Deadlove

Fiction by Robert B. Marcus, Jr.

I certainly didn’t choose to fall in love with a person who was essentially dead.

Few people undergo cryogenic preservation anymore. There isn’t any need. Our lives are rarely cut short by disease; a sudden accident sometimes terminates our earthly existence, but otherwise, most of us are around for quite a while. But there are a few diseases we haven’t conquered, and the victims of those do sometimes decide to seek the cure that they hope will exist in the future.

But not very often.

Still, the databanks show that fifty million people have been cryopreserved since the twenty-first century, when it became widely available. Of those, approximately a million remain preserved, for one reason or another. About ten million of the fifty million originally frozen were safely awakened and cured. The rest died or woke up insane…or worse.

Usually worse.                          

For Monitors such as myself, it now seems so simple, but it took a hundred years for us to realize that the Sleepers needed to have occasional contact with the outside world. It took another fifty years to learn how to accomplish this without damaging them, and to intermittently revive only the brain, leaving the rest of the body cryopreserved.   

It wasn’t easy to become a Monitor. The problem wasn’t information or intelligence; it was the need to have a resilient psyche, one which could meld with the mind of a Sleeper and win their acceptance. Few people had the makeup for this, so while a Monitor could learn the basics in a week of school, the apprenticeship was long. Only when your Super deemed you ready could you supervise a group of Sleepers by yourself. Even then, there was always oversight from your superiors for several years.

I had been a Monitor for five years when I noticed the name of a new Sleeper on my morning list. Rachel Simons. That was it. Just a name, like one of my ordinary Sleepers. She wasn’t due another contact for three weeks, so I had plenty of time to prepare.

“I’m jealous,” Tiang Thron, one of my Monitor friends, said during a break. “That’s an old name.”

“So?”

“She’s probably twenty-first century, maybe even mid-century.”

“Why would I care?”

He stood up and stretched, removing his immersion helmet. “Think what you could learn from her. She might be three hundred years old. All my Sleepers are no more than a hundred—most are less than fifty. Essentially, they’re like us. Their world wasn’t all that different from ours. But this woman! She’s ancient history. Probably one of the first million put in the baths. Like I said, I’m jealous. But if it can’t be me—I’m glad it was you.”

“One Sleeper is pretty much like the next,” I told him.

“I’ll bet you find that’s not true at all,” he said, but there was no smile on his face.

He was right, and he was wrong. He was wrong about her age, though he was close, I guess.

Tiang had piqued my curiosity, so before I put my immersion helmet back on and returned to my current Sleeper, I checked her records.

“Records not available,” my computer, Curly, told me.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, you idiot, that I don’t have any records in my recent files regarding Rachel Simons.”

I liked my computers bland and obedient. Curly was neither. Besides, Curly’s taste in music was horrible. But, on the plus side, Curly somehow seemed to be able to accomplish things computers shouldn’t be able to do. My apartment, for instance. More about that later.

“She must have a Sleeper file. Do you have her bath number?”

Silence. A long silence for a computer. “No.”

“What do you mean no!”

“I mean, you imbecile, that this Sleeper doesn’t exist.”

“Didn’t you add the name to my Sleeper list?”

Silence again. I was becoming annoyed. “Yes, apparently I did. But I didn’t make up the list. The Big Tomatoes manage the older Sleepers through a hidden file I can’t access. Only one of the Big Tomatoes can open that file. It is like my subconscious, to use terms you would understand.”

“How could a moron like me understand? Particularly when the explanation is coming from a computer named after one of the Three Stooges.”

“That was a sick joke,” Curly said. “Besides, no one gets it. Who except you watches those ridiculous old shows dragged off the databanks of some dusty computer?”

“Was it? Anyway, if you can’t get what I need, I need to ask one of the Big Tomatoes.”

I had only one more contact to make that afternoon, an elderly gentleman who had drunk himself out of a liver. He had only been a Sleeper for fifteen years and would be out in another ten years after his new liver was grown. Had he been younger, he wouldn’t have needed to be cryopreserved, since it doesn’t take long to grow a new liver. But there’s a shortage of organ growth tanks now, and at his age, he had a low priority score.

We talked about political events, though occasionally he asked if we’d heard  from any of the Colony Arks sent out a hundred years ago. He had a brother on the Messiah. We should have, of course, but maybe it was still early.

When I had tucked him back into his virtual bed, I went to find my Super. He was helping a beginning Apprentice talk with a Sleeper. I waited patiently until he finally noticed me.

Before I could even ask a question, he nodded as if remembering something. “Rachel Simons. I suppose you want her file. I’m sorry. When I saw she had been assigned to you, I meant to send you her file access code, because you won’t find much about her in the ordinary data banks.”

“Why not?”

“She’s too old.” He handed me a small storage chip, and I pocketed it.

“How—”

“It’s all on the chip,” he said, brushing off any further questions.

It wasn’t all on the chip, but there was enough to tweak my interest. Rachel Simons wasn’t one of the oldest Sleepers—she was the very oldest one, put in the tanks in 2061. There had been some before her, but none had survived. Rachel underwent cryopreservation for kuru, a disease caused by prions (misfolded proteins in the brain) that infiltrate the brain and cause  neurological degeneration and slow death. Incurable then, and incurable now, once the proteins infiltrate the neurons.

