Chapter 2

His first conscious memory was auditory in nature. Someone was calling his name.

"Mr. Frazier? Can you hear me?" a voice said to him. "Mr. Frazier?"

His mind was not clear. He felt the way a man feels the morning after he has spent a night drinking heavily. His head ached and his thoughts were fuzzy. He had a vague sense that something had happened to him, but he could not remember what it was. It was something bad, something painful. He could sense that much. Whatever had occurred, it was something that he did not care to think about right now.

"Mr. Frazier?" the voice called again. "Ken? Can you hear me? Open your eyes if you can hear me."

He did not try to open his eyes, though he thought that he probably could if he wanted to. He just wanted to lay here, to nurse this awful headache that was plaguing him. Why wouldn't the voice leave him alone? And just who was it anyway? It was a female voice, he could tell that much, but it was nothing like Annie's. The tonal inflection seemed... well... it seemed kind of rough, unrefined. It sounded like one of the street people that he used to deal with when he worked patrol; an uneducated, ignorant type of accent. A trashy accent, to put it mildly. That very thought brought the memory he was trying to suppress a little closer to the surface. Patrol. He had worked patrol in San Jose. He was a police officer that flew helicopters for the San Jose PD. And... well... something had happened to him, hadn't it?

"Ken?" it said again. "Are you there? If you can hear me, I want you to squeeze my hand."

Squeeze my hand. That phrase brought a little more back to him. Hadn't Annie said those very words to him just recently? She had! Annie had told him to squeeze her hand and she had been crying! She had been crying over him! Why?

He began to struggle to remember now, trying to force the memory to surface. Annie had been crying and telling him to squeeze her hand. She had been sobbing, tears running down her face because... because...

"Ken?" the voice repeated, intruding upon his thoughts. "Ken? Can you hear me? Squeeze my hand if you can hear me."

He felt a hand touching his, a soft, feminine hand. It was squeezing his palm, over and over again, gently but insistently, prompting him to squeeze back. He did not, would not. He wanted to follow his train of thoughts to their conclusion. What had happened to him? Why had Annie been crying? Why had she been telling him to squeeze her hand? It was almost as if she thought he was... dying.

That thought brought a flood of memories into his forebrain. Flying a helicopter, a muzzleflash, a pain in his side, his partner (what was her name?) pulling him free from the cockpit. He had been shot! Some maniac had shot him and he had almost crashed! But what had happened after that? What had become of him? All he could sense was the hazy, though powerful image of his wife crying and of being unable to speak to her.

"Anything?" another voice, this one male, though still with that trashy street accent, inquired.

"Not yet," the first voice responded. "I'm getting good alphas on the tracing. According to the computer, he's in there. He's just not responding yet."

"There could be traumatic catatonia," the male suggested. "Alphas don't necessarily rule that out. You know that."

"No shit," she said, somewhat testily. "And you know that sometimes it takes a while for them to respond once we get the alphas back."

There was no more conversation between them. Shortly, the woman went back to calling his name and telling him to squeeze her hand.

What had happened after the helicopter, after the muzzle flash? He had been in the hospital of course, that much was obvious. But what had happened then? Had he gone to surgery? He strained his brain, trying to think, trying to remember. The vision of Annie came to him again, the image of her crying, of her leaning over him. He had been unable to talk to her for some reason, but he had been able to hear. He remembered her talking, trying to be encouraging for him, trying not to let him know that he was... dying.

He had been dying! He had been shot through the liver by a rifle bullet and he had been dying! It came back to him in a flood, an unpleasant though welcome flood. Obviously he was not dead. This was not an afterlife of some sort. He was reasonably sure that angels did not say things like "no shit" and speak in dirtbag accents. Had they found him a liver after all? Had they performed a successful transplant before his body died of its own internal poisons? Or was this just another brief interlude of awareness?

"Ken?" said the voice again. "Ken, can you hear me? Mr. Frazier? Squeeze my hand if you can hear me."

