He said, And that figure had a lot of zeroes.
I was all, Let me think about it. After a few weeks I proved I could do it. It wasn’t hard. Biggest problem was getting the blood to heat up inside the body so the corpse wouldn’t spurt stuff well below human temp. I said they could fix him up with a heated jacket, but they were anal about it. To make him talk, they had to deepfake a voice box and have someone speak through it or give it a simple AI, and call me for complicated speeches. Then we set a time and a date for them to fly me offshore—me and A— and M— and G—， everyone else staying at home—to do the job, and to get the payment. They got me a Sino-Swiss bank account under an alias so I could move the cash. I had phone calls from the bankers setting it up. And we were all pretty excited about this because, hell, couldn’t we start bankrolling the cryo project again? Wasn’t this funding money?
He said, I was all set to fly out when we got another update about the FTL project. They’d got every commitment we’d struggled to get or were in the process of begging for, all of a sudden. IAF had said yes. Pan-Euro had said yes. They’d tendered the plan for the first and second and third waves to fly everyone off the planet, and it was going to take five and a half years max, and that was with leaving people behind to shut everything down before the final wave. No mess, no fuss. They’d stolen a lot of our wording but, like, that was just one last kick in the ass, we barely felt it. And the reason it was going through was that it was charitable. They said they were funding the bulk of it. It was their money taking these soon-to-be-impoverished trillionaires into space. The guys who’d been so tight with us that their arseholes squeaked when they walked.
M— and A— kicked off again, all, This is horseshit, this is lies. What ships are they using? Who’s engineering this and where? Our contacts were all, Ooh, we’ve seen photos, our people toured the yards, it’s fine, it’s all according to plan. I couldn’t believe how naive they were being. I couldn’t believe they were falling so hard for this corporate smoke show when there’d been so many checks and balances and hemming and hawing over us. C— tried to say, Yes, but that was a different time, things are very scary now, if you were launching the cryo project right at this minute you’d probably find it a lot easier, but that didn’t make any of us feel better. It was A—’s little brother who said, Well, you have to understand money is one big shared hallucination, but I’m not sure they could have hallucinated this much, none of this is even in crypto. We were sure it was a con. Not even a pipe dream, but a con.
He said, But nobody listened to us. Nobody investigated the things we told them to investigate. Everyone showed us what looked like evidence to them, and when we argued back they reminded us that cows had best friends and complex social relationships. M— and A— were a united front, and that was scary as fuck. It was always frightening when they stood together. Both of them were pretty quiet when we ended up taking the helicopter out together, us three, landing on a random oil rig to do what we were going to get paid to do. I asked to see the body before anyone passed any money off to anyone. Sixth sense, I guess.
He said, They let me in to see the body, and I realised who I was dealing with and how big this was. Because I wasn’t dealing with a group. I was dealing with a fucking nation. I was dealing with a huge political conspiracy. A— and M— looked at it, and looked at me, and they said, Do it.
So I did it. I fixed up the corpse, all the ice damage from storage, all the trauma of the body trying to eat itself after death. Did the blood transfusion manually, to rehydrate what was there and get it going. Made sure the body was working mechanically, unstiffened all the muscles. Rejigged the heart. Did the little tricks I’d thought of, got the eyes to blink by themselves, helped them install the throat speaker and helped with the mouth. I was feeling pretty sick about it by that point. I’d had no idea the guy was even dead. I mean, that was the point, nobody did. But I didn’t feel like a hero. Then again, what could I do? They kept saying that this was for a year max, nobody could afford this much political instability right now, we were in the middle of an extinction event.
He said, So I had him sitting up and walking around and moving and we even tested him making a video call home. All fine. It worked great.
But I was like, You’ll still need me for big public appearances, I can do it long-range. And they were all, We’ve budgeted for that. And that was when A— and M— stepped in to negotiate. They said they didn’t want the payment in pure cash. They said I wanted something more material. And we went around and around and fucking around. At one point I thought they’d open fire on all of us because they were being so fucking stroppy. They were hitting the table like in a police drama, like, We can end this whenever we want! The ball’s in our court! We know how much this means to you now! I was all, Wow, sorry guys, I don’t really know either of these two, they’re very unexpected and mean. I came here to have a good time and I think they’re being very harsh. I think between Bad Cop, Worse Cop, and Sorry Cop, they got so sick of us that they told us, Fine, we’ll arrange it here and now.