The Curiosity (9 page)

The counting clock shows 15:47 has elapsed since that frozen heart first started beating. At twenty minutes Gerber begins ventilator weaning, minuscule steps this time but reaching full withdrawal in half an hour. The other techs report steady blood pressure. Billings returns to the body and records his observations: finger twitches, eye motion.

No one is celebrating this time. It is a solemn business. I ask Thomas for a copy of the procedure list and he hands me the original—can he have no idea what this thing will be worth?—and tosses the bare clipboard on a desk. Then I slump in a corner and wonder what has just become of my worldview.

“Rock solid.” Gerber sits back. “Sixteen respirations per minute, ninety-two beats give or take, zero life support.” He clasps hands behind his head. “Baby's all grown up.”

“Well . . .” Carthage tugs his collar like his tie is too tight. “I suppose I don't need to tell you all how disappointed I am.”

“What?”
It's Borden this time. “What are you
talking
about? What better result could you possibly expect? What do you want?”

Carthage rubs his forehead with one hand, as if to say it is a shame the world is populated with imbeciles. Then he stares through the glass at the living, breathing, silent creature. “I want consciousness.”

CHAPTER 9

The Ancient Dictionary

(Kate Philo)

W
ithin hours of reanimation Gerber had designed a way to stream the frozen man online live. It was a massive invasion of privacy, but after I'd committed the apparently unforgivable offense of questioning Carthage's ethics in front of the whole staff, I remained too far in the doghouse to make an effective objection.

In fact he put me on the night shift. It was a clear comedown from supervising all the researchers on the ship, but truthfully I didn't mind. I liked the quiet control room, the hum of machines, the silent body breathing away in its chamber. Whatever misgivings I felt about the project and my role, the frozen man had a reassuring presence.

Often Billings was there, toiling with his small specimens. Sometimes I'd convince him to take a break from cataloging, the drudgery of organizing chaos before experimenting on it. He'd been right about that giant berg. It contained a trove of small species, including hundreds of flash-frozen sardines.

Dixon now had a desk in the lab offices, where he sat most nights pounding the keys of his laptop. While he was working, the man had impressive focus: scowling, impervious to distraction, pausing to dig through his notes before plunging back in. When he took breaks I would engage him in conversation, hear war stories about his newspaper days. But the man had a particular habit, as if he could sense the moment I began to feel sympathy or connection with him. He would utter something vile, coarse, sexist, driving me away from him, back to my work.

Gerber was present most nights, too, as unsleeping as an owl, though I didn't understand why. What more systems design work could there be? I supposed he was doing basic science, which is to say he was being paid to think.

I can't say that I had many tasks myself. The electrodes remained securely in place, barnacles on the man's chest and back. Computers monitored everything day after day without a single crash. I felt like a night watchman, everything but the flashlight.

Meanwhile the red digital clock counted up the frozen man's new existence, nine days, nine hours, plus change. Gerber's tracking program changed camera angles every thirty seconds. Simultaneously, vital signs, plus brain and heart activity readings, scrolled continuously across the bottom of the screen. Anyone wanting this data could download it for free. In the first twenty-four hours, our Web site had 14 million hits. Each visit lasted an average of twenty-six minutes, which Gerber declared exceptional for the Internet.

“Most people don't even have sex for that long,” he said. Across the room, Dixon snickered into his coffee cup.

Gerber spent his nights trolling the blogs. Not surprisingly, the frozen man made the Web buzz like a hive. Each morning Gerber e-mailed the wildest finds to all project staff, until people complained of the in-box clutter. After that, he hung a little bulletin board on the control room wall, with a scroll above:
PERV DU JOUR
. Periodically he thumbtacked his latest discovery there, which most staffers read each day the minute they arrived at work.

One night, for instance, Gerber hung screen captures from frozen mantwin.com: photos of our guy with imaginary siblings he might have had. One person posted an actor who'd played the grizzled sheriff in a sixties TV western, someone else suggested an Olympic swimmer with sharp cheekbones. Others were more inventive: a skinny monkey with wide facial hair vaguely like the frozen man's sideburns, even the flared front grillework of a tiny, fuel-efficient car.

