The Big Sleep

“Sir! Excuse me, sir. A moment of your time.”

I looked up to find a man in an old-timey tweed suit, clutching a
briefcase and a bowler cap. The edge of my mouth twitched up.

“Sure.”

The man ambled up to me, smiling. He tucked his cap under one arm and
handed me a card.

“Sir, my name is Artemis, and I represent SleepCo. You can call me
Arty. You’ve heard of us?”

“Of course. We put my dad into cryo last year. Big C. We’re hoping
there’ll be better treatment in another decade or two.” I tucked the
card into my pocket, not reading it.

“Well, sir, I am delighted to inform you that we are expanding our
offerings in the realm of perfectly reversible cryopreservation. Now,
when your father became a customer, I assume you posted — “

“This is a sales pitch?”

“Sir, it is an opportunity.”

I laughed. “I’m 45, man. I’m in perfect health. I’m not one of
those nuts who wants to see the future more than I want to see my
friends while they’re alive.”

“Yes, yes. You look it. But as I was saying, sir, we are expanding
our offerings.”

“What the hell would I need cryogenic preservation for?”

“Hear me out! Now, your grandfather, I’m guessing you got him the
full package? One-time $100k payment, interest pays for his good
sleep indefinitely?”

“Yup.”

“Well, consider this, young man — “

“I’m 45.”

“Consider this, sir. That one-time payment was exactly large enough
for the interest, after inflation, to pay for the ongoing costs of
preservation even in our 5-sigma scenarios. You’ve heard about our — “

“Yes, I’ve heard all about your 5-sigma scenario planning.”

“Well, sir, consider this. What if you put up $100k to pay for
ongoing preservation — and let us invest your life savings on your
behalf.”

“Well, I suppose…hm. I suppose it would grow, wouldn’t it?”

“Indeed, sir, indeed. Average stock market returns after inflation
have been about 5% in recent decades, and we expect this to continue.”

“I’m bad at math. Spell it out for me?”

“Well, sir, if you opted for 15 years of good sleep — long
enough your friends would still be alive, the world would still be the
way you left it — you’d double your money, sir.”

Huh. I scratched my chin a little. I’d been pretty good about saving
money — I was about halfway to being able to retire. Instead of
working for the next 15 years, I could just…take a nap? My
parents were gone already, and I wasn’t really expecting anyone else I
knew to die in fifteen years. No kids to take care of.

And then I’d be retired at 45, instead of 60. I could travel the
world, do things, instead of just sitting home watching the news all
day.

Huh.

I patted my pocket, making sure I still had the man’s card. “I’ll
think about it.”

— -

My eyes opened in darkness. There was a whooshing noise, and suddenly
my vision was flooded with light. I sat up, groping around, and
someone handed me a towel.

I realized I was wet, for some reason. I dried my face. Had
something gone wrong with the cryo sleep? Or…

“Welcome to the future, sir,” said a voice I recognized from what felt
like last week. I finished drying my face and looked up. It was
Arty, with a few more wrinkles on his face than I remembered.

I cracked a smile. Just like that? And I’d jumped 15 years into the
future?

“I guess it worked, you son of a bitch,” I said.

“Indeed, sir, indeed.”

I smiled at him, and he smiled back.

“So, that’s it? I’m retired?”

“That’s for you to decide, sir,” he answered diffidently. “Here.
We’ve prepared an information packet.”

He handed me a glossy brochure. The cover read: “What did I miss?
2047 edition.” I opened it and leafed through, choking before I’d
even finished the third paragraph.

“50% of the population is in cryosleep?!?” I choked out. “Economic
growth is down 70%? What the hell is this.”

“Well, sir, when I approached you all those years ago, you were what
our demogrpahic targeting department termed an ‘early adopter’. In
the decade since, your decision has become routine. Even those who
have already reached retirement age frequently decide they’d like to
bump their nest egg up a little bit before they settle down.”

I threw down the brochure. “And what about the economic growth, Arty?
How much did I actually make?”

“Quite a bit, sir, quite a bit. Not quite the doubling we were hoping
for, but you’re 63% richer than you were.”

That mollified me a bit. 63% for taking a nap was still amazing.

“If you’d like, sir, we’re offering a discount on our re-up program.
We’d be happy to put you back to sleep until you’ve reached your
financial goals.”

“And how long will that take?”

“That’s a very complicated question, sir. The world is in uncharted
waters, financially speaking. If you turn to page three of your
packet, you’ll receive a primer on Ettinger’s law.”

I picked up the brochure and leafed to page three. There was a
smiling cartoon man sitting on a stylized cryonics pod, with a speech
bubble that said “The long-term capital gains rate is determined by
the marginal cost of cryogenic preservation.”

I threw the brochure down on the ground again. “In English, Arty,” I
growled.

“Well, sir, the short version is that the cheaper a century of good
sleep gets, the more people can afford it. The more people can afford
it, the more people opt for the free stock market returns. The more
people go to sleep, the slower the economy grows. The slower the
economy grows, the larger the amount of capital necessary to pay for
sleep with the interest. And so on, back and forth, until we reach an
equilibrium.”

“Just ballpark it for me.”

He hemmed and hawed a bit, but eventually said it might be another
thirty years. I said I’d pass, and he politely escorted me out of the
building.

