(e6f4e37l)

His neighbor, trying to be helpful but failing, cornered Bill in the parking lot to explain how cryogenic scientists could freeze his brain in ice until a point in the future when microscopic robots could repair it. Bill daydreamed about all the brains in jars he used to see at school. How he used to wonder whether there were still somehow pieces of individuals inside - scattered fragments of partