The Torpedo

Dr. Saars-Tomlin had already passed away by the time Jessica started her career in the radiology department. The Torpedo – the sole product of the late neurologist’s life work – had been pushed up against a wall in a storage room which also held an obsolete MRI machine. None of Jessica’s coworkers mentioned the stasis device until her sixth week there, and even that was only in passing; an intern was told she might find a certain missing monitor stand in the annex back there by the Torpedo.

“Does anyone ever check it?” Jessica asked.

“Its lights always seem to be on. You can look at it.”

This last phrase had the emphasis on the you; you can look at it; you can answer the door if you want to talk to the canvasser; you can reserve the cabin in the winter, but I’m certainly not going up there at that time of year. 

Jessica did look at it. It was eight feet long, and perched on a wheeled stand which brought it up to her waist. It was white, and mercifully dust-free despite its neglect. It had no hum, no purr, just a small screen at the side showing a green dot and a temperature: minus 178. On the side toward the wall, the two halves of its shell were hinged.

She would check it from time to time, although she knew it had lasted for years already with no changes. Furthermore no one would have known what to do if the dot had turned red, or if the temperature had risen to minus 177 or, for that matter, up to a turkey-roasting level.

“You can open the lid,” a chief nurse told her, a few months in.

“You don’t have to do anything first?”

“No, it’s just a cover. It doesn’t even need that lid to operate. That’s what everyone says, anyway.”

Jessica did lift the top half. This revealed a transparent inner lid. Inside was the man, naked, smothered in clear gel, not looking too peaceful or patient. His eyes were closed; but with his eyebrows slightly raised and his mouth pulled into a bit of a frown, he looked impatient to return.

He was naked. He was unremarkable.

He struck her as around forty years old.

She looked again: Well, maybe thirty-eight.

“Nothing can be done for him?”

“Dr. Weston was the last one to look into it, and he said no. He said the brain was dead, like a rock. That was a few years ago, though. They say someone has a manual somewhere. Or did.”

“Dr. Weston?” Jessica asked.

“From Neurology. He retired a couple years ago.”

“And this man is dead?”

“Well, that’s what Dr. Weston said. But they say that Dr. Saars-Tomlin thought otherwise. No brain activity, but not dead.”

The man, whose name no one knew, was the first patient to be placed into stasis in the Saars-Tomlin device. He was also the last. A few months after his placement (interment? The language did not have a good word for this), Dr. Lily Saars-Tomlin herself had died. She was young. It was a cycling accident. 

“Ironically,” the chief nurse said, “she was roughed up so badly that no one thought it was worthwhile to put her in one of her own devices.”

No one afterward continued Saars-Tomlin’s work on suspended animation. 

The tube had come to be called the Torpedo after some years. Someone said it was a reference to an old movie.

Jessica took a liking to the Torpedo, and its inhabitant, whom she called Dan. 

In truth, “a liking” may be far too warm a description of her attitude; but she was the only person who ever looked at it. The green dot and the temperature never varied.

She had noticed right away, back when she started, that the Torpedo wasn’t plugged in. 

“It must be battery-powered?” she had asked. “No cord. And no solar.”

“It is,” the nurse had answered. “A plutonium battery.”

“What?”

“Yes, plutonium. A tiny nuclear drive. They were once used in pacemakers, you know. They stopped using them because they were worried one might get cremated along with a body. But that’s what powers it. Dr. Saars-Tomlin actually repurposed two or three old pacemaker generators, for this.”

The light stayed perpetually green.

One particular January First, Jessica set a cupcake on it and wished Dan a happy new year, thereby starting a tradition which no one else observed in the years in which she herself was away or just forgot.

A woman came to visit the Torpedo on several occasions, but Jessica missed her each time. Her colleagues said she was Dan’s daughter. (These colleagues didn’t call him Dan, and neither had this visiting woman, of course, but no one remembered his name if she had said it.) She was old. On the last visit she was reported to be frail, and then neither she nor anyone else ever came again.

Time passed. Careers progressed. Jessica had considered looking up the retired Dr. Weston, to ask what he knew about Dan and the Torpedo, but she never had time. After a few years she wasn’t even sure if the name she had heard had actually been Weston. Maybe Wesson? Winston?

Jessica moved up in the department. The hospital went through a renovation, but the Torpedo stayed in the same building. It was rolled to different rooms several times, but never left the institution. 

