Keeping Ahead of the Game
By John McGondel
Copyright 2006

He felt as if awake, yet still in a dream. He felt himself thrashing around wildly, but his arms and legs had binding restraints attached to them. At least that’s what his awakening mind thought that it felt like.

He could hear a muffled noise that sounded like a bell. He was finally awake and tried to open his eyes, but they seemed as if glued shut. Then he felt hands on his face and the top of his head, and felt something sucking at his ears. He tried to speak, but his mouth was full of some unidentifiable material. People were talking, he could hear the words, but most of them were unrecognizable.

Finally, his ears were cleared, and he could hear what sounded like doctors speaking very quickly and very excitedly. He understood part of what they were saying. It sounded like a mixture of Chinese and American. He caught words like neuro, and sympathetic, and a bunch of stuff about vessels, veins, arteries, and capillaries. Then he felt himself falling away, even as he heard them speaking loudly and in a frenzied fashion.

The next time he awoke, he could see several people looking at him; they were all smiling. He saw one of them approach him, and noticed that the woman appeared to be some sort of Asian, but she was speaking that same language as the others had when he first awoke.

She asked him “Do you remember your name?”

He tried to answer, and eventually croaked out a very hoarse “Yes, James Montgomery, why?”

“Do you know where you are?”

“Hell no.” He had to stop, because his mouth did not seem to want to work for him.

“If you stare at this keyboard, whatever letter or word you look at for a full second will appear on the screen in front of you, understand?”

As she was saying this to him, a full wall-sized screen materialized in front of him, as if conjured up through the wall itself.

He tried to nod, but his head would not move. He stared at the screen, until his semi-lucid mind picked out the right letters. Those letters were: “Where I, and why I here? How my family? My wife daughter okay?”

The woman motioned a quick neck-nod to one of the men, who walked over to the table.

He said “I am Doctor David Robert Wong, and I am here to make you comfortable with your transition back to an animated state. Do you understand?”

Confused, the man looked at the computer and saw it print some words on the screen:

“No, not understand. Where family? Where my own doctor? What is wrong with me? Why not feel arms or legs?”

The staff all looked at each other, and the “transition” doctor came over, pulled up a chair, and sat in front of his face. “You have been cryologically preserved, in a frozen state, since your accident. You are in a hospital which is very far from where you used to live. We have just revived you, as there is a compelling need to restore you to full bodily function status.”

“Full bodily? I am not full bodily now?”

“Well, the accident was such, and the medical knowledge so primitive then, that only the real essence of your body was able to be preserved.”  The doctor looked very uncomfortable.

“What parts exactly?”

“They managed to retrieve your head and spinal column, intact, from the accident scene.”

“That is not possible. I can feel my arms and legs. I can hear my heartbeat…”

The doctor then moved a large mirror over to in front of the patient. The patient gaped in horror, and then fainted. The doctor spoke: “There is almost a zero possibility that this patient will not need a lot of continued counseling to augment his physical therapy. When will his clone body be ready for the operation?”

“That depends entirely upon his mental state of preparedness for surgery. When and if he makes it through this, which should be no problem, we will have to re-educate him as to what century this is and how much civilization has changed.”

“But when are you going to tell him that, er, that, uh. . .”

“That his great-great-grand-daughter needs an organ donor and that he was all we could find? How rare is his blood-type anyhow?”

“It isn’t his blood-type; it is his ability to fight disease. The man had one of the foremost immune systems known to mankind, even two hundred years ago.”

 (He waited two hundred years- so you can wait a month or two for the next installment).  J