giant berg. It contained a trove of small species, including hundreds of flash-frozen sardines.
Dixon now had a desk in the lab offices, where he sat most nights pounding the keys of his laptop. While he was working, the man had impressive focus: scowling, impervious to distraction, pausing to dig through his notes before plunging back in. When he took breaks I would engage him in conversation, hear war stories about his newspaper days. But the man had a particular habit, as if he could sense the moment I began to feel sympathy or connection with him. He would utter something vile, coarse, sexist, driving me away from him, back to my work.
Gerber was present most nights, too, as unsleeping as an owl, though I didnât understand why. What more systems design work could there be? I supposed he was doing basic science, which is to say he was being paid to think.
I canât say that I had many tasks myself. The electrodes remained securely in place, barnacles on the manâs chest and back. Computers monitored everything day after day without a single crash. I felt like a night watchman, everything but the flashlight.
Meanwhile the red digital clock counted up the frozen manâs new existence, nine days, nine hours, plus change. Gerberâs tracking program changed camera angles every thirty seconds. Simultaneously, vital signs, plus brain and heart activity readings, scrolled continuously across the bottom of the screen. Anyone wanting this data could download it for free. In the first twenty-four hours, our Web site had 14 million hits. Each visit lasted an average of twenty-six minutes, which Gerber declared exceptional for the Internet.
âMost people donât even have sex for that long,â he said. Across the room, Dixon snickered into his coffee cup.
Gerber spent his nights trolling the blogs. Not surprisingly, the frozen man made the Web buzz like a hive. Each morning Gerber e-mailed the wildest finds to all project staff, until people complained of the in-box clutter. After that, he hung a little bulletin board on the control room wall, with a scroll above: PERV DU JOUR . Periodically he thumbtacked his latest discovery there, which most staffers read each day the minute they arrived at work.
One night, for instance, Gerber hung screen captures from frozen mantwin.com: photos of our guy with imaginary siblings he might have had. One person posted an actor whoâd played the grizzled sheriff in a sixties TV western, someone else suggested an Olympic swimmer with sharp cheekbones. Others were more inventive: a skinny monkey with wide facial hair vaguely like the frozen manâs sideburns, even the flared front grillework of a tiny, fuel-efficient car.
Not all responses to the reanimation were odd. Both of Massachusettsâs U.S. senators called with congratulations. The president of MIT sent flowers. I was meeting with Carthage when they arrived. While Thomas centered the arrangement on the credenza, I suggested to my preening boss that we invite sociologists to study who was following the reanimation online most fervently. Carthage glared at me, barked, âFocus.â
A cardiologist in Milwaukee said the frozen manâs EKG matched that of a person in deep rest. âItâs like the day after a marathon and his body is recovering,â he said. Dr. Borden, Carthageâs pet physician, calculated the frozen manâs appetite and wastes and said he had the metabolic rate of a hibernating reptile. I thought: How humanizing.
A Chicago epilepsy researcher downloaded encephalograms and declared that âSubject One is using as close to one hundred percent of his brain as has ever been measured for a human.â I wondered how she could draw such a broad conclusion with only three daysâ data. But once she had told CNN it was âlike he was shining a light in every corner of his mind,â the phrase replayed worldwide every thirty minutes for a day and a half. She
Dixon now had a desk in the lab offices, where he sat most nights pounding the keys of his laptop. While he was working, the man had impressive focus: scowling, impervious to distraction, pausing to dig through his notes before plunging back in. When he took breaks I would engage him in conversation, hear war stories about his newspaper days. But the man had a particular habit, as if he could sense the moment I began to feel sympathy or connection with him. He would utter something vile, coarse, sexist, driving me away from him, back to my work.
Gerber was present most nights, too, as unsleeping as an owl, though I didnât understand why. What more systems design work could there be? I supposed he was doing basic science, which is to say he was being paid to think.
I canât say that I had many tasks myself. The electrodes remained securely in place, barnacles on the manâs chest and back. Computers monitored everything day after day without a single crash. I felt like a night watchman, everything but the flashlight.
Meanwhile the red digital clock counted up the frozen manâs new existence, nine days, nine hours, plus change. Gerberâs tracking program changed camera angles every thirty seconds. Simultaneously, vital signs, plus brain and heart activity readings, scrolled continuously across the bottom of the screen. Anyone wanting this data could download it for free. In the first twenty-four hours, our Web site had 14 million hits. Each visit lasted an average of twenty-six minutes, which Gerber declared exceptional for the Internet.
âMost people donât even have sex for that long,â he said. Across the room, Dixon snickered into his coffee cup.
Gerber spent his nights trolling the blogs. Not surprisingly, the frozen man made the Web buzz like a hive. Each morning Gerber e-mailed the wildest finds to all project staff, until people complained of the in-box clutter. After that, he hung a little bulletin board on the control room wall, with a scroll above: PERV DU JOUR . Periodically he thumbtacked his latest discovery there, which most staffers read each day the minute they arrived at work.
One night, for instance, Gerber hung screen captures from frozen mantwin.com: photos of our guy with imaginary siblings he might have had. One person posted an actor whoâd played the grizzled sheriff in a sixties TV western, someone else suggested an Olympic swimmer with sharp cheekbones. Others were more inventive: a skinny monkey with wide facial hair vaguely like the frozen manâs sideburns, even the flared front grillework of a tiny, fuel-efficient car.
Not all responses to the reanimation were odd. Both of Massachusettsâs U.S. senators called with congratulations. The president of MIT sent flowers. I was meeting with Carthage when they arrived. While Thomas centered the arrangement on the credenza, I suggested to my preening boss that we invite sociologists to study who was following the reanimation online most fervently. Carthage glared at me, barked, âFocus.â
A cardiologist in Milwaukee said the frozen manâs EKG matched that of a person in deep rest. âItâs like the day after a marathon and his body is recovering,â he said. Dr. Borden, Carthageâs pet physician, calculated the frozen manâs appetite and wastes and said he had the metabolic rate of a hibernating reptile. I thought: How humanizing.
A Chicago epilepsy researcher downloaded encephalograms and declared that âSubject One is using as close to one hundred percent of his brain as has ever been measured for a human.â I wondered how she could draw such a broad conclusion with only three daysâ data. But once she had told CNN it was âlike he was shining a light in every corner of his mind,â the phrase replayed worldwide every thirty minutes for a day and a half. She
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