Not all responses to the reanimation were odd. Both of Massachusetts's U.S. senators called with congratulations. The president of MIT sent flowers. I was meeting with Carthage when they arrived. While Thomas centered the arrangement on the credenza, I suggested to my preening boss that we invite sociologists to study who was following the reanimation online most fervently. Carthage glared at me, barked, “Focus.”

A cardiologist in Milwaukee said the frozen man's EKG matched that of a person in deep rest. “It's like the day after a marathon and his body is recovering,” he said. Dr. Borden, Carthage's pet physician, calculated the frozen man's appetite and wastes and said he had the metabolic rate of a hibernating reptile. I thought:
How humanizing.

A Chicago epilepsy researcher downloaded encephalograms and declared that “Subject One is using as close to one hundred percent of his brain as has ever been measured for a human.” I wondered how she could draw such a broad conclusion with only three days' data. But once she had told CNN it was “like he was shining a light in every corner of his mind,” the phrase replayed worldwide every thirty minutes for a day and a half. She may have rushed to judgment, but it made her a household name.

The popular culture backlash was close on her heels. Tabloids speculated on whether the frozen man was an alien. Religious conservatives held public prayer vigils, between calls to Congress to shut us down. “Lazarus was raised by the Son of God,” one congressman said, pointing at the sky. He had white hair and a fantastic speaking voice, nearly operatic. “Who do these Boston blasphemers think they are?”

My sister, Chloe, sent e-mails, her tone evolving based on the news coverage: how-did-idiot-you-land-a-job-with-people-so-smart became what-are-you-doing-up-there-anyway, then what-is-wrong-with-you-parasites.
What is your role in all of this anyway?
she wrote.
I can't decide which would be worse, you being at the center of this fiasco, or you being some peon gofer among the people who actually get things done.
Gee, Chloe, aren't you special.

The cryogenics companies, whose freezers were stuffed with bodies, watched their stocks soar. A national news magazine ran a cover story, “Rebirth of the Biotech Age?” Our front desk fielded over six hundred requests for interviews, all declined. For reasons known only to himself, Carthage continued giving Dixon exclusive coverage of the project, putting his byline in newspapers around the world. Thus the reporter never gave anyone a moment's peace. Twice I felt his humid breath as he leaned over my shoulder to watch me work. It took a long, cold glare to get him to back off.

Then a security guard spoke to the TV cameramen clustered outside the front door like a pack of neglected dogs: “These people are secretive,” he said, taking his sunglasses off for once. “We don't even work for the building's owners. The project hired us so no one could snoop on whatever they're doing in there. Who knows what they're up to? Who knows what their plans are?”

Carthage watched the news, raised an eyebrow, made a call. The security company replaced the guard while we began occasionally using the loading door in back to get in and out of the building. But the damage was done.

Still, the postal service had to deliver our mail in a separate truck. It sat in the basement in wheeled canvas bins, envelopes to the brim till someone had time to open them. Gerber pulled one letter at random. It said the staff of the Lazarus Project was the spawn of Satan. He laughed till his crazy hair shook. Billings tried another, from a Texas billionaire wanting the Lazarus Project to revive his dead stud Thoroughbred.

Meanwhile late-night TV comedians joked away: perhaps Vice President Gerald T. Walker should come to Boston, to see if the Lazarus Project could bring
him
back from the dead, too.

Yet by noon of the fifth day, the Web comments primarily complained about how boring the video stream was. Don't you love the world's attention span? Bring a man back from a place beyond human conception, and people will be amazed for approximately one hundred hours. I sat down to read the postings, but after about ten I had to stop. Here was a ravenous beast with an insatiable appetite. I wondered how these people would have responded to the painfully slow work of Pasteur, who developed germ theory only after the deaths of three of his children. Or Fleming, inspired by the horrific rate of World War I infection deaths to work ten years seeking an antibacterial agent, only to discover penicillin by accident. Or Salk, chasing polio for eight years while tens of thousands of children were afflicted, their lives saved only by the prison of an iron lung.
Ho-hum, very nice, now how about curing malaria by Monday?

