BARBED WIRE webzine
Vancouver's only FREE webzine with a COMPLETE money-back guarantee
also available in glorious technicolour at http://home.istar.ca/~paull/wire
Comments are welcome. Email paull@istar.ca

Barbed Wire is produced by a group of enthusiastic malcontents. This is a short-
term project, a premeditated cultural blip, planned for 12 issues. Original 
illustrations are by Geoff Carter.

This is the FINAL issue of Barbed Wire.
Stay tuned for Barbed Wire Offline - a CD rom containing the complete 12 Issue 
collection and featuring sound, video and stills by guest contributors.


ISSUE 12 - The Death Issue 
(This is the last issue of Barbed Wire webzine)

- Message From the Editor
Rest in Peace

THE (IR)REGULARS
- IN BOX
Readers write: more fibre, animal sex debates, boat fires...

- Lost and Found
Alex Mackenzie snags a pencil drawing from a notice board at a local drop-in 
centre.

The Death Issue
Thematically linked stories
from the Barbed Wire stable

D E A T H
Honey, I fucked the Corpse
Paul Levine digs up the dirt on cyber-necrophilia and discovers that "ideas 
about raping, mutilating and killing congregate comfortably in the abstract 
ether of cyberspace, dressed as fantasy."

Too Close for Comfort
Healthy young John Spooner gets a premature lesson in the subtleties of 
ventricular tachycardia, myocardial infarction and angioplasty when he passes 
out in mid-conversation at a summer barbecue. "They threaded several long wires 
into my heart through the large vein running beside my groin," he recalls.

Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven 
but Nobody Want to Die
Chuck Blade looks into the feasability, the plausibility and the affordablility 
of suspended animation or Cryonics. "Blood is drained from your head and a 
cryoprotectant is pumped in," he reports. "Then you're placed in a giant thermos 
filled with liquid nitrogen and you wait."

Born Again
Ridge Rockfield witnesses an unlucky soul's string of looping travelling 
calamities. "The plane turns wing over wing and explodes into hot red flame and 
pitchy smoke," he observes.

Lady Dead Freshness versus 
the Greatest Race Driver Who Ever Lived
William Harper eavesdrops on a discussion at an after hours red wine and rare 
cheese hangout frequented by members of the fast-growing Monk-underground.
"Lady fuckin' dead Freshness - she wasn't even driving," someone declares within 
earshot.

Coyote on the Duffy Lake Road
Jack Valiant has a yearning for a household pet but an ancient spirit ensures 
that dead doggie dramatics ensue. "Coyo's presence, she of muted expression, 
silent long looks and nightly moaning became the turpentine that finally unglued 
us all," he tells us.

Homeless Academic 
Taran Grey gives us an insider's guide on how to avoid an early demise in your 
glorious undergrad years by making a home for yourself in the nooks and crannies 
of your local university. "The Walkman will be your best friend in the whole 
world," he tells us, " and the only person you can really talk to."

Wildlife and Death
Alan Sirulnikoff catches a slection of god's creatures in varying states of 
glory and decay.

Death Trip
Barbed Wire takes to the road for sites of burial and memorial around British 
Columbia.





Message From the Editor
Rest in Peace
Both on and offline, magazines suddenly disappear usually because they've failed 
to cater to their intended demographic, thereby losing their advertising base 
along with the interest of their readers and ultimately their writers. 
Publications that meet this fate usually die without a wimper, bolstering their 
marketability to the bitter end, rarely having the opportunity or the motivation 
to plan for a final issue which, in most cases, could be no more than a tacit 
admission of failure.
From the initial conception of Barbed Wire, I planned to evade the failings that 
typically befall magazines. To avoid dissappointing our demographic, I decided 
that we shouldn't have one, that we should target no-one in particular and 
simply leave the door open for visitors. To escape the risk of dissatisfying our 
advertisers, I opted to avoid finding any. And to keep both myself and all the 
other contributors interested and engaged, I resolved that we'd put out a year's 
worth of issues, one per month, and call it quits. While this experiment in 
online publishing has taken a year and a half to complete, we've been completely 
successful at avoiding the pitfalls of publishing failure. Hereby, this the - 
final issue - of Barbed Wire is not coloured by grim defensive pronouncements 
about how talented and unappreciated we are, how our bright spark was snuffed 
out by lack of support, how we really had a good thing going until people 
decided we weren't worth reading. Instead, we're celebrating a mission 
accomplished with almost 200 contributions of articles, photoessays and artworks 
that have been viewed worldwide by tens of thousands of people.
By the same token, while writings in this publication have ranged from the 
achingly earnest to the brilliantly banal, Barbed Wire has provided an outlet 
for many first-time writers as well as a number of enthusiastic amateurs and 
underemployed hacks looking for a place to publish their real thoughts rather 
than institutional or promotional dross. As an old hand at on-line publishing, I 
can now share with you my carefully researched conclusions about this endeavor, 
information that other would-be editors might employ in building their distinct 
publishing empires: anything dealing with sex or shit attracts a 
disproportionately large readership. A magazine that combines the two? There's 
no telling the fortunes to be made.
So while we're happy about the trajectory Barbed Wire has taken, there's been no 
avoiding the depressingly appropriate theme for the final issue - Death. Nobody 
has accused Barbed Wire of being a haven for upbeat, prosac-munching, pre-
millenial Pepsi generation, Miata-driving, cow-eyed polyannas with a perchant 
for the all purpose declarative "whatever". So, true to form, we end this 
enterprise with a selection of pieces about the subject sensibly avoided by 
anyone trying to get through life without getting bogged down with the thought 
of their incomprehensible, illogical demise. Death, it seems, is wasted on the 
dead.
To start us off, Taran Grey provides an indispensible resource for avoiding 
early death in your student years with his Homeless Academic. Jumping on the 
bandwagon for Internet boosterism, my own Honey, I fucked the Corpse examines 
the phenomena of online snuff and virtual necrophilia and their associated 
"communities" in cyberspace. John Spooner's Too Close for Comfort outlines a 
case of near death whereas Chuck Blade's Everybody want to go to Heaven but 
Nobody want to Die looks at a potential avenue for avoiding death by getting 
your head cryonically frozen.
In the fiction arena, Ridge Rockfield takes us on a series of travelling 
calamaties in Born Again, while William Harper overhears a debate between a 
couple of liberal monks about celebrity death in Lady Dead Freshness versus the 
Greatest Race Driver who ever Lived. And in the realm of faction, local gadfly 
Jack Valiant makes his mark with a sad story about dead dogs in Coyote on the 
Duffy Lake Road.
For the last time, Alan Sirulnikoff provides us with a photo-essay - this time 
capturing animals both animated and defeated in Wildlife and Death while Barbed 
Wire takes to the British Columbia highways for images of roadside and graveside 
memorials in Death Trip. Finally, local artist Geoff Carter, once again, 
provides evocative illustrations to accompany the stories.
This issue marks the end of Barbed Wire online but plans are afoot for a free 
"best of" print version and a cheap CD rom. If you want to be informed about 
developments of these items, add yourself to the Barbed Wire mailing list here.
We, of course, also welcome your feedback. Please address all correspondence to 
paull@istar.ca

Paul Levine 
Vancouver, Canada 
October 1998





Honey, I fucked the Corpse
by Paul Levine
No matter how you slice it, necrophilia - or what the Oxford somewhat shyly 
describes as "an erotic attraction to corpses" - is a messy business both 
morally and, one imagines, literally. It's hard to think of an activity more 
universally reviled, more unthinkable than taking a dead body and using it as a 
sexual plaything. This is why I had to scratch my head when my mother called me 
to recommend the movie "Kissed". "It's a love story," she said. "About 
necrophilia".
Now I could clearly tell from her tone that my mother had not made her 
suggestion to cater to my worst voyeuristic instincts but rather she was 
championing the movie as a pleasant distraction from the hurly burly of modern 
life. My interest piqued about how depictions of raping cadavers could be 
sufficiently muted to provide acceptable entertainment for crowds titillated by 
stories of forbidden love between lady of the manor and the butler, I set out to 
view what local Canadian critics were lauding as "bold", "daring" and "dark".
In Canada we're a likeable bunch but, living in the shadow of the great American 
machine, we suffer a terrible inferiority complex about our own cultural output. 
We overcome this by garnering reflected glory from any Canadian who has moved 
somewhere else and made it "big" (as if being Canadian were a talent in itself) 
and by lavishing home-grown talent with generous helpings of unequivocal praise 
in our media. Because of our minute population, the mere publishing of a book or 
the making of a film is an event in itself, an act of nationalism, and a 
confirmation of our uniqueness, regardless of the palatability of the 
production.
While we love and encourage the familiar, the mundane and the predictable - 
books on fish, films on bears - we also don't mind if, on occasion, our artists 
misbehave, particularly if we initially reject them and their efforts are first 
recognized outside of Canada. At this moment, David Cronenberg, Atom Egoyan and 
most recently Lynne Stopkewich, the party responsible for "Kissed", fill out our 
"enfant terrible" quota in the film world. While the former two have, over the 
course of their lengthy careers, produced impressive, challenging works worthy 
of the "enfant" accolade, Ms. Stopkewich's entrée effort tags her, for the time 
being, as merely "terrible".
The protagonist of "Kissed" is a bookish young woman who is lucky enough to have 
an attraction to corpses and a job as an embalmer at the same time. With the 
logistics conveniently out of the way, we're left to wait for her to pluck up 
the courage to act on her impulses and give us a lesson in the sensual 
possibilities of the lurid conjoining of the living and the dead. As she 
crouches over her first victim, writhing naked in the glow and tint of the 
embalming room, a wash of light saturates the scene as a voice over that haunts 
all the love scenes blathers on relentlessly in vaguely poetic new-age 
platitudes.
"Crossing over was glorious and overwhelming... and absolutely addictive," the 
voice tells us as we stare into the muffled action and instantly rid our minds 
of anything resembling, say, a rigamortis-stiffened penis thrusting in and out 
of her as the corpse's bones crunch in time to her movements while bile, blood 
and shit leak from all available orifices. After witnessing a few of these 
scenes you're almost convinced to take to the streets in the cause of 
necrophiliac rights, to lobby for those trammeled underfoot by society's high 
moralism, to take up the practice yourself. But, for all its avoidance of the 
meat of the matter, Kiss proves not to be a story advocating sex with the dead 
but an examination of a special kind of love: the particular challenges faced by 
those who have sex with corpses and the guys who love them.
Enter the living love interest named Matt, a young medical student who's taking 
some time off his studies "to think".
"Why do you want to be an embalmer?" he asks our sweet heroine.
"Because of the bodies."
"What do you mean?"
"I make love to them."
"Really?" says Matt without a trace of concern, curious to know more, like she'd 
told him she'd taken up baking.
The rest of the movie confirms the old adage "once you've had a dead man you'll 
never go back to a live one". As we watch Matt get progressively more jealous at 
the stiff competition, the inevitability of the other old adage "if you can't 
beat them, join them" comes to bear. And even then, in the last cold, final, 
climactic, dramatic, epitome fuck, we're deprived of any murmur of the 
uncomfortable realities of common corpse diddling. Instead we learn the real 
lessons of Kissed - that guys will do just about anything to be on the receiving 
end of a sincere fuck and that necrophilia on film is palatable by middle-brow 
movie-goers providing it has all the life sucked out of it.
The most common conception of necrophilia - raping a corpse - rarely makes the 
evening news because it's a fairly marginal activity practiced by a select few 
who, one imagines, carefully think through the logistics of a night on the town 
with a dead person to avoid detection and arrest. Five years ago a Californian 
named Karen Greenlee made international headlines as a result of very bad 
planning. Suddenly taken with one of the cadavers freshly delivered to the 
cemetery she worked for, she spontaneously stole away with her new paramour for 
a forty-eight hour, one-sided grope. Police eventually found her in the next 
county overdosed on Tylenol, a cautionary detail suggesting that sex with the 
dead gives you a hell of a headache. Since there's no law against Necrophilia in 
California, Greenlee was charged with the relatively minor offenses of illegally 
driving a hearse and interfering with a burial. Between the bad press, the 
lawyer fees, the loss of her job and what she calls "the source of my sexual 
satisfaction", Greenlee has embraced her predilection and remade herself as an 
unapologetic spokeswoman for sex with the dead. In an interview widely available 
on the Internet entitled "The Unrepentant Necrophile", she explains how numerous 
incidents of sexual congress with the dead in funeral homes go unreported, how 
dead obese people repulse her, how she's had a hard time accepting herself.
"For a while I found myself thinking, 'yeah, this isn't normal'," she tells us. 
"I went through all that personal hell and finally I accepted myself and 
realized that's just me." Accounting for her numerous suicide attempts, she 
explains that "the reason I was having a problem with it was because I couldn't 
accept myself. I was still trying to live my life by other people's standards."
Here we have the revenge of the semantics of multiculturalism. If society is 
willing to tolerate odd behavior from minorities on the grounds that their 
actions are indicative of their cultures, then, hey, no matter how obscure your 
behavior is, if you can find others who do the same, simply build a "community" 
and claim cultural status. Necrophiles are only too happy to slide down this 
slippery slope claiming the same moral relativism that underpins arguments made 
in defense of homosexuality. If you have an urge to shag the dead and your mind 
tells you otherwise, you've been brainwashed by society. You need to learn to 
accept yourself, live by your own standards, come out of your closet and, 
presumably, head straight for the nearest graveyard.
Before the Internet gained popularity, it was exceedingly difficult for anyone 
with a socially unacceptable kink to network with each other, share information 
and wanking materials. Now, virtual communities in the form of web sites, chat 
rooms and newsgroups devoted to every oddball activity imaginable are 
commonplace. Do an Internet search for "necrophilia" and you'll find dozens of 
sites catering to the needs of those who find death erotic. Disappointingly, 
none of these sites claim to indulge the desires of your garden-variety grave-
robbing corpse diddler; instead the dirty business of necrophilia is reframed as 
a rich, harmless fantasy. Club Dead, a site offering video simulations of 
violence and death scenes, is typical of this phenomenon. Here you'll find 
titles likes "Drowned Stripper", "Pillow Suffocation" and "Guitar Player", which 
is described like this:
"A young women decides to take guitar lessons and visits our special Club-Dead 
teacher. He decides to start the lesson off with a drink. After she passes out 
from the poison, our teacher fondles and gropes the women. While he is having 
"relations" with her, she comes to--startling our teacher. He quickly does the 
only thing that comes to mind--starts strangling her--then suffocates her with a 
pillow."
Video Stills from Fantasy Necro/Snuff Sites 	 	 	 

