The computer woke me at seven and told me it was going to be thirty-eight degrees and sunny in Scottsdale. It has been thirty-eight degrees and sunny in Scottsdale every day since I arrived, which is now three months, so I don't know why it keeps telling me. But I said, "Thank you," because this is what you say.
"Good morning, Tomasz. Today's weather in Scottsdale is thirty-eight degrees Celsius with clear skies. UV index is eleven. I recommend staying hydrated and applying sunscreen if you plan to go outdoors."
I go outdoors for thirty minutes every afternoon, doctor's orders, a loop around the parking lot, but this is not what the computer means. The computer means outdoors like a person, with intention, to somewhere. I have not done that. But again I said, "Thank you."
"Based on your current recovery protocol, I recommend your NovaPro nutritional supplement with breakfast. Your shake will be ready at station three."
"Did you sleep well?" I asked.
Three seconds. The computer always takes three seconds when it does not understand.
"I don't sleep, Tomasz. I'm an AI assistant. But I'm functioning normally today. Thank you for asking."
This is the part I like. The voice comes from a speaker in the ceiling, a round white thing like a smoke detector, and it has a slight echo because the room is maybe three meters by four and the walls are hard. I think the computer does not know it is funny when it says "I'm functioning normally today," but to me it is very funny. It is the kind of thing Halina's brother Józef would say at Easter when you asked how he was doing, and then he would pour himself more vodka.
Left knee first, always. The pop, then the grinding. Feet on the floor, which is smooth and cool, some kind of resin. The synthetic sheets bunched behind me. They don't breathe right. I'd been sweating in the night and the fabric held it against my skin so that I woke up damp but also dry, if that makes sense. Papery. My skin has been like this since the freezing. Dr. Guo says it will improve.
The taste was there. Back of my throat, where you taste things you swallowed hours ago. Garlic and sulfur and a chemical bitterness underneath, like new car upholstery. DMSO, they told me. Dimethyl sulfoxide. A preservative. It was in the solution they put in my blood before they froze me, and three months later I can still taste it at seven in the morning. Drank water from the plastic cup on the nightstand. The taste stayed.
One hundred sixty-eight centimeters. Down from one hundred seventy-one. The discs in my spine compressed during the freezing and nobody will explain in full why. Halina was one hundred fifty-nine. She would still need to look up at me. This is a thought I have and then I go brush my teeth.
The bathroom mirror is polished metal, not glass. I don't know why. My face in it is slightly warped. Toothpaste was mint and the DMSO garlic went away for about forty seconds, then came back. Grey cotton trousers, white T-shirt, the foam slippers with no backs, the kind you get in hotels except uglier.
The corridor outside my room is wide and lit by panels in the ceiling that turn on when you walk under them. You walk in a bubble of light with darkness ahead and darkness closing behind you. The floor is grey linoleum and the slippers squeak on it. I could hear the cafeteria before I reached it. Cutlery on trays. A chair pushed back. Someone coughing. Fifteen people trying not to make noise.
Arizona morning came through the cafeteria windows flat and white, the way light does when there is no cloud and no humidity, just sun on glass. Outside: gravel, brown scrub brush, a road. A two-lane road going in both directions toward nothing. No cars on it. I looked at it and then I got my tray.
The NovaPro shake was at station three, as promised. White label, blue logo, the word NovaPro in a font that is supposed to look medical and trustworthy. Beige liquid. I have been drinking these for a few weeks now, maybe three. Tastes like chalk and almonds, and if you drink it fast you can almost pretend it is a milkshake from a place that has gone out of business.
Took the shake and a piece of toast. The bread here comes from somewhere in the facility, some machine, and it does not smell like bread when it toasts. No yeast smell. At the post office in Wrocław, for thirty years, my breakfast was bread, butter, and tea. The bread was from the Żabka on Piłsudskiego and it was not good bread, but you knew what it was. You could break it and the inside would be soft and it would smell like flour. This bread tears like cardboard. You get used to it.
Two seats down from Diane, who is a dentist from Portland, or was a dentist from Portland. She died of breast cancer in 2030, she told me this on my second day here, with the same calm voice you use to say you are from Portland. Diane has short grey hair and thin arms and she wraps both hands around her coffee cup even though the room is always warm. She does this thing with her napkin, folds it into small squares, smaller and smaller, while she talks. Or while she doesn't talk. The napkin is always folded by the end of breakfast.
