"Okay, he's awake."
Those three words reverberated around the inside of his skull like it had been hollowed out with a blunt instrument, possibly a large serving spoon. He recognised them, he understood their meaning, but was unable to string them together to grasp the context. A dull ache behind his eyes blossomed into a bright white pain as he gradually eased into consciousness. A blurry glow of cold, clinical light was all he could see as he tried to focus on the indistinct shapes around him. One thing was for certain, this was not his bedroom. The world was disconcertingly unfamiliar.
"Can you hear me?"
It was that distant voice again. He tried to respond but his throat was too dry to allow him to form the words. He tried to swallow but ended up gasping for breath. Gradually, the fuzzy lines became shadows and the shadows took form. Someone was stood over him, but they quickly disappeared from view before he could discern anything more. He was cold and disorientated. An unknown place steadily emerged from the muddy gloom, which only posed more questions than it answered.
His arms and legs were heavy, far too heavy to move. Every muscle in his body felt taut and stiff, like a bundle of elastic bands that had been stretched too tight and then held in place. All he could do was lie there and absorb what information his senses would allow.
The dingy room smelled dank and musty like a neglected basement in a long abandoned apartment block. There were water stains on the yellowed ceiling, which peeled off in small sections from the old, rotten plaster lining. Rusting steel cages still barely clung to the dim, flickering light fixtures which buzzed and clicked in the quiet room like a cacophony of electric crickets. From the corner of his eye he saw row upon row of large silver tanks lining the far wall. They stood floor to ceiling and about four feet wide, each one peppered with rust spots over the dull, grimy surface. Several of them appeared to be leaking some sort of dirty brown liquid onto the floor.
"What's your name?" asked the voice, now recognisable as female. He tilted his head to the other side and saw a young woman stood next to him. She was wearing a crisp white jacket and was holding what looked like a clipboard.
"David," he croaked, then cleared his throat. "David Williams."
Over the next fifteen or twenty minutes the young woman administered multiple injections into his muscle tissue, from the corded tendons in his broad shoulders, all the way down to the sinews in his feet. She ran test after test on him using strange looking medical equipment, which beeped and buzzed as she passed each device slowly over his torso. He flinched each time the cold metal touched his bare skin, and bit his tongue each time his questions were met with a curt 'quiet please'.
"Okay, Mr. Williams, I think we're done," she eventually said. "Can you sit up for me?"
It was a struggle. David gripped the edge of the cold steel table and tried to hoist himself upright. He needed the help of the woman to make it all the way to a sitting position. His head swam like it was half filled with a liquid that sloshed around each time he moved. After taking a few deep breaths he was able to centre himself and swing his legs over the side.
"Who are you?" David asked, noting her appearance. The white jacket she wore, the paperwork that she had in her hand, all of the tests she'd been running on him, all indicated that she was a medical professional of some description.
"I'm your nurse."
"My nurse?" he replied. "Oh shit. Have I been in an accident?" David felt utterly disorientated. This was not the first time he'd woken up in a place he did not recognise with a woman he did not know, but this was something different. Wherever he was, it did not look like any hospital he'd ever been in.
"You could say that," she replied cryptically. "What is the last thing that you can remember?"
David concentrated for a moment. He sent a little probe down to his short term memory and found it came back with less information than he was expecting. He answered her question uncertainly, "I think I remember crossing the street."
With a practiced motion, the nurse clicked a thin plastic tube which she removed from her top pocket and shone a bright light into his eyes. It was painful to look at, and he could barely follow it from side to side as she moved it around.
"Perfect."
"What's going on?" he asked more forcefully this time. "Where the hell am I?"
"Yes, this is always the difficult part. I would suggest you brace yourself for this." The nurse stood directly in front of David and with a calm and measured tone, spoke the words which would change his life forever. "Mr Williams, you've just been brought out of cryogenic suspension."
"What?" replied David, not quite sure he'd heard her right.
"Cryogenic suspension. You've been, for want of a better word, defrosted."
