"Bruno cannot help feeling the two events are somehow connected. It comes as little surprise to Bruno when he learns he has cancer. The doctor in charge of his case, Josef Ackerman, offers a choice: he can either undergo the gruelling and fallible radiotherapy currently prescribed for his disease, or he can become a pioneer in a new, radically experimental treatment programme in which patients are frozen down, remaining in a state of suspended animation."
"And when he is awoken 22 years later in 1995, we are unsurprised to discover that the future in which he finds himself is no paradise. True, Bruno's cancer has been cured, and if he is chronologically speaking a middle-aged man, in biological terms he remains a sprightly 33. Indeed, while Bruno has been down, the idea that someone might have two ages has become relatively commonplace."
Bruno works as a fiction editor for a popular weekly magazine and invents stories about a gloomy ballet dancer, Jenny. A small lump leads to cancer diagnosis and an offer of conventional radiotherapy or experimental suspended animation, in which patients are frozen until future cures exist. Bruno chooses suspended animation and is awoken twenty-two years later in 1995. His cancer is cured and his body remains that of a 33-year-old, though he is chronologically older. Society has normalized dual biological and chronological ages but become stratified: near-immortality requires labor and payment, while those who accept natural death must mortgage organs to sustain affluent lifestyles.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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