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It was a terrible joke – I had written it in a mild panic – and I was embarrassed by it the moment she unfolded the cardboard. Good news! We have cryogenically frozen Demeter until a cure is found for glass breakage. Keep chilled. Amina fished the green gummy bear from the envelope, huffed and slapped my cheek lazily. ‘Where’s the real present?’ she asked.
The dainty glass statuette I had ordered for Amina’s birthday, a replacement for the one she had knocked off a shelf and broken, had been delayed. It arrived a few days later. When the doorbell rang, we had been asleep after touching each other’s bodies. Finally, some years after first retiring, we had stopped feeling guilty about sleeping during the day; if it was a problem, it was a nice one to have. I slipped into a tracksuit and signed for the package.
We had briefly discussed trying to fix the original Depression glass figurine, and I was relieved when Amina quickly decided it wasn’t worth pursuing. Its sickly yellow-green glaze contained uranium, but more worryingly, it was by far the ugliest item in our home. Although she had been somewhat attached to it, Amina had moped about the mishap in a way that I hadn’t understood until a couple of days later, she confessed that she had been mourning not just the figurine, but her sense of movement and control.
She told me that she had found it hard not to see it, the cracked goddess, as a metaphor. I took a breath. ’Sometimes, a broken thing in the house is just a broken thing in the house,’ I said, cupping her hands in mine. ‘We’ve been breaking crockery for a long time. And we’re getting too old for metaphors.’ I cleared my throat and straightened my neck with mock seriousness. ‘Also, ah, earlier this morning, I broke something of my own. Wind.’ She scoffed loudly and rolled her eyes.
Posted by p/diamonddedman – 3 months ago
hey eddit! i’m greg, cryonics business owner. ask me anything!
what’s up – my name is greg dedman (yes my real name!) and i am a partner at all-good cryonics (allgoodcryo.com.au) out here in sunny wingfield south australia. to celebrate our 40th birthday we are offering some great cryo deals and packages (strictly limited) so – hit me up with any questions and i’ll do my best to answer them! i will be here for the next couple of hours. okay, over to you!
EDIT: thank you for the questions! phones are running hot on those special offers so i have to fly. may come back later to answer more q’s. stay cool!
I was in the bedroom folding sheets when I heard a repetitive sound coming from somewhere beyond the room. It was low in volume, but harmonically intense enough to feel vaguely threatening, like it could suddenly erupt from near-silence. My heartbeat quickened. Outside, rain slapped against the concrete driveway. Amina had already fallen asleep on top of the covers, her thumb planted in the opening pages of a book.
I thought I might be able to assign the sound to a haunting (finally!), but the howl-hum was too obvious for that, and I had to admit the fridge seemed more likely. I walked into the kitchen. The fridge stood in the corner, poker faced and humming in its ordinary, quietly brutish way. I wrapped my fingertips around the far end of the fridge door and tried to heave it away from the wall. I looked for anything it might have been touching, causing it to resonate, but no, nothing.
I furrowed my brow as I walked back to the bedroom. The sound grew louder. Amina stirred, pulled at her shawl, half-mumbled something. I wondered if the sound could have been a UFO hovering outside our window, and I did consider opening the blinds to check, but I realised that if I saw it then I’d probably have to do something about it, and the moment passed.
jaxenby · 3 months ago
Hey Greg, what training did you have to do to start working in cryonics? Is it a cool career? 😄
diamonddedman 🎤 · 3 months ago
hahah, icy what you did there 😉 all-good is my wife’s family’s business and i started here 14 years ago. i was actually working in landscaping before this but jarrod, my dad in law, was a chemical engineer (guess you could say i’m still working with the old man, *waves to storage room* lmao). when the industry was just getting startedat the start of the industry it was all science and engineering guys but now it has gotten more standardised, so it is less about research and more about keeping things running. of course we have the geeks on call!
over all it’s a good career because it’s all about the people and i get a kick out of delivering a good service. but it is a long game. some people i started talking to at the beginning of my career are only now going into storage. it is really about maintaining relationships and that is rewarding and the most important thing.
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jaxenby · 3 months ago
Thanks Greg!
