Reanimation

“This is highly irregular, isn’t it?” The female in the white lab coat asked, more as a statement than a question, her flaxen hair in a knot as severe as the furrow in her brow.

The male stood beside her busied himself with a clipboard. “You really have to stop making molehills out of nothing, doctor.” He sighed, saying the last word as if it was an inside joke. “This is just the next step in the process. We’re doing something good here. Can we focus? What readings are you getting?”

The female bristled. Voicing concern over the morality of unfreezing a cryogenically preserved corpse was hardly making molehills. Was that even the right expression? She was pretty sure molehills were small. She shrugged it off. A battle for a different day. She studied the monitor and confirmed the reading with her handheld. “260 millijoules and rising. 270. Holding steady at 280.”

“Are you sure? It’s never been that high before.”

The female fought to keep her voice even. “Yes, I’m sure.”

They both watched in silence as the body on the exam table twitched ever so slightly. It happened so quickly it could have been their imagination. Was that a clenched fist? A flicker of an eyelid? The body was still slick from the cryoprotectant solution. It could be a trick of the light.

The male’s knuckles were white from holding the clipboard too tightly. He was now staring at the monitor. “Holy shit. Look at the signals we’re getting. I can’t believe it, we never thought…”

Something was not right. The female felt it first. She involuntarily took a step back, her body a tight coil, ready to sprint. Her hand automatically reached for the red alarm button on the wall. She hovered over it hesitantly, stubborn doubt flooding her brain, her thoughts merciless: The emergency alarm, really? This is hardly more than a frozen cadaver. Here you go again, making molehills out of—

No, no, no.

The body was now sitting up. It’s eyelids fluttered open slowly, agonizingly, as if the neurons were struggling to remember how to fire synchronically. It’s mouth gaped open then closed, the lips quivering like it was trying to speak.

“I’m getting the fuck out of here.” The female slammed her fist on the alarm button and pulled on the glass door. It didn’t budge.

A chuckle from behind her. “Where are you going, doctor?”

The male had an eerie smile on his face. He looked positively ecstatic. “What, you don’t want to talk to our new friend here?”

“Did you lock the fucking doors?”

“Oh, for God’s sake, calm down, I knew you were going to freak out so I took some… measures.” The male reached over to the body and pushed on a syringe connected to an intravenous cannula. “It’s funny, isn’t it? Like how this sedative will be circulated throughout this body. The heart is not beating, so we have to electrify it artificially. And then…”

The body slumped back onto the exam table like a freed marionette.

“Voila.” The male looked as if on the verge of laughing. “Exciting, isn’t it? Just think of all that we can do with this.”

The female counted her breaths. She predicted this would happen eventually, didn’t she? After all, she was the one who invented a way to reverse thermal stress in cryogenically frozen tissue, repair the tiny fractures from the freezing process. But no, there was something very wrong here. The body…. it was trying to tell her something. She struggled to remember the way the mouth moved.

The male was excitedly tinkering at the controls. “We have so many calls to make. I can’t believe we just made this much progress so quickly—”

Help. The female realized. That was the word it was trying to say. But how? As a biologist she knew there was absolutely no way the brain could have survived the freezing and revival process. The purpose of the experiment was just to see if they could reverse the vitrification of individual cells, regenerate tissue, maybe whole organs, but not a whole person…

Get yourself together. The female scolded herself, her eyes never leaving the exam table, her right hand still grasping the glass door handle. The body was already dead when it was cryogenically frozen. Already dead. The repair should only occur at the cellular level. There is no way it could cause a corpse to… what? Come back to life?

--

Her name was Alice.

She was twenty-five when she died. It was quick, or at least that was how she remembered it. If remember was the right word.

It was late Spring, flowers were in full bloom and the sun hit her skin in all the right places. The air smelled of lilacs and honey and she was happy. A reckless, youthful, giddy type of happy. Why wouldn’t she be? She was a cellist in the making. The moment before she died, she remembered humming a tune softly, her heartbeat a metronome.

Suddenly, the metronome stopped. Then… nothing.

The doctors would later call it a ruptured arteriovenous malformation. Alice would have deemed it a nice death. Poetic, really. There was no pain, only music and lilacs.

As luck would have it, her parents were wealthy. Obscenely so. The type of wealthy that can throw a billion dollars at a cryonics lab without making a dent in their expense account. In their world, money could buy anything, so they foolishly believed they could cheat death and buy their daughter’s life as well. Like Death was someone they could negotiate with. Just another shady business deal. It sounded fair, didn’t it? A billion dollars for their daughter.

The body on the exam table, however, was not their daughter. Oh sure, there were fragments of her in there, a memory of lilacs blooming, a line from her favorite song, the distinct sound of the stubborn wolf tone of her cello. But it was not Alice. Not really.

Far from the innocent happiness Alice felt just before she died, the body on the table awoke in unadulterated agony. It was angry and confused, like a feral animal in a cage, desperate to be freed.

The male scientist grinned ear to ear at the monitors beside the body, the rhythmic pulsation of his carotids thumping hypnotically like a siren’s song. If Alice were here, it would have reminded her of a metronome. Unfortunately for the scientist, the corpse that was once young, beautiful, musically talented Alice, was now just blindingly, single-mindedly, very, very hungry.