THE LOST CITY OF LOS ANGELES
by John Shirley
I.
I didn’t expect to wake up, not ever. I didn’t want to wake up. The news was terrifying every day, and I was incurably ill
In 2048, when UCLA offered me the chance of taking part in their preservation experiment, I thought I’d hit a sort of jack-pot when it came to ending my life. It was something like the old cryogenic plan, where they froze you and hoped to revive you once they’d found a cure for your fatal disease. Only it wasn’t freezing; it was quantum sta-sis. Unlike cryogenics, it actually works.
The preservation tubes put you under, dreamlessly and painlessly. I figured eventu-ally the power would fail, because of what was coming, and the tubes wouldn’t last all that long on the plutonium charge and I’d probably die in my sleep.
