we don’t ultra-freeze our patients until their skulls fracture, we don’t expect them to survive as if they were dumped into Antarctica. No one else even knows about our new processes, they’ve never been revealed. You can understand why Mr. Morgan stopped us for a moment. We have many proprietary inventions and procedures at ExitStrategy.”

“But also at that time,” Franklin continued, “Mike realized that he could build storage tanks—we call them pods—out of an acrylic instead of aluminum or steel. The acrylic has decided advantages over the metal.”

“Yes,” Mike said, “and there is much more that we can tell you later. We feel that our patients from 1985 and onward stand a very strong possibility of revivification. Another major development around 1989 further strengthened our chances for success.”

“So, Miss Pearson, what do you think?” Miss Dunham asked. “Is Mike Burgess delusional?”

“Well, no—um, I don’t totally know. It sounds like he is employing real scientific methods. It does sound like your firm is far more successful than your competition.”

“Uncle Mike, tell her your background—as a young man. When you were her age,” Franklin encouraged.

“Well, all right, I suppose,” Mike answered. “Kate, keep in mind I don’t like to talk about myself. I dislike braggarts and don’t want to be one myself.”

“Go ahead,” Kate said, “this whole meeting has become curiouser and curiouser… I’m ready to hear more.”

“Ah, look at that, she knows Lewis Carroll. Very good, my dear,” said Gloria, with a little giggle. “Now go on, Mike, don’t be so modest. Start at the beginning, please.”

“Oh all right,” Mike said hesitantly, “but it’s really not that interesting. I wasn’t a spy or anything or an actor like my nephew Franklin. I was smart—that’s not a lie. I finished high school at age fifteen. I had a bent for math and science that came out of nowhere, I guess. My parents didn’t even finish high school. My dad was military and was based at Chanute Air Force Base in Rantoul, a little ways from Champaign-Urbana and the University of Illinois. So when I was this little math and science wunderkind my parents found out that a great university was just twenty-five miles away and decided that they needed to get me there. I started at U of I at age fifteen and majored in mechanical engineering, but eventually focused more on electrical engineering. When I arrived as a freshman, people on campus looked at me funny for a couple years because I was so young, short, and scrawny—not the big hulk of an overweight old man you see today,” he added with a grin. “But by my junior year I had grown up a bit and was working lab projects for John Bardeen. You may know the name.”

“Oh yes, I do!” Kate said. “We studied the development of the MRI and other imaging devices my sophomore year.”

“Well, Kate,” Mike continued, “Bardeen spent over twenty-five years teaching at the engineering school. He won Nobel prizes in two different fields. He and a fellow named Shockley invented the first transistor when they were at Bell Labs. Think about that—the first transistor! It won him the first Nobel. Then at U of I he pioneered research in a fledgling field at the time—superconductivity. In fact, we have an MRI at ExitStrategy, and that MRI was made possible by Bardeen’s work. And getting back to me, I was there as his number one assistant for seven years. He won a second Nobel for the superconductivity research. I went with him to Sweden for the ceremony, and, this is funny—Professor Bardeen had brought two of his kids to the first Nobel ceremony. The king of Sweden chided him for it, but Bardeen pushed back, saying ‘I’ll bring them all next time.’ I was there for that second Nobel ceremony and sure enough, he brought all seven of his kids right up unto the podium. This time the king approved! After that, Frigidaire lured me away. I was able to use crazy side aspects of superconductivity research to invent ridiculously efficient heat-transfer systems. And that’s how I made my name and a boatload of money working for Frigidaire and their parent company, General Motors. So, is that enough about me? Does that help you realize we’re doing real science and we’re not delusional?”

“Well, it would appear so. You seem to have had an amazing career. Yes, color me impressed. But I’d really like to see this facility—get a sense of it,” Kate said.

“Sure. I know why you said that, Kate,” Mike answered. “The way a lab looks tells a visiting scientist everything. Is it clean and neat, or is it sloppy and dirty? Does it house cutting-edge technology, or is it just a bunch of dirty test tubes and Bunsen burners? We’ll drive up to see it in a bit if you like. We have technology there that you’ve never dreamed of.”

“Technology, real science—that’s what I’m looking for in a job. I just realized I’m hungry now. Mind if I go visit the pastry cart?”

“Not at all, Kate. Go dig in, have as much as you want!” Mike insisted.

While Kate poured herself some coffee, grabbed a croissant and smeared a bit of blackberry jam on it, the others exchanged smiles and nods. “She’s perfect, isn’t she? Just what we’ve needed,” Mike whispered.

Kate returned with her plate of food and coffee. The tension in the room had disappeared. Even Randolph Morgan had become less gnarly. After Kate ate a few bites of her croissant, Gloria showed her around the suite as if they had been friends for years. After the little tour and a few more minutes of small talk, they reconvened the interview.

“Well, Kate, are you ready?” Franklin asked.

“Ready for what?”

“On Monday you called yourself a nerd—a lab rat. Want to see your lab?”

“My lab? Hmm, so you’re the salesman, right?” Kate gave Franklin a little smile. “Sure, yes—no harm in looking, right? I’m ready when you are.”