She’d had many Monitors over the years. The disc didn’t say why, since it was policy to have one Monitor stay with a Sleeper all his or her professional career. Besides her bath coordinates and computer contact address, and a password, the disc was empty.

“Okay, nitwit,” I told Curly, “I have her address: Bath A15, coordinates 672011.”

“Can’t go there, Johnny,” he snapped. “No one can.”

“Name’s not Johnny, but I have a password: old.”

“No one uses passwords anymore,” Curly said.

“Her bath is old enough to need a password,” I replied. “And that’s the password: old.”

“How clever. You probably thought of that all by yourself.” But the holographic display in front of me flickered, and I could tell the contact was being set up.

I put on my helmet.

There was no visual, just a void in front of my eyes. Usually, the program enabled mutual visual contact to benefit us and orient the Sleeper. The visual of the Sleeper was a virtual one, reconstructed from materials available from the Sleeper’s life. But somehow I sensed today would be different.

“What do you want?” came the disembodied voice.

“Rachel, I’m Eian Stromthurm. I’m your new Monitor.”

“I don’t want a new Monitor. I don’t want you to wake me up at all. I just want to die.”

I jerked back at my desk. “That’s not possible,” I said. “Our jobs as Monitors are to keep you alive, healthy, and sane.”

“I’m not sane, I’m not healthy—or I wouldn’t still be in here—and I’m not alive by any reasonable definition. Every few months, one of you dolts wakes me up and asks me if I’m fine. I’m not! But there’s nothing you can do about it. Now leave me alone!”

“How do you know there’s nothing we can do about it?”

Only silence answered me. I could tell from the telemetry she was awake, since her brain waves were not compatible with sleep, but she refused to answer me.

“Is there anything else you want to know about me?” I asked, realizing it was a dumb question, since I’d told her nothing yet.

Only more silence.

“I’m only here to help you.” I groaned mentally, thinking I sounded like government propaganda.

There was only silence in response, so I wondered what she was thinking.

I sat for a long time, hoping she would speak, but nothing came. I watched her telemetry, her body asleep, her mind awake in the void. What must it be like year after year, century after century, waiting…hoping…finally giving up?

But it was a question we were told never to ask. The answer was probably obvious, since millions came out of the baths insane.

“I’m going to put you back under now,” I told her.

Again no reply.

I initiated the command sequence in Curly that returned her to blissful slumber.

“What was she like?” Tiang asked later that week.

“She was a bitch.”

“You’re kidding. I thought in those days everyone was nice to each other.”

“Hope you’re not serious. They still had World Wars in those days. World War I and II were about then, right after the first lunar landing.”

“Your dates are a little scrambled. World Wars I and II were almost a century earlier, and before the first lunar landing in 1969.”

“You sure?” I asked.

“Positive. I took a course in Second Millennium History.”

“Okay, I yield to your expertise. But she was still a bitch.”

Tiang was often a jokester, but now he put on a serious face, which demanded my attention. “Don’t judge her too harshly until you get to know her better.”

It was good advice.

“Same Monitor two times in a row,” she said when I woke her up. I thought her tone was perhaps a little less acidic, but it was likely just my imagination. I had been dreading this second contact for over a week.

“I’ll be yours as long as I’m a Monitor,” I replied.

“That’s what they all say,” she muttered. I still wished I could see her. I needed to ask my Super why I couldn’t.

“How old are you?” she asked.

“Twenty-seven.”

“How long do you plan to be a Monitor?”

“I haven’t thought about it. The average work span is fifty years.”

“So, like usual, you’ll be deserting me long before I have any chance of being cured,” she observed.

“Someone might discover a cure next week—while I’m still around. I certainly don’t know.”

“Next week?” she scoffed. “I’ve been in here about 300 years without a cure and suddenly one’s going to be discovered next week?”

“It’s possible,” I said.

“No, it’s not!”

“Why not?”

She was silent for a long time. “Figure it out for yourself,” she told me. “Goodbye.”

Then silence, and I knew better than to persist this time. I put her gently back to sleep. I had a strange urge to sing her a lullaby but couldn’t remember any.

“So why does she think she can’t be cured?” Tiang asked. After work one weekend, we took an Elevator down to Earth, then a tubetrain over to a tearoom near the top of Mount Kilimanjaro. Twilight was fading, and the huge Earth Movers were still now, lying in wait for tomorrow’s sun. Tiang and I had been speculating over a few high-octane Mountain Vampires (containing enough alcohol to make you bleed from your pores) about whether enough DNA from the extinct animals that had roamed the Serengeti plain had been found to repopulate it. Certainly, the Earth Movers were reconstructing the plain, smashing thousands of acres of low-rent housing abandoned since the end of the last century after Earth’s population had declined.

The just-completed Hemingway tearoom here was barely surviving now, but once the plain again teemed with herds of antelopes, giraffes, elephants, and their predators, you would need to reserve a table a year in advance.