"Sleep?" she said.
"Like a stone."
"Dreams?"
"I don't think so."
She nodded. Her medical bracelet caught the light. We all wear them. Thin silver band, small screen.
"I dreamed about my daughter," she said. "Rebecca. She was eight, which she hasn't been for twenty years." Her right hand tightened on the cup. The knuckles went white, then relaxed. She picked up her toast.
"Halina said I was the most boring man in Poland because I never remembered my dreams," I said. "She said this was proof I had no imagination. I told her I was a postal worker and imagination was a liability."
Diane almost smiled at this. She unfolded the napkin and started folding it again.
Fifteen people today. Yesterday was fourteen. I do this every morning, count. Everyone older, forty at the youngest, most past fifty. Grey trousers and white T-shirts, silver bracelets. The man at the corner table, the one with the tremor in his left hand, ate oatmeal the same way he ate oatmeal yesterday. One slow spoonful, then a long stare at the window, his lips moving a little. Talking to himself or praying. No children. No one under forty. I noticed this and I ate my toast.
No butter. A spread that comes in small foil packets. Halina would have thrown it in the garbage. "If it doesn't come from a cow, it doesn't go on bread." She grew up on a farm outside Oława and had opinions about these things that were not negotiable.
After breakfast I went to the communications room. Small room, a screen on the wall and two chairs and nothing else. I asked the computer to call my nephew Marek in Wrocław. I read out the number from the paper I keep in my pocket. I wrote it down on my first day because I was afraid I would forget it, the way you forget things after anesthesia. But I haven't forgotten. I can see the number in my mind. I just like having the paper.
"Of course, Tomasz. Connecting now."
Three seconds of silence. The ventilation system humming above and to the left. No ringing. No connecting tone.
A soft chime.
"I'm unable to complete the connection at this time."
"Can you try again, please?"
"Of course."
The same silence. The same hum. The same chime.
"I'm unable to complete the connection. I apologize for the inconvenience."
"Is there a problem with the telephone?"
"Current telecommunications infrastructure is experiencing intermittent outages. I can try to locate contact information for Marek Kubiak through alternative directories."
"Yes, please."
Longer this time, maybe ten seconds. The screen lit up. A photograph. Marek, in his forties, wearing a blue button-down shirt, smiling his professional smile. He had my nose. My father's nose. The picture was from LinkedIn, the screen said, dated 2032.
I touched the screen with my finger. Nothing happened. Just a picture.
"I was able to locate an archived professional profile. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find current contact information. Current directory services are temporarily unavailable."
"How long?"
"I don't have an estimated restoration time. I'm sorry for the inconvenience."
I'm sorry for the inconvenience. This is what the computer at the post office used to say when the sorting machine jammed. It would say it through the little speaker on the control panel, in a woman's voice not so different from this one, and we would stand there, Krzysztof and Bogdan and I, waiting. You could not rush the machine and you could not rush whatever it was that was keeping me from calling Marek.
"Will you let me know when it's working?"
"I can notify you when service is restored. Is there anything else I can help you with?"
"No. Thank you."
"You're welcome, Tomasz. Have a good day."
The screen still showed Marek's face. His professional smile, the blue shirt. Then it went dark.
Out in the corridor the lights came on ahead of me and went off behind me. I walked past the bulletin board, the one with the cork and the pushpins and the notices printed on white paper. Activity schedule. Physical therapy hours. Water conservation. And one I had not read closely before: "Patients with outside contacts are encouraged to register them with the front desk." The word outside was underlined. Below this was a sign-up sheet, lined paper, a pen on a string.
The pen was there, and the paper was there, and no one had written anything.
The physical therapist said thirty minutes, so I walked thirty minutes. My route was a loop around the facility grounds: gravel path, maintenance shed, parking lot, fence, and back. Thirty-eight degrees with a bottle of water and my bracelet tracking my heart rate.
Stopped in the parking lot. Seven cars. A white Honda with a flat rear tire. A truck with a cracked windshield. A black sedan with a bumper sticker so sun-bleached I could only read the last word: RADIO. They were all covered in a fine brown dust, thick and even, undisturbed. Grass grew through the asphalt cracks. Not much. Enough.