He did not squeeze her hand. Instead, he opened his eyes. It was a struggle. The eyelids seemed very heavy, as if they had weights attached to them. When they did creak open a little the light in the room seemed as bright as the sun. Daggers of pain shot through his head and he slammed them shut once again.

"Ken?" the voice said, hopeful excitement in it now. "Can you hear me?"

He tried again, slower this time, allowing his pupils to adjust gradually to the onslaught that was assaulting them. Everything seemed fuzzy at first. He saw the outline of a blonde haired woman before him. She seemed to be wearing a brief gray top that exposed her shoulders and her midriff. She was looking at him intently, though her image was not yet clear enough for him to read her expression.

"Are you there?" she asked him, leaning a little closer. "Can you say something?"

He blinked a few times, trying to bring things into focus. It helped a little. He could see that the blonde woman was in her thirties. She was very petite, very pretty and despite the fact that she sounded and dressed like an ignorant ghetto dweller, she had an intelligent air about her. Standing next to her was an older man of about forty or so. He was wearing a gray tank-top type garment and white shorts; as if he were planning on playing a game of handball later. He too seemed to exude a calm, thoughtful intelligence despite his accent. What was going on here? Who were these people? They weren't doctors were they? Doctors didn't talk or dress like that.

"Mr. Frazier," the woman said, leaning in even closer. "Can you talk?"

"Hi," he croaked. His vocal chords sent a shrill message of displeasure throughout his throat at their usage. It felt like he had a severe case of laryngitis.

Nevertheless this single, barely audible syllable had a dramatic effect on the two people standing before him. They broke into smiles of delight and seemed on the verge of cheers. What the hell?

"Can you tell me your name?" the woman asked him next.

His name? Hadn't she just been calling him by his name? Why was she asking that? No sooner had that thought surfaced however, then he realized she was not asking to gain the information. She was asking to see if he knew what his name was. He swallowed a little, bracing himself for the pain before answering. "Ken," he croaked to her. "Ken... Fra... Frazier."

This produced even more excitement among his two visitors. To his astonishment, they actually high-fived each other. "We did it!" the woman cried, hugging her companion. "We fuckin' well did it! The motherfucker knows his name!"

"Fuckin' aye!" the male replied excitedly.

Ken was starting to feel very peculiar about this whole thing. Fuckin' aye? The motherfucker knows his name? What was with the profanity? What was with the accents? Just who were these people who looked and acted so intelligent but talked like third generation welfare recipients?

With those vaguely troubling thoughts in mind, he took a moment to examine his surroundings. Just where was he anyway? Was this the San Jose Medical Center? That was probably where he would have been taken after the shooting. But somehow that just did not seem to fit with what he was seeing. It just didn't look like a hospital room. He was in a bed and he had a cotton sheet covering him, but that was about the only thing that seemed as it should be. He was flat on his back and looking upward at the ceiling and it was like no ceiling that he had ever seen before, hospital or not. The material seemed to be some sort of shiny white plastic. There were no light fixtures on the ceiling, nor were there any on the walls within his field of view. As far as he could tell, the light was just there, brightening up the room with enough illumination to take photographs but coming from nowhere in particular.

And then there was the fact that there did not seem to be a single tube or wire attached to him anywhere. He could hear a machine rhythmically beeping behind him, presumably with the beating of his heart, but there were no EKG wires snaking out from beneath the sheet. Nor was there an IV in his arm. He had once been in the hospital for an appendectomy and during his stay there for that relatively routine matter he had been wired up like a radio, with tubes snaking from both arms and even something shoved up his penis. So why, after having a life-threatening wound to a vital organ, was he just lying here without any of that? And how were they monitoring his heartbeat if not with EKG pads? He craned his head forward a little, looking down the length of his body. The right side of his abdomen, where the bullet had entered, where they would have cut him open during surgery, was completely unmarred by a scar of any kind. There was nothing but smooth, unlined white skin with a few brown hairs sticking up. How was that possible? Had he really been shot? Was that all some sort of delusion? Was this maybe a mental hospital that he was in, and not a medical hospital?

