They always come to me at night. I fall asleep, and they climb out of their frozen tombs, creep into my bed, and scream. “I can feel the emptiness inside! I know what you did! Where is the rest of me?”
Some nights they don’t say anything at all. They just come, dragging enormous bags of wet sand. They bury me in it. I just lie there, unable to move, choking to death.
Please understand, I am not an evil man. I never thought I was hurting anyone!
It all started four years ago, when I first came to college. Don’t get me wrong. I knew from the beginning that I could never afford a decent education. But I had to try! When I grew up, we were so damn poor. I knew I had to try to make something of myself. I had to get a good job, where I could afford to send my mother a check every week. She was all alone. She needed my help.
So I found one of the best schools in the country. Not one of those Ivy League schools where half the people study English Literature and other useless garbage. I was going to get a real job, something where I could help people. This was a new medial school, the only place in the country that offered degrees in medical robotics.
I was just a kid when the first medical robots appeared. In the beginning, they were little more than cameras with wheels. A doctor could sit at home in his pajamas and examine patients by remote control. A few years after that, we had surgery remotes. For the first time in history, hard-to-reach patients didn’t have to be moved. The doctor could come to them. A surgeon in Washington could give an appendectomy to an oil rig worker in Alaska.
Eventually, the robots got complicated enough that an entirely new job was created: medical robotics technician. Half doctor, half computer programmer. If you wanted a job in the medical field, it was the only way to be sure you couldn’t be replaced by a machine. Those goddamned machines…
I remember walking back to my campus apartment, going through my mail. There was a flyer for some fraternity party, a few ads for credit cards, and my first bill. Tuition, lab fees, books, time on the supercomputer, all of it added up to about sixty thousand dollars. The panic hit me instantly, an icy hand squeezing my stomach. I threw up in the bushes.
Dropping out just wasn’t an option. I couldn’t abandon my mother. So, I had to face what every college student fears most: work. A friend of mine told me about a place called Infractus Incorporated. He had no idea what kind of business it was, just that they needed people and needed them fast. I looked up the address in the phone book and headed out.
It was a tall, stone structure, more cathedral than office building. The receptionist led me into an enormous, wood-paneled office and dropped me into a chair.
The man there was wearing an orange suit and a chrome necktie. He looked like a walking chainsaw. I introduced myself, but he didn’t give me his name.
“So, why do you want to work here?” he demanded.
Oh, hell. How are you supposed to answer that when you don’t even know what they do?
“I, um… I’ve always thought Infractus Incorporated did important work. I can tell your company thinks big. You are going to change the world, and I want to be a part of that.”
“You’re damn right we are!” he laughed. He grabbed my shoulder in that way books on business management say is a friendly gesture. It made me want to punch him in the throat. “I’m glad you’re interested in new technology,” he continued. “In this job, you’ll be on the bleeding edge.”
Just like slitting your wrists.
He clapped me on the back and welcomed me to the company. Two men in black jumpsuits hustled me out the door and into the back of a van that was waiting outside. The one in the passenger’s seat, skinny, blond hair, turned around and called back to me.
“I’m Hank, and this fat bastard is Paul. We’re on the retrieval crew, like you. The crew has a pretty nice dorm. I think you’ll like it. There are beds, of course, so you can get some sleep while you wait for a client to kick the bucket.”
“Oh, of course,” I said, trying to sound like I knew what was happening. “That’s my job, waiting for clients to die.”
“It’s an easy job for the money,” Hank said. “Just sitting around all day, waiting for the idle rich to idle themselves to death.”
“Great,” I thought. “Corpses. What do we do with them? Take them to a crematorium? No, not if the clients are all wealthy. Maybe we cremate them and launch their ashes into space.”
The retrieval team’s dormitory was a squat, brick building with two garage doors in front. There was a pile of beer cans and other garbage on the front lawn, and a tree with a couple brassieres hanging from it. The inside reeked of spilled liquor and sex. It was like a fraternity had taken over a firehouse.
I tried to pump Hank and Paul for information without making it too obvious that I had no idea what my job was. They didn’t like to talk about work. A couple hours later, Paul made dinner for everyone. Lobster gumbo. Apparently Infractus gave the retrieval team free food.
I returned to my apartment, grabbed my books. Back at the dorm, I tried to study, but soon fell asleep. The next thing I remember, Paul was standing over me, punching me in the shoulder. The clock on the wall said four AM.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” I growled, ready to choke him.
“Time to go to work,” he said. “There’s a woman in the hospital about to die of emphysema.”
“So?”
“So we have to go get her,” he said, giving me a dirty look. “C’mon, get dressed. We have to leave right now.”
