Hindsight

You know, I heard giving birth was the worst pain a person could feel and still come out of it looking more or less normal. Torture, yeah, you can squeeze more pain out of a person, but not if they need to show up for work anytime in the next year. If they need to show up in a bag on the side of the highway, sure.

Anyway, coming out of freeze is the most excruciating thing, and I'd have to ask a lady who'd done both, but I'm pretty sure it tops shooting a person out of your body.

You ever go in a hot tub in the winter and then jump out to make a snow-angel in just your trunks? Feels pretty cool. You can feel the tingle of every flake melting, see the steam of your hot body burning through the white rising toward the stars. Well, you used to be able to - stars are harder to see now, for four or five different reasons.

When you get back in the hot tub, laughing with your friends, you get to feel your cells explode, pins and needles all over. It's like being electrocuted with a weak taser.

Well, coming out of freeze is like 3rd degree burns mixed with pins and needles mixed with giving birth mixed with your muscles spasming.

When they froze me I chatted a little with the tech, and young guy with glasses who was really excited about all the little buttons he was pushing.

"We'll make a map of your muscles, and your brain activity, and a complete mitochondrial map, along with healthy samples of every type of tissue in your body. Bone, nerve, muscle, blood, it all gets recorded. All digital. We don't need to pull any of it out of you."

"Why digital? I looked into you guys - you don't have any way to use it."

The place was called FrozInc., and they were the first of any private company to get a government contract for freezing and storing the highly dangerous. If I'd have been smart I would have waited until it was available for the general population and then I would have had myself frozen. But you don't get to pick when you'll get caught, and for me, my time to get caught was August of the greatest year in human history so far, 2020.