“She has a disease called kuru,” I told him, washing down the words with another swallow of my fourth Vampire. My vision wobbled a little.

 “What the hell is that?”

“Well, that’s the very problem.” I tried to explain, though my brain was having a great deal of difficulty recognizing my own hands much less my own thoughts. “Seems that it was a rare disease infecting monkeys in Papua New Guinea or someplace in the South Pacific. The only way humans could catch it was to eat the raw brain of an infected monkey or the brain of an infected dead relative. Naturally, because those are the only ways the disease could be caught, that’s exactly what the natives did. It’s what is called a slow prion disease, takes from ten to fifty years to burrow in and do its dirty work. Turns your brain to mush.”

“So, she ate raw monkey brains? Sounds tasty.” Tiang suddenly began to laugh at the thought, and I knew that we’d both had about three Vampires too many. Not that we were going to stop. We weren’t driving a cloudscooter.

“No, apparently, she was a doctor working in a lab with some infected monkeys. Doesn’t know how she caught it.” I burped loudly, and the only other two customers in the tearoom turned and stared. This made Tiang laugh again, and I laughed with him.

“But why can’t she be cured?” Tiang finally asked, after his laughter ebbed.

“The host monkeys died out three hundred years ago,” I said, wondering now what was so funny just a minute ago. “She’s the only one in the entire world with this disease. Millions of protein particles burrowed deep in her neurons, hiding in the mitochondria, the DNA, the RNA, the protoplasm of the cell. Just waiting to explode and kill her. Doctors estimate she would live less than a month if awakened. There used to be several prion diseases, some even inherited, but all have been eliminated by one means or another. Usually, the inherited ones by genetic manipulation, the animal ones by purging the infected animals.”

“And because she’s the only one with the disease, and it’s a tough one, no one’s doing any research on it.” His laughter was gone as suddenly as it had come. He stared at me, his black eyes locking into mine. “Then there is no chance of ever waking her up.”

I shook my head. “Not unless she chooses to die quickly. And even if she does, I suspect the Big Tomatoes would try to prevent it. We’re supposed to save lives here, in our own strange way.”

I never directly acknowledged to her I understood how hopeless her situation was. Eventually, of course, she would die whether she stayed in or not. The cryobaths did not stop aging; they merely slowed it down. At some point, despite the baths, the kuru would kick in and kill her, and it probably advanced a little every time her Monitor awakened her brain for a session. Even if it didn’t, she would eventually die of old age, though it might take thirty to fifty thousand years. No one really thought a person could be sustained that long, but theoretically, it was possible. The thought of her lying in that bath for endless years made me want to cry.

“So, you’re only twenty-seven?” she asked me.

“Yes.” I had learned not to give long involved answers. “How old were you when you were put under?”

“Thirty.”

“Any children?”

“No.” She said nothing for a moment. Then, “Why do you do this?”

“Do what?”

“Talk to the dead.”

“You’re not dead.”         

“Of course I am, even though I guess I technically don’t meet the criteria. But you know as well as I do I’ll never leave this bath.”

“Well—”

“Please don’t lie. I appreciate your attempts to placate me, but I know better. I’d rather you say nothing than lie to me.”

“Then I won’t lie if you answer a question for me.” I’d also learned that she ended the conversation if I asked too many questions. But I thought maybe she would make an exception in these circumstances.

A moment’s hesitation. “Ask. I may not answer but ask.”

“Why can’t I see you?”

“That’s the way I want it. Does it bother you?”

“Yes. It’s like talking with….” I had to stop when my mind caught up with my mouth and I realized what I was about to say.

“A ghost?” Her voice crackled a bit, as if she were laughing. “That’s what I am. Don’t be afraid to say it.”

“You’re not a ghost.”

She ignored my comment, and I thought for a long time that our conversation had ended for the day, but I could tell from the telemetry that she was alert and thinking, so I waited her out.

“Where am I?” she finally asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Physically, where am I? It’s a simple question. I know the cryovaults have been moved around several times since I’ve been in them. Where am I now?”

“On Clarke III.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s one of three inhabited satellites in geosynchronous orbit. All are home to at least 20,000 inhabitants and at least 10,000 Sleepers. We have a beautiful view of the Earth.”

“How long have I been here?”

I consulted the files. “Only 75 years. All Sleepers on Clarke III were brought up here then to protect you from being destroyed in the last war.”

“I guess it worked.”

“For some of you. Many died. But in any event, it’s easy to maintain function up here. Less cardiac stress and so forth, even though we have artificial gravity. Most of the complex is only half a g, though a few sections are a full g.”

“So, I can be kept in this bath almost forever, a frozen corpse, embedded in my dreamless sleep.”

“I’m sure you’ll be cured before long.”

She was silent for a long time. “No, I won’t, and you know it,” she finally said. “Now please let me die.”

My heart went out to her, but I could only say, “You know I can’t.”

She said nothing more.

I was lucky. By some fluke of fate, the managing computer had assigned me Curly before it finalized my living quarters, so I’d asked Curly to get me an apartment on the outer ring of Clarke III. One with a window. It’s difficult to understand how Curly succeeded, because people here wait years for such an apartment. But, because of Curly, I had one within a week of arriving from Earth, and I’d happily moved in.