Jessica herself left the hospital for some time to pursue a placement abroad, but eventually returned. Later she took a year off for a teaching sabbatical, and again came back. 

Jessica retired. On her last day, she did not say goodbye to Dan.

The Torpedo had been stored upright for a time, and had at one point been shrouded in a discarded painters’ drop cloth for over a year; but the green dot never faltered, as far as anyone knew.

The Video Message

Part One

Perry was dreaming of a dizzy spell. He was spinning, with his feet barely on the floor, and the blood was rushing to his brain to the point of bursting; and now while the front of his skull was about to detonate, he was also drowning, in thick water, a slab of it atop his face. A slab of water suffocating him, and he was unable to move, unable to rise. His hands floated free in space but he could not move them to push away the pillow of water.

His raging skull and the slab of water merged, joined, and then began to slide off. The water slid down his face as he rose. He was being pulled. Someone was pulling him up; hands were on him.

And now he reclined in a bed, its back raised. Another person was there, actually sitting on the edge of it. Was it the same person who had pulled him free? Maybe. It was a woman around sixty.

“You look better today,” the woman said. “Are you feeling better?”

“How do I,” Perry started. “Look better. How. Do I look better?”

“More alert,” she said.

“I. I don’t remember this place.” He could see it was a hospital room.

“Well, it has changed,” she said. “Although you have been here a very long time. Do you remember my name today?”

“I do not. I have met you already?”

“I am Penelope. This is your fourth day awake.”

“Just Penelope?”

“My last name is Serrano.”

“But I mean you look like a doctor.” She wore a white lab coat over matching dark blue pants and button-up blouse. “You must be Dr. Serrano.” 

“I am.”

“What specialty?”

“Neurology. You are definitely more awake today. What do you remember?”

Perry looked down. He was covered with a white sheet. His arms were atop it.

“I don’t remember coming here.”

“How about where you were before that?”

All that came to him was a long time of darkness, apparently sleep. That had started immediately after a bright white light. He could see this in his mind: a flash.

“Go back as far as you can.”

He tried to picture the time before the flash. For a moment it seemed it might have been an eternity—forever—but then he saw himself:

“I remember something. Sitting in our driveway. As a child. It was gravel. I think I had a truck. A toy truck.”

“That’s the first thing you’ve come up with, in these four days,” Penelope said. “You’re doing very well.”

“My mother was there. The sky was blue, it was summer. A warm day. I remember birds. Birds in the trees, we had many of them.”

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“Many birds, or many trees?”

“Both.”

“And your name?”

“My name? I haven’t told you that?”

Penelope barely shook her head. She was smiling.

“Perry. My name’s Perry.”

Not until the sixth day did he see a time between his childhood and the white flash. And now the memories came in a surge:

He had a wife. 

Or –

He had had a wife.

She was beautiful; the kind of woman he had dreamt he would be with, when he was a teenager. 

Black hair. Tall. And warm; she was warm with him. She smiled at him. 

She wore denim. He could be himself with her. 

Her smile dazzled. And her eyes. 

Wife? Could be a girlfriend. But she was with him; that was certain. If she was his girlfriend, she wasn’t going anywhere. He didn’t need to worry about that.

He remembered that had been the heart of his daydreams, back when he was fifteen, sixteen: Not that his future wife would be super cute – although he did envision her that way – but that she would be with him. For good.

“All the doubts will be over,” he had said to himself, long ago. “You’ll just be with someone. There won’t be any games. There won’t be anyone else. You won’t have to – prove your love.” He would remember her birthdays, and he would clean for her; that wasn’t what he meant. He didn’t mean that he would be able to take her for granted. But the games of the sixteen-year-olds would be over; he wouldn’t have to worry if she liked someone else. He wouldn’t have to worry that he revealed his feelings too much. It would be acceptable to tell your feelings to your wife. 

“Someday I’ll just be with someone.”

And that was what he remembered now: he had indeed met someone, shared a life with someone.

Many years ago.

He was aware enough – becoming aware enough – to know that this was much too much to share with Dr. Serrano now. 

And there were children; or at least one child. A daughter.

Oh my God I hope I’m not forgetting a child, he thought. Forgetting a son. Or another daughter.

Go easy on yourself, you’ve been half dead.