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daryllina200 · 3 months ago
we actually went so far as to buy a shared cemetery plot but now we are curious if we could get frozen side by side and woken up in the future together? how would that work. – D + L
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diamonddedman 🎤 · 3 months ago
great question thanks! when you are stored it is most economical and efficient (and thus safest) for us to store multiple persons within the same tank (we actually explain this pretty well in the newsline segment from a couple of months back, don’t know if you saw it?).
we are currently exploring themed dividers to offer you a bit more of a private space – if you want to give us a call we can take your details and let you know when this becomes available.
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daryllina200 · 3 months ago
hm thank you, can we explain if we can get woken up at the same time? – D + L
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wwBun · 3 months ago
I was wondering this too. How’s it work?
clydesbg · 3 months ago
lololol ‘multple persons’
diamonddedman 🎤 · 3 months ago
sorry i missed that bit! at all-good and most other facilities, synched reanimation is a premium option that costs a little bit more because it means we have to store and maintain one of you for longer than is medically necessary which creates additional costs on our end.
based on the more than a decade of successful reanimations we do recommend you take the standard option because then you can be around to support your partner through their reanimation, including the important matter of paying for it if you do not have any surviving relatives. plus you just don’t know 100% for sure when or if a cure will be found for their particular cause of clinical death. i know it is maybe not the most romantic option but we here believe it is a truer expression of love and being there for each other.
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We spent our days tending to our ethical investment portfolio (modest returns, I will admit), or doing small tasks that filled the hours with a surprising ease. Amina would write to our children, both overseas, about medicinal cannabis start-ups and new housing models and Pema Chödrön chapters she had read and liked. We’d send them photos of our meals. I’d wander the aisles of the organic market or update our direct debit details or tighten screws in door frames and scrub rust from the gardening tools. At night, we would read in bed or (on good nights, fun nights) talk for hours in a deepening barrel-aged whirl.
Some days we would visit the park once and then again, just to lay on our backs staring into the flowering gum tree we liked best. People walking past us sometimes gave us looks that I assumed meant that, at our age, they hoped to distance themselves from the dirt lest they accidentally slip under it. It was during one of those afternoons that Amina raised the gummy bear.
‘Lei, I know it was a joke, but I started doing some more reading about that cryo stuff, and it actually got me thinking,’ she said as we looked up through the branches. She reminded me of a conversation we’d had decades ago, about how firmly she believed in accepting and supporting people as they aged, and yet how deeply and stubbornly she would mourn the loss of her own abilities. Now, it was happening more quickly than she had anticipated. ‘And we could afford it.’ She scrolled her phone for a moment, to quote a line to me: ‘As demonstrated through scientific history, model building based on extrapolations from indirect evidence is central to science.’
‘So I’ve been thinking I might want to be a part of that. I mean, it comes across a bit freaky at first, but to be honest I think there might be something big in all of it. It’s like time travel. Like, just imagine knowing what happens.’ I lay there quietly, trying to take it in. Amina turned her face toward my cheek. ‘Let’s talk more about it later, okay?’ A man walked past, glaring into a phone held at the end of a selfie stick, holding the posture of a goose.
After dinner that evening, while Amina took a bath, I scrolled the websites of cryonics operators and tried not to imagine their authors as slimy white men weighed down by jetpacks and saviour complexes. Many of the arguments were convincing in a limp, shoulder-shrug way. Some positioned the discipline as a sort of long-term CPR. For others, it was foolish to overemphasise present-day science when the relentless forward march of curative medicine was staring us in the face. I pushed my glasses up my nose and squinted as I read about ‘clinical death’ and ‘legal death’ and ‘irreversible death’. Between the lines, I began to understand that accepting death was seen as a cop-out. I was glad to be alone, free to smirk and laugh through my nose as I read.
Full cryopreservation was priced at $90,000 for ‘indefinite’ storage – or $50,000 for the head and brain only, which was distressing to imagine. I shouldn’t have been surprised to learn that everyone was obsessed with heads and brains. Liquid nitrogen could cool bio-mechanical processes to a near-halt, effectively freezing time. I learned that it was not as simple as freezing bodies. The rate of cooling mattered, and the body’s water content had to be carefully managed. Ice crystals would damage cells, so cryoprotectants – antifreeze – would allow tissue to vitrify instead. Vitrification meant that organs would assume a ‘glassy state’.
I learned that multiple bodies and heads would be stored in each unit (a tank of liquid nitrogen), and bodies would be stored upside-down so that if the tank leaked, the brain would be the last body part to be compromised. I could see why Amina was excited by it, but I almost threw up when I saw grimly-lit photos of needled implements and tubs on an estate planner’s website, and imagined the face I woke up to each morning. I closed the tab immediately and pushed my forehead into my palms.