"What's your date of birth, Mr. Frazier?" the blonde woman asked him next.

It took him a moment, but, by concentrating, he was able to recall the information. "July 16th, " he replied. "1969."

"1969," she said, her expression seemingly one of awe.

"Amazing," her companion echoed. "Just fucking amazing."

He wondered why his year of birth caused so much fascination with them. Maybe this was a mental hospital. Maybe he had not been able to tell them that before. Was he making progress?

"And what city do you live in?" she asked him next.

That one was easy. "Pleasanton," he told her. "About thirty miles from San Jose."

Again they seemed more awed by his answer than they were pleased by it. What was so fascinating about Pleasanton? It was a freaking suburb.

"And what did... uh..." she blanched a little, and then quickly corrected. "What do you do for a living?"

"I'm a police officer," he replied. "And a helicopter pilot. That is, I fly for the San Jose Police Department."

"Do you remember what happened to you?"

He hesitated for a moment, not because he didn't remember but because he was afraid that what he did remember was some sort of delusion. How else could the lack of a scar and the lack of monitoring equipment be explained? And if you concluded the shooting was a delusion, what else might be part of it? Had he really been a police officer, a helicopter pilot, an army pilot? Had he? Or had he simply been a plumber or a garbage collector who had had a schizophrenic breakdown of some sort and imagined all of that?

"Do you remember, Mr. Frazier?" the male asked him.

"I... uh... think I do," he offered.

They looked at him expectantly. "Well?" the woman finally prodded.

"I think that uh... that I was shot," he said softly. "While I was flying over a house. The bullet came through the instrument panel and hit me." He swallowed a few times, trying to gauge their reaction. It seemed like they were pleased by his words. "At least that's what I seem to remember."

Yes, they seemed very pleased indeed by his words, giving each other another high five and offering congratulations. But what did that mean? Did that mean that he wasn't crazy? Did it mean that he was? For the first time it occurred to him that these people might not be his friends. They might not be trying to help him. Maybe he was part of some twisted experiment? Was that possible? What was real and what was not?

"Where..." he asked, "where exactly... uh... am I?"

Their delight at whatever their accomplishment had been eased up a little bit at his words. A look passed between them, a look that he wasn't really sure how to interpret.

"You're in a university medical center research hospital," the woman finally said, seeming to pick her words carefully. "We have repaired the damage done to your body by the gunshot wound you received."

Ken nodded slowly. So the shooting had apparently not been a delusion after all. This thought made him feel a little better. But what about the lack of a scar? How had they done that? Things were still certainly far from clear. "Did they..." a pause to let the pain in his throat dissipate. "Did you find me a donor?"

"A donor?" she said, looking confused.

"For my liver," he clarified. "It was damaged wasn't it?"

"Oh," she said, nodding her head a little, as if something had just occurred to her. "Yes, in a manner of speaking, we did find a donor for you. Your liver is working just like it's supposed to now."

"Yep," the male agreed. "It's the shit, my man."

The shit? Ken looked at them in bewilderment, unable to shake the strong impression that he was talking to the housekeeping staff instead of medical experts. "And who are you?" he asked. "Are you doctors?"

"Yes," the woman said. "I'm Doctor Valentine and this is Doctor Jerico. We're neurological specialists."

"Neurological specialists?" he asked, confused. "Isn't that, you know, the brain?"

"Fuckin aye," Jerico agreed. "The brain and spinal column are our thing."

He ignored the un-doctor-like slang for the moment. "But there was nothing wrong with my brain, was there?"

"No," Valentine said. "There wasn't. That's kind of why you're here with us today. You've been through some rankin' shit, Mr. Frazier."

"Some rankin' shit?" he repeated. "What does that mean?"

"I'm sorry," she told him, grinning a little. "I guess our speech probably sounds a little strange to you." She seemed to think for a moment, as if trying to translate her thought into different phrasing. After a moment, she did just that. "You've been through a hell of an ordeal," she said. "We were assigned to your case to kind of... well... help you through it, to help keep any brain damage from happening. It's what we do."