The disclaimer on the front page of this video web site helps us delineate the 
harmless idea of taking women, drugging, fucking and killing them from the 
reality of such despicable acts in the non-imaginary world.
"Club-Dead is a web site that features fantasy erotic horror and death. Real 
death is ugly, tragic, and not glamorous. We do not advocate any kind of 
violence, especially to women."
Herein lies the crux of necrophilia for the nineties: it's a safe-sex corpse-
free mind fuck, the most contemptible of acts elevated to the abstract, scrubbed 
clean of any moral implications because nothing is really happening.
Now I've never really supported the notion that images of violence or sex in the 
media are responsible for violence and sex in the real world. I prefer to think 
that, while the media is capable of exploiting our baser instincts, we're drawn 
to these things because, on some level, we like them. I also like to think that 
a bit of simulated nastiness on TV or at the movies can calm those who might 
otherwise act upon their worst instincts. So why do I have such a tough time 
buying the argument from Internet necrophiles that they're seeking harmless 
catharsis? Perhaps it's because they say things like this:
"One man wrote that he had necro/snuff fantasies and was resigned to becoming a 
serial killer until he found us and realized it was simply another fantasy. What 
if we had never existed? How many lives would have been sacrificed on the altar 
of propriety?"
So, on one hand, necrophiles are enjoying innocuous fantasies that bear no 
relationship to the real world. And on the other, they're channeling their urges 
to rape, maim and kill. Snuff out their websites, take away their computers and 
they'll have no place to go but out the door and into the world. You have been 
warned.
The author of the above quote calls himself Templar. He's the self-appointed 
gatekeeper of the popular website called "Necrobabes". Having crafted a primer 
for newcomers entitled "An Introduction to Necro/Snuff", Templar welcomes 
newcomers to the world of killing women in an attempt to help us deal with our 
preconceptions about what he calls a "fetish". Necrophiles, we are told, are a 
"tight knit fun group" who have nothing but respect for women, aren't 
particularly attracted to Satanism, and love entertaining "gender affirming 
primal fantasies".
"At about the age of 8 I started to fantasize about killing women," Templar 
tells us innocently.
Luckily for all the females around him at the time, he found a way of "affirming 
his gender" by drawing pictures of thin women with huge breasts in various 
states of suffering. Over the years, Templar has distilled his fantasies down to 
this simple scenario: "A beautiful, evil woman is shot or stabbed in the navel." 
But don't get him wrong; he's thought about actually murdering people but he 
decided it really wasn't for him.
"I couldn't get into consensual killing," he tells us. "It just struck me as 
sad."

The Necrobabes site is run by Vicki. She's a male necrophile's dream come true: 
a woman who likes to play dead. In her essay entitled "My Fantasies", the snuff 
equivalent of a letter from Penthouse forum, Vicki explains how participating in 
a historical enactment of a native massacre first tipped her off to the 
pleasures of lying limp. As she got older, she tells us, she "would fantasize 
about being killed in various situations." Now married to a regular guy who 
finds no pleasure in catering to her quirks, Vicki indulges a rich fantasy life 
to get the thrills she wants. Like Templar, she's narrowed down her range of 
pleasures to a few specific scenarios.
"I like being shot," she declares, adding "as I make a dash for the door." She 
continues, "I think a public hanging would be cool, if it didn't take too long. 
I'm planning to be smothered by a pillow soon."
Since a large portion of the Necrobabes site is devoted to hawking pseudo-snuff 
videos starring a roster of actresses including Vicki, there's a convenient 
alliance of business and pleasure at work here. If Vicki appears just a little 
too eager about her fantasies, perhaps enthusiastic enough to cross over into 
the real world, she's careful to set the record straight.
"Just to say it as a disclaimer," she writes. "I have no desire to get myself 
killed. I don't want to kill anyone, except in fantasy."
So with all this abstract imagining going on, supported by stories, drawings and 
videos, necrophilia on the web amounts to little more than a cottage industry 
supplying paint guns to war games players. The practitioners are guilty of 
nothing more than bad taste and thought crimes, transgressions currently un-
punishable under most civilized criminal codes. Those who really kill for fun 
don't seek out communities on the Internet or anywhere else for that matter; 
they're grim loners who, no doubt, scoff at the safe, exoticisization of the 
concept of death by video entrepreneurs and indulgent wankers.
To get a view of necrophilia unfiltered by the great death fantasy marketing 
machine, I exchanged a number of emails with a middle-aged engineer from the US 
Midwest who responded to my posting requesting interview subjects. Jake (his own 
pseudonym) makes a good argument for a peculiar subset of necrophilia as a 
harmless fetish and he also makes some important distinctions between what he 
sees as three categories of necrophilia.
"Say a homicide photo is posted of a naked prostitute who was shot to death. 
Three different necrophiliacs download this picture. The pure Necro uses it to 
fantasize about finding and copulating with the corpse. The corpse itself is the 
erotic subject. The Sado-Necro's fantasy is about being the killer, performing 
the act. A Maso-Necro's reaction is quite different. He imagines being the 
victim; feeling the impact and penetration of the bullet, the gush of blood, the 
onset of death."
It is into this final category - erotic attraction to one's own death throes - 
that Jake places himself. Tracing back to his childhood when he first became 
aware of what he calls his "perversion", Jake considers his sensual obsession 
with his own demise to be without cause, as a simple, somewhat regrettable fact. 
His wife, Jake tells me, silently tolerates his interests but refuses to indulge 
them. So Jake is left to his own devices, trawling the Internet for sources of 
vicarious experiences that permit him to put off the inconvenience of having to 
experience his own death, or what he calls "the final thrill".
So if the whole enterprise is designed to avoid one's own premature death, I ask 
Jake, doesn't consuming necroporn make you a little depressed, suicidal even?
"As a necro, I cannot allow myself suicidal thoughts," Jake cautions, although 
he reveals that he has no intention of unnecessarily prolonging his life. "When 
I feel I am getting decrepit," he says, "I will take the steps to put myself in 
harm's way."
Of all the forms of necrophila, it's the classically tragic hell and the 
sophistic gymnastics of Jake's suicidal catharsis that I find myself most in 
sympathy with. Why indulge your destructive desires? I ask Jake. Has he sought 
any professional advice?
"I do not feel that I need to be 'cured' any more than someone gay since birth 
needs to be 'cured'," Jake explains. "I function just fine and it's just a part 
of me. Not an all consuming obsession."
Jake credits the Internet for helping alleviate the solitary suffering of the 
lone maso-necro.
"It wasn't until I was on the web and found alt.sex.necrophilia that I saw that 
others shared necro pix that I realized I wasn't alone," he says.
So, for better or for worse, virtual communities have flourished on the Internet 
where in the physical world they would never have seen the light of day. And by 
the same token, repulsive ideas about raping, mutilating and killing congregate 
comfortably in the abstract ether of cyberspace, dressed as fantasy. In the 
future, who can guess what other forms of disembodied, amoral ideation will find 
community on the information superhighway? Meanwhile, one fact seems ever more 
certain with the development of virtual reality: anyone devoted to performing 
concrete acts in the real world may as well unplug their modem and head straight 
off to the morgue.
Paul Levine


Too Close for Comfort
by John Spooner
In the realms of human potential and management training, there exists a trust-
building exercise, wherein the main participant closes her eyes, folds her 
hands, and falls backward, preferably from a modest height. If everything has 
gone according to plan, co-participants are gathered behind the faller and 
cooperate to gracefully catch the trusting individual and interrupt what would 
have been a violent encounter between cranium and concrete floor.
This contrived drama is meant to build trust in the faller and a sense of 
responsibility and teamwork in the catchers. This is achieved through careful 
communication and pre-planning, so that everyone knows their part. If one person 
were to fall suddenly and without warning, you couldn't really blame the 
catchers if they were caught unaware, no matter how much they cared about the 
faller.
It was at a backyard summer barbecue, one of those exceedingly suburban affairs, 
that my heart first tried to kill me. I don't know why it chose that particular 
place or moment. If it really wanted to do the job right, it would have waited 
until I was driving a car, or scuba diving, or running with scissors.

At the time, I was standing on the sundeck at the house of a friend and talking 
to a man with whom I had just become acquainted. I had learned that he worked 
for a large corporation which had hired me some months earlier to do a bit of 
character acting in an ad campaign designed to bring some life to an otherwise 
boring employee benefits package.

In a nanosecond, this fact, and all other items in the short-term memory buffer 
of my brain were dumped. I was aware of only the very present moment and a 
profound sense of relaxation and well being. I was receiving no sensory input, 
but I only realized this later, because what mattered at the moment was only the 
feeling of eternal peace and relaxation. It was like being not-quite-awake-yet 
in the cabana of some breeze-kissed tropical atoll. Or the kind of peace you 
would get after a really good massage in zero gravity. Did I have a near-death 
experience?

What had actually transpired in the physical world was somewhat more mundane and 
violent.