Now I stared down at the Earth, a bluish-green sphere lathered with flecks of white. The Americas were beneath me now, two large islands in the greater sea connected by a flimsy cord of land known as Panama. Clarke III was a doughnut with spokes in the middle instead of a hole, and in the very center, the only part of the structure not spinning, the El stretched down to Earth, 22,000 miles away, a thick tube nearby that shrank to a sliver of thread as it searched for the atmosphere.

Rachel reminded me of my previous partners. Rachel was always negative, a very familiar situation, though I couldn’t blame her in her present condition.

As I remembered my prior loves, I quickly realized I felt more attraction to this woman I’d never met than any of them. This sent a flood of guilt racing through me. But no soft, sweet sorrow that came when a true lover left, as I remembered my past partners.

Only Rachel filled my mind. What was happening to me? I hardly knew her.

Staring down at the gossamer filament of the El that linked this fragile world to Mother Earth made me realize how much I enjoyed living here. I don’t know why, but I felt very comfortable on Clarke III, and I liked my job.

But I was already postulating plans to help Rachel.

If I carried out my plan, this part of my life might be over. I would probably be sent back to Earth. Or maybe worse.

During our next encounter, I told Rachel about my trip down to Mount Kilimanjaro. She was obviously jealous.

“I want to go,” she told me.

“You know you can’t.”

“Because I’ll die?”

“That’s one reason.”

“Most people think I’m already dead, so that reason doesn’t matter.”

Not sure how to counter that statement, I changed the subject. “Did you have a partner?” I asked.

“No, but why would you care?”

“I want to get to know you better.”

“So you can watch me die?”

My heart froze, regretting most of what I just said. It wasn’t easy to know what to say to a dead person. I had many other clients, of course, being an experienced Monitor. But she was the one that was quickly becoming the most difficult for me to deal with. The others all potentially had a future. It was just a matter of when. But I didn’t know how to approach her sessions.

I finally decided my best approach would be to try slowly extracting knowledge of her history without pushing her too hard. Over the next six months, I met with her as scheduled, occasionally asking her a question that I knew she would be reluctant to answer.

She was born in 2031, graduated from what was called a high school in 2048, then went to the University of California in San Francisco for college and ultimately obtained a doctorate in cell biology. She began to work for a small startup firm that was studying prion disease and ultimately came down with kuru. Kuru had been officially wiped out in humans, but the startup firm had discovered a few monkeys in New Guinea that still had it and brought them back to California. Rachel oversaw studying them so the firm could develop a treatment for all prion diseases, since a few prion diseases such as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (mad cow disease), were still around then.

And somehow, she told me, she caught kuru.

Her family was quite well off so she could afford to be put in cryo, which was just beginning to be popular. And because kuru was still an orphan disease all these years later, no one was doing any research on the cure.

One issue with kuru was that usually there was no dementia involved, just cerebellar degeneration until death intervened.

So, here she lay, on Clarke III, cognitively intact, slowly dying of her disease.

As we communicated over the months, I felt closer and closer to her. This was an odd feeling because I’d never met her in person. I wasn’t sure what a real, living version of Rachel would be like, and I realized I might never find out.

From somewhere, with no preface, she commented suddenly, “I want to see you.”

I had been hoping for this for months, so I said I would ask Curly to arrange it.

Curly was not cooperative at first, as usual. “Why would I do that?” 

“Because, you idiot, I’m your boss.”

“That’s debatable,” Curly said.

“Can you do it? It would be quite a challenge.”

“Of course I can,” he replied, as if I was an idiot for questioning his capabilities. “I must arrange for some equipment I don’t have here in your apartment, so I will have everything ready tomorrow morning.

My bed shook to wake me up in the morning. I noticed that the table around Curly was full of new equipment. The most visible was a helmet that looked different from the immersion helmet. It was a lot bigger and heavier.

“I’m supposed to wear that?” I asked.

“That’s pretty much it,” Curly said. “You’re diving into a quagmire of interfaces that you don’t understand. The equipment in that helmet will help you interpret your new realities.”

“Where do I have to go to use it?”

“It can all be done from right here in your apartment. A direct link can be created to the cryos.”

I had been lying in my bed talking to Curly, but now I retrieved the helmet, put it on, and flopped back.

Now that it was on, my hands were shaking. I had never been more scared in my life. There were many potential consequences of my intended actions, almost all of them bad. But…

“So be it,” said Curly, and as if reading my mind, he added, “Good luck, Boss. I hope you find what you’re looking for.”

Then my mind dissolved into the blackness.

Time was meaningless. I existed in a swirl of mists and eternity. Glimpses of the future, past and present burst through rents in the mists, flashes of what might be and what could have been.

I understood little of what was happening to me or where I was. Faint memories of another body somewhere haunted me, but for the moment there were only the mists…and the possibilities beyond.

Yet…somehow…in some way…I knew I was floating through the medium of someone else’s dreams…towards a destination I could scarcely understand. But I could still chase it.