"I... uh... I see," he said, although he didn't. "So... so I'm going to be all right then?"

"Yes, Mr. Frazier," Valentine agreed, flashing him a smile. "It seems like you're going to be just fine. But we would like to give you a complete neurological exam just to make sure. Physically you are doing fine, probably better than you ever have before."

"Better than I have before?" he asked, confused. "What do you mean by that? I was shot by a rifle and I just had a liver transplant didn't I? And I can't even lift my arms off the bed. I can barely move my head off the pillow."

She looked a little embarrassed. "Well... that is actually our doing," she said. "You see, when we wake someone up after they have gone through what you have gone through, they are sometimes a little... well... jacked."

"Jacked?" he asked, blinking.

Again she seemed to search her mind for a translation. "Uh... combative, violent," she clarified. "So what we have done is give you a sort of calming agent to help to keep you from fucking yourself... uh... excuse me... from hurting yourself."

"You mean I'm drugged," he said, this knowledge making him feel a little better.

"In a manner of speaking, yes," Doctor Jerico replied. "We're going to shut it off in a moment so you can assist us in our tests. Later, another doctor will be in to check your physical condition. We have no reason to believe that that will be anything less than perfect. The repairs of your physical injuries went very well. Your new liver is functioning beautifully and your muscles and organs received a little juice-up as well."

"A juice-up?"

"That's correct," he said. "Now, we're going to remove the restraint field from you. Are you ready?"

"What?" he asked. "What do you mean, restraint field? What do you mean remove? I thought..."

"Computer," Valentine said aloud, ignoring him. "Cut the cervical block on Mr. Frazier. Keep it on standby."

"Fuckin' aye," said a pleasant sounding female voice that seemed to come from nowhere.

What the hell? Ken had time to think. She was talking to a computer? A computer that was nowhere to be seen and that replied with street slang? The suspicion that he was in a mental hospital tried to resurface. Before he could get any further with these thoughts however, his brain became occupied by wonderment. All of a sudden he could move again. It was like weights had been removed from his hands and legs, from his head. He could move!

"Jesus," he muttered, raising his hand from the bed. It came up easily. He tried his legs. They too moved easily. He tried sitting up in his bed, expecting that it would be painful. It wasn't. In fact, he felt physically better than he had in years.

"How do you feel?" Valentine asked him, smiling a little.

He moved his body back and forth a few more times, searching for twinges of pain, of soreness. There weren't any. He looked under the sheet, noting that he was naked beneath it. Again he marveled over the complete lack of a scar or a mark of any kind where he had been shot. With a start he realized that the faint incision on his lower right side, where they had removed his appendix so many years ago, was no longer there either.

"What is going on here?" he said, looking at the two doctors. "What kind of hospital is this?"

"Mr. Frazier," Valentine answered. "I know that things probably seem a little strange to you at this moment."

"A little strange?" he asked. "Now there's an understatement. They seem pretty fucking bizarre to me. Where are the scars from the shooting? Where is the scar from my appendectomy?"

"They have been repaired along with the other damages to your body," she told him. "You are now in perfect physical condition, Mr. Frazier."

"How?" he said, almost afraid to know the answer. "How was this done? You said this is a university research hospital? What university? Where the hell am I?"

"This will all be explained to you soon," Jerico told him soothingly. "Allow me to apologize for the confusion you are feeling. As you can see, our hospital is slightly more advanced than the... uh... conventional medicine that you are used to."

"No shit," he said numbly, and to his surprise, his words seemed to delight the two doctors.

"Now," Valentine said. "If we could perform our neurological testing now? We really should get this done before any further questions."

Ken licked his lips a little. His mouth and throat were no longer as dry as they had been. Was that from the removal of the mysterious "cervical block" or just because he was now awake and using his voice. He did not know. There were a lot of things he did not know. He decided that he would cooperate with these two strange doctors for the moment and allow them to perform their tests. But afterward he had a few questions to ask them. "Okay," he said. "Do your tests."

