Suspended as they were in darkness, I thought of biological samples, flayed and plastinated or else packed in formaldehyde, pickled like onions and left on the shelves of some mad scientist’s laboratory. They looked dead, and in a sense they were: the processes of their lives suspended, forwarded to another day. I had known this moment would come, and yet nothing could have prepared me for the unnatural horror of it. Fear is death to reason, I told myself, and again it was Gibson’s voice, quieting me with the familiar words. Reason, death to fear. This was only cryonic fugue, routine and
...more