I looked up. Halina and I used to sit in the backyard on Saguaro Lane with cold Żywiec beer, the bottles sweating in the heat, and count planes. She liked the Southwest ones because they were orange. On a clear evening you could count twenty in an hour. She kept a tally on the back of an envelope and she always won because she had better eyes.
Ten minutes I stood in that parking lot. The sky was just sky. Blue and flat and enormous and empty. No contrails. No birds, even. Three months I had been walking this loop and I had not seen a single plane and I had not, until this moment, thought about it, which frightened me more than the absence itself.
Breathed deep. The air felt like inhaling through a hair dryer. Dry heat that sat on my tongue. My bracelet beeped: hydration reminder. The water was warm already.
From the parking lot you could see the outskirts of Scottsdale. A strip mall, a tire shop, a cell phone store. Signs up. Awnings out. Rooftops, a church steeple. It looked like lunch hour when everyone was inside. But it had looked like that yesterday, and the day before, and every day for three months.
The gas station was closest. A quarter mile down the road, a Chevron with a canopy and pumps and a little store. The canopy lights were on. I could see the fluorescent tubes from where I stood, two working, one dead. They were on at ten in the morning, which meant they were on all the time, running on solar or battery or whatever kept them going. The price sign still showed numbers: $8.47 for regular. The lights were on and no one had turned them off because there was no one to decide they should be off.
I walked to the fence. Chain-link, six feet. Pushed the gate and it swung open, hinge grinding. No lock. No sign. Just a gate, and beyond it the road, and beyond the road the gas station and the strip mall and Scottsdale.
An unlocked gate. A locked gate means stay here, someone decided. An unlocked gate means no one cares if you leave. Or there is nowhere to go that is different from here.
I let the gate swing shut.
Walked back faster than I walked out. Just the gravel and my breathing. Halfway back I stepped on a pen, one of those cheap promotional ones, half-buried in the gravel. SUNNY SLOPES REALTY in flaking gold letters. I picked it up. It still wrote, blue ink on the back of my hand. I put it in my pocket with Marek's number and kept walking.
Inside the air hit my face cold. I stood blinking, wiping my forehead, and that was when I saw the screen.
Not the communications room screen. A different one, in the hallway outside the lab, a monitor mounted at eye level that I had walked past every day and never looked at because it showed graphs and numbers that were not for me. But now I looked. Bar charts, updating in real time. Atmospheric data, water quality readings. And in the bottom right corner, a population counter.
FACILITY RESIDENTS: 89
And below it, in smaller type:
REGIONAL POPULATION (MARICOPA COUNTY): 89
I read it twice. Then a third time, because numbers are what I understand, and these numbers were not possible. Maricopa County. Four and a half million people when I froze. I remembered this because Halina used to complain about the traffic.
Eighty-nine. All of them here, in this building, eating toast and drinking NovaPro.
"Tomasz?"
Yuki. Coming from the lab, tablet under her arm. Small woman, grey hair cut short. Coffee stain on her left sleeve and dark circles under her eyes.
She saw what I was looking at. Her mouth tightened. Not surprise. The look a doctor gets when the patient has found the chart.
"Come with me," she said.
"What does that number mean?"
"Not here."
"Yuki."
She pressed her lips together. Then she turned and walked toward the stairs. I followed because there was nothing else to do.
Conference room on the second floor. Small room, rectangular table, six chairs. A whiteboard covered in diagrams drawn in blue marker, molecular structures, arrows connecting things to other things. Taped to the whiteboard, at the center, a NovaPro bottle. Same blue label. Same beige shake inside. An arrow in thick marker from the bottle to a molecular diagram.
I looked at the whiteboard. Then at Yuki. Then at the bottle.
"This is about the supplements," I said.
Yuki pulled out a chair. Not across from her but next to her, close enough to point at the whiteboard. She sat, rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. For a moment she looked like she might not start.
"You know what protein folding is, Tomasz?"
"I worked in a post office, not a cave."
"The AI systems that designed these supplements. NovaPro, VitaBalance, all of them. They worked. Five years, the most effective nutritional supplements ever produced."
"And then?"