Paul tossed me a black jumpsuit and headed downstairs. I dressed as quickly as I could and joined him outside in the van. Paul and Hank sat up front, and I jumped in the back. Sitting in the back was a long, translucent box, like a coffin made out of plastic. There were two steel tanks attached to it with heavy, rubber tubes. The label said it was liquid nitrogen, and a number of other chemicals I didn’t recognize. Below the list of chemicals, in tiny print, were the words “Danger: Cryonic Preserving Solution.”
At the hospital, Hank and I grabbed the box, and Paul led the way to the dying woman’s room. The doctor, a tall, gray-haired man, was already there. Staring at the heart monitor, he didn’t even look up when we arrived.
I waited for Hank or Paul to do something, but they just stood there, staring. After a while, the heart monitor flatlined.
“That’s it,” the doctor said. “She’s DNR, so I’m done here. Have at it, boys.”
“DNR?” I asked Paul.
“See the yellow bracelet? It means ‘Do Not Resuscitate.’ It’s illegal to be frozen before you’re actually dead, but you can tell the doctors to not save your life if your heart or breathing stops.”
“Why would you want to be frozen alive?” I asked, forgetting that I was already supposed to know.
Hank laughed, and slapped me on the back. “God, they do a great job of training the new recruits, don’t they? The whole point of cryopreservation is to keep your body from rotting before they find a cure for… Well, for whatever the hell killed you. So if you were frozen alive, it would mean there would be less damage to your body, and it would be easier for them to fix you and bring you back. At least, that’s the theory. They’ve been doing this since the nineteen seventies, and nobody’s ever come back.”
Paul pulled the sheets off the dead woman, and Hank and I undressed her. Her chart said she was twenty-six, but to look at her you wouldn’t have known. Heavy smoking had added years to her face. However, her body was firm and well-muscled. She had a perfectly flat stomach and small, high breasts. She probably thought all those trips to the gym would make up for the nicotine.
Paul slipped his hands under her arms and Hank grabbed her legs. I threw back the lid on the plastic box and they placed her inside, gently, like she was a carton of eggs. Paul slid the lid back in place and showed me how to turn on the tanks of liquid nitrogen. The box filled with a white fog, instantly freezing her.
As Hank and I carried the frozen corpse back out to the van, I called ahead to Paul. “Do you believe in this stuff? I mean, do you think it’ll actually work?”
“Hell no,” he laughed. “Even if they could bring her back, why would they? We’ve got twelve billion people on earth right now. Who needs one more?”
“That’s right,” said Hank. “Why bring a person back from the dead when it’s so easy to make a new one?” Paul made an obscene hand gesture, and Hank laughed hysterically.
Two weeks later, there were seven more frozen dead. We took them out to a warehouse on the edge of town that was already filled with the plastic boxes. It was like an immense, arctic tomb for people with more money than sense.
I was sitting in the couch at the dorm when Hank came in with the mail. “Here’s your paycheck,” he said. “A check for Paul, a check for me, and a porno mag for everybody…”
I tore open the envelope excitedly, practically ripping the check in half. My bill from school was already a month late, and the panic was coming back.
Three hundred dollars.
Oh, hell.
“What the hell is this?” I yelled. “Three hundred dollars for two weeks of work? That’s less than minimum wage!”
“What did you expect?” Paul asked, surprised. “In two weeks, we did maybe ten hours of work. And it’s not like you’ve got any expenses. We get free food, free housing, and enough extra uniforms that we don’t need to buy our own clothes…”
Apparently Paul and Hank planned to spend the rest of their lives hauling frozen corpses. Me, I had to make something of myself. I had to make my mother proud. For the next few weeks, I spent every spare moment I had looking for a new job, but there was nothing. I gave the school my entire paycheck, but I knew that wouldn’t hold them off for long.
Days later, we were back at the hospital, waiting for a stroke victim to flatline. He was taking his time dying, so I decided to look for coffee. From my position at the vending machines, I could see a doctor talking to a distraught-looking, middle-aged couple.
“So you’re abandoning her? You’re just going to leave her to die?” the woman asked, close to tears.
“I’m not abandoning anyone,” the doctor explained calmly. “Your daughter needs a new heart. Unfortunately, there are ninety-three people on the waiting list ahead of her. There’s nothing I can do.”
“What if we… What if we paid you?” she said. “You know, above and beyond your usual fee. A little ‘bonus money,’ just for you. We could give you twenty thousand dollars.”
The doctor sighed, angry. “Even if I was willing to break the law, I couldn’t be of any help. I’m not the Department of Health and Human Services… They control the waiting list, not me. I’m afraid we’re simply out of options.”
I finished my coffee and headed back to the room. The stroke victim was still breathing, but he looked close to death.
“Hey Paul,” I whispered, “I have an idea.”
We put the corpse in the freezer box, and the freezer box into the van. I got behind the wheel and headed for campus.