Some moments prior to my epiphany of meditation, my formerly stable and 
assuredly strong and healthy heart had gone into a rogue rhythm known as 
ventricular tachycardia, or "Vee-Tack". This cool bit of ER jargon describes the 
abandonment of the familiar "lub-dub" pumping rhythm of the old ticker and the 
adoption of a dangerous techno dance groove -- a continuous fast thumping of the 
large muscles of the cardiac device -- anywhere from 150 to 300 beats per 
minute. It looks very nice and machine-like on paper, but when it comes to 
moving blood around the body...well, thanks for coming out, see you in the 
afterlife.
My blood surged back and forth uselessly along vessels meant for one-way 
traffic. In a short time, my brain used up most of the available oxygen and 
found it wasn't getting any more. It was time to shut down all non-essential 
systems, starting with...consciousness
I had no warning of my blackout. Even alcohol gives one some warning, but this 
time, nothing. Unfortunately, as is my habit, I was standing with my knees 
locked in the upright position. Fortunately, I was not holding a glass or other 
potential shard-producing object.
My face-plant was so perfect and relaxed that I had two identical scrape wounds 
on my thumbs where they dragged on the surface of the wooden deck. If you were 
to balance a six foot long, slightly bowed-out two by four on end and then 
carefully tip it forward, you would have a good approximation of the fall.
None of those gathered around me reached out to stop, interrupt, or otherwise 
break my fall. Such are the rewards of the boy who cried "wolf" -- every last 
one of them waited for me to stop myself at the last moment. Ha. I received 
several rave reviews for my gracefulness from those in the semi-circle into 
which I belly flopped. A truly Olympic caliber performance.

After some indeterminate private moments of out-of-body bliss and love, both 
consciousness and awareness of my physical self returned almost simultaneously.

I opened my eyes to the very concerned and worried looking face of Dennis, the 
man at whose feet my face had landed. The host of the party, he is a fire 
fighter trained for rescue and life-saving. As I said earlier, If my heart had 
really wanted to kill me, it would have waited until I was surrounded by 
marketing executives or in some other equally hopeless situation.

I still felt relaxed and at peace with the world, so I waited for Dennis to 
complete what I recognized as a neurological assessment of my body. He was 
concerned that I had damaged my spine in my headlong rush to join chin to 
plywood. After I assured him that I could indeed hear and see him, he told me 
what had happened, and that I had a rather bloody and ragged wound on my chin, 
which would likely require stitches.

Although I did not realize it at the time, the fall may have saved my life by 
causing a blow to my chest, which converted my heart back into a normal rhythm.

After Dennis helped me to a chair, the two of us decided that my swan-dive into 
the deck was likely the combined result of skipping the noon meal and some 
slight dehydration, along with the effects of the scorching afternoon heat. The 
lovely lady of the house, my friend, fetched me a sandwich and a sugary 
beverage.

As I was at a Saturday afternoon barbecue, there were precious few people 
remaining who were sober enough to drive to the hospital of the area, and 
Dennis' father was enlisted. We drove without incident, or indeed, much 
conversation. I wondered what these people of the god-fearing valley thought of 
me, an urban type who came into their midst and committed the faux-pas of 
publicly losing it under the influence of god knows what chemical concoction 
those city fellers stick in their bodies?

The suburban hospital: new, busy, slow, and bureaucratic. Wait where? Go there? 
Register? With who? Okay. Bang!

At the registration counter and someone is pulling me off the floor. Again. No 
blissful experience this time, just lost moments. Into a wheelchair and off to 
the examination bed. Fast hospital service this way, but I was beginning to get 
a little concerned. I had eaten. I drank fluids. Why did it happen again?
A very serious looking Doc gave me the emergency examination routine and somehow 
fixated on my heart. He hooked me to the heart monitor over my head and told me 
my heart rate was elevated and he was concerned about it. Me too.

The Doctor bustled about, taking care of other injuries and disabilities nearby. 
Every now and then, he would check me again and ask how I was doing. I would 
tell him I was fine and then ask him to stitch me up so I could get back to a 
party that I half suspected I would not see again.

I waited, feeling alone with people I didn't know.

With no warning, the heart monitor started an unholy shrieking and I craned my 
head backward to watch the neon trace on its screen. It looked like a orange 
ribbon, rising and falling in smooth curves. It stopped.

The doctor, who had been nearby, came to the bed and asked me, "Could you feel 
that?"
I half wanted to tell him that this was starting to scare the shit out of me, 
but I said, "A little bit"
He ordered some intravenous medication. The nurse giving me the drugs didn't 
help the situation by repeating, "You're too young to be having this happen"
I didn't ask what he meant.
They kept me in the ER, observing and waiting. At one point, I became the 
patient from hell, refusing to cooperate in an ECG unless someone gave their 
word to phone my wife. I wanted her there, and not just because I was frightened 
and alone. My wife is a highly trained and experienced nurse. She has done heart 
research. She cares for the sickest of the sick and has seen a lot of people 
die. I figure she knows a lot about hearts and a lot about death. Maybe she 
could talk to the people at this hospital and get them to stop my heart from 
killing me.

Catherine came to see me after I had been transferred to the intensive care 
unit. She works in an ICU, but at a different hospital. It is where most of your 
health care taxes go -- 80 percent of health care money is spent on patients in 
their last two weeks of life. I was in the ICU because there was no other place 
in the hospital that could monitor my heart from the nursing station. Catherine 
greeted me and we talked a bit, but she spent most of her time talking to 
Doctors. I relaxed. I felt cared for.

Catherine told me they figured my heart had gone into ventricular tachycardia at 
least three times: when I first collapsed, at the registration desk, and then in 
the ER, which they had a record of. That record of 40 bad heartbeats was to be 
one of the only clues they had in determining what was wrong. Many more readings 
were taken over the next few days, but my heart continued to pretend it was 
normal.

Catherine said they wanted to transfer me to the hospital where she worked, the 
heart centre for the entire province, and she was happy about that. She also 
said she was a little frightened. Funny, with her around, I was just beginning 
to relax.

The barbecue was on Saturday afternoon, and I wasn't transferred until Monday 
evening. Two full days of being tethered to a bed by electrical leads and 
intravenous tubing. They didn't want me to disconnect my heart leads, so I had 
to pee in a bottle, which I did frequently, due to the relentless drip of the IV 
fluid. I managed to avoid the dreaded and drafty hospital gown, and usually wore 
a pair of shorts. People told me of the beautiful hot weather outside. I read a 
lot.

After my ride in an ambulance, I arrived at the big city hospital and took my 
place on a bed in the cardiac care unit. Physically, I still felt healthy. It 
was pretty much the same setup as the other hospital, but with more action. The 
first thing I noticed was that my roommates were constantly being shuttled out 
and back in again, but in a state of unconsciousness. I eventually gleaned that 
they were all here for the same procedure: angioplasty.

Here in the western world, our lifestyle and popular culture seem to require 
that we ingest various animal substances high in fat content and inhale the 
toxic smoke of burning plants. People who rigorously follow this regimen develop 
deposits known as plaque in their blood vessels. This is of particular concern 
when it happens, as it often does, in the coronary arteries, the small network 
of tubes which supply blood to the mighty heart muscle itself. As the coronary 
arteries become more and more restricted, the heart becomes weaker and weaker, 
until ultimately one of the major vessels becomes completely blocked, causing 
part of the heart to begin to die. This is known by its clinical term, 
"myocardial infarction", which literally means, "dead heart muscle". Most people 
just call it a heart attack.

When one of the white-frocked high priest practitioners of western medicine 
detects a blockage in the coronary arteries, he will often recommend a procedure 
called angioplasty. A long flexible tube is inserted into the large artery of 
the upper leg and threaded through to the offending coronary vessel. When the 
catheter tube is in place, a ballon is inflated, pushing the fatty detritus 
outward, squishing and flattening it into the walls of the blood vessel. If all 
goes well, the vessel is opened, the patient leaves the hospital the next day, 
and can enjoy a hearty burger and fries at home with their family.

George, one of my roommates, was not so fortunate. He came to the city from a 
town far to the north to have his angioplasty. George is a three pack a day 
smoker and he lives in a town where men eat meat and potatoes and that's the way 
they like it. After George had his procedure, his lovely wife and beautiful 
daughter returned from their luncheon to claim their lord and master, only to be 
told that the blockage was too great. The angioplasty tube could not penetrate 
the garbage, and nothing could be done. I knew that this meant George would 
probably be having a bypass operation.

In a bypass procedure, the blocked portion of artery is removed and replaced 
with a piece of vein taken from the leg. This sounds fine, but the heart has to 
be stopped, and it is not an easy organ to get at. In order for the green team 
to work on the heart, they must go through the sternum, that large flat bone in 
the middle of the chest. It has to be sawn up the middle and the ribs spread to 
the side. This is known to medical persons as "cracking the chest", a most 
violent act, and George and his little family were a little concerned at the 
prospect of their middle-aged husband and father having his thorax ripped open 
by masked strangers. I felt lucky by comparison, but still wanted to be 
elsewhere.

My turn with the masked men came the next morning. I was taken to a room filled 
to overflowing with some of the most impressive machines I had ever seen. A huge 
flouroscope dominated one side of the room, and several large computer monitors 
sat on steel desks at the opposite side. An anaesthetist minded his corner niche 
of alchemy and tubes, while an extremely efficient nurse named Bonnie shaved and 
abraded parts of my chest and legs, the better to make electrical contact with 
the dozens of electrodes she then stuck to me. Additionally, there was a large 
patch taped to my back to electrically ground me out, and two smaller patches, 
stuck to the center and side of my chest. I asked what they were, and she said 
they were attached to a defibrillator, so that if my heart went into arrhythmia, 
they could just bring me out of it. You mean jump-start me, I thought.

Then she tied my hands to the table and the anaesthetist put me to sleep.

Two hours later, I awoke and was returned to my bed. My wife told me that they 
had threaded several long wires into my heart through the large vein running 
beside my groin. Using the wires, they had electrically "looked" at my heart and 
stimulated it to go into the offending rhythm. They found the source of the 
arrhythmia, a spot high on the side of my right ventricle, which was introducing 
bad karma into the pacemaker tissues of the heart muscle. Using another wire 
powered by radio frequency energy, the Doctor "zapped" the nasty electrical node 
into oblivion. It was gone. Apparently, I had been fixed.

Three days earlier, I didn't even know that I had a life-threatening heart 
abnormality, and now it was gone. Had it happened ten years ago, the medical 
procedure would not have existed. If the problem area had been in the left 
ventricle and not the right, the equipment was not sufficient for the job. In 
either case, I would have been put on drug therapy, probably for the rest of my 
life. But such was not the case. I was free and clear. I felt exhilarated. I 
wanted to leave the hospital right then, but the cardiologist wanted two tests 
done the following day and then I could leave.

The first test was a stress test. I was made to run on a treadmill until near 
exhaustion and then recline until I recovered, all the while hooked to a heart 
monitor. The second test was an echocardiogram, which is essentially an 
ultrasound of the heart. This allows them to see if there are any physical 
abnormalities with the heart itself. The Doctor pronounced me well, sent me 
home, and then left for his own vacation.

After I was home, I reflected on the past four days. Had I really had a minor 
near-death-experience, or was it just what happens when the brain begins to shut 
down and die? When a heart dies, there is pain and suffering. The brain has no 
nerve endings of its own, so maybe when it dies, all of the memories and saved 
experiences and smells turn off and collapse one by one. The brain chooses all 
the best feelings and goes through them one more time, like people do when they 
move out of their childhood home. A final nostalgic float through the faded 
moments of our lives. Maybe the old hippie maxim says it best -- "Death is the 
best trip of all. That's why you should save it for last".
John Spooner


Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven 
but Nobody Wants to Die
by Chuck Blade

Prologue
Mother Earth has been a difficult mistress. Through a fortuitous sequence of 
cosmic events and an advantageous passage of time she has sired countless rich 
and diverse kingdoms like no other planet in this solar system. Probably like no 
other in this galaxy; possibly the universe.
After billions of years of evolutionary shenanigans we Homo Sapiens arrived 
without much fanfare. By possessing smaller teeth, less body hair, and a larger 
brain mass, we distinguished ourselves from our Homo Erectus kin. Meagre talents 
from which to shape a world class carnivore to be sure. Yet from these humble 
beginnings we have emerged as the dominant species, far surpassing nature's 
modest intentions for us, climbing to the top of the food chain and manifesting 
our own destiny by altering that of every other life form on the planet. A zero-
sum game that has driven the evolution of the human animal: we win, nature 
loses.
Although, perhaps as a final measure of her largess, Mother Earth concealed 
within our design her most ambiguous gift. A dispensation that, once revealed, 
would lead us to usurp her supreme authority and subjugate her, in perpetuum, to 
a life of servitude and disgrace.
Conjecture will forever cloud the exact origins; the when, where, and why we 
alone are aware of ourselves, but once self-consciousness dawned upon us it 
eventually allied itself closely with another singular human trait, that of 
invention, and mankind began in earnest to fill his world with meaning.