It was a girl he remembered, and he realized he must have been remembering her at different ages. He held her; and she walked. Her hair was thin, and then thick, and then long and thick. She looked toward him – and toward his wife, his girlfriend, the woman in denim – for everything, at first; and then she looked out on her own. 

He remembered her in a purple dress. She wore her hair tied back with a ribbon.

Araceli. 

It came to him. 

He breathed in sharply and felt his heart pound.

His wife was Jennifer. Their daughter was Araceli. 

“How long?” he eventually asked Penelope. (She had asked him to use her first name.) Today she was wearing a long black dress. It did not strike him as office wear, but it was just another day in the hospital room.

“How long do you think?”

“It must have been decades. Your clothes are different. You sound different. And your screens are nothing we had.”

“This?”

She shrank the transparent screen which she held in her hands down to a disc the size of a silver dollar, just by moving her hands together, and then pulled it out to its full circumference again.

“Yes, like that,” he said. “But you can tell me. You don’t have to keep trying to make sure I’m ready. I know that everyone I knew is gone.”

Penelope smiled.

“We know you can handle it. And we’ve already told you, but you’ve forgotten.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

“No need to be sorry. It has been at least one hundred and twenty years, for you. You were asleep that long. It is 2148.”

 Neither spoke for a long while.

“I can’t remember years, Penelope.”

She didn’t respond.

“But one hundred and twenty?”

“Yes.”

“So everyone is gone, then.”

“You have great-grandchildren,” she said. “We have told them about you.”

“Told them about me,” he repeated. “Of course they had forgotten. The family wasn’t aware.”

“They were aware you had lived. But no, they hadn’t known that you might come back.”

How long does it take history to forget?

More interestingly: What of the last person to remember?

King Richard III was killed in the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. His grave was lost to history as soon as the following century.

In 2012, his bones were found beneath a parking lot. How long had they lain forgotten? How long did his erstwhile subjects and their descendents remember the burial place of their king?

And who was the last person to remember it? Certainly when he was buried, everyone would have known. It was not done in secret; the newly-minted king, Henry VII, had exhibited the body for days to stem any rumors that Richard had survived the battle. The burial would have been publicized; perfunctory, but publicized. Everyone near the church would have known. 

But perhaps as soon as the next generation, the grave had been forgotten.

Who was the last person to know that Richard was buried beneath the floor of the church, or beneath the floor of the ruined church, or in the lot which had once been occupied by a church? Was it someone who had seen the burial with her own eyes? Perhaps someone who trusted her eyewitness father, and who had been told by him? A wise old woman in the neighborhood?

Whoever it was – Perry mused – his or her friends, family, and neighbors would have thought the person crazy toward the end. 

Grandma is claiming again that Richard Crookback was buried just down the street, they must have said, rolling their eyes. 

There were still buildings, streets, cars in 2148. Perry saw them out his window, at first, and then in walks around the hospital. There were no floating cities or flying pods. Many of the buildings dated from his first lifetime or earlier.

“How should I phrase all this?” he had asked Penelope. “My first life and my second life?”

“That’s up to you, you’re the pioneer. You tell us.”

People still came into the hospital; ambulances still brought them. The ambulances were silent and driverless, but they brought them.

“You don’t have robots fly out to cure people in their bedrooms?” he asked. 

“We do, sometimes. But people still come in. As you see.”

“And I was here the entire time?”

“The entire time. You were moved around from room to room, but always in this hospital.”

“I can’t imagine the bill I must have run up.”

“You were not difficult to maintain.”

“I was just lying in that case? For over a hundred years?”

“Yes.”

“And the power never went out on that thing? Was it solar?”

“It was nuclear powered. Like a space probe. But you’re not radioactive. We checked.”

“How did I not starve? Or – decompose?”

“The woman who designed it worked a miracle. We could not replicate it today.”

“Really? You could not build another? Even today?”

“No.”

“She must have been well ahead of her time.”

“She was.”

“And she didn’t build more?”

“No one was sure it would work. And she died young, herself. And wasn’t able to come back.”

“I remember what I did,” he told her on another day. “For a living. But I can’t take so much of your time. You’re the only one listening to all this. You must have other patients.”

“We’re all content to have someone assigned to you. And I’m the one. And I’m passing along everything I hear, don’t worry,” she said. 

“Archaeologist. That’s what I did, what I was. With the state university.”

