Note: While this article presents one possibility for how the future may play out, it should not be taken as a specific prediction by either the author or the Brain Preservation Foundation.

Amy Robertson-Wong
August 18, 2085

‘My husband had only died because saving his life would have been too weird.’

Annabel Walker had this realisation earlier this year after watching a video of Marcus Chen, a retired primary school teacher, sitting on a bed. His face is slack with relief, and teary-eyed family members are seated all around him. The scene is striking, but not particularly shocking - unless one surmises that Chen has recently been revived from preservation, after having been legally dead for fifteen years.

Annabel barely made it to the toilet before vomiting.

Chen had been the mentor of her late husband Julian, who had died at sixty-four in 2076. Six months earlier, he'd been diagnosed with progressive bulbar palsy. The disease had taken him quickly. First came the slurred speech, then difficulty swallowing. A feeding tube. A neural interface for communication. Then one night, his breathing simply stopped.

“I thought of myself as someone who would have done anything for Julian,” Annabel tells me, sitting in the Preston home they shared for thirty years. “I researched experimental treatments. I learned to operate feeding tubes and neural interfaces. I would have given him my organs, years of my own life, whatever it took.”

After a pause, she continues shakily. “But I never thought about preservation. The doctors never mentioned it. I mean, I think I'd seen it once in a science-fiction show, but I didn't think it was real. I never even asked... I can't believe I never even asked…”

Annabel's anguish represents one face of a growing crisis. As revival from preservation moves from miracle to routine medical procedure, the world is grappling with an unprecedented form of collective trauma: the realization that millions of deaths over the past sixty years were preventable.

Available But Invisible

The bitter irony is that preservation wasn't a secret, hidden in covert laboratories or siloed in well-guarded, trillion-dollar research facilities. Speculation about the technology had existed since the early twentieth century, while serious scientific proposals had been explored from the 1960s onwards. By the 2020s, neuroscientists were developing protocols that could verifiably pr...

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