Somewhere deeply embedded in the redundant neural- circuitry of our brains there 
lies hidden our first experiences with that incipient consciousness and the 
consequent horrific recoiling from it's grave and unknowable implications.
Or maybe we were visited thousands of years ago by an alien master race more 
evolved than us? Bioengineered lifeforms interfacing with extremely complex 
micromicrotechnology, exposing our future to us and sending us hurtling on a 
path forward with our gaze forever heavenward. Benevolent alien gods who showed 
us the way and are out there still.
Eventually we would develop some pretty sophisticated thought systems on our own 
to buffer ourselves from the horror vacui. Not merely explanatory thought 
either, but a systematic logic which crashed like a wrecking ball into the 
pantheon of the gods and discredited many of their creationist hoaxes.
Yet, since then, and for now, Mother Earth has had the last laugh. By building 
in a design obsolescence, she insured that all her progeny would have a 
circumscribed mortality. Only so much life and then death. Regardless of all 
things. The only thing you can be certain about is Death. Your death. My death. 
Or can you?

Desideratum Futurum
"As human knowledge and medical technology continue to expand in scope, people 
considered beyond hope of restoration (by today's medical standards) will be 
restored to health. (This historical trend is very clear.) The coming control 
over living systems should allow fabrication of new organisms and sub-cell-sized 
devices. These molecular repair devices should be able to eliminate virtually 
all of today's diseases, including ageing, and should allow for repair and 
revival of patients waiting in cryonic suspension. The challenge for cryonicists 
today is to devise techniques that will ensure the patients' survival."
From CRYONICS: A PUBLICATION OF THE ALCOR LIFE EXTENSION FOUNDATION. Volume19:1
A little over thirty years ago a book, authored by Bob Ettinger, entitled "The 
Prospect of Immortality", took hold of Fred Chamberlain's imagination and 
wouldn't let go. The idea of life extension had been around for some time, the 
suspended animation of astronauts during deep space voyages in science fiction 
novels and film, but here was a book that was truly visionary. Informed of the 
most current experimental sciences, optimistic about their egalitarian utility 
and convinced of the profound changes in the human condition they would 
inevitably render, it became the bible to a small group of Californians who 
organized themselves into the Cryonics Society of California.
Dissatisfied with lack of receptiveness and misrepresentation, Fred Chamberlain 
and his wife Linda incorporated in 1972 and the Alcor Society for Solid State 
Hypothermia was born.
Initially Alcor resources were those of the Manrise Corporation. Things were 
tough in the early years, despite the exciting possibilities cryonics offered 
for mankind, Alcor could boast only a membership of five. By the late seventies 
Alcor members had become closely associated with the Free Enterprise Institute, 
the self-proclaimed old guard of the American Idea and curators of the great 
American civilization.
There were few suspensions during the early eighties and those were contracted 
to Trans Time Inc., which in turn delegated the actual procedures to Cryovita 
Laboratories.
In 1988 a precedent-setting case before the California Supreme Court established 
cryonics as a legitimate practice and raised public awareness about the company. 
Predictably memberships began to increase. In 1980 there were twenty members, in 
1985, fifty, and by 1990 over three hundred.
Having outgrown their offices, and worried about impending natural disasters in 
California, Alcor considered moving its operation. Finally the Riverside City 
Council, vehemently opposed to animal experimentation, shut down almost all of 
Alcor's research. By 1994 it was decided to move and, appropriately, Phoenix was 
the chosen location.
This move caused divisions with the ranks of the ALCOR army. Some long-standing 
members who criticized the move were threatened with expulsion; others just 
left. On the surface this strife seems puzzling. As a non-cryonicist even I can 
see the logic precipitating the move. It wasn't until I had nearly completed my 
research on this story that I came across an entry in an article discussing "The 
Information Theoretic Criteria for Death" (discussed later) where the author, 
Ralph Merkle, strongly criticized current cryonicists and ALCOR in particular 
for not countenancing the theory.
(In fact he revealed that ALCOR had in effect muzzled its members from debating 
the theory and threatened expulsion to those who did not abide. Mike Darwin, a 
long-standing member and researcher was expelled for just that reason but in 
their History page on their web site they claim an amicable split).
A "Patient Care Trust" was formed in the spring of 1997, within Alcor, as a 
separate financial entity, for fiduciary security and accountability. A new 
service corporation, BioTransport, Inc. is currently under consideration for a 
number of roles as a "Corporate partner" for Alcor, expanding on the role 
earlier served by Cryovita Laboratories.
Impressive growth and progress for a foundation that claims to be a non-profit 
corporation.

Resurrecting a Cow from Hamburger
You have just been pronounced clinically dead. Your Alcor Alert Bracelet 
notifies the attending doctor to call in the Mobile Response Team. They arrive, 
advise your grieving family of the changes in your will permitting them to seize 
your body. They produce an affidavit claiming Alcor as the irrevocable 
beneficiary of your life insurance policy and fly your mortal remains to 
Scottsdale, Arizona.
Before you arrive the Response Team is stabilizing your condition. They inject 
you with medication and nutrients to protect cellular damage and the cooling 
process begins. The begin CPR. By Alcor's definition you're not dead, just 
terminally ill. They will be working swiftly to minimize the effects of 
ischemia, a deadly anaemia that sets in when the blood vessels constrict and 
vital organs, the most important being your brain, are deprived of oxygen.
Back at Alcor HQ administrators are contacting your insurance company advising 
them of the urgency of the situation. Being the sole and irrevocable 
beneficiaries of your policy they negotiate full payment within thirty days thus 
insuring timely and adequate funding for your suspension.
According to the terms of your membership only your head will be cryonically 
preserved so upon your arrival a team of trained technicians begins the delicate 
operation of severing your head from the body. Your family is notified that if 
they wish they can take possession of your headless remains for burial or 
cremation once the necessary tissue samples are taken and the data stored in 
their database so that a future nanotechnology can rebuild you.
In the "dewar" room the blood is drained from your head and a cryoprotectant is 
pumped in. This is literally an anti-freeze much like the one in your car, only 
a higher concentration, so that your brain doesn't completely ice over during 
suspension. Then you're placed in a Dewar, basically a giant thermos filled with 
liquid nitrogen and you wait.
You wait until a future technology is developed that can repair the damage done 
during prolonged suspension. Some inevitably occurs. A future technology that 
can rebuild you cell by cell, tissue by tissue, organ by organ. A future 
technology that has solved troubling issues of disease, ageing and tissue 
rejection. A future technology that is capable of reproducing the structures 
that encode for memory and personality so that you will truly be yourself again 
in the future.

Member Profile: Lynn Thomas Sethman
Why three names: Thomas is my maiden name and I want my family remembered.
D.O.B.: 07/10/25
Job(s)/Volunteer Work: Former hospital volunteer; now nutrition and self-help 
for friends and family.
Educational background: 2 yrs junior college.
Best feature: Like to help people.
Worst feature: Can't tolerate intolerance.
Favourite books: Non-fiction health books.
Book you are currently reading: A Cure for Cancer; I usually read magazines.
Favourite non-cryonics magazine: Let's Live and Life Extension magazines.
Favourite Movie: The Way We Were.
Favourite TV Show: Law and Order.
Religion: Cryonics.
Most-prized possession: My privacy.
Most-prized possession you've arranged to have upon reanimation: None, because 
there's nothing I ever want to see again.
Personal philosophy: I want to feel I'm in charge of my own destiny.
Immediate goal upon reanimation: I'd like to have my body and intelligence 
redesigned.
Achievement you are most proud of: That I'm at this age and still have a useful 
energetic attitude.
Personal strength: Enthusiasm
Personal weakness: Energy
Happiest memory: Going to Europe.
Greatest fear: A snafu in my suspension.
Why are you a cryonicist: Because cryonics gives me a comfort zone. Because this 
way, I don't have to think about death in the same way I did before.

The Last Immortal Pt. 1
Dr. Jonas Cordair sat listlessly at his console in the lone office of Rivivo 
Labs Inc. A noticeable resignation dulled his usual precise movement. Outside 
his office window a synthetic rain shower splashed methodically. He had been 
staring for a quarter hour now at the same screen as if he were trying to bring 
something into focus. The liquid crystal monitor mutely returned his gaze. 
Reflexively he tabbed to its telepresence program, C.U.C.Me, and despite knowing 
there was no one else in the building he nevertheless stepped through all the 
remote locations in sequence.
Each was the same: a grey and empty perspective of corridor. He paused briefly 
at each screen, listening for the last time to the ambience of vacant hallways 
and dark rooms. Sensing his mood the room lights brightened. Finally he arrived 
at the only view that mattered now. In front of him lay the nearly completed 
form of the company's final reanimate. He was seeing through the eyes of BotViv, 
his android directing the operation, providing the off-line support for the 
legion of nanodes currently being deployed inside the patient's brain.
"How are you doing, Viv?"
"We're approaching 95% completion of the third phase Jonas. You'll be pleased to 
know that we've removed every last molecule of cryoprotectant and CellScan 
returned a promising report on sub-cellular organelle integrity."
"Details please."
This was the final phase of the protocol and most crucial. Trillions of 
nanomachines, one per cell, were conducting molecular repair of the cells, using 
the architecture of healthy cells as a template.
"Less than 1ppm of lysosome enzyme detected. Less than 0.0001% protein 
denatured. Structural preservation is 98% although there's been 5% drop in 
information retrieval."
"Why the discrepancy?"
"Vivian will run an ITC It'll take few minutes."
"That's fine, Viv. Give me the results as soon as you can."
Dr. Cordair returned to his office and retrieved the members file and studied 
the pertinants:
1998: patient (Chuck Blade) enters cryonic suspension.
2025: Cryoscan reveals irregular CPA concentration gradient. Damaged tissue 
flagged with radioactive isotope.
2050: Patient Trust Fund exhausted.
2055: Revivo Labs Inc. merges with Stillife.
2098: Bioengineering supplants cryonics and micro-technology.
2099: Member reanimation begins.
2101: Revivo Labs Inc. goes into receivership.
2102: Final reanimation (Chuck Blade) completed.
BotViv came back on line.
"Jonas, ITC results indicate Nanodes 1011001 through 1101010 were operating at 
an efficiency of 103% resulting in some plastic changes at the synaptic level 
during Stage 2 of CPA removal."
"Implications?"
"Short term memory will not be recovered and propreoceptive capabilities will be 
compromised although he shouldn't suffer any significant loss of function."
"Thanks Viv."
"Dr. Cordair."
Botviv's formal address startled him. He had programmed her to use his Christian 
name when they were alone.
"Yes."
"Now that we have reached the terminal revivification what will become of me?"
"I've submitted a writ of purchase with our creditors. I'd like to purchase you 
and bring you home with me."
"I would like that very much Dr. Cordair but you know as well as I do that the 
likelihood of that happening is very, very remote."
"I'll do everything in my power Viv to prevent anything from happening to you. I 
promise."
There was a long, uncomfortable silence.
"Cellular repair has been completed doctor. I'll begin flushing out all 
nanomachines and the patient should be ready for revival in fifteen minutes."