FlexLikeKatniss · 3 months ago
Question ~ I’m guessing there is probably some boring ‘no clothes’ or ‘paper underwear’ rule but is there some option or leeway to be frozen in clothes of some kind? I totally get that shoes or jewellery or whatever would probably be too risky but what about even just some basic loose-fitting outfits? TFW you wanna wake up feeling freshhhhh af yunno? ~
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diamonddedman 🎤 · 3 months ago
thank you for your question. we get it and there was some research done early on but unfortunately clothes do create a lot of extra potential issues for the process and so no cryo business that took its work (and the safety of its clients) seriously could accommodate those requests.
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cardinole3 · 3 months ago
u know they put u in tank upside down right? OMFG imagine u think ur gonna get frozen all dignified in a hospital gown and just end up flashing everyone for like 50 years 🤪 🤪
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AltBwoyT · 3 months ago
waking up penniless AND naked … mm been there done that
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Shaman_ista · 3 months ago
I was brought back five years ago after my clinical death by stroke a long time ago. I don’t want to get into it (it’s still very raw). But, the entire experience was humiliating. I truly wish I had just died a natural death. A lot of us in the revived community feel the same way but we can be sued if we talk about the specifics.
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clydesbg · 3 months ago
oof. truth hurts hey mods 😉
GherkinAddict · 3 months ago
Just can’t get over the image of floating upside down in a vat of nitro with a bunch of other upside down people ($40k each!) and severed heads (from just $25k, bargain!). Really fucked up shit.
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NIMROD2352 · 3 months ago
lol u know why they keep ‘em upside down? it’s so if there’s a nitrogen leak the brains are the last thing to get damaged/thawed/melted 🧠🦺🍨
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AltBwoyT · 3 months ago
shattered i wasted all that money on guitar lessons when face melting solos were just a leaky cryo tank away
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GherkinAddict · 3 months ago
HA. Imagine someone half-asses the bowel emptying and the tank leaks and some rando’s precious frozen head ends up getting shat on by another frozen stranger’s frozen arse. That’s progress baby!
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NIMROD2352 · 3 months ago
too bad for the heads only crowd; robots still suuux
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gr0uchH0eMarx · 3 months ago
mama always told me to keep a cool head
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Mammalian · 3 months ago
You laugh but this kind of shit (pun intended) has surely happened. Haven’t you read the stories (see here and here and oh, here)? Kind of insane to think this used to be a considered a prestigious choice for the lucky few. My family that has BEEN THERE. There was a paperwork error that meant my granddad (we are talking Order of Australia medal etc) was accidentally thawed without a cure awaiting him. Kaput, brilliant life wasted just like that. We went in to the facility (Royal Cradle in Melbourne) with our lawyer and it was an absolute mess. The door wasn’t even locked and we were inside alone for at least five minutes before the guy came out of the bathroom and got a fright seeing us standing there. There was loud techno coming through the walls because they had to build and rent out extra rooms around the building to keep the business afloat.
No refunds of course (and beside the point) but it put our family in a really shit position. My cousins were furious and wanted to make them suffer but if we had won a settlement in court or sent the owner under, it would have meant every person stored there (including three of my aunts and my gran) would be gone forever (just one example of why ‘Freeze in place’ law makes no sense). Since dereg, prices and standards have taken a nosedive. Weird to say… but I think the glory days of cryo are behind us.
TLDR: YES, the medical science has started to catch up and many people have been brought back, but AT THE VERY LEAST go and see a facility for yourself before you commit (why does nobody do that?), don’t expect it to be even vaguely the same when they wake you, and for your own damn sake join the campaign to repeal Freeze in place.
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GherkinAddict · 3 months ago
Anybody genuinely surprised? Your eyes working okay? Just cause we nailed cancer doesn’t mean we actually fixed anything. Everyone knows capitalism is the *real* cancer but no, let’s keep obsessing over things that affect one person at a time. Go off.