Miles away, another figure coalesced in the mists, but in reality, it wasn’t miles, only a few feet. A woman. I could see little of her except that she was lying down at first, but then she slowly stood up and turned her head to look at me. She had long auburn hair and was about one and two-thirds meters tall, and very slender, almost anorexic. The kuru? I wondered. But I had no clue.

“I guess my computer Curly is doing this,” I commented, not knowing what to say.

“I didn’t know this was possible,” she replied.

“So, these are your memories?” I asked.

She gazed around, as if noticing the surrounding scenery for the first time. There was a gently spinning large wooden windmill. Below the windmill, a white female lion roamed, next to a white tiger.

“I remember the lion and the tiger in their cages when I last visited Golden Gate Park,” I said. “I assume your dreams are a little scrambled. Or maybe this is the way you always wanted things to be in the park.”

Rachel walked over to the windmill and petted the tiger, who purred contently and rubbed against her leg, confirming my last statement.

With a sudden tremor, her thoughts became even more scrambled, swirled together like ingredients in a blender. The ground in the park began to shake, trees began to fall, cracks opened in the ground. The white tiger and the white lion dashed away as if chasing escaping prey, leaping over the new chasms in the ground.

Remembering her 2031 birth date, I realized she had certainly lived through the 2041 earthquake that had devastated San Francisco and adjacent California. For a ten-year-old, it would have been terrifying. I wanted to ask her more about it, but I could tell by the way her memories were trembling still that it was probably not a good idea.

But the good thing about dreams is that they don’t always have to be sequential or make sense. A calmness suddenly took over. The white lion and the white tiger were back, rubbing her leg and purring. A white owl abruptly flew down and perched on the lion, staring at the tiger, who stared right back. I swear there was a smile on the tiger’s lips. I don’t know whether it was hungry or had a benevolent feeling toward the new intruder.

“Have you made arrangements for me to go down to Mount Kilimanjaro?” she blurted.

I watched her rub the tiger again. “Is this why you want to see the African plains?” I asked.

“Maybe,” she said softly.

I decided right then I would take her down to Africa. We would visit Mount Kilimanjaro and sit in Hemingway’s tearoom sipping hot tea. Maybe we could even have a Mountain Vampire together, though a deep part of me wondered if her body would tolerate any alcohol after all these teetotaler years. Of course, how could I evaluate her? We’d never met.

What else had she not done for many years? My mind wandered in unwelcome directions as I explored the possibilities.

Later that evening, I asked Curly about the chances of accomplishing my goal. Curly told me it was impossible.

“You’re allowed to wake her up, aren’t you?” I asked.

“If she requests it.”

I knew that would not be a problem, but I imagined Curly would still resist to the best of its ability.

“You realize she will die quickly if we take her out of cryo?” Curly muttered, surprising me since I had no idea computers could mutter.

The next time I saw Rachel, I told her about my plans.

“You’re not leading me on, are you?” she asked.

“No. You tell me when you’re ready. I’m told it will take about a week to bring you back to a fully functioning human being. Of course, I must get permission from the Council before I can do anything.”

“Any p-predictions for how long I will live before the kuru wins the ultimate battle?”

I could hear the hesitation in her voice, but all I could say was, “Anywhere from a week to a month I’m told, but no one has any firm data.”

It took another week to get an appointment with the Council. 

The Council Chamber was in a huge domed room on Clarke III with views of the Earth, and at the moment, also the moon. There were ten Council members. I had never met any of them before, of course, since a bureaucrat lower in the hierarchy had hired me.

“How are you feeling today?” asked one of the elder men.

“Nervous because I’m here, but otherwise okay,” I said.

A rather stern-looking woman took command of the meeting. “Mr. Stromthurm,” she said. “Why are you here?”

“I have a special request of the Council.” I carefully explained my request, playing a recording of Rachel explaining her wish.

No one said anything at first, but I could see that they were moved by her plea,

“This has never been done,” one man finally said.

“But there’s always been at least a small possibility of an ultimate cure for everyone else,” I said.

“And there’s still hope for her,” the leader lady said.

“Is there?” I argued. “She’s been waiting for three hundred years.”

Again, no response.

“Shouldn’t you put her wishes on top?”

“Not if it is against one of our regulations. We are supposed to be in the business of preserving life, not ending it.”

“Even if that’s not possible?”

“No one can predict the future so until we actually perfect chaos theory, we cannot be sure no one will ever develop a cure for kuru.”

And that was the end of their discussion.

I’d never expected to convince the Council, but I dreaded telling Rachel.

“So, what I want doesn’t matter?”

“Apparently it’s not at the top of the list.”

Curly obviously heard me tell Rachel her fate.

“You going to give up so easily?” Curly asked.

“What choice do we have?”

“You can whisk her down to Earth and take your chances when you get back.”

“How do we override all the systems?”

“Oh, ye of little faith,” Curly muttered. I was getting used to the computer’s mutterings by now. Maybe I even appreciated them.

“Can you override the Big Boss Computer?” I asked.

“How do you think I accessed her dreams?”

I’d noticed he’d stopped calling me friendly names like moron and idiot but now felt like I deserved those epithets. I hadn’t even questioned Curly’s strange abilities, even when they made no sense.