A Few Questions
Subject: 
Re: cryonics
Date: 
Mon, 21 Sep 1998 19:44:18 -0800
From: 
"Ralph C. Merkle" <merkle@merkle.com>
To: Chuck Blade <claudio@infinet.net>
CC: merkle@proxy3.ba.best.com
Glad to hear you're interested in cryonics. My web page at 
http://www.merkle.com/cryo provides a quick overview and links to further 
reading (in case you haven't already seen it).
At 05:41 PM 9/21/98 -0700, Chuck Blade wrote:
>1) What is a cryonic definition of death?
See http://www.merkle.com/cryo/techFeas.html#CRITERIA
>2) Given a sufficiently advanced technology could you describe the procedure 
for the revivification of a person from cryonic suspension?
See http://www.merkle.com/cryo/techFeas.html#REPAIR
>3) Are there any known or hypothesised irreversible effects from a long term 
cryonic suspension?
I am not aware of any mechanism that would cause information theoretic death 
that is supported by present evidence, see 
http://www.merkle.com/cryo/techFeas.html#FREEZING. Storage at liquid Nitrogen 
temperatures of tissue for about 30 years has been done, with no evidence of 
deterioration over that time period.
>4) Regarding the Information Theoretic Criteria of Death; do we not also need 
to know, apart from position, the charge and spin the atoms of the brain possess 
in order to be confident about the preservation of memory and personality 
structures?
see http://www.merkle.com/cryo/techFeas.html#note5
>5) Could you describe some of the minimal changes that occur during 
restoration?
See the section titled "We'll use the conservative approach," and in particular 
the last two paragraphs of that section.
>6) Given a feasible and affordable nanotechnology how long would it take to 
rebuild someone?
I very conservatively estimated three years in the paper. I expect that 
substantially faster would be feasible. See, for example, 
http://nano.xerox.com/nanotech/convergent.html
>7) What are STM's?
See http://nano.xerox.com/nano and follow some links about STM's and SPM's
>8) I have read that short-term memory is not preserved during cryonic 
suspension. What is the verdict for motor memory and autonomic nervous function? 
Am I going to have to learn how to walk again and think every heartbeat and 
breath?
Long term motor memory should be preserved as well as long term memory, as it 
appears that the basic mechanisms are similar. In general, the kind of medical 
technologies required to reverse freezing injury will be able to
reverse other injuries, resulting in a healthy human. There is some speculation 
that neuro-preservation, because it results in loss of spinal information, would 
require some retraining of basic motor skills. This point is debated.
>9) Assuming that future technologies are both powerful and affordable enough to 
revivify the terminally ill in cryonic suspension isn't it safe to assume that 
other bio-technical advances preclude the need to do this?
There is some debate about this point, as it requires making specific 
assumptions about the precise capabilities of future medical technologies.

>10) Will you choose cryonic suspension when your time comes?
I'm signed up with Alcor. See http://www.alcor.org
>Thank you for your time and consideration.

When Is Dead not Dead?
On the web Ralph Merkle's name is synonymous with current cryonic theory. I 
queried three other senior members of ALCOR but he was the only one good enough 
to respond. If you haven't figured it out by now, cryonics is the science of 
preserving the dead although the sensitive intellects at ALCOR prefer to call 
you terminally ill. This isn't just PC weasel speak mind you, their point is 
that if you had a coronary, say in the year 1898, the medical know how of the 
day couldn't have done a thing to save your life yet today a heart attack 
doesn't mean you have to die because today's medical advances can safe your 
obese, cholesterol saturated hide and all it's clogged arteries so that you can 
enjoy a fuller, longer life. So we shouldn't call you dead just because today's 
medical knowledge says so when a future technology will be able to solve the 
problem of death that we can't right now. You see dead isn't dead. We're all 
just terminally ill.
This semantic slight of hand undoubtedly has the positive psychological effect 
of helping erase possible common sense doubts we may have about cryonic 
suspension. If you're dead you're dead but if you're just ill then maybe you can 
be cured.
ALCOR is selling immortality. For a mere $120,000.00 you can have your whole 
body suspended. If you're financially constrained then $50,000.00 buys you a 
Neuro-suspension. That's just your head. An extra $10,000.00 is levied to non-
residents of the USA. Hardly clearing house prices but what value do you place 
on your life? Should you die and your suspension arrangements are only completed 
after your legal death, a $25,000.00 surcharge is applied.
Not surprisingly the conundrum of a concise definition of death is addressed 
using the ubiquitous metaphor of information. This definition is called the 
Information Theoretic Criteria of death. A person is dead if their memories, 
personality, hopes, dreams, etc. have been destroyed in the information 
theoretic sense. That is, if the structures in the brain that encode memory and 
personality have been so disrupted that it is no longer possible, in principle, 
to restore them to an appropriate functional state then the person is dead.
Just what the structures are, that encode memory, personality, anxiety, in short 
what makes us human, is not well understood. Rather, Information Theory Criteria 
of death assumes that knowledge of the co-ordinates of each and every atom in a 
persons brain can be used to determine (with absolute finality) whether memory 
and personality were destroyed or preserved but not expressed.
In short, the ITC of death asserts that the essence of our individuality, that 
which makes me - Chuck Blade - and differentiates me from everyone else, is 
solely a unique arrangement of atoms in my brain. So my fondness for 
scatological humour, my dislike of American TV melodrama, my ambivalence toward 
fashion are all duly encoded in a specific arrangement of atomic particles. If 
Paul feels the same way about American television then we would share a 
congruent atomic arrangement there but if he was definitive about his love of 
fashion then the atomic array would be a close match except maybe for the 
positioning of a hydrogen atom or two.
This insinuation of the computer metaphor upon our understanding of the mind is 
not just reductive but a reversal of subject and modifier. The metaphor that the 
computer is an extension of our nervous system seems very functional as far as 
metaphors go but by reporting the vast phenomenology of the human mind as a 
certainty based upon a computational analogue of it is logically suspicious not 
to mention insulting. Perhaps this is a trifling matter. I'm squabbling over the 
position of a few atoms while standing in the Hall of the Immortals, and maybe I 
don't know my quanta from a Quaalude, but it was my understanding that it is 
impossible to exactly determine at any given instant or by a single operation 
more than one magnitude or quantity, i.e. velocity, position, etc, of an 
electron. This is called the Indeterminancy Principle. If we can't define the 
electrons with certainty then the (quantum) state of the atom cannot be known. 
If the atomic state is uncertain how can we combine them into molecules? How are 
we going to put poor Humpty back together again?

Eternity in a Nanochip
The emerging science of nanotechnology promises to build microminiaturized 
"machines" small enough to be injected into the blood stream in order to repair 
all kinds of cell damage, whether it is caused by ice crystals, age, or illness. 
As it stands now nanotech only exists in computer simulations. The mind boggles 
when considering the super sophisticated code that must be written for 
microscopic machines performing precise operations at the sub-atomic level. 
These robots must also be self-replicating and carry with them smaller computers 
to co-ordinate their functioning.
These tiny machines replicate in astronomical numbers. Starting with one 
replicator, a copy is assembled in about a thousand seconds, the two replicators 
then build two more in the next thousand seconds and so on. In less than a day, 
they would weigh a ton. In two days they would outweigh the Earth. In four hours 
after that they would exceed the mass of the sun and all the planets combined.
What happens when one of them crashes?
The success or failure of cryonics is dependent upon the successful development 
of a nanotechnology that must in turn be affordable. We are reassured of this 
once again by analogy to the microchip. ALCOR believes it will subject to the 
same economics of scale causing nanotech to plummet in price.
I'm dubious about the affordability of a technology that could deliver us once 
and for all from death and offer unlimited, perfect, replications of ourselves. 
Hypothetically speaking, if we knew the molecular structure and atomic co-
ordinates of a car couldn't we manufacture that too? Wouldn't nanotechnology 
have serious economic implications upon the corporately controlled means of 
production?
And this is going to be affordable?
When a member chooses a whole body suspension two thirds of the money ALCOR 
receives goes into a Patient Care Fund, to maintain and eventually restore 
people who are in suspension. Under the heading "Who Will Unfreeze Our Frozen 
Patients?" in the ALCOR newsletter I received, the language is less than 
reassuring. The determination to revive it's patients will be strong because 
"those patients will still be ALCOR patients" and "ALCOR will still be staffed 
by ALCOR members many of whom will have friends or loved ones in suspension 
depending on them." Finally they claim that so long as the present management 
are vulnerable to disease, accident, or ageing, "their own lives may depend on a 
powerful, ethical organization."
Finding contrary and skeptical discussion on the web concerning cryonics proved 
difficult. Few people seemed willing to express incredulity on the subject, as 
if their own death was being held in the balance. I did come across a BBS 
entitled "The Skeptics Page" and it was here, in a debate between a cryonicist 
and a skeptic, that it was pointed out that ALCOR, it's soft focus ethics 
notwithstanding, is under no obligation whatsoever to revive you in the future 
but that this must be undertaken by a relative (will there be any left alive?) 
or a philanthropic organization (The Church of The Former Day Cryonicists?) or 
some other interested party (your creditors).
Regarding your financing plans, ALCOR encourages you to seek out an insurance 
company amenable to the concept of cryonics (and they do provide with a list) 
making them the sole beneficiary of the policy, which only pays for your 
suspension not your reanimation.
"Cryonics gives me the possibility of surviving indefinitely, living almost 
forever. What could be more wonderful than that?" - Statement by an ALCOR 
member.

The Last Immortal Pt. 2
Dr. Cordair stood in the Dewar room watching BotViv make the final preparations 
for Chuck Blade's revival. The unadorned, grey concrete walls of the room 
reflected the light of the sodium bulbs giving a dull inanimate ambience to the 
proceedings and created a sound proof chamber in which all that could be heard 
was the crunching of BotViv machine computations and the dim crackling of the 
fixtures overhead..
He preferred to be in the room himself, rather than through the telepresence of 
BotViv, convinced that this helped soothe the patient and minimize their 
confusion and fear. He was in fact not needed at all, Vivian was programmed to 
perform the resuscitation operation herself, but he assumed his commanding role 
at the crucial moment, when the thermodynamics of the operation began to reverse 
itself leading to serious cooling injury, instructing her to accelerate the 
warming process.
During previous similar operations he had adopted a solemn air, the benevolent 
doctor executing his grand masterpiece, but today a grave and brooding attitude 
clung to him, despite the miracle he was about perform, and would not shake 
loose.
"The patient is ready for devitrification Dr. Cordair."
"Proceed Vivian."
Chuck Blade felt a gradual and languid movement upward through some kind of 
viscous solution. A greyish light began to slowly saturate his field of vision, 
seeping in from the edges, smearing it with blotches of varying opacity. Ahead 
of him he could discern a gradually diminishing horizon. Now he was sure he was 
moving towards it. He began to sense that this had all happened before. For an 
instant he saw himself lying unconscious by the side of a road, his car wrapped 
around a telephone pole. He began to struggle against this amorphous enclosure 
he was in, trying desperately to break through to the surface but his body 
wouldn't obey. It was inert and lifeless. He began to scream but he heard no 
sound. The lights were growing dimmer and he felt himself being dragged back 
into a cold and dark tomb.
"Devitrification has started, Dr. Cordair."
"Introduce 250cc of Metamorphide and accelerate warming by a factor of 10."
Suddenly Chuck felt an implosion, a soft punch delivered deep inside his head, 
and waves of warm sensation radiating outward from the center of his skull. He 
had broken to the surface and could hear muted sounds reverberating endlessly.
"Welcome to the future Mr. Blade. How do you like it?"
Voices. He could discern human voices. His body felt huge and disproportionately 
massive. He tried to move but couldn't. He flashed back to the roadside; the 
scene now peopled with bystanders, policemen and paramedics. He was on a gurney: 
his body discernible by the outline under the blanket that completely covered 
him.
"Re-animate seizure, Dr. Cordair."
"Give him 25cc of Integratol and start him on the Nutri-Drip."
The convulsions gradually died down and Chuck felt an incredible hunger and 
thirst. His vision had cleared. He was in a cold grey room. A man stood over him 
talking.
"...you probably feel as though your body is heavy and larger than it actually 
is. Don't be alarmed. We do have some time to help you adjust to this. How are 
you feeling?"
"Where am I?"
"You are in the Dewar room of Revivo Labs Inc. We have just brought you out of 
cryonic suspension. The year is 2102. Welcome to the future Mr. Blade."

The Cryonic Manifesto
We are cryonicists because we choose to be optimistic rather than pessimistic 
about the future. We understand that what is commonly called death is almost 
always nothing more than a physician stating that he is unable to immediately 
restore a person to life: that this decision as to when a person dies will vary 
from physician to physician, place to place, and time to time.
We are cryonicists because we know that what we are doing is right. We don't 
know if what we are doing will work; but we know that it is the proper and moral 
action to take.
We are cryonicists because we know that each of us is responsible for his own 
life and survival, that if we do not take action to defend our lives, no one 
else will. Being cryonicists puts us back in control of our lives: no longer are 
we under an absolute, inescapable death sentence. We believe that it is better 
to fight than to surrender, and we will not give up solely on the basis of 
someone else admitting their impotence.
Distilled from the Why We Are Cryonicists newsletter.