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NIMROD2352 · 3 months ago
taht’s right. when my dad first brought all this stuff up he said it was like a stupid competition between the life span of the individual and the life span of civilisation, and now look at us
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devilryandrevelry · 3 months ago
that is wild but also lmao at your snobby hoity toity family. 🤴 ‘don’t you know who i AMMMM!’ *becomes dead*
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gr0uchH0eMarx · 3 months ago
die, wake up, get cured, re-enter society…..immediately get cancelled for your outdated views 👨🏻🍳👌💋
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JennSellarsOfficial · 3 months ago
Can you really blame us for just wanting to hang on to sweet, precious Dear Life though. It’s not perfect but nothing in this World is and we have to do our best with what we have.
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shane555spiral99 · 3 months ago
WHOA. I had mostly heard a lot of stories of people waking up in debt with no savings and no descendents to pay for their cures, either because they all died off or because their kids all got cryo too
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We hadn’t decided yet, or maybe we had. For Amina, there was something hopeful and utopian about it, another chance to live in a world that knows how to fix more than we know how to fix now. To be fixed until you could be fixed. Every now and then, I sensed a little surge in her investment. She tried to bring me around, but I could not shake the feeling of hubris and false hope, and I had to stop myself from saying aloud that it could only work out badly. The tentative, speculative part of the science gradually shrank to very little in our conversations, and Amina began to talk about the process as though it had been resolved and proven. I wondered about the many discussions we’d once had about the quiet dignity of life and death. A few years ago, we had even encouraged our friends to join a campaign to legalise voluntary euthanasia.
It put distance between us. Once, I tried to frame my discomfort in terms of our Asian-nesses, and how weird it would feel to reverse our imported sense of inheritance – to burden our descendants with looking after us, stubborn ancestors they’ve never met. Amina fell quiet and pulled her hand from my thigh before taking a deep breath, pausing, and offering flatly that our parents were long dead and it was our right to seize the choices they wanted to equip us with by migrating in the first place.
prince-s-superstar · 3 months ago
clearly the industry definitely isn’t perfect but i wanna say having my great grandma around has been a revelation for our family. we get to learn so much about who we are from her stories about growing up os and coming here and what that was like when it was a new thing. it has for sure helped my dad understand how my mum feels singled out (before he was all “you’re too sensitive” but now he knows it comes from somewhere). anyway the MAJOR downside is having to listen to my GG talk about how she’s “into younger guys” …
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general_levies · 2 months ago
I know someone who went through this and regretted it. Funny nobody’s mentioned the Backdown clause (where they can euthanise you if you experience unbearable suffering) but I spose that makes sense because you still have to pay for your cure plus a euthanasia levy. That is so depressing I could barely even finish typing it.
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CharlieBOOquet · 2 months ago
cryo was the worst decision i ever made. ignore the OP, don’t do it to yourself or anyone that cares about you.
readyfor_ShARK · 2 months ago
seems like everyone here is forgetting the success stories but you do you, internet.
I imagine the shock of being revived in an unfamiliar and unknown time, in an uncertain state of repair, with no love. If they cure what kills Amina before they cure what kills me, will they wait to revive us both at the same time? Will they revive us when it’s merely possible, or when it’s also affordable? I try to find out, but these laws barely exist.
I feel tired from thinking about it, and fall into a deep sleep. I dream we are holding copper coins in our hands and smelling them. I dream we are cradling our children and they are sleeping outside and shivering and we rock them to sleep, but they spill over our elbows like milk from a shallow dish. I dream that all the stones on the beach are industrial products smoothed by water, and when I pick them up to look more closely, there are traces of brand names and engraved labels and everybody is kissing. My mouth is open and caterpillars tap a raga on my bottom lip. The howl-hum makes an appearance. Baby sweetheart honey darling dearest coo cuddle caress. I miss my babies and then I am by a rail yard and I’ve bitten down on a light bulb. My mouth is full of broken glass and I cannot spit it out fast enough.
A distant magpie sings for just a second. The bedside lamp is on, and there are only one or two insects fussing around the pot plant. There is the howl-hum. I wake up this way, unsure for a moment where I am or what time it is.
Suggested throwbacks for you
AminaPMZ · 31 years ago in e/cryotalk
Hi all!
Just started digging into this movement and the more I read, the more I feel my mind doing backflips about what it means to be alive, what ‘death’ and ‘time’ really are, and what human potential is buried within us. I’m new to all this and beginning my thought journey, and wanted to connect with others who are a little further along than I am. So: tell me your stories! 🙂
[ Open 31 replies ↓ ]