“I’ve been working in the lab, testing software for surgery robots,” I explained. “At this time of night, there shouldn’t be anybody around.”
It was surprisingly easy. A couple broken windows, a crowbar to a locked closet door, and we were in. Nobody was supposed to know that the machine was there, so why bother with security? We threw our plunder into the back of the van and sped back to the hospital. On the way there, I turned off the tanks and opened the freezer box.
The corpse wouldn’t be examined by a doctor again. He had already been declared legally dead. As far as Infractus Inc. was concerned, that was good enough. But still, once it was in the warehouse, other people would see it. How do you remove a heart from someone’s chest without leaving a mark?
The surgery robot looked like a chrome octopus attached to the underside of a camera tripod. I set it up, turned it on, and positioned it over the dead man’s mouth. The robot slid its tentacles down his throat. The motion was almost erotic.
There was a loud “crack” as the robot broke the dead man’s jaw. The robot retracted a moment later, a wet lump of muscle in its tentacles. I stopped for a moment, staring at the heart. A surgery robot wasn’t smart enough to put one into your chest, but it did a great job taking one out. I had the robot drop the heart into a small freezer box, the kind we used when someone could only afford to freeze their brains.
I bribed a hospital orderly to take the heart inside the hospital, place it with the others, and label it with the right information. I also had to bribe the surgeon, three nurses, and other miscellaneous hospital personnel. Three days later, the daughter had her transplant surgery and my team had twenty grand.
I split the money three ways, minus bribes. If I wanted to come back to school next semester, I still needed forty thousand dollars.
Hell.
I researched the organ transplant system, how human surgeons worked, how blood types worked, everything. I even researched cryonics. It helped to kill the guilt.
Cryonic preservation created ice crystals, which caused significant damage to the body. The preservation process that Infractus Inc. used actually caused the brain to crack, like the surface of a frozen lake. Even if they could undo all the damage, they would still have to find a way to reanimate the bodies. And how would they do that? This is real life, not a Frankenstein movie.
I explained all of this to Hank and Paul, just to make sure they wouldn’t get any second thoughts later. I didn’t want either of them to turn me in. I explained that the organs were just going to be abandoned in the warehouse, but we were giving them to people who really needed them. They needed our help! Even if they were wealthy assholes, they still deserved the organs more than the corpsicles did. And so, we took anything we could sell: hearts, lungs, kidneys, eyes, anything but skin.
Getting the money for school took a lot longer than I thought. I had to worry about blood type, tissue type, and a host of other factors, not to mention bribing all the surgeons and nurses to accept a black market organ.
And then there was the matter of the corpses themselves. I had to break their jaws or do even more damage going in the other end. I repaired the damage as best I could, with my limited experience running the surgery robot.
The space inside the bodies had to be filled with something, so their chests wouldn’t cave in. Hank suggested sand. Sand was cheap, readily available, it could assume any shape. It wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough.
Two years later, Hank and I were watching the news while we waited for Paul to finish cooking dinner. We could hear the radio in the kitchen, and Paul singing along with the music. I went into the kitchen to ask him when the steaks were going to be ready.
“Guys!” Hank yelled from the other room. “Guys, get in here! Oh, god!”
I thought he was having a heart attack. I ran into the room, Paul close behind me. The newsman on TV was finishing his story, his mouth stretched into a wide smile. “Amazingly, Wilfred Richardson is conscious and communicating with the doctors. He is expected to make a full and rapid recovery. I’m sure classical music fans everywhere are rejoicing.”
“So what’s the problem?” Paul snapped. “Why the hell are you screaming?”
“Don’t you know who that is?” he squealed, his face white.
“No!”
“Wilfred Richardson is a famous violinist… He’s supposed to be the best in the world.”
“Who gives a damn?” Paul snapped. He turned around and headed back to the kitchen.
“We should… He died a year ago!” Hank cried. “Liver failure. They didn’t have a compatible liver, so he decided to be frozen – to be cryogenically preserved. And this morning, they brought him back! They found a liver, and they brought him back from the dead.”
“Oh, god,” Paul moaned. “The process works… My god! We’re murderers.”
“I need a drink,” Hank moaned.
Paul and Hank felt like hell for a few days, but they got over it. For some people, greed is more powerful than guilt. But I had to stop. I gave them the surgery robot and left. As far as I know, they are still filling that warehouse with corpses full of sand.
Every minute I’m awake, my heart aches. It feels like its being torn from my chest and dragged out of me. I started drinking heavily. It was the only way I could forget the guilt long enough to fall asleep.
At night, the dead appear to me, screaming. It just keeps getting worse. Last night, a little girl – oh, Christ, a little girl! – She came to me and tried to cry. But she couldn’t. I had already stolen her eyes.