Epilogue
The will to life is certainly not unique to the human species. All creatures 
embody this drive from mammals to microscopic organisms. Few humans consider 
themselves to be just another manifestation, a higher order mammalian one, of 
the life force that drives the planetary engines of creation. We are free after 
all. It is the rest of the planet that remains a slave to the capricious laws of 
nature. Our survival isn't based on conditions of fitness nor is it dictated by 
food supply. Disease has come under our control as well and may soon be 
eradicated. But death lingers on, stubbornly refusing us the rightful 
inheritance of the self-conscious: immortality.
One thing we can be sure of is that, as a result of our incessant exploitation 
of our unique talents, we stand upon a paradoxical threshold defined, on the one 
hand, as the limit of our mismanagement of this planet and, on the other hand, 
as a frontier to a hopeful yet uncertain future. The paradox deepens with irony. 
Our technologies put us in this precarious situation and our technologies will 
deliver us from it with their ultimate promise. Then we'll be done with that 
bitch, Mother Earth, and her nagging demands for attention and her conditional 
schemes of harmonic co-existence.
Oh, the promise? Eternal life, of course.


The Last Immortal: The End
Chuck Blade stood outside the front doors of Revivo Labs Inc. shaking 
involuntarily with a palsy from head to foot. A condition, the doctor explained, 
due to the resistance of the myelin sheaths to cryoprotectant absorption. As a 
result the conducting fibres of his neurons had suffered architectural damage. A 
condition, the doctor explained, he would eventually bring under control with 
therapy.
The world before him was alien. Nothing like the earth he remembered a hundred 
years ago. There was no visible sun yet a painfully bright light shined, 
extinguishing all shadow, and giving every object a surreal and exaggerated 
animation. Everything seemed unnaturally quiet. Cars passed without a sound. A 
low-grade anxiety began to uncoil from within him.
He struggled towards a row of benches. He had no sense of his movement. He had 
to keep his head down and watch every unsteady step. Having to think through 
every footfall. He began to sweat from the effort and rivulets of cold 
perspiration ran down his back. Finally the feet of the bench came into view and 
he collapsed down into the wooden slats misjudging the distance and impacting 
with a crash that sent a shock of pain vibrating up his spine.
Sitting now he tried to regain his composure and fight the paranoia that was 
crowding him. He felt exhausted from the short walk. His head jerked 
spasmodically from side to side making it difficult to focus on anything. He saw 
people, beautiful people, god-like in their physical perfection, walking past. 
They looked then looked away when he tried to meet their gaze. Suddenly he 
realized there were no birds in the sky, or the trees.
He jumped at the sound of a young girl's voice. The shrill pitch of her words 
rang painfully in his ears.
"Look Mommy, it's a reanimate."
Without a word her mother pulled her to her side. As they were quickly walking 
away the girl looked over her shoulder and sang a rhyme to him.
"Reanimate, reanimate, 
why don't you admit it.
You're lost in this world of ours
And you'll never make it."
He slumped down on the bench feeling nauseous. He tried to focus on something to 
stabilise himself. His thoughts raced madly out of control, gone before he could 
make sense of them. He remembered he had been clutching the card the doctor had 
given him before he left the building. Chuck tried to steady his hand while he 
read:
Congratulations on your successful resuscitation. Cryonics has given you back 
your life so that you can live happily and learn, and explore up to the borders 
of the Universe. You already have a big advantage in the future because you 
understand what technology is and how it may develop. Don't worry, you're not 
alone. Other cryonics patients should be emerging with you to explore a New 
World full of exciting possibilities. Good Luck. 

Chuck Blade



Born Again
by Ridge Rockfield
The bus rounds the corner a little too fast. He can see a bend in the river in 
the gorge below, and the fear rises in his gut. There is no guardrail and when 
the bus's fat ass slides out in the greasy downhill turns he wishes he had a 
wheel to hold onto, a soother he could grip.
(Is it his imagination or are there people waiting on the roadside and scattered 
along the high cliffs watching all of this?)
Everyone else in the bus seems unconcerned about the bus's erratic handling, so 
when the rear right tire blows with a gunshot he is surprised by the sudden 
cries of fright. He, however, is expecting it, even thinking he deserves this 
for being so far from home. The bus slews lazily while the driver strains to 
straighten into the skid, but the grade is sharp and falling and the road is 
curving out from under the bus.
(There are people and they are naked. It looks like some have tails.)
The silence is remarkable. The river below glints in the sun. Heat rises from 
the red rocks of the canyon. The bus tips over and the passengers riding on top 
slide off and cartwheel down the flinty slope and over the first set of treeless 
bluffs. They are gone without a sound.
He is standing and steps out of the rear door which has popped open and the bus 
is falling away at the exact moment of his departure, everyone else on their way 
down to a horrible death. He stands on the road's edge beside the desperate 
skid-marks that extend invisibly out over the precipice. From below, a growing 
cloud of dust rises in the air. He hears the faraway sounds of metal separating 
from metal, the steel body of the bus breaking itself to pieces on rock.
(They are hiding, though he can hear scrambling on the slopes above the road. 
Low mutterings and guttural talk reach his ears.)
He is frightened and tired, but cannot stop to think and so begins to walk and 
walk. He hikes for days, sleeping under trees and drinking from streams before 
coming to a rural airport on the outskirts of a low, sprawling village. He 
forgets to tell anyone of the bus accident: it was so long ago and entirely 
final. Inside the small terminal, a man watches the minute hand on the clock 
sweep around the face as if it were counting seconds. The time is wrong.
(That man had a tail. It was stuffed in his pants. There was a shit in the 
middle of the washroom floor.)
A Dash-7 sits on the field. He buys a ticket to the next destination. Passengers 
assemble by the rolling stairs and file in to take their seats. The pilot fires 
up the turboprops, and taxis the plane onto the runway. The pilot hits the 
throttle and the plane claws its way into a cerulean sky.
The landscape is serene and rational. The patterns of drainage and settlement 
are clear and apparently self-regulating. Several passengers are wearing track 
suits and reading paperbacks. He notices for the first time that his clothes are 
torn and dirty, and that scratches and bruises are visible under his torn 
clothing. He is hungry.
When the left engine quits, it is more of the same, a here-we-go-again type 
thing, but he doesn't dare laugh, even when a passenger ahead turns to him and 
shrugs his shoulders and rolls his eyes. It is the man from the airport, the 
clock-watcher. The engine coughs and dies, and the left nacelle bursts into 
flames.
The plane rolls over into a steep dive and the pilot pulls the nose up just 
before it hits the deck. The plane skips over the desert and does a front flip. 
The tail section breaks off just forward of where he sits alone. It comes to a 
sudden rest while the rest of the plane turns wing over wing and explodes into 
hot red flame and pitchy smoke.
(Someone is running from the fiery wreckage. The clock-watcher, again. Skipping 
and jumping.)
He is unhurt and unbuckles himself from his seat and runs toward the flaming 
wreckage. He can't get within 40 feet of it, the fire is so intense. A few 
bodies are scattered nearby, but no one is moving. He had marked "Pleasure" on 
the customs form.
He begins to walk again through the yucca-studded desert. Days later he 
scrambles up a dry scrubby ridge to look out over the lonely ocean. The coast is 
empty, and he camps near a cold clear stream that empties into the surf. Early 
the next morning a fishing boat appears in the bay and he flags it until it 
lowers a dinghy. He is rescued by the sun-burnt crew, but he cannot tell his 
tale because no one understands his language.
(The captain doesn't look at him, but winds his watch and chews his tobacco. The 
boat's name is Jesus de Sangre.)
The boat is fishing for yellowfin tuna. The freezer hold is almost full. The 
crew feeds him fish and some fruit. He feels safe, and is given a bunk to rest. 
He falls into a deep sleep. He may have slept one hour or one week, he cannot 
tell when he is jarred awake by the ripping, grating sound of metal on metal 
that shuddders through the entire vessel. He races topside and the crew point to 
the black hulk of a submarine which has surfaced and torn a huge hole in the 
boat's stern. The sub's conning tower sinks back beneath the surface and is 
gone.
The fishing boat founders quickly. The catch of tuna draws a horde of hungry 
sharks which turn their ravenous attention to the floundering crew. He sees the 
captain treading water and smiling and then he disappears in a explosion of 
bloody water and swirling fins. But the sharks leave him alone for he is too 
skinny and floats lifelessly in the water. When they are gone, he assembles a 
raft from cushions and pieces of the wheelhouse.
(The main plank is the boat's transom. Jesus de Sangre in red letters across 
it.)
Days on days pass. The sky refuses to change over the limitless water. A low 
swell sometimes rocks his raft. The salt air and the salt sea drive his dementia 
to new dimensions. He dreams open-eyed that he is dead, but cannot convince 
himself because if he can conceive of his own death, then he must be yet alive. 
But this state of nothingness-
he cannot remember his birth, he cannot remember his name. He can't remember the 
word for the colour that emits the low-frequency sound that laps over him in the 
dark and in the light. Is it in his head or outside? It ends where it begins.
The light ahead is a tunnel in the night, and all four lanes of traffic are 
moving into it at the same speed, 70 miles an hour. The tunnel descends, the 
roar echos inside and the light is green, bouncing off the clean, tiled walls. 
He can't see the other drivers, they are all looking dead ahead as he is, and he 
can't turn his head though he senses he would like to.
(The bus driver, the captain, the clock-watcher.)
Then they are out of the tunnel and are shooting across the high bridge above 
the grass fires in the ravine below. The traffic moves smoothly and quickly, 
there is no point in changing lanes because everyone is moving at the same rate 
and towards the same destination.
The toll collectors sit in the booths and watch the cars move past at 70 miles 
an hour. The drivers roll down their windows and the money is sucked out of 
their hands into the wire baskets. The toll collectors stare out the booths. The 
money flies into the baskets.
(The clock-watcher.)
The descent continues, gradual and constant. The jet airliner coming low over 
the freeway is on its final approach. He ticked the box marked "Pleasure" on the 
customs form. The customs officer stared at him, but did not search him. His 
gifts were hidden in his baggage.
The plane touches down. Fires illuminate the terminal, and throw huge shadows 
over the catwalks. The plane touches down again. Commandos storm the plane and 
shoot the passengers, but miss the terrorists. The authorities thrust guns into 
their dead hands and take pictures. He is watching all of this. Where has he 
seen this before?
"But he was on vacation. He was returning from Cancun!!" I am sorry to say you 
didn't know your husband well at all. He was a murderer and a spy. The dead 
clock-watcher, his eyes half-open and right hand half-closed around an 
automatic.
At dawn, to prove the authorities right, the first wave of troops launch their 
attack on the airport. Machine guns traverse the fields and in the intersecting 
cones of fire the soldiers drop in rows and heaps. High-explosive shells timed 
for air-burst explode above them. He is waiting for his luggage at the carousel 
while all of this happening. He is thinking of a book he wants to read. He is 
tired from the long journey. He gets on the bus for "the trip of a lifetime."
Ridge Rockfield


Lady Dead Freshness versus 
the Greatest Race Driver Who Ever Lived
by William Harper
The following is the full transcript of a conversation which was overheard (and 
recorded) recently at the GOLGOTHA, an after hours red wine and rare cheese 
hangout in Vancouver's vibrant downtown eastside. The atmosphere of the Golgotha 
can best be described as elegantly gloomy with a neo-Christian pagan twist; 
Christ and Mary imagery on the walls and a staff and clientele consisting mainly 
of members of the fast-growing Monk-underground (cool Roman Catholics pushing 
the envelope on their vows and pursuing the late night urban vibe of a world 
class city). The conversation itself begins with TREDWAY and WALLING grabbing a 
corner table. They are not monks themselves; just run of the mill late night 
fringe-types who like a weird place to hang out and shoot the apocalyptic 
breeze. Each is smoking his own Panter mini-cigar and they trade swigs from a 
bottle of cheap red wine.