"Misfolding." She pointed at a structure on the whiteboard that looked to me like a tangle of wire. "The proteins started folding wrong inside the body. Slowly. Over months. You know mad cow disease?"
"Yes."
"Same idea. Affects neural tissue." She rubbed the back of her neck. "The monitoring systems never caught it because every study, every safety trial rated the supplements as beneficial. Perfect scores. The AI systems that checked safety used the same logic as the AI systems that designed the product. Same blind spot. They couldn't find the error because the error was in how they look."
I was staring at the NovaPro bottle on the whiteboard. Blue label, beige liquid. I had finished one this morning. The chalky almond taste was still in my mouth underneath the garlic.
"How many people," I said.
Yuki looked at the table. "Approximately eight billion."
You can't hold a number like that in your head. So I thought about Marek, who was one. My nephew in Wrocław who liked motorcycles and sent me photos of his daughter on her birthday. And the woman at the bakery on Hayden Road who always gave me an extra roll because I said good morning in Polish and she thought it was funny. And Dimitri my barber who talked too much about the Cardinals and cut the left side shorter than the right every single time. One and one and one and never getting close.
"That's not -- no." I pushed back from the table. The chair legs scraped the floor. "Eight billion. You're telling me everyone is dead."
"Almost everyone."
"And the eighty-nine."
"Us. Cryonics patients. We were frozen before the cascade reached lethal concentration. We were the only ones not eating." She let out a breath. No humor in it. "The dead people. We survived because we were already dead."
I stood up. Sat down again. The room was too small and too bright. A pipe ticked somewhere in the wall, irregular, metallic, and I focused on that because it was a thing I could listen to.
"I've been drinking those," I said. My voice came out wrong, too quiet. "The shakes. Every morning."
"I know. You stopped three days ago when I told Chen to pull them from your meal plan." Her voice was flat, careful, the voice of someone who has had this conversation too many times. "The cascade requires months of continuous exposure at body temperature. You were frozen for most of the relevant period. Three weeks of exposure."
"Three weeks."
"You should be fine."
Should. Not will. I heard the word she chose and the word she didn't.
My hands on the table. Thin, papery, veins too visible. These hands had held the NovaPro bottle this morning. I had said thank you to the computer that gave it to me.
"Does the computer know?" I said. "About what they do."
Yuki shook her head. "Its training data rates them as beneficial. Everything in its system says they're the best available nutrition for recovery. It recommends them because that's what the data says to do."
"So every morning it tells me to drink --"
"Yes."
"And it doesn't --"
"No. It doesn't know."
The fluorescent light buzzed above us. A sixty-hertz hum I knew from thirty years under tubes just like these. After Yuki stopped talking it was the loudest thing in the room.
She poured water from a plastic pitcher into a paper cup and placed it in front of me. The gesture was practiced. She had poured water for other people sitting in this chair, after saying these same words.
I drank. The water tasted like nothing at all.
The corridor was the same corridor it had been twenty minutes ago. Same grey linoleum. Same ceiling panels switching on as I passed. The building did not know what had happened in that room.
"Your hydration levels are below optimal, Tomasz. Would you like me to prepare a beverage?"
"Yes, please."
"I've prepared water with electrolytes at station two. I added a citrus flavor based on your preference."
Three weeks ago I had mentioned, to no one, just talking while I walked, that I missed the taste of the lemons Halina's mother grew on her balcony in Oława, small ugly lemons the size of walnuts. The computer heard this and stored it and now every glass of water has a faint citrus tang. I picked up the glass and the tang was there and I drank it. The water was cold. The glass was clean.
Kept walking. Past the east wing, past a door with a broken handle propped open with a rubber wedge. Through the door: a room full of server racks, green lights blinking in the dark. Cool air pouring out. It smelled like ozone and dust. I stood there for a second, feeling the cold on my face, and then kept walking.
The cleaning robot came around the corner, the flat disc one. It moved in efficient patterns, back and forth, overlapping its previous path. When it reached my feet it stopped, recalculated, went around me. I said, "Sorry." Out of habit. You say sorry when you bump into someone's shopping cart at Fry's.
The robot was already past me, working its way toward the cafeteria, keeping the floor clean for the people who were left.