"Very good," Valentine smiled. "Computer," she said into the air, "activate neuro screening program 27."

"Fuckin' aye," replied the computer's voice.

For the next twenty minutes he was asked to perform a variety of basic tasks and answer a series of questions. Though he had never had a neurological exam before, at least not that he could remember, there was really nothing extraordinary about it. He raised his arms and legs, gripped a small measuring device with both hands, pushed on another one with his feet. They had him toss a rubber ball from one hand to the other. An instrument that looked like a flashlight but that utilized a red beam was shined into each eye. A scanning device of some sort was run down the length of his body. He was asked where he had grown up, what his parents' names were, what his wife's name was, and a hundred other things. As he performed their tests and answered their questions their attention seemed to be focused not upon him, but upon the wall behind him.

He took a glance there once to see what they where staring at. What he saw was a flat television type screen about three feet square. It was not mounted to the wall but rather seemed to be a physical part of the wall, with not so much as a millimeter of outward protrusion. His name was printed near the top of the screen along with a series of numbers, most of which he didn't recognize but one of which was his date of birth. Below this were approximately ten rows of readouts that consisted of red tracings marching from left to right. Next to each column was a letter that presumably identified, for those that were schooled in it, what the reading was measuring.

"How is that machine getting this information from me?" he asked, a little uneasily. "I don't have any wires connected."

"It's a wireless system," Valentine told him. "It can read your brainwaves from the minute polarization changes that they leave in the air around you."

"I see," he said slowly.

"Now, Mr. Frazier," she asked him next. "If you could please tell me who your high school principal was?"

Finally Dr. Valentine declared the examination at an end. She instructed the computer to send the data to her office ("fuckin' aye," it confirmed) and then looked at her patient. "You seem to be doing very well," she said. "I won't know for sure until I examine the data in detail, but it looks like you have come through this... this process without any neurological deficits at all."

"Okay," Ken said carefully. "That means I'm going to live, right?"

"It would seem so," she told him.

"That's good to know," he said, more than a little relieved. "It kind of looked like I wasn't going to make it there for a while. It's a good thing you found that new liver for me."

"Yes," Jerico agreed, a strange smile upon his face. "It's a good thing."

He hesitated for an instant, almost afraid to ask his next question though he couldn't imagine why. Finally he spit it out. "My wife," he asked. "When can I see her? She must be very worried about me."

Their expressions both darkened at his words and another look passed between them. He felt a dagger of dread worming into his heart. Was something wrong with Annie? With the baby? "What's the matter?" he asked them. "Is she okay? She's about to have a baby."

The two doctors continued to pass looks back and forth for a moment, a non-verbal sort of argument taking place. Finally Valentine turned to him. "Mr. Frazier," she said softly. "I don't know how to tell you this, but... well..." She hesitated.

"Tell me what?" he demanded. "What's happened to Annie? Where is she?"

"This is always the hardest part," she sighed, mostly to herself. She turned back to him. "You've been, well, kind of in a coma for a while, Mr. Frazier. For quite a while."

"A coma?" he said. Had his son already been born without him? Hadn't there been cases of people being in comas for years? Was his son already in school? Was Annie remarried? Holy Jesus! "For how long?" he asked. "Is my family all right? How long was I out?"

"Mr. Frazier," Valentine said. "Perhaps I should clarify things a little. It wasn't exactly a coma that you were in, at least not in the way that you think of a coma."

"My family?" he insisted, not wanting to be side-tracked from the issue. "Where are they?"

Valentine looked up at the ceiling for a moment. "Oh Laura," she moaned to herself. She looked back at him. "Your wife," she told him, "loved you very much Mr. Frazier."

The feeling of dread deepened. "What do you mean loved?" he asked. "What's happened to her? Is she... is she dead?"

"She is dead," she confirmed. "I'm very sorry. We were hoping not to have to break all of this to you just yet. But you've come out of the... the process remarkably alert."