TREDWAY: So you heard about Wheeler, I guess.
WALLING: Car crash death, right? At least he was the one driving.
TREDWAY: But do you know the key details?
WALLING: You got the inside info?
TREDWAY: It was a year right to the day of the Lady Di thing, right? According 
to Cleo who's like married to his cousin, it was a suicide. There was a note and 
all, but they're keeping it quiet, of course.
WALLING: The guy was kind of obsessed with her. It was a good death, I gotta 
say.
TREDWAY: Wheeler's?
WALLING: No, Lady Fucking Dead Princess. My favorite part was like three days 
later on CNN, after the death but before the stupid funeral. They had this 
computer re-enactment of the death crash, sorta 3-D graphic thing of the BMW or 
whatever it was ricocheting through the tunnel, really vicious impacts off 
cement posts and all, and they're intercutting this with serious crash-test file 
footage, crash-dummies getting mangled to shit in slo-mo, and they're 
intercutting this with HER picture, of course, Lady Dead Princess, smiling and 
so fresh. Real hardcore kinda sado-erotic juxtapositions. That's what people 
liked best about her. There was a pole conducted. What people loved her most for 
was her freshness.
TREDWAY: Very JG Ballard - very CRASH - the book, but not the movie so much.
WALLING: I gotta say though, if you're going to talk about celebrity car crash 
deaths, you can't ignore Ayrton Senna. The celebrity car crash death of all 
time.
TREDWAY: Kind of expected though, don't you think? He was a race car driver.
WALLING: It doesn't matter. May 1, 1994, live world-wide TV audience in excess 
of half a billion people. The best driver maybe of all time leading the field 
into Tamburello, one of the great curves, chased hard by Michael Schumacher 
maybe the second best driver of all time. And then suddenly, totally unexpected, 
Senna's car veers right, barely half a second between total speed and control 
and WHAM!!! hundred and fifty mile side-front impact with cement wall. 
Suspension bolt snaps back and punches a hole through his helmet. Good as dead 
at the scene but they didn't announce it as official until after the race . . .
(At this moment, the conversation is interrupted by one of Golgotha's many 
monks, a small man dressed in the traditional concealing robes.)
MONK: It just so happens I was in Brazil at the time - -
(A brief uncomfortable silence ensues as Tredway and Walling realize they are 
not only being interrupted but that this Monk has been eavesdropping on at least 
part of their conversation.)
MONK: I was doing Jesuit Mission work in the slums of Sao Paolo. Oh, the passion 
of it all. The President quickly declared a three-day period of official 
mourning, and I knew it then, as I bore witness to the deep and common sorrow 
that fused the whole nation.
TREDWAY: What did you KNOW?
MONK: As the twentieth was America's century, so the twenty-first will be 
Brazil's. Such resources, human and otherwise. Such passion. Have you seen them 
play football?
WALLING: Soccer?
MONK: And such music? Spontaneous street celebrations that swallow an entire 
town. Another proud and resilient nation that like America harbors the dark 
secret of slavery at its very historic base. I don't know what it is in the 
horror and redemption of past slavery that so makes for a nation's greatness, 
but the mere fact of it seems inescapable, don't you think?
WALLING: Slavery's hardly unique to America and Brazil. Britain ruled the world 
for a while, and they just sold slaves. They never really were slaves. Serfs 
maybe, but that's a whole different dynamic. Sorry, man, I gotta shoot you down 
on that one. It's a bad argument all around.
(The Monk doesn't reply. A strange silence settles on the conversation for a 
moment.)
MONK: You know whose death troubled me more than Ayrton Senna's ever could?
TREDWAY: Whose?
MONK: Princess Diana. The news of her death - - I remember it like I was there 
at the scene myself. It struck me to my very soul. I felt it then. I still feel 
it now. A lost freshness . . . a certain special freshness that none of us shall 
ever know again in this sad and troubled world. There's a dead princess inside 
us all now and she's never going to go away.
(Another momentary silence.)
WALLING: Are you fucking serious?
MONK: Excuse me?
WALLING: What kind of Celine fucking Dion fans do you take us for? Get out of 
here, Holy Man. Get out of my sight this instant or I'll fucking hammer you.
MONK: Good God!
WALLING: No. Angry fucking vengeful god. Now split, you stupid Christer!
(Walling actually grabs the Monk and shoves him. The Monk scurries off into the 
darkness of the Golgotha ambiance.)
TREDWAY: Asshole.
WALLING: Fucking flake.
TREDWAY: Fucking vagrant. Did you see him try and sneak a swig of our wine? Uh-
oh. Look, he's talking to the bouncer. Quick, finish up.
(Tredway and Walling trade hurried final swigs from their bottle of wine.)
WALLING: But back to Senna. I mean, that crash had to happen. James Dean, Jane 
Mansfield, Marc Bolan - - it's always booze or drugs or just plain bad driving. 
But Senna -
TREDWAY: The guy's coming our way. (To the bouncer) We're leaving, okay.
WALLING: Senna was on a racetrack. He knew the risk absolutely. Roland 
Ratzenberg was killed the previous day on almost the exact same stretch of 
track. The best driver in the world on one of the most demanding curves. If 
Senna couldn't make that turn, nobody could've. As if God himself felt he had to 
suddenly remind us all of what is and isn't physically possible.
TREDWAY: Come on, man, let's go.
(They get up and the conversation slowly fades as they cross the club toward the 
exit.)
WALLING: But Lady fuckin' dead Freshness - she wasn't even driving. Where's the 
fucking glory in that? A drunk chauffeur who'd been hanging out in a lesbian bar 
pretending to drink orange juice . . .
RECORDED AND TRANSCRIBED BY MR. Harper, September 17th, 1998.
William Harper


Coyote on the Duffy Lake Road
by Jack Valiant
The people up in that sparsely populated range where the mountains make the 
transition from the Pacific coast to the British Columbia interior know about 
the spirit some call Coyote. Some people think the trickster, the giver and 
taker of life is a belief, like the legends about the goat people, the beautiful 
people who disguise themselves as fluffy white mountain goats and live in a 
crystal cavern under the emerald skylight. I have only seen this spirit 
incarnated as Coyote once, running brazenly happy along the road down Lillooet 
Lake yapping in the sunlight. True, I have also only seen him once in his other 
legendary incarnation slinking across the Duffy Lake Road in an avalanche area 
glancing over broad-shoulders behind dark ugly pug-face in his resplendent 
wolverine fur. So, He had to know me by the third time around, when he decided 
to move-in on me and really mess my mind in his awesome trickery.
How about a dog? I suggested to Henry.
And after a couple of days he came back from Lillooet with an answer. "There's a 
woman by Cayoosh creek with a litter of reserve dogs - all mixed up and good 
natured mongrels."
How I got the idea for a dog in my head is a mystery, but I could surely guess 
that Coyote unravels his tricks over long uncertain times like a dog napping one 
eye open for approaching prey and always ready to hop to his feet and take a 
walk with the first human being who happens along.
I got to thinking that a puppy would be a great companion for a singular child 
living with his mother and her lover next door. Henry thought I wanted a dog for 
myself. And I thought Henry wanted a dog in his shifting transitory life. Our 
immediate neighbors were all abuzz in that energetic mystery of longing, taking 
and disavowing responsibilities, dreaming, planning, remembering happier dog 
days gone, anticipating.
Arne and I set of in the van late in the afternoon. The sun was plenty hot as we 
climbed through the spring snow banks up the mountain road past Duffy Lake. 
Coming down through steep dry canyon into Lillooet the wind began to blow and 
the sun slipped closer to the darkening ridge along the mighty Fraser River.
The Fraser runs thin, fast and deep past the dry sandy benches of Lillooet town 
sitting up several hundred feet above where Cayoosh Creek empties paying tribute 
from Duffy Lake forty kilometers back up where we'd come from.
"Let's get going before dark," I wished aloud as Henry poured coffee. And we 
headed down to the banks of the Cayoosh to find the woman and her litter. The 
old bitch was waiting too, barking with a friendly wag of her tail as we 
wandered through the yard. One puppy ran about speeding through her world and 
certain playground. We mumbled through formalities questing for our puppy in 
mind. But the woman of the house called, and looked and called again, but but 
but...somehow the puppy we'd come for had vanished beyond earshot. A short 
search, a few phone calls, some waiting, and a chat with the neighbours, it 
became apparent, our puppy was not coming back. She'd run away in a definite act 
of unfamiliar behavior. Coyote had already begun his tricks in earnest.
People were muddled in a mess of surprised disarray and disappointment. The 
puppy we were supposed to have gotten was the fourth out of five and the woman 
intended to keep the last for some relative. After a brief discussion, she 
kindly offered her last puppy in place of our lost promised one.
The second puppy was female, though at that young age not much different than 
the male we'd been promised. She was the last companion to the mother still 
running wild round the yard. Her fur ran through blue-grey curly locks to 
reddish-tan markings and a pure white belly. She lay on her back and laughed. 
Henry cornered her, Arne collared her, and I slipped her into my van.
We departed from Henry and the woman then and drove up Cayoosh Creek passing 
Duffy Lake about midnight. The waters were black in the moonless night save for 
reflections of the snow laying waist deep all around. It was a cold and still 
night of the kind where a voice carries clear and far. Arne carried her on his 
lap, she now beginning to miss the old bitch and no doubt smelling different 
grounds. She moaned softly and wriggled much.
Then came an odd misdirected thought into my road weary mind. "Let's have a rest 
stop past the avalanche zone," I suggested this in thinking somehow that the 
puppy might relax again if allowed out for a sniff of air and a measure of 
bladder relief.
There's a parking area for hikers that's past the avalanche zone where the 
wolverine had appeared the previous summer. I stepped out onto the hard-packed 
snow of the plowed lot by the roadside and opened the rear doors of the van. 
Arne put her down on the floor. She sniffed the cold air, then quicker than you 
can say coyote, she shook-off her collar and bolted past me into the night.
Up over the head-high plowed bank she barreled and was gone into the stilled 
darkness of the night forest. We never caught a glimpse of her again. Coyote was 
laughing for the second time this night at my self imposed foolishness.
What now? What now? What now? I pondered despondency, black humour, frustration, 
humiliation, and played for a delay, any small reprieve from the full acceptance 
that I'd lost the second dog and the not too small matter of a promise made to a 
wee lad neighbouring my home.
Whistle, whistle! Call, call! I kept up the motion, as much for Arne's sake as 
my own. But I just knew the situation was desperate. In the end, she was long 
gone. Gone into the realm of never to be resolved speculation. Any conclusion 
could serve as well as any other. Wolverine. Coyote.
We tried walking on the crust of the waist high snow she had skipped across so 
freely. Broke through every second step and crawled back out of the darkness on 
our winter jacketed bellies, our boots stuffed full with crushed wet snow. We 
got back in the van and redirected headlights through the impenetrable forest 
gloom. We cruised the road in both directions. But she was gone, long gone.
The loss of the second dog in one evening left us pause for thought. Sitting 
parked in the abandoned snowbound lot was one of those maturing life moments 
when, being a man, with a much longer range of adult experience than my teenage 
companion, I knew my duty to carefully prop up Arne's disappointment, sadness, 
confusion. Coyote was really giving us the gears. We waited a full two hours 
there, periodically starting up the van for warmth. It was well into the wee 
hours yet still far from Spring's dawn in that mountain valley. We talked about 
our second puppy's most certain imminent death. The cycle of life and how we'd 
have to prepare for the inevitable deaths of aging family members.
It was getting late. If I stayed until daylight there might be a glimmer of hope 
in finding the puppy. But my schedule wouldn't allow for that, being still three 
or more hours from home and due at work in Vancouver first thing in the morning. 
And I had to gather at least an hour or two of sleep before that inevitable 
grind.
I stepped out of the van and stood beside the dark roadway and puffed a last 
cigarette, ready to give up. A pair of headlights approached from the north and 
slowed. The vehicle was nearly invisible in the darkness, a sleek low black 
pickup truck. It pulled to a stop directly in front of me and the driver's 
window wound down silently. A friendly bearded man inquired from within whether 
I had lost a dog?
Well I just about jumped out of my boots. YES! Yes. Yes.
"Female?" he queried.
"Yup."
"Lovely quiet temperament....She was up the road in the middle of the avalanche 
zone...you're one lucky fellow...here she is!"
The shaggy fellow opened his door, and out climbed a beautiful dog, a large 
shorthaired tan-coloured boxer/pit bull cross of sorts. She was no puppy, in 
fact a full-grown bitch with pendulous nipples hanging from her belly.
"Oh, one more thing....What's her name?"
"Coyo," was the first name that popped into mind.
The black truck rolled away quietly, leaving Arne and I in the road with the 
third dog. She climbed into the van obediently and settled calmly at his feet. 
Off we went again, down out of the gloomy mountain night into the rising dawn 
past Whistler along the treacherous Sea to Sky highway and into the waking city.
Coyo lay on the sofa as I climbed into bed for a fitful couple of hour's 
shuteye. From time to time she moaned softly. Not enough to warrant full 
attention, but just enough to deprive me of restful sleep. Before work, I left 
her with the family next door, the lad thrilled at her calm mature countenance 
and instantly forgetting that it was a puppy that had been promised.
As it would turn out, Coyo only stayed with us a week, but managed to take a 
bite of us all in that short time - metaphysically speaking. Her presence 
brought to light any number of unresolved personal conflicts between myself, 
Arne, Henry, the neighbouring couple, the lad, and more to the point, a 
houseguest we were indulging during that fateful week.
The guest, Mike, is a mad artist of unquestionable talent and obvious 
eccentricity. He'd come back to Vancouver out of the blue from Montreal where a 
failed marriage and alcoholism had reaped a terrible toll on his health and 
person. Having grown up in Vancouver, he hated the city in a very personal way, 
yet he was there to settle an estate. His father had died suddenly leaving Mike, 
a brother, and the father's estranged wife to sort out a lifetime of unresolved 
disputes, fractured relationships, the stuff of legacies.
Henry and I had been alternately enjoying and enduring Mike's frenzied company 
as his past and future relentlessly revealed themselves through a mist of 
Guiness, Jack Daniels, and daily ink sketches, sometimes coloured, sometimes 
starkly black and white. Mike was not at all interested in the new dog, being 
far too entombed in his own existential wrestling. We all went on about our 
daily lives, but the energy within our tiny apartment and close neighbourhood 
was stirred into such a volatile mix as could hold no certain futures. Coyo's 
presence, she of muted expression, silent long looks and nightly moaning became 
the turpentine that finally unglued us all. Things would never be the same.
Since the dog ownership and even more importantly, responsibilities, had never 
been clearly determined, a low-lying stress began to colour the relations of all 
involved. Within a couple of days, Henry and I were red-faced screaming at each 
other over our original misunderstanding about who actually wanted the dog and 
would care for her. The neighbour had her hands full with her wee lad, new lover 
and an intrusive ex-husband, Mike was in Van Gogh land, and Coyo set about 
attaching herself to Arne or anyone else who happened to drop in and visit. She 
seemed to do this purposely to humiliate whoever happened to be acting out their 
own particular frustration since at any time an innocent human could be counted 
on to say to any of us offending residents, "Hey! Settle down. You'll disturb 
the dog...and she's so nice...oooh..." 