Gerber started a new protocol: editing each day's tapes into ten-minute summaries. Carthage asked Dixon what time would be ideal for publicity, so the tape releases occurred to suit the noon and 6
P.M
. TV news cycles. The media appreciated the editing, and most led their newscasts with our tapes. But just after the third release a madman shot up a mall in the Midwest. We became yesterday's story.

Carthage was disappointed but it was fine with me. We needed more time for science. Chloe, despite her digs, had a point. We did need to understand what we were doing. What was the goal? Also what would we do if the frozen man actually woke up, spoke, became fully alive in this new time?

No one wanted to discuss these things. No one even contacted the research vessel, hunting hard-ice off southern Argentina, to say we had restarted a dead man's heart. The crew was slaving out there in a frigidity I knew too well, as solitary as a satellite in space.

One night I walked to work with an equally isolated feeling, like I was adrift in a vast sea. Maybe my mood was caused by the rain, a spring downpour that left puddles in the streets. Also the sidewalk protesters had become more numerous, thirty or so. One snarled at me as I hurried past. Then it didn't help that Gerber and Billings were both so intent on their work when I arrived, they had not even paused to say hello.

The all-night shift stretched ahead like a straight, flat highway. In minutes I had confirmed that the monitors were working fine, no adjustments needed. The video tracking changed angles on schedule. The counting clock marched onward. Various devices had begun their daily automatic backup.

I surveyed the control room. Headphoned Gerber stared at his screen while typing ridiculously fast, waiting for an answer to appear from the ether, then bursting his next reply. Billings was inventorying samples, inking labels, thumbing them on test tubes.

His obsession had created a distance between us. Days earlier I'd approached him in the lab for the lunch we shared every week since the bourbon-soaked train ride. “Hey, Graham, it's almost one. Do you want Chinese or Italian?”

“Is today Monday?” He kept his eyes to the microscope.

“All day and part of the night.”

“Truly sorry, lovely,” he said, turning his head while remaining bent toward the table, “but I'm right out flat. This little bloke on the slide won't live but another hour.”

“No problem,” I said. “Next week.”

He didn't answer, eyes already back to the lenses. Wandering back to my desk, I realized something: after the power failure during the frozen man's reanimation, in which Borden had risked an explosion, Billings hadn't returned to the main chamber once. Maybe he was avoiding lab politics. Or maybe he was excited by those small specimens. Billings had performed so many reanimations on tiny creatures, he was sharpening predictions of which organisms would wake and which wouldn't, how to increase survival times, how to use less electricity. I'd read the notes, his typical staggeringly good documentation. Still, he'd moved his computer to a corner, dodged most monitoring shifts, skipped staff meetings unless Carthage himself called them.

I considered Billings again from across the room. He slid a tray of newly marked specimens back into the portable freezing rack, then pulled out a fresh one: two hundred test tubes without labels. He coughed mildly, settling in his seat for the new batch.

Finally I allowed my eyes to wander in the one direction where there might be something engaging. The chamber. The frozen man lay in there breathing as slowly and steadily as waves hitting a beach. Two days before he had wiggled a pinkie. The next morning the staff consensus was that it had twitched, the distinction being that it revealed only nervous activity, not intentional motion. I disagreed, but the final documentation called his move a reflex. Otherwise the man was as still as a statue of the Buddha.

I went to the glass. The frozen man's clothes were ragged but tailored. He still wore those signature boots. His sideburns looked almost comical, Spanish moss on his cheeks. Borden had proposed washing him, shaving him, dressing him in fresh garments. Carthage said not yet, no point in disturbing the body until it reached stability. Until then, no one was to enter the chamber without specific tasks or explicit permission.

Yet there I was. Standing at the intersection of science and magic, fact and speculation, cold research and warm curiosity. Then the frozen man breathed—not the usual deep slow bellows, but a gulp, as though he had said the word
hoop
on an in-breath. I spied my colleagues, both absorbed, neither aware of my existence much less my temptations.