Annie was dead. His beautiful wife, the mother of his child, was dead. He felt numbness at the thought, numbness that he knew would turn into overwhelming grief before long. "How did she die?" he asked. "Was it in childbirth? Is my son all right?"

"Mr. Frazier," Valentine said. "If you'll let me explain everything to you, I think there will be less of a shock. Your wife did not die in childbirth. She delivered a healthy baby boy about four weeks after you were shot. She named him after you."

"A baby boy," he said wonderingly, feeling a tear on his face. "And where is he now? Are her parents taking care of him? Are mine?"

"Your wife," she explained slowly, carefully, "raised your son to adulthood."

"Adulthood?" he asked, thinking that he must have misheard her.

"Adulthood," she confirmed. "Annie died of a disease called Ebola during an... well... lets just say an epidemic that swept through your country. She was sixty-eight years old at the time of her death."

"Sixty..." he couldn't finish. Sixty-eight years old! Annie had died at sixty-eight years old? That was thirty-eight years after he had been shot. Thirty-eight years! He began to shake his head in denial. "That's impossible," he told them. "It's just impossible!"

"I'm sorry, Mr. Frazier," Valentine told him. "I know this is a rankin' shock to you."

"How could I have been in a coma for thirty-eight years? That's crazy!"

"You were not exactly in a coma, Mr. Frazier," Jerico cut in at that point. "That was maybe a fucked up choice of words. You were in a state of cryogenic cooling."

His head was swimming as he tried to cope with all of this; with the grief of being told that Annie was dead, with being told that his child was an adult, and finally, that forty years had gone by since he had been shot. Was it really 2041? Was Annie really dead?

"You would have died if not what your wife did for you," Valentine said, picking the thread back up. "You were legally considered dead for all intents and purposes. Your liver was destroyed and there were no donors available. A death certificate was signed and filed. You were given a funeral with honors by the police department you worked for and your wife - Annie - was given a very large monetary settlement for your death. But you never were completely, physically dead. Annie saw to that. She arranged for the cryogenic storage of your body by a Los Angeles firm that performed such services."

"Annie had me frozen?" he asked, bewildered that his wife would do such a thing.

"Apparently," she explained, "she was told that if only medical science was a little more advanced, they would have been able to save you. She took that rather drastic step in the hope that one day they would be able to fix you. And she was right, we were able to fix you up eventually. It just took a little longer than she thought it would."

"You see," Jerico said, "the problem at the time of the shooting was your liver. That was why you... well, let's say died for lack of a better term. But your liver wasn't the reason why you were kept in cryogenics for so long. By the middle of World War III medical science had advanced sufficiently enough so that the damage could have been repaired then. Vital organ cloning became a widely accepted technique during the war to treat gunshot wound and shrapnel victims."

"World War III?" he asked, feeling overwhelmed. A world war had been fought while he had been asleep? What else had happened?

"It was a pretty fucked up war," Jerico assured him. "But let's try and stay on track here. My point was that you could easily have had your body repaired a long time ago. The problem was that there was no known way of retrieving someone from the cryogenic state alive. Until a method was found to do this successfully, you just had to stay dead and in storage. To tell you the truth, medical science never really worked very hard on this problem. It's only in the last few years that our university developed a technique. And even then most of those in storage were beyond repair. Their brains were damaged, containing no stored memories or thoughts, not even autonomic instincts. Out of more than a hundred attempts, you are one of six that we have managed to get back with those memories and brain patterns intact. We were able to do this because your wife made arrangements to have you frozen before you actually succumbed to death."

"Before I succumbed?"

"Correct," Valentine said. "Most cryogenic storages were people that had been frozen immediately after dying. It was a legal requirement of the time. But your wife managed to pull a few strings and let them come in while you still had brain activity. In addition, you were frozen using an advanced technique; a technique that halted all of your life systems in place without damaging the cells of your brain. Your wife then set up an indefinite trust fund to pay for your continued storage." She gave him a sympathetic smile. "Like I said Mr. Frazier, she loved you very much. She didn't want to let go of you."