“Our son Phil? Who had an accident? While his sister was watching him?”
Wise was blank-faced. “I have no idea what’s eating you. Everything I said in there was part of a script. I’m just following it.”
“What script?”
“The one Cost-Benefits gave me for this op. You think I make this stuff up as I go along?”
“Who in Cost-Benefits—”
“All right then!” said Dr. Ogilvy. “Are we ready for the tour?”
We headed down the hall towards our first stop, with me still staring daggers at Wise. Meanwhile Ogilvy, either because he’d picked up on the tension or because it was part of his standard sales pitch, launched into a rambling explanation of the company name: “It’s from the poem by Percy Shelley.”
“Ozymandias, King of Kings,” said Wise. “‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.’”
“Yes! That’s the one. And of course, ‘my works,’ that’s meant to be ironic, since as the poem goes on to say, there’s actually nothing left of those works, other than the inscription that brags about them. Which, given what we do here, may seem like a strange allusion to be making. But you see, there’s actually a double irony, because it turns out Shelley picked on the wrong king. At the time he was writing, 1817, I believe, Egyptology hadn’t gotten off the ground yet, so one pharaoh was as obscure as any other. Today, though, thanks to science, things are very different. Ozymandias—aka Ramses the Great—is not only one of the most famous rulers in history, but we know, contrary to what Shelley wrote, that a lot of his works did survive.”
“So what’s the point?” I interrupted, not wanting to fall asleep before I had a chance to finish grilling Wise. “Don’t speak too soon?”
“Exactly!” said Dr. Ogilvy. “Exactly. Don’t speak too soon! And we believe a similar caution applies to what we’re doing here. Our industry, Mrs. Doe, perhaps I don’t have to tell you this, but it has its share of skeptics. Some people, I won’t call them ignorant, but some…uninformed people, think cryogenics is, well—”
“A load of crap?”
“—a fantasy. An optimist’s pipe dream…But the same thing has been said about a lot of scientific advances.”
“Like organ transplants,” I said. “Or cloning.”
“Yes! Yes! You do understand. What one generation mocks, the next takes for granted. And I promise you,
Mrs. Doe—we’ll pray for your son, of course we will, and we’ll hope for the best—but even if the worst happens, he won’t be lost forever. I guarantee, we will bring Phil back…And here we are!”
We’d come to a security door marked CRYOSTASIS A. Ogilvy swiped a keycard through a reader on the wall and the door slid open, hitting us with another blast of cold air.
I stepped inside, expecting a morgue-type setup, bodies filed away in lockers along the wall. Instead, Ozymandias’ clients were arranged on freestanding racks, encased in tall metal cylinders like giant thermoses—what Dr. Ogilvy called “cryopods.” There were six pods to a rack. They hung upright, but could swivel to a horizontal position for loading and unloading. At the far end of the room, a team of moon-suit guys—probably the same ones we’d seen on the helicopter pad—had just cranked a pod into the loading position; white vapor boiled out of it as they removed the end cap.
One series of racks held smaller containers, each about a third the size of a normal cryopod. I said: “Please tell me those aren’t babies.”