Waking the Zed - By ML Katz Page 0,1

lying or deluded.

Dr. Klein paused and gazed at her young assistant. She kept her placid smile frozen in place, enjoying the younger woman’s discomfort. She imagined how Pamela would look, frozen in one of the gleaming capsules. If Pam Stone could have shared that image she surely would have listened to her instincts and bolted for the door.

“Ms. Stone thinks she keeps her face impassive, but I know what she’s thinking,” the doctor speculated silently. “Well, she doesn’t have to believe in me. She only has to do her job for a little while longer. After that she can return to school or her parent’s farm for all I care. People like her should be usefully employed teaching middle school science classes. People like me change the world through the advancement of human knowledge.”

Dr. Ada Klein had surely always believed in herself. Even if her parents had not always lavished praise on their perfect little girl, which they certainly did, she would had been aware of her gifts since before the very first day she had entered kindergarten class. She had certainly never had any issues with her school work, except for being bored by the chore of copying simple words or coloring in boxes to work out basic math problems. Sometimes she had only felt challenged by minimizing her gifts so she would not draw the ire of her more modestly talented classmates.

As a very young child, Ada had learned that she could not be the first one with the right answer every time. Now as an accomplished scientist, she learned that restriction no longer applied.

Once the final results of her work became public knowledge she imagined that many of her past acquaintances, including old schoolmates, would be beating on her door for help rather than mocking or shunning her. Everybody will be eager to tell all their friends that they knew me. This simple and cynical young woman she employed as a favor to the university, for example, would be clamoring for full time work instead of regarding her duties as some sort of highly paid nonsense. Then Dr. Klein could decide if she would get more pleasure from terminating the young woman’s employment or keeping her around to torment a bit longer.

In the meantime, Dr. Klein certainly never minded the fact that she spent most of her time working with the uncomplaining corpses in the gleaming laboratory, away from the chatter of animate people. Her client’s passive faces, viewed through the transparent face plates, seemed calm and restful. She imagined they almost looked hopeful. Her clients certainly would not speak up to censure her when her experiments finally legitimized a lifetime of work. She imagined them rising from their preservations chambers full of praise and gratitude. They would have Dr. Ada Klein to thank because she was their savior.

Technically, at least in the opinion of Future Faith Cryonics, Incorporated, the hard frozen bodies, resting in their separate capsules around her were not corpses at all. They were her very wealthy clients who had chosen cybernetic freezing, right at the moment of death instead of a burial. She would have harvested them sooner, before a doctor called the time of death, but the laws forbade it. Dr. Klein considered these laws quite silly and old-fashioned, but she had to abide by them to stay in business.

In the case of the silent and still residents of the frosty capsules, the line between life and death blurred. But in life, they believed they could be preserved at the moment before a doctor would call their time of death. And then they believed in the promise of resurrection when science had advanced sufficiently to revive and cure them. They had believed that Future Faith Cryonics, Incorporated was the best company to insure their destiny.

Ada’s clients may have believed in the promise of cheating death partially because of the scientist’s global reputation. A few decades earlier Dr. Klein had made a name for herself by working on the team that developed a virus blocking protein that cured everything from common colds to Ebola. She could have retired on her royalties as a rich and admired person. But she had not been content with simply curing the living when she was sure that in many cases she could even raise the dead. Dr. Klein actually lived quite frugally and invested most of her cash back into the company. She enjoyed having a comfortable and secure income but she craved renown.

Her customer service representatives