All this stuff was vaguely interesting to the extent that anything was, but by their last morning Cyril was distracted. About to reunite with his wife that afternoon after however many zillion years, he felt not eager anticipation but anxiety.
After a revoltingly bitter lunch—something dreadful had happened either to human taste buds or to the ability of the species to cook—Cyril’s new best mate led him into a simple room with a small table, two cups of liquid, and two simple chairs. A moment later from an opposite door a very short figure, almost a midget, entered with a female escort. The tiny person looked incredibly old and rather shell-shocked. Beside her minder’s streamlined plumage, the pocketed below-the-knee dress looked sack-like and frumpy. Surely this gradual, arduous process of “recognizing” his wife was not the form. In the past he would simply have seen her.
When the hologram moved towards the door, Cyril panicked. “You’re not going to go?”
“You speaken same losted linguilism, yes?” the hologram puzzled. “So no requiration of trans.”
“Oh, right, of course,” Cyril said. He wasn’t about to say aloud that he didn’t want to be left alone with her.
When Kay’s escort departed, he could swear that she also shot her minder a mournful glance. Cyril walked more slowly and stiffly to his seat than recent awakening from suspended animation justified, for his body having been put on pause had made moving around again no harder than pressing play. The only activity he found fiendishly difficult was existing at all.
Perhaps if there’d been time to script this reunion in advance, they’d have blocked the scene with an embrace. As it was, not only did they not touch, but neither party acted as if it occurred to them to do so. They took their time sitting. When Kay finally looked up, her eyes were cardboard. “Hello,” she said.
“Hello,” Cyril said.
Time passed.
“How was it for you?” Cyril asked. A trite inquiry after sexual congress, but neither took up the joke.
Her face flickered with annoyance. “There is nothing to remember. So what kind of a question is that?”
They sat.
“Did they cure the ALS?” Cyril remembered to ask.
“Yes,” she said stonily.
Of course, he might have noticed when she walked in that she no longer displayed those classic symptoms of stumbling and poor balance. But picking up on these improvements would have displayed the kind of attentiveness that came naturally in relation to someone whose pains were in some sense your pains too, whose death sentence was your death sentence too, and this woman could have been anybody.
Cyril took a sip of the liquid and made a face. He hadn’t even wanted any, since the flavour was as punishing as he’d anticipated. But it was something to do.
“The food here is terrible,” he said.
“I think they think it’s very sophisticated,” she said, though her delivery was aimless. “I think we’re being fed what to them is haute cuisine. They think they’re feeding us like royalty.” The thought seemed to exhaust her, and her gaze kept sliding off her husband’s face as if it were covered in cold cream and she couldn’t get visual traction.
“The English they speak now,” he said, realizing with embarrassment that he was “making conversation” in a manner he couldn’t recall ever having done in previously effortless exchanges with his wife. “There are no more adverbs. There are no declensions—no I versus me, she versus her. In the written form, after everyone got hopelessly confused about how to use commas and semicolons, they reduced all punctuation to the forward slash. All letters are lower case, and all spelling is phonetic. Those fashionable truncations from our day—prob for problem, cab for cabernet, uni, bro; the way Hayley started saying obs, which got on your nerves—now they’ve done it to everything, chopped all the long words into snack size. Their vocabulary is miniscule, because it’s ‘more efficient.’ If we want to learn to communicate, mastering the dialect is probably doable, even at our age.”
“Uh-huh,” she said dully. “I can’t say that I care.”
Factual memory informed him that this woman was once vigorously, even frenetically interested in everything—often to no purpose. Perhaps her current apathy was “more efficient.”
“Do you feel . . .” He wasn’t sure of the adjective. “Lost?”
Kay had the look on her face of a classic stroke victim with “slow processing speed.” “That’s too specific,” she said at last. “I’m not sure what feeling is.”
The whole texture of this encounter recalled his ungainly efforts at courting at uni, before he met Kay. It was the texture of a bad date.
“Well, it worked,” Cyril said, unable to repress a note of sourness.
“What worked.” Again, the irritation.
“Our grand plan,” Cyril said, with corresponding irritation. “We went into cold storage. When we woke up, both our terminal conditions were curable.”
“Oh, that,” she said. “So?”
He had no idea what he’d ever seen in this woman.
* * *
When they were finally rescued from each other what seemed like hours later but was really more like ten minutes, the hologram told Cyril that he would now need to see a different kind of doctor.
“You and your spouse are the oldest cryogenically preserved specimens we have ever revived,” the Different Kind of Doctor said clearly and grammatically. Wearing a flashy feather suit whose crimson was reminiscent of the male cardinal, he had a diode or something attached to his head. Google Translate was a success. “I
