Cryogenics

• Maxwell Wu, Grade 6, North Rocks Public School
• Short Story
• 2016

Finalist in the 'Word Zone 2016' competition

The man had been frozen for a long time, possibly frozen for longer than he would have liked. He was lying in a dark, spacious container. He knew nothing about his location. All he knew was that it was somewhere in Russia, in a dark research facility. Just another soldier who was going to be displayed in a museum. He had been locked into a chamber. The last time he had been outside the chamber, he had been in a plane. The pilot had vague memories of shouting, shouting and smoke. And suddenly, recollections of his past life came flooding into his head, like a dam bursting.
He had once been known as Jim Lee, the American pilot sent to Russia to defeat the Red Army. After a series of successful bombings, people had begun to call him ‘Messenger from God’ as a reminder of his skills in aerodynamics. But one day, everything had gone wrong. Jim had been betrayed by a friend, one that always seemed nice enough. Jim had flown too far and gotten entangled in a balloon, one the Red Army had stolen from Britain. His aircraft had spontaneously combusted.
He had managed to stay conscious all these years through a meditation his master had taught him. Just before the men injected the fluids into his brain, he had thought of one object that he felt deeply for. Through this, his mind would be connected to the outer world. For Jim, his tether was his family, who were probably lying side by side under the ground.
Wait a minute. Something was wrong. This shouldn’t be happening. The first sign was the ice melting. Before he had been cryogenically frozen, he had overheard one scientist saying that only temperatures fatal to life would penetrate the chamber. With a sinking feeling, Jim realised that he was the last human alive. All the other frozen bodies were dead too. None had been built as well as his chamber.
Suddenly, the metal flowed down onto the sheet of ice. It was now no more than a stream. At the exact same time, the chemicals in Jim’s brain started boiling, causing severe nausea and trauma. It was as if he was an egg, and the chemicals the water. Pain wore down on him like a sledgehammer, pounding his nerves to dust. Jim screamed as he was pulled into the gravity of the expanding sun.