Dead But Alive

chapter fifteen: surrendered

It's cold.
Cold, cold, so cold it's burning.
It hurts.
My chest aches, and my skin burns like it's being eaten away by acid. There's bright lights overhead, murmuring voices and people standing over me. I move, throw my shoulders back, and there's a hard flat surface beneath me. I struggle, but my wrists are bound, my ankles tied down. Something pushes hard on my chest, painful and sharp. I inhale, sharp and ragged, air as cold as ice entering my lungs, freezing them. I try to talk, try to scream, but there's a tube in my throat and I can't. The panic returns, made worse by the pain. I cry out, and one of the blurry shapes turns and faces me. "He's awake. Give me the hypo." He holds out his hand. Another blurry shape puts a needle in his hand, and a sharp pain invades my shoulder.
I'm out again.

I wake up feeling detached. It's an out-of-body sort of experience, and it seems like I'm floating. I could only describe the sensation as chilled blood, and organs suspended freely inside my body. My blood feels cool and thick as it flows through my veins, with no direction.
Instead of pumping back and forth though my heart, it's just...there. I'm paralyzed, cold on every side. I try to blink, and my eyelids feel solid, like glass clicking into place when I close my eyes. My arms won't move, but my fingers do, stiff and numb. I clench them, and even though they hurt, it's comforting to know that I have some mobility left, minimal though it is. 

I doze on and off, without stopping to consider that corpses don't sleep. After a while I start to get curious about where I am. I come to realize that I'm settled in a crate of some kind, almost like a coffin, and packed in ice like Dr. Terrance warned. It's a strange feeling, to be buried in the stuff like a dead fish. It's almost sad, how Reid Ridley went from swimmer, Olympic contender to frozen, dead fish.

A bit depressing.

Because I have nothing else to do, nothing to think about, I scroll through the facts in my head, trying to solve it all. The fact that I'm packed in ice means that I no longer have blood inside me, but cryoprotectant, and before long I'll be transferred to another facility. 

I am like a coral, heartless and bloodless. Not alive, but alive nonetheless.

I wonder where I'll be taken.

It hits me for the first time that I have chosen to be cryonically frozen. I have allowed complete strangers to take control of my body, to freeze me into a literal ice cube for the second time in my life, transport me to foreign places, run tests and experiments on me, and ultimately, possibly fail to revive me. 

It's lunacy.

And suddenly, I regret it. I regret it all. Which is what I dreaded most at the beginning. Not the procedures themselves, but the awfulness of suddenly changing your mind and being powerless to do anything about it. The fear suddenly overwhelms me, my frozen heart seizing in my chest. It doesn't beat, I've found, now that they've extracted blood and slowed it with cardioplegic solution, but it seems to throb gently to its own song, humming softly when I'm relaxed, leaping and jumping inside me when I'm afraid. It's rattling around now in my brittle ribs, banging inside my chest like it wants to escape. I long to free my arms, to wrap them around myself in an effort to calm my heart. I long to kick free, to give power to my legs so I could climb out and grab myself a blanket. But I am packed in ice. Dead fish, dead Reid. 

Only not dead. Just suspended. Unsure, undecided. Wavering between the worlds, with no hope of ever settling fully into either one.

It's not a good feeling.

Suddenly there is a soft clicking noise just beyond the crate I'm in, like a lock on a door. A hinge creaks, and there is a burst of bright light. A shadowed figure steps into the room, his facial features hidden by glasses and a mask. I'm not closed in, just lying in a box with ice, so I can see him. If I could move, could control my own body, I would cry. I am dead to him, a lifeless corpse instead of the lively reckless immortal teenager I once was. To him, to the world, I am nothing.

What have I done?

"You still alive in here?" 

My heart jumps again, frantic now. It spins insanely, choking me as it ricochets into my throat and back down.

Who said that? 

He comes over to me, walking slowly, his eyes trained on my face.

"You alright, Reid?" he whispers.

Reid. My name.

He said my name.

Something inside me explodes in pure joy.

I am alive. I am still Reid. I am myself.

And he knows. He believes I am alive.

The thrill of having my name spoken aloud travels up and down my numbed spine. A tiny bit of feeling prickles back into me.

But then shock settles in, cold stunned awe gripping me.

Who is this man?

He denies the rest of them. They call me dead, in stasis, no longer there. I've heard them. They talk about me like I'm not there, like I'm not aware, like I'm a corpse.

I am not.

He does not think of me that way.

"You are, aren't you?" he continues, coming closer until I can make out eyes behind his glasses.  "You're alive in there, Reid."

If I were normal, I would be breathing fast, air whistling through my lungs. But my breathing doesn't exist either. I don't pull in air and then exhale it. I'm just in stasis, somehow existing, not needing oxygen. Not needing blood. Dead but alive. 

The shadow turns away from me, glancing toward the soft blue glow in the wall that lulled me to sleep when I was first placed in ice. He heads over there, and there are clicking and typing sounds that tell me it's a computer.

"Yep," he says as he approaches me. "Just as I thought. You've still got brain activity, Reid. You didn't go fully under. You're alive." He kneels beside the crate, his eyes dark in the unlit room. He stares at me, and I stare back with only my eyes, unable to move my head. Adrenaline ripples through me, warming my frozen body. It's crazy that he speaks to me like this.

Crazy, and against the rules.

"You're alive," he repeats, whispering the words in awe. "But you knew that, didn't you?"