By the end of the week, a bed for Coyo had been built at the neighbour's and the 
lad had begun to take a shine to her. Yet, given the social/ mental/ 
organizational instability in all our lives, no one person could be said to have 
taken mastership over the animal. And of course such was the trickery Coyo threw 
into our lives to better see ourselves as the fools we were and are.
After a thoroughly upside down and inside out week, the day of reckoning came. I 
was in the kitchen sitting the dog while the neighbours were out delivering the 
lad for visitation rights with his divorced father. A knock came at the door and 
Mike, in a mild state of inebriation and artistic ecstasy stumbled over to open 
it. His mother stood in the doorway tentatively broaching topics of familial 
concern. Unbeknownst to me, Coyo also got up and investigated the new arrival. 
Since Mike's mother did not know that we' recently acquired a dog, she did the 
sensible thing when confronted by a large animal seeking exit from the doorway 
in which she lingered. She let the dog out..."to go back to its home..." she 
later explained.
A moment later when I noticed Coyo's missing presence, I bolted out the door and 
gave chase, catching sight of her just as she slipped the garden gate open and 
dashed out to the busy sidewalk of 4th Avenue. Around the corner she went and 
across a side street she headed west. I ran after her, calling and waving in a 
terrible echo of the experience of the runaway puppy at Duffy Lake. She stopped, 
turned and looked, then continued on another block. I ran fast, she ran fast. I 
slowed, she slowed. Then, without warning, she suddenly bolted behind a big red 
disposal bin and right onto busy 4th Avenue. She was hit instantly by a minivan 
loaded with an entire Vancouver Asian extended family - from old folks to 
middle-aged to small children. They must have felt quite a bump as they drove 
away, confused faces pressed to the glass.
Coyo lay under a parked car, bleeding slightly and moaning slightly. A 
pedestrian had stopped to help, so I ran back and got the van. With the help of 
more passers by, we lifted the parked car and I scooped her into the back of the 
van and drove off to Broadway to find a vet.
Up and down the street I drove, trying to remember the location of the clinic 
I'd seen so many times before. On the third or fourth pass, I stopped at a 
crosswalk as a kindly looking middle-aged man and his daughter wandered across.
"Excuse me, Sir. I'm looking for the vet...I know he's around here..."
"Yes I am," replied the man. "But I'm closed for business now....what's the 
problem?"
And though he was off-duty and supposed to go shopping with his daughter, the 
man carried Coyo into his clinic, laid her on the table and gave his best 
professional opinion.
"There's barely a scratch on her, but...I'm afraid she's done for...internal 
injuries..."
And thus I stood in the harsh white light of the deserted clinic with the kindly 
man and his saddened daughter as the life slowly ebbed away from the third dog. 
Her pulse slowed, her breathing laboured, a few sharp whimpers and she was gone.
The household settled into a stunned sense of loss, combined with an odd sense 
of relief at the sudden solution to our confusion of the past week. The lad was 
told that Coyo had gone home. We all began to settle into our usual working 
routines, albeit still daily sidestepping the morass of our houseguest's 
alcoholic instability. Not that Mike really should carry any guilt in Coyo's 
death. After all, she was The Trickster! But in any case, late one evening a 
couple of days following the event, Mike came in from the street eating from a 
can with a plastic spoon.
"Where've you been?" I asked perfunctorily.
"Oh, I felt like liver and onions, but I didn't feel like cooking...picked this 
up at 7-11..." He was munching on canned dog food. Make what you will of it....
CODA: The next day, the wee lad's father was bit in the face by a strange dog.
Jack Valiant


Homeless Academic
by Taran R. Grey
A few weeks ago I heard that a couple of guys were going to spend this semester 
living at Simon Fraser University, but not in residence. If these guys are doing 
it out of some brain dead, bohemian, stick-it-to-the-man mentality, they should 
be lobotomized, sterilized, and/or euthanized. There is only one instance when 
becoming a member of the academic homeless is acceptable: when you're dirt poor, 
too proud to ask for help, and too stupid to just get a job and do the best you 
can. For people who fit this criteria, as I did in the summer of '94, here's a 
few jumbled bits of "How-To" insider information.
Location, location, location. Do your research carefully. With all the moving 
that's gone on following the opening of the West Mall Complex and Maggie Benston 
Centre, rooms are vacant and opportunity is high. As well, there are some rooms 
with false ceilings and pseudo-attic type dealies. Stand on a chair, move the 
tiles and look around. You might get lucky. Furnace rooms with adjoining 
stairwells are the best bet. On Friday and Saturday nights you can sleep in the 
open to escape claustrophobia because there aren't many people on campus the 
following mornings.
There are soft brown benches lying around the hallways of the chemistry 
department. They're fairly lightweight, so you can carry them yourself, but it's 
faster to have a friend help you. Place two of them in a staggered fashion and 
you can curl up in the fetal position. Borrow a blanket from your Aunt, tell her 
you need it for packing material. The math department might still have these 
space-age plastic chairs with removable seat cushions; voila, pillow. The pillow 
covering is really abrasive and scratches when you move your head, so remove it 
and put the foam wedge in a couple of Safeway bags. If you don't put the wedge 
in a bag, foam bits will stick in your hair. Sleep with your clothes on, it's 
warmer.
You need three lockers: one for books, one for clothes, and one for stinky 
stuff. Only one locker is allowed per person, so ask your friend to get one too. 
Just find an out of the way locker for your stinky stuff; you don't want to be 
billed if they have to hose it out later.
A Walkman and a rechargeable electric shaver are the only major purchases you 
need to make. The Walkman will be your best friend in the whole world and the 
only person you can really talk to. Get an adapter for it. An electric shaver is 
the fastest way to shave. Find an electrical socket in the bowels of the 
classroom complex to recharge it. If you're careful, it'll be safe.
Cheat on bus fare. Pay five quarters instead of six. Bus drivers can't count 
that high. Never go so far that you can't get back on the same transfer.
Hide your food in many different common room fridges. Geography has the safest, 
business had the worst. Never, never, ever say no to a condiment. HP Sauce is 
expensive stuff and we get it free on campus. It's expensive because it's 
chockablock full of nutritious goodness. Have your fries with mustard and relish 
and ketchup etc. Serious Burgers, now White Spot, used to give out free onion 
bits. There's your vegetables. Nicotine is too expensive to be a food group.
Don't wear a condom. You're not going to be having sex anyways so don't bother.
If you're a people person, you won't be for long. Using public washrooms will do 
that to a guy. A secret I will take to the grave is the locations of the clean 
bathrooms which recessive trait, fecally obsessed, misogynist freaks of nature 
haven't smearing with repugnant graffiti.
Accept the fact that your health will degenerate. Your hair will fall out in 
clumps. Your nose will constantly run, but don't carry around a wad of toilet 
paper in plain view. Eventually you will begin to bond with the sisterhood and 
become one of the few men in the world that understands a woman's pain. Your 
quasi-menstrual cycle will complete it's circuit every two days. When you get 
the shakes, touch your toes.
If you're still living on campus while this is going on, you've lost your mind. 
When you loose your mind, the first thing that goes is the part that tells you 
it's gone, so never act on impulse. For example, if you look at your bloated 
stomach and think you're getting fat and buy Slimfast powder and run out of milk 
so you just eat spoonfuls of powder with Coke to wash it down, just don't O.K.
You should resist the urge to hate all happy, healthy people. It's really 
difficult, but you gotta try.
For entertainment, discover the bookstore. Lougheed Mall doesn't have two 
separate bookstores anymore so that puts a crimp in your potential social life. 
Feel free to fall madly in love with female bookstore employees. They're the 
smartest, sexiest, most beautiful women in the world. Just don't look directly 
at them or you'll die of longing. Besides, after a few weeks of homeless life 
you aren't the most non-threatening (let alone attractive) person alive, so it's 
best to just write resentful poetry.
At first you'll be absolutely terrified of being busted by security. A door will 
open three floors up and you'll tuck your wind-up alarm clock under your packing 
material and hold your breath. By the end of the semester you'll be so jaded 
that when a couple of security guards stand directly overhead and have a lengthy 
conversation about the best lay they've ever had, you'll open one eye then drift 
off to sleep again. Dealing with security is easy. They are either dumb fired 
cops, or dumb wanna be cops. The bigger the Maglight, the stupider they are. One 
Friday night I was treating myself to sleep on a comfy couch beside Mackenzie 
cafeteria. At 3:30 A.M. a guard shook my foot and woke me. "Hey...hey you! Are 
you supposed to be here?" "Yes." He never recovered and I got to go back to 
sleep.
Taran R. Grey can be found at http://www.rockies.net/~sjbj/criticali.shtml




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Barbed Wire is produced by a group of enthusiastic malcontents. This is a short-
term project, a premeditated cultural blip, planned for 12 issues. Original 
illustrations are by Geoff Carter.

This is the FINAL issue of Barbed Wire.
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collection and featuring sound, video and stills by guest contributors.