I’d moved out of my apartment, but SleepCo had rented me another one
as part of the package deal, along with clothes, a computer, and a few
other creature comforts. It was all worth it, for the amount of money
I’d made overnight.

There was no phone in the apartment. The computer was strange, with
no ports and a touchscreen keyboard, but they’d given me another
brochure to bring me up to speed. I eventually figured out how to
make calls on it.

I started calling my friends, but almost nobody picked up. Those that
did remembered me, though, and I had two evenings of drinking planned
before I ran out of names. They also helped me piece together what
was going on.

50% of the population might be in cryosleep, but my social circle had
been well-off and on the older side. Almost everybody I’d known was
under right now. It had been ad-hoc at the beginning, but enough
people had run into the problem I was in that they’d started
coordinating their wakeup times. Most of my friends had opted to
sleep until the turn of the century.

Long after I would be dead.

I sat for a while in my strange apartment, with the strange computer
on my lap. Things hadn’t quite worked out the first time, but if it
was a choice between building a life from scratch while stretching my
savings, or waking up 50 years hence rich and surrounded by people I
knew…

— -

I was weightless, when I came awake. It was less wrenching than the
first time, and when I checked, I wasn’t wet.

I was weightless, though, and it was making me nauseous.

“Welcome to the future, sir,” said a voice I didn’t recognize. I
rotated in space awkwardly to see a man who looked a tiny bit like
Arty, if you squinted. It made the hair on the back of my neck stand
up.

“Arty?” I asked, hesitantly.

“No, sir. My name is Percy. Artemis was my father.”

“Huh. And they just…assigned you to me? Where’s Arty?”

“Sleeping the good sleep, sir. He entrusted me with all of his
contracts. Always believed in the personal touch, my father did.”

“I’m surprised they let a salesman make decisions like that.”

“Oh, he wasn’t just a salesman. He was promoted several times while
you were asleep, sir. Ran the entire customer acquisition division of
Sleep before he went to rest.”

“Just…Sleep? Not SleepCo?”

“No, sir, we ceased use of a limited liability vehicle during the one
world government reconciliation. We’re just Sleep, now. It’s all in
your information packet.”

He handed me a sheaf of paper, thick as a book. Not a big book,
more like airplane reading. It didn’t have a title on the front, just
a big line drawing of a smiley face.

“We also have a computer prepared, sir, if you’d like, but policy is
to use paper for anyone born before the millennium.”

“Uh huh. Paper is fine. Percy, why am I weightless?”

“Page 37 of your packet, sir. All cryo-suspension facilities are
located in low earth orbit as a cost-saving measure.”

“A cost-saving measure?”

“Yes sir. It’s very warm on earth, makes it expensive to keep people
cold. Over long enough time spans it’s cheaper to just take them up
the elevator. It’s all on page 37, sir.”

“And how are my investments?”

“Sir, I’m pleased to inform you that you are inordinately wealthy by
the standards of your time. Economic growth has been explosive.”

“What about, you know, that thing? Ettinger’s law?”

Percy smiled a little. “A very innocent time, sir. Economic growth
in the mid-2000s was limited by human labor, so of course the price of
cryosleep directly impacted it. Economic growth now is mostly limited
by energy supply, and there are sharp speed-of-light constraints on how
fast we can acquire more energy. You can find more information on
page 86.”

I flipped through the packet, shellshocked. The enormity of what I’d
done was just starting to sink in.

“Sir, I believe you coordinated your awakening with several other
gentlemen? I’m being informed that your compatriots have gathered in
a bar, if you would like to join them.”

I looked up at him. He didn’t seem to be wearing an earpiece or
anything. “You still have bars in space? I guess you’d have to.”

“It’s a facility in our cultural decompression zone, sir. You will
most likely choose to live in the decompression zone for your first
few years as you integrate into modern life. It’s on page 5.”

I looked down at the pamphlet. I could catch up on it later.

— -

“George!” I said as I walked into the bar. There he was. He’d gone
cold a few years later than me, but he looked basically the same. He
glanced up when I called his name, a big smile cracking his goofy
face. “Paul!” I said in the same tone of voice, seeing the man next
to him.

A bunch of my pals and a few people I sort of knew were seated around
a big wooden table, in the corner of a normal-looking bar. Everyone
was dressed weird, especially the man behind the counter, but it was
loud and smelled like whiskey. There was even artificial gravity,
somehow. I could’ve forgotten where I was, if the entire wall hadn’t
been a single pane of glass showing a beautiful view of the Earth
below us.

Cultural decompression zone, huh.

I walked over and sat down next to George. “Welcome to the future,”
he said, grinning.

A drink appeared in front of me somehow, and I picked it up, staring
out the window at the Earth where it hung against a curtain of
speckled black.

I’d never been one of those nuts that wanted to see the future more
than I wanted to see my friends.

I knocked back my drink, smiling, and George clapped me on the back.
I could live with this.

I felt with my hand, though, and made sure Percy’s card was still in
my pocket. He’d said a lot of crazy things, as he’d walked me over
here. About how fast things were growing, the leaps being made, and
how fantastically rich I was. Said I could go to sleep for a few
millennia, let them keep investing my money, and he could promise me a
planet.

A planet. A few millennia. You’d have to be nuts. But you’d have to
be even more nuts to chuck the card.