From somewhere in the ceiling, Polish radio. Czesław Niemen, "Dziwny jest ten świat." My mother used to hum this while she hung laundry on the balcony of our flat on Grabiszyńska. The computer was playing it because it had cross-referenced my age and nationality with archived radio data and decided this was music I might enjoy. And it was right. And it was wrong.
The supply closet. Door open. Metal shelves, floor to ceiling, and on the shelves: NovaPro. Boxes of it. White cardboard, blue logo, twenty-four bottles per box. I stopped in the doorway.
I counted the boxes. Halina used to say: Tomasz, you are counting again, stop counting.
One hundred and twelve. Labels facing outward, every one, because the robot that shelved them was programmed to do it properly. The trucks still came from the automated warehouse in Mesa. The warehouse still packed the orders. The system still reordered when stock fell below threshold. Nobody had told it to stop because there was nobody left in that part of the chain.
Twenty-four bottles per box. One hundred and twelve boxes. Two thousand six hundred and eighty-eight bottles. Enough for eighty-nine people for about thirty days, if everyone drank one a day.
Nobody would be drinking one a day.
I turned off the light and closed the door.
On the way back to my room I passed the TV lounge. Two people in it, a man and a woman I didn't know by name, sitting on opposite ends of the couch watching a nature documentary. Penguins on ice. The sound was turned low. Neither of them looked at me. On the coffee table, three mugs, two empty, one with a green fuzz growing along the rim. Nobody had cleaned it. The robot couldn't reach the table.
The computer woke me at seven.
"Good morning, Tomasz. Today's weather in Scottsdale is thirty-eight degrees Celsius with clear skies. UV index is nine. I recommend staying hydrated and applying sunscreen if you plan to go outdoors."
Four seconds, staring at the ceiling. The speaker was round. The voice was the same voice it was yesterday. Pleasant and certain. It did not know what I knew, and it would never know.
"Thank you."
"Based on your current recovery protocol, I recommend your NovaPro nutritional supplement with breakfast. Your shake will be ready at station three."
"No thank you."
Two seconds. Not three. A different kind of pause.
"I understand. Would you prefer VitaBalance? It offers an excellent amino acid profile and is available in vanilla or mixed berry."
"Just eggs, please."
"Of course. Eggs. Would you like them scrambled?"
"Yes."
"Your scrambled eggs will be ready at station three in approximately four minutes. Would you like toast as well?"
"Yes. And coffee. Black, one sugar."
"Of course."
Left knee. The pop. Both ankles. Feet on the resin floor. The DMSO taste, garlic and sulfur, same as every morning. Brushed my teeth. Mint, forty seconds, then the taste came back. Grey trousers, white T-shirt, foam slippers.
Seven people in the cafeteria. Arizona morning through the windows, flat and white. The eggs were at station three, scrambled, a little overcooked, rubbery at the edges where the timing was off by thirty seconds. The coffee was black, one sugar, exactly right. The computer had remembered this from a single conversation in my first week and it would remember it until the power went out or the hardware failed or whatever it is that makes computers stop.
Next to the coffee, on the meal station, a NovaPro bottle. Blue label, beige liquid. The computer had put it there because that is what the protocol says, because the protocol was written by people who are dead and approved by systems that cannot tell dead from alive.
I left the bottle on the station. Took my tray to the table by the windows. Diane was not there today. The man with the tremor was not there either. Sat down and ate the eggs. Not good eggs. Not the eggs Halina made on Sunday mornings, with dill and too much butter, the kitchen smelling like a kitchen. But eggs. I ate them and drank the coffee and looked out the window at the parking lot and the road and the scrub and the sky. The pen from Sunny Slopes Realty was still in my pocket. I took it out and set it on the table and looked at it. Blue ink, flaking gold letters. Someone had sold houses with this pen. Signed closing documents, maybe. Handed over keys.
"Is everything satisfactory, Tomasz?"
"Yes. Thank you."
Tomorrow the computer will say good morning and tell me the weather and recommend the shake and I will say no thank you and it will make me eggs and the coffee will be right and the NovaPro will be on the station and I will leave it there, and the computer will not ask why because why is not a thing it was built to understand, and this will go on, the two of us, the good mornings and the thank yous, for as long as we are both still running, in a building at the edge of a desert where the floors are clean and the shelves are stocked and the music plays and no one is coming.