His mind was unable to fathom the sheer magnitude of what she was saying. The words made sense but when they were all pieced together and applied to him, it just sounded like a daft concept from a comic book. Of course he'd heard of cryogenic freezing, but surely that was just something from science fiction movies. David quickly came to the conclusion that someone was playing a very elaborate, well-planned practical joke on him.
"Let me explain," the nurse continued. "You are what we refer to as a 'rejuve'. You died in the year twenty-fourteen and were placed into stasis as part of the cryo-clause in your employment life insurance policy."
"Cryo-clause, huh? Is this a wind-up?"
"No, Mr. Williams, it's not," the nurse replied straight-faced. "In a nutshell, what used to happen was that insurance companies would place a small clause in their policy fine-print making you eligible for a cryogenic preservation scheme. If you died a premature or unnatural death, they froze your body until the medical technology became available in the future to allow you to be brought back."
David started to feel faint.
"It was kind of all a big joke at the time of course. They would charge you a premium every month for the scheme, only a small amount, but of course that added up to quite a lot cumulatively. That coupled with the fact that most people never even bother to read the fine print anyway meant they were on to a winner. The insurance company's only obligation was that in the event of an accidental or unnatural death, all they had to do was turn you into a human popsicle and warehouse you."
"I think I'm gonna throw up."
"Anyway," she continued casually, "about fifty years ago when all the regenerative medical breakthroughs happened, the courts ruled that the insurance companies had to make good on their policies. A bit of a fuck-up on their part so they're gradually going out of business now, hence the state of this place."
"Are you telling me I've been in a block of ice for, what, years?" asked David. He glanced around the room at all of the corroded steel tanks lining the walls. It suddenly dawned on him that inside each of those tanks, with their little blue LED lights flashing away on the front, was a real human being.
"Indeed. It's actually a fascinating science if you're into that kind of thing. In order to stop the water in all your cells from crystallising when they freeze you, they suck out all of the water molecules and replace them with a cryoprotectant compound." David flinched and scrunched his face as the nurse emphasised the 'sucking' element of the process.
"It acts like an antifreeze," she continued with a smile that showed how much she really loved her job. "If they didn't, we'd basically have to scoop you out of the tank with a bucket when you were brought back to ambient temperature. Then what they do is cool your corpse to about negative two-hundred Fahrenheit with dry ice, drop you into one of these things, and fill it with liquid nitrogen."
"So, let me get this straight," replied David as he shuffled uncomfortably from side to side. "I'm in the future?"
"Well, technically speaking you're in the present, but I suppose from your point of view you could say that."
"You've gotta be fucking kidding me!"
David jumped off the table and started stumbling across the room. He headed for the window on the far wall in a roundabout way; his legs were still getting their bearings so he ended up doing an unusual kind of drunk crab-walk. He tripped and weaved dangerously as he veered across the floor, trying to avoid the obstacles of steel trolleys and mysterious rank puddles.
"Wait!" the nurse shouted across the room to him. "You've got to go through orientation first. You could go into shock!"
David never heard her warning, he was too focused on glimpsing the world of tomorrow. Scenes from all of the television programs and movies he'd watched when he was a kid suddenly started barreling through his mind. All of the strange technologies and weird customs that had delighted him growing up were now his reality. His hands gripped the dusty blinds and after a deep breath, he unceremoniously threw them open.
Through the grime-streaked glass, several hundred feet below, stretched out a metropolis of unimaginable proportions. Mega-structures and twelve-lane highways littered the vista for as far as the eye could see. The housing blocks towered towards the clouds like an endless forest of urban decay. Enormous, hulking masses of grey concrete blocks and corroding steel supports dominated the landscape all the way to the horizon. He felt dwarfed and humbled by the sheer magnitude of the sight before him; an overwhelming feeling of claustrophobic anxiety overcame him as he looked out into a new unfamiliar world.
"I don't believe this."
"Shocker, isn't it?" the nurse said in an amused tone. "Listen, I don't mean to rush you but I've got another two of you deep-freeze guys to thaw out today."