Strangely Naked

Cryogenics is my favorite scam. They set up all of these elaborate freezing chambers and take advantage of the grieving for a nominal profit. Wait, did I say “favorite”? I meant “most offensively egregious way to bilk emotionally bereft people since people who claim to commune with spirits.”

In case we’re not all up on the short-sightedness of it, remember that cryogenics is making promises that it has no way to keep and is taking money for something they are not capable of, freezing your loved one at the worst moment of their life, their death. If they were to freeze them at any other point, by law it would be considered burying someone alive. They’re also promising that at some point they’ll be able to unfreeze them safely, which the technology doesn’t exist. Also, that they’ll be able to unfreeze them whenever there’s a cure for whatever ails them, which may also never exist, especially not within our lifetimes. Also, they’re promising that they can KEEP your loved one frozen indefinitely which, occasional electrical grid failure and general human error has made difficult. Oh, and let’s not forget that freezing your body destroys your corpse at a cellular level (it’s called Vitrification).

Okay, facts aside, let’s assume the process is successful and that we can thaw a person out. I hope they make it fun.

Imagine if they used nothing but robots and monitors to reattach Ted Williams’s head to a new body and woke him up in a world run by machines. “It’s a new day, Teddy. Baseball has been replaced by bloodsport for the amusement of your new robot overlords. Care to try your luck in the arena stick-ball-man?” Then an hour of maniacal laughing.

Better yet, I want to be there when a cast of multi-racial people including at least three ethnically diverse people wearing yarmulkas thaw out Walt Disney. He would never stop screaming.

Or we could just practice radical honesty. Just throw these people from the 80’s into the present, give them the truth raw. “Welcome back. Let’s catch you up: People live a majority of their lives in the virtual space where anonymity allows them to shed any pretense of empathy, Donald Trump–yeah, a guy named Donald, the guy best known for an unconscionable hairdo, malignant narcissism, cheating on his wife and scamming people for real estate deals–is the president of the United States, the polar ice caps are melting and it doesn’t seem to matter to 50% of the population of the largest nation in the world because greed is considered a sacred religion,  school shootings are standard and legislators whose entire job is to act in the best interest of the populace and in particular the most vulnerable people in our society don’t seem to give a single care, space travel is considered boring, we’re cloning monkeys (gotta sprinkle in some good news),

~Deep breath~

“People don’t trust scientists anymore–you know, the people who do hard work and that work is now dismissed like it’s opinion and as though other scientists are constantly trying to undermine and debunk these theories–, the Russians went away and are now back as a threat to national security, we spend billions on making tanks we don’t use while poor people die without healthcare, natural disasters are a regular occurrence, weed is legal in several states (again, have to sprinkle in the good), Ducktales is back but so is Blade Runner and a lot of people complaining about new Star Wars, Nazis are back, Furries are a thing you’ll learn about, same with Cake Farts, David Bowie died, so did Tom Petty and Prince, and probably everyone you knew or loved is also dead. But welcome back!” Then we play the Welcome Back Kotter theme and Moonwalk out of the room.

If the technology gets there, I want to watch a reality show just showing people being thawed out and caught up on modern events.