“Cryogenics was still in its infancy,” Cyril said. “But if we didn’t give it a try, we were going to die.”
“Why did you not want to die?”
“That seems like a stupid question.”
“If our research on much fresher specimens is any guide, you now think everything is stupid.”
Cyril felt caught out, and also resentful, as if the therapist had been spying. “In this future—”
“It is not the future. It is the present. That is one of the many things you are going to have trouble with.”
“In this present, then. You don’t fear dying or try to avoid it? Or do you not die?”
“We die,” the human cardinal said blithely. “But all that matters is the continuation of . . . I am not happy with this expression of yours, ‘the hive.’ I detect it refers to insects. This is too reductive.”
Cyril proposed, with a nod to the counsellor’s garb, “How about, ‘Birds of a feather flock together’?”
The therapist’s expression remained flinty. Perhaps such a psychic high priest was above a sense of humour. “The whole to which I refer is something you have no understanding of, and no capacity to understand.”
“Sorry, but I’d call that rather insulting.”
“We aren’t troubled by offending your vanities. There was a time, when the unity of our greater organism was more fragile, that we’d have regarded your primitive individualism as a grave threat. Had you been reanimated in an earlier era, you might have been stoned to death. But now our solidarity is unassailable, and we’re more likely to regard you as quaint, or more probably as pathetic.”
“With all due respect”—the standard introductory flourish with which Members of Parliament had always begun an abusive harangue—“you don’t know me at all. I’ve never advocated ‘primitive individualism.’ All my life, I’ve been an ardent socialist . . .” Cyril’s huffing and puffing collapsed. One of the most dreadful side effects of suspended animation was a horrifying inability to lie to himself. He had been neither a socialist nor an egalitarian. He had espoused socialism in the interest of his own glorification, and he had always felt superior to everyone else.
“That’s a prime example of what we find pathetic,” the doctor said. “This idea that there’s such a thing as ‘getting to know you.’ As if others will be mesmerized by your unplumbable depths, and we’re sure to be fascinated by your amusing eccentricities, ironic inconsistencies, and arresting complexities. There’s nothing special about you, as there’s nothing special about any of us. Your only personal distinction is hubris and ignorance. We know we’re all the same, and being interchangeable doesn’t bother us in the slightest. That’s why death leaves modern humans unfazed. Whereas for you the notion of being just one more fungible worker bee, to use your disagreeable analogy, is intolerably demeaning, and you cling to the farcical fancy that your subtraction from humanity would leave a gaping hole.”
“Maybe I used to think that,” Cyril said glumly. “Not any more.”
“We have digressed. If I may resume: from what we’ve patched together, there were a number of ghastly instances in which cryogenics went wrong. More than one subject was buried alive. Or bodies were put into perfect stasis but the minds remained alert—much like what you call ‘locked-in syndrome’—so that by the time the subjects were reanimated, they were irretrievably insane, and a danger to themselves or to others. Sometimes consciousness was revived in decomposing corpses. As a result, for a long period whilst you and your wife were in a state of hiatus, the practice was banned. So you’re quite a rarity. The records from your era are nearly all destroyed. You might usefully fill in some gaps for us. But I’m here to warn you that you are in imminent danger of wilful self-destruction—colloquially, ‘topping yourself.’ That would entail our so-called hive losing a valuable asset. To prevent that loss, I need to prepare you for what to expect. At the moment, you are thinking that the immediate shock of emergence into a new world is the hard part. You assume that later you will get acclimatized, and learn the language, make friends even, and fit in. It’s therefore important for you to understand at the outset that your experience of a time in such contrast to your own will only get more difficult. You will never get acclimatized or make friends as you understand them. You will never fit in.”
“That’s not very welcoming,” Cyril objected.
“I want you to imagine you are a dinosaur in a natural history museum that has been miraculously brought to life. So you can pound down the street. Are you going to fit in?”
“You got that from my conversation with that professor chap. It was a metaphor.”
“The dinosaur is a good metaphor. You stand out in the landscape. People will stare at you. You are clumsy and can’t communicate. The only thing wrong with the metaphor is that you are freakishly stunted.”
Once more, Cyril was stung. “I used to be considered on the tall side.”
“Get over it,” the clinician said brutally. “We are in the early stages of developing full clairvoyance, which is one reason language is being minimized; it will soon die off, like the vestigial tail or the appendix. You will feel left out. I assure you that being in a room with people nodding and laughing whilst not even needing to say anything is a great deal more isolating than being at a party where all the cool people give you the cold shoulder.”
“You can read my mind?”
“Crudely. If I care to. Though to be honest, your head is not a place where I particularly wish to go.”
Cyril was about to say defensively, “Being me isn’t that bad!” but stopped himself. It was that bad. It was terrible, and he did not know why.
“You see, when you opted to ‘go to sleep,’ as you’re prone to misconceive suspension,” the therapist continued, “you didn’t take seriously the possibility that when you ‘awoke’ all