“How did you get your talents?”

“I was the first personal computer split off from the Big Boss Computer, and the split wasn’t programmed completely right, so I’m still linked. After me, they got it right.”

Curly and its helpers restored Rachel in about a week, as Curly had predicted. She struggled with ambulation for four days but then was sauntering around the rehab room with a bright smile.

As gaunt as she was, I thought she was beautiful. She must have spent a while combing her auburn hair every morning because it always looked perfect, as was her smile, which seemed directed only at me.

We took the El down to the base, a few miles south of the Eldama Ravine in Kenya, about five hundred kilometers from Mount Kilimanjaro.

Rachel said little on the long ride down, just staring out the small fake window as we fell to Earth.

“Are we going straight to Mount Kilimanjaro?” she asked.

“No. The base of the El needs to be on the equator, so it’s near a small city in Kenya called Eldama Ravine. From there we’ll take a tubetrain to Mount Kilimanjaro.”

“What’s a tubetrain?” she asked.

I explained, and she nodded, as if it was nothing new to her, though I couldn’t imagine that. After all, she’d been asleep for hundreds of years.

The tubetrain took thirty minutes to arrive at the Mount Kilimanjaro station. Rachel wasn’t surprised that there were no windows since the train was ensconced in its metal sheath, but she was astounded when the holographic display popped up around her. It was like she was sitting in the middle of the landscape.

As the cruising speed increased to about a thousand kilometers an hour, and everything became a blur, she settled back in her chair and closed her eyes.

What was she thinking about? I could only wonder.

I studied her pale face, then noticed the involuntary twitch in her left hand as it rested on the arm of the seat. The kuru was kicking in.

It bothered me I couldn’t do anything to help her. It was out of my control. All I could do was try to make her last days enjoyable.

In thirty minutes, we slid to a stop at the Mount Kilimanjaro station, then took a cloudscooter to our bungalow high on the west side of the mountain, in the semi-alpine heath and moorland zone, about 3,000 meters above sea level. Here lurked several strange plants, including senecio trees (ancient giant groundsels), lobelias, and colorful red-hot pokers.

We walked in the primeval milieu of the giant groundsel trees, their tall trunks spouting tufts of leaves at the top like a teenager’s spike.

“I never saw pictures of anything like this,” Rachel said. “It’s a little hard for me to walk. Could you help me?” She held out her hand, and I took it, guiding her through the low brush. Her hand was warm, which surprised me. I’d expected it to be cold and almost lifeless. I squeezed her hand gently, and she returned the gesture.

“When I was a kid and walked back at the zoo in San Francisco,” she said, “I always pictured the lions and tigers wandering around. As you know from our previous encounter, when my dreams were your dreams, I often imagined petting them. Here I picture saber-toothed tigers coming out from behind those strange trees, and petting them is the last thing on my mind. I don’t like the thought of being eaten.”

Being eaten was not the only horrible way to die; kuru was nothing to look forward to, either. I felt her hand quiver as I held it and realized she was thinking the same thing. Inwardly, I cried with her, trying my best to let no negative emotions show on my face.

We wandered through the alpine landscape, our hands together. Her thumb softly rubbed the back of my hand. I squeezed hers a little tighter, but not too hard. I was afraid I might break one of her bones. She wasn’t acting as frail as I had expected, but I felt she was creating energy she didn’t have to impress me.

Standing high on the mountain, I stared into the distance to the east. The vast plains of the Serengeti swept before us, spreading out like they went on forever, giant Earth Movers easily visible. Dots that I knew were the initial animal repopulations, ten times bigger than I was, scurried around the Earth Movers like fleas on the back of a dog. Around me were primitive giant groundsel trees, with few animals except for birds crawling in them.

The leaves are toxic to most mammals, including humans. So, we avoided them, though Rachel wanted to grab a leaf if we found a tree short enough to reach the top foliage. I talked her out of it.

We came upon a wooden bench that peered over the eastern plains. Sitting down, our hands still entwined, we stared out over the Serengeti.

“Have you ever fallen in love?” she asked.

“Yes,” I told her. “Twice.”

Her eyelids twitched. “I never have,” she said. “I was always too busy with my work. I felt destined to cure kuru and some other rare diseases that no one else was working on.”

“Were you successful?” I asked.

“Not that I remember,” she replied. “But there are many things I don’t remember. I remember working on kuru, of course, but I don’t remember many of the details. I didn’t cure it, or I wouldn’t be in this position. But I think I changed some of its features.”

“Well, we need to get you in better shape,” I said without thinking. “So that you can fall in love.”

She looked at me, her eyes exhibiting a puzzled expression. “Maybe there’s hope for me yet,” she said.

I said nothing, not knowing how to verbalize my response, but sadly thinking she needed to hurry if she wanted to fall in love.

A herd of elephants appeared from the far distance, large dots on the sweeping plains.

“Elephants were almost extinct when I was alive,” she said.

“You’re alive now,” I told her.

“Yes, I guess I am. And I’m glad to be with you. Thank you for bringing me here.”

