“So what’s your prob?” the receptionist asked with the distinct air of not giving a monkey’s. The skinny young woman wore athletic gear to work, and she was chewing gum.
Disinclined to confide their heartache to a bored pencil pusher, Cyril said tersely, “ALS and pancreatic—”
“Yeah, we had a few of those. Pain in the arse, innit?” she said, not moving her gaze from the computer screen. “Any time limit?”
“No, the period is indefinite,” Cyril said. “As we’ve specified, we’re not to be revived until both conditions can be alleviated by medical breakthroughs. The fees are indemnified by a trust. We sent in all the documentation.”
“Does it hurt?” Kay asked with sudden urgency. She’d been too embarrassed to ask before.
“How should I know?” the receptionist said, smack-smack.
“At least at Dignitas we’d get better service,” Cyril grumbled to Kay under his breath.
“Do we need to disrobe?” Kay asked anxiously as the girl led them to the inner sanctum.
“Puh-lease,” the receptionist said. “This is a cryogenics lab, not a naturist camp. And no offence, but I could skip looking at your wrinkly ass.”
“Oh, no offence taken,” Kay said sourly.
“Sarky, for a past-sell-by.” She seemed to mean it as a compliment.
Two capsules were open and lit from within. There was no getting round their resemblance to caskets.
“Are we supposed to simply—lie there?” Kay asked.
“What else would you do in that thing, Morris dancing?”
“You could be a bit more respectful,” Cyril said. They were both getting rattled by the disconcerting lack of ceremony.
“Look here, you lot getting cold feet?” the receptionist asked. “’Cause you’re gonna get cold feet, even if you go through with it.” She tee-heed. She’d made the joke before.
“Could you give us a moment alone, please?” Cyril requested firmly.
“A minute or two,” she said. “But if what you’re really up to is waffling on and bottling it, I got to warn you that the penalty for pulling out at this point is, like, I don’t know, a gazillion quid.”
In their brief window of privacy, Cyril kissed his wife deeply, the way they used to kiss for hours when they were courting, and they withdrew from one another’s lips at last with the same reluctance they both remembered from those days as well, when they had to get back to their medical studies. That kiss sent a tingling shimmer through the entirety of their lives together, as if their marriage were a crash cymbal whose rim he’d just hit deftly with a felt mallet.
“See you later,” Kay said.
“See you later,” Cyril said.
The last thing they heard was the sound of that woman’s gum.
* * *
A few seconds after that—or what seemed a few seconds—Cyril opened his eyes to find a dusky-skinned woman of indeterminate race staring down at him with an expression of clinical curiosity. “Hearm ca? Seem ca?”
His eyes were dry and painful. The sound of the woman’s voice hurt. But the pain seemed deeper than his response to sensation. Being here hurt. Being at all.
“Turn lighden,” the woman said, standing upright. She was at least eight feet tall.
The illumination dimmed, which helped the agony of seeing, but only somewhat. Cyril tried to form a word, but making his mouth move was hard work; even harder work was thinking of what to say. Either his neurological system was suffering from a mechanical creakiness, or his brain and facial nerves were functioning perfectly well—in which case what was keeping him from speaking was his mind’s stark instruction that anything that he might say was not worth the effort because it was stupid.
“Waa,” Cyril croaked weakly.
The woman in peculiar clothes—her form-fitting gear was covered in sleek black feathers, as if she were a superhero crossed with a crow—squirted an aerosol into Cyril’s mouth. “Secure!” she said over her shoulder. “Sum viol.” Then a large man with the same indeterminate complexion and gear of blue feathers came to stand watchfully beside the supine specimen.
Whatever had happened to the outside world in that blink of an eye between the closing of the capsule and the raising of its lid again, something had happened to Cyril. He felt like a copy of himself—a poor copy, like the decayed kind you got when you didn’t photocopy from the original, but copied the copy, then copied that copy, and he seemed to be the result of at least ten reproductions on. When he struggled to retrieve his recent memories, the recollections were in fragments: dwarves, bunnies, and a woman’s Lycra workout shirt floated by. Again his mind directed that he needn’t fit the scraps together because they were stupid.
Cyril managed to lick his lips. “Could you please tell me where am I?”
The several people in the room all burst out laughing.
“Pardon me, did I say something humorous?” he puzzled.
They cackled again.
“Sar,” the woman in black feathers said. “Sounya ha!”
“I hate to cause any trouble, but it would be awfully helpful if you could find someone for me who speaks English.” Of course, the request was absurd if no one spoke English. “English?”
As the team crowding round the capsule continued to find him hilarious, Black Birdwoman asked, “Angle?”
“Google Translate?” Cyril proposed with little optimism. These people did not look right, dress right, or talk right. Wherever and whenever he was, the chances of a rather imperfect smartphone application still being extant half a million updates later were nil. Not that it mattered. Not that anything mattered.
His minders conferred, poking at whatever mechanisms a human race over eight feet tall poked at, until at length a hologram of an older man in a suit of fine golden feathers appeared beside the capsule. Experimentally, Cyril struggled to a sitting position. Everything ached. Not just the bones. Every cell.
“Allowest I introduce I-self,” he said grandly. “I expertise on loster dialection. Service at your. Trans.”
Some expert. Cyril said, “Maybe you could start by explaining what language these people are speaking.”
The “expertise on loster dialection” looked shaken, but when Cyril repeated the request much more slowly he seemed to
