Mary of the Cold

I loved Mary. Many did, not just in the Institute but in the world. The famous photograph of her sitting outside her son's cryochamber – asleep – waiting – was poignant enough. It was the contrast with who everybody saw during the day — the indefatigable activist pleading, cajoling, lobbying for somebody to find a cure for her son's disease — what built her legend.

During the day she fought for a cure. During the night she slept and waited.

Mary of the Cold.

For all I know the legend was true. We were never close. I was the senior doctor in charge of her son's cryochamber; I had explained to her, as it was my legal obligation and in my nightmares my suspicion, that cryochambers weren't the sleep of myth and science-fiction but the preservation of the dead; I had been there when she had killed him by pressing the button that activated the bed around his still breathing body; I had seen her eyes when it stopped. Those things hadn't been enough to create a bond.

Seven years she fought until the cure was found. An infinitude of eternities for a news cycle, less than a blink for medical research. I had known in advance that the cure was close to being found and waited in dread since then. She would come to me, cure in hand, and ask for his son to be woken up. And I would have to remind her, like God's corporate lawyer pointing at a subatomic clause, that I had already told her cryochambers were death and resurrection wasn't a service we provide.

Even sooner than I had suspected she was given the cure. The same day she was sitting in front of me while I readied myself to break the soul of a woman I loved with the depth of distance and asymmetry.

She didn't ask for her son to be woken up. She wanted a bed next to his for herself. I was so surprised that I said yes. It was news, of course. Mary of the Cold, frozen, waiting. A saint of hope in a planet almost without.

I think they all misunderstood. Twice I had been the one who had had to tell her what law and scientific consensus forced me to say and she hadn't misunderstood. She never had.

I loved her more after that day. I also started to hate her a little. But I never said anything to anybody. Not even to myself in those days when I stay slightly longer than my duties demand in the cold chamber with its empty beds.