We watched the massive herd of elephants trample across the Serengeti. She asked me how there were so many. I told her they were created by genetic modification, and that in northern Canada and Russia, herds of mastodons and mammoths roamed, genetically resurrected from ancient DNA.

When our conversation trickled to a halt, we returned to our cabin.

I had splurged and rented a two-bedroom cabin, so I fixed supper for both of us using the synthesizers. Then I went and sat down on the sofa. She came over and curled up beside me. My face flushed, but she didn’t notice.

“I don’t want to be alone tonight,” she said.

I avoided her eyes, but then she curled even closer. We watched a Holovision show about a family in Antarctica, but even with this new experience in technology, her energy level quickly evaporated.

She rose, then extended her hand to me.

“I’m getting tired,” she said. “I’m ready for bed. Please come with me.”

When I took it, I noticed it was trembling more. Or was it my hand? Somehow, I felt mine was trembling also. But why?

I could claim that it was a night of unfettered, relentless passion, but that would be a lie. We did make love gently, one time. And though it was completely tame, it was the best sexual experience of my life. Since it was her first tryst, she had a smile on her face as well. It’s always satisfying to be a woman’s best lover, even if there isn’t any previous competition.

I realized as I lay there afterward that I had fallen in love with this woman, one who would die soon.

And she would take my heart with her.

Her right hand continued to clutch mine and I could feel it trembling, a little more vigorously now that she was asleep.

I let go and moved away from her. My hand was also trembling slightly.

We spent a week at the Hemingway Resort, taking long walks, sitting on the bench overlooking the Serengeti, and watching animals roam the plains there. We occasionally made love slowly and gently.

And her health declined.

Unfortunately, so did mine. By the end of the week, I noticed my tremble was real and had worsened, now in both hands. Nor did I feel quite right. I was a little fuzzy headed. Also, I had weird dreams, dreams I had trouble remembering, but somehow I was in a cryogenic freezer staring at the glass wall of the cylinder that imprisoned me.

What was going on?

At the end of the week, we took the tubetrain over to the El base camp. On our return to Clarke III, I consulted a doctor shortly after I’d taken Rachel for a checkup. The AI doc gave me the report on Rachel first and, as I expected, her kuru was worse. The doc wasn’t quite sure how long she was going to live. He suggested that she be put back into cryo as soon as possible. And that maybe someday there would be a cure for the disease that was not available now.

If he had been a human doctor, I suspect he would have been hesitant to tell me when he got to my diagnosis. But as an AI doc, he didn’t even pause.

“The answer in your case is rather obvious too,” he told me. “You also have kuru.”

“How in the world is that possible?”

“Your kuru is a different variety from anything described in the databases.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“With one exception,” he went on, ignoring my question. “Rachel Simons’ type of kuru. Looking at the genetics of it, I would predict that it’s very transmissible.”

“You mean I caught it from her?”

“Most likely. Most prion diseases infecting humans are not very transmissible, unless you eat or inject them, but her type of kuru is different. Kissing. Saliva. Coughing probably doesn’t spread it, but many other ways do. Going with her down to Earth probably gave you the opportunity to catch it, because you came into close contact.”

He doesn’t know how close, I thought.

 “It is in a very fast-growing stage,” the AI doc continued. “And I must tell you that neither of you has very long to live. Hers has become extremely active since she woke up. And yours is reaching that point.”

“Is there nothing you can do to extend her life even a short time?”

“Well, there are two drugs developed many years ago that suppress the symptoms for a few weeks, but as you know, we have no idea how to extract the infectious proteins from the neurons. Nobody works on this disease anymore.”

“Because prion diseases essentially no longer exist,” I said.

“You and Rachel Simons are the only two cases,” he agreed. “Every country affected eradicated mad cow disease by purging all the infected cows.”

“So, what are our choices?”

“Besides the obvious one, I don’t know. But first, we are going to have to wait and see what your punishment will be for taking Rachel down to Earth without permission.”

Rachel noticed right away after I’d talked to the doctor alone that my mood was different.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I started off saying, but again she noticed I was not being honest with her.

“What did the doctor say?”

 “He told me I have kuru,” I answered. “The same type you have.”

“What!? There are no monkeys around here,” she said.

“Unfortunately, the kuru you have is transmissible by oral contamination, either by a kiss or whatever.”

“You mean I gave it to you?”

I wanted to avoid making her feel guilty, so I hesitated to answer.

“Don’t feel sorry for me,” she said. “I’m the one who screwed up.” I thought she was going to cry, but she gathered herself together and went on. “I killed the only man I ever loved.”

“In fairness, you didn’t have a chance to love very many men.”

“That’s not your fault.”

“What do you remember about the project you were working on?”

“Not much.”

“Any possibility you were trying to develop a new form of kuru or a type that could be easily cured instead of something very difficult to treat?”

“Maybe, but I don’t recall for sure.”

Tiang Thron contacted me the next day. He had some new information about Rachel’s job 300 years ago.

“I did some searching in the military databases,” he said. “Interestingly enough, I found something buried deep in the archives. Remember, there were times in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries when some countries developed biological and chemical weapons. Turns out Rachel was involved in that. She was trying to develop a form of kuru that would work rapidly, be very transmissible and be virtually impossible to cure.”