“Did you enjoy the work? Do you remember?”

“I loved it. I remember feeling very lucky to have that career.”

“Very nice, Perry.”

“Ironic, isn’t it,” he said. “I can dig for my own first life, now.”

“Well, we still have archaeologists. There’s still plenty of history to study.”

“Even more of it, actually,” he said.

He eventually learned that there was indeed much more to study. Among many other things there was a Roman shipwreck in Iceland; a Polynesian fishing camp on the west coast of Guatemala; and Columbus’s Santa Maria had been found.

“I have news,” Penelope told him one day.

“Every single thing you say is news to me. This must be big.”

“We found videos. For you. From your wife, and your daughter.”

Penelope had asked Perry several times if he wanted to wait, perhaps until the next day, to watch the videos; but he wanted to see them right away. He now sat with her in her office. She had placed her screen on her desk, then extended it upward until it was three feet in diameter – it stood vertical on its own – and now touched an icon.

Jennifer and Araceli looked out at him. 

Both had dressed well. They wore dresses, and Jennifer had spent time on her hair. Araceli looked just slightly older than he remembered; but he suspected this was because his memories of her backdated her age somewhat, rather than because a lot of time had passed between his near-death and this video.

“Perry,” his wife said. There was weight to it. “Dr. Saars-Tomlin –” she paused slightly “– tells us that you will be able to watch this, someday. If you can’t just speak to us directly. Speak to us or to Araceli.”

The pause before she had said “tells us” made him think that she had been on the verge of saying “insists that” instead.

“If you are watching this, she must have been correct. 

“I suppose that whoever you are with will tell you what happened. But – you had died. Your brain activity had completely stopped.” She looked slightly away from the camera and shook her head, barely.

“You were gone. 

“But Dr. Saars-Tomlin offered to put you in the stasis device. It was new. You were the first person to be placed in one. And you’re still the only one, for now. Your parents and your sister wanted to try it. They said there couldn’t be any harm. And we didn’t mind; I didn’t mind.

“Perry,” she said. “We don’t really know how well this device you’re in is going to work. But here we are. If you are seeing this, the doctor was a genius. Wasn’t she.

“We are doing well. I’m working and Araceli’s in school. We miss you so much.”

Araceli leaned into her mother, at that point, and Jennifer put her arm around her.

They didn’t speak, for a moment. Araceli kept her eyes on the camera while Jennifer looked down. Jennifer had been speaking with warmth, and with love, he saw, but also in doubt. He imagined her delivering these words to a blank camera lens. 

Araceli, for her part, beamed.

She may have talked Jen into this, he thought. 

His wife resumed:

“The university paid out your death benefit. We’ll be fine.”

She smiled, nearly laughed.

“They paid out your death benefit. There’s a sentence very few people have ever heard, I’m sure.

“Perry, I just feel like sharing the . . . quotidian details with you, but I’m not sure what you’ll care about when you see this. The azaleas are blooming. Araceli only missed a week of classes. I think Ellison knows you’re gone, it seems like he sits outside the bedroom for you sometimes. Whistler is good, still in Ara’s room. We’re going to drive up to Pittsburgh next weekend to see my parents. And Bill and Connie have been very helpful, very kind. Of course. Through all of this.”

He saw her look down, and tighten her arm around their daughter.

“There are so many instances, so many times a day, when I think that you are still here. I put the car key in the bowl where you can find it. I don’t open mail to you. And the things you’ve done for us are all around . . . the lilies of the valley you planted look so nice. The pesto you made is still in the freezer, we haven’t had the heart to eat it.”

“Save it,” Perry murmured. “For when you’re really busy and you need something quick.”

Araceli said something not caught by the audio. Jennifer nodded to her. “Of course.”

She spoke to the camera: 

“Daddy, I got the solo. And they made the decision before the accident; they didn’t just give it to me. Because of that. You know. I’m sorry you can’t be at the concert.

“And I’ve been weeding the strawberries,” she added. 

Then the two of them were quiet. Araceli looked at her mother, and then back to the camera, and then she too dropped her gaze just as Jennifer had.

“We miss you so much,” Jennifer said. “My love. My love.”

It was rare for her to use language like that. Perry breathed in.

“And we hope you never see this. Or we watch it together, but it’s old news. We’re waiting for you.”

“We’ll see you, Daddy. We love you.”

This story to be continued