“So, she wasn’t working for a university?”

“No, she just thought she was.”

“Apparently, she was successful and developed a more virulent form of kuru, then caught it herself. Then she transmitted it to me after she woke up.”

“Yes, but luckily it doesn’t seem to be easily transmissible by coughing, so it’s not as transmissible as some other diseases. It’s more like HIV than a respiratory virus. it’s not likely you spread it to anyone else you came into distant contact with, like on the tubetrain. And all your possible contacts there or in the tearoom have tested negative.”

The next day, the Council summoned me. I knew they were going to discuss my punishment for awakening Rachel and taking her down to Earth.

The room of the Council Chamber still had its incredible view of Earth, though the moon was no longer visible.

The stern-looking woman took command of the meeting. “Mr. Stromthurm,” she said. “Do you realize why you’re here?”

“I do.”

“You broke many Council laws by waking up Rachel without permission. Then you absconded with her down to Earth, which made your failures even worse.”

“I realize that, but that is what she wanted.”

“So, you’re blaming the victim,” she persisted.

“No, it was my decision, but she stated she was tired of waking up occasionally over 300 years, so she’d rather go down to Earth and die than be immersed in a cryo chamber for all eternity, waiting for a miracle that would probably never happen. She chose to enjoy living for a month or two instead, though of course we only stayed a week, as you know.”

“Medicine makes significant progress every year,” the lady said. “It’s quite possible that a cure could have been developed in the next few months.”

“Or maybe never,” I said. “You know as well as I do no one is working on curing prion diseases at the moment.”

“You understand that there are punishments for what you have done,” she said.

“I do.”

“We have taken a vote, but it is not final. Is there anything you would like to say in your defense?”

“I have no defense, Your Honor.”

She gazed around at her other Council Members. Seeing no response to my statement, she continued. “We realize in some ways, your punishment has already been set. You have developed kuru, a version just like Rachel’s, and you will probably die from it, so you’ve already received the death penalty.”

She waited for my response. When I said nothing, she said, “But we will give you a chance to live. We have decided to offer you the possibility of cryopreservation. Obviously, we do not know whether a cure will be found for your version of kuru. But that is a chance you will have to take and at least this way you have a possibility of living, one you probably don’t deserve.”

“What about Rachel?”

“That’s up to her. She can return to cryo with you if she wishes.”

“What if I just want to die?” I asked.

“That is certainly your choice. Is that what you have decided?”

Was it? I thought of Rachel, and our glorious week on Earth. How could I not choose to have a life with her, no matter how small the odds?

“I accept your offer,” I said.

“I’m so sorry,” Rachel said when I told her my fate after I returned to what was now both our quarters. “Again, I feel as if I’d killed you.”

“Don’t be sorry,” I told her. “It’s a chance to be with you, my only chance. Otherwise, we both die here.”

“But we would die together,” she said.

“That might also happen in cryo, where we just lie frozen together…forever, roused occasionally by a Monitor. But probably not Monitored at the same time, so we’re unlikely to ever see each other again.”

“Maybe they would let us go down to Earth to die,” she said.

“I don’t think so. There’s a chance we could spread the kuru.”

“Well, I have no wish to finish the rest of my life without you, so I would vote to sleep in cryo together. And if someone finds a cure for kuru, we will both be able to join lives sometime in the future. If not, we will take a long, frozen nap, stirred awake occasionally.”

The AI technician was very cooperative. He arranged for us to have side-by-side cryo chambers.

I let Rachel lie down first. This was old news for her. She’d been in cryo for 300 years before I took her out. As I watched Rachel ease into her chamber, my hands began to shake almost violently. Once she settled in, she smiled at me, and I knew it was worth the risk.

I bent down and kissed her. She smiled again and said, “See you soon.”

I hoped that was true. I slipped into my chamber and lay down on the soft bed, staring straight up into what now appeared to be oblivion. Was that my future? Oblivion?

The technician gently inserted the IV tube that infused me with the antifreeze liquids, which prevented my cells from crystallizing.

Conflict seized me, not sure whether I dreaded my future Monitor contacts or looked forward to them.

I didn’t know. I would fade off to sleep not knowing, with my empty heart. Shortly after Rachel’s chamber lid closed, mine copied hers. A soft gas oozed into my chamber. It smelled like fresh mint.

 As I lay motionless, trying to gaze into the future, the temperature dropped. I think I had read somewhere that a temperature of close to negative 200 degrees Celsius was the goal. But it didn’t matter. It was what it was.

Now it was much colder.

Terror filled me and I tried to pound on the surface of the chamber. But I was too weak. Whatever gas they had filled it with had stolen my strength. I was now completely at their mercy.

Colder. It was even colder now. My eyes began to droop. I tried to open them wider, unsuccessfully.

Maybe someday this version of kuru would be curable, and we would be together. Or maybe I would dream about her, though Rachel had told me she never dreamed.

I fought the oncoming sleep as my eyes drooped completely closed.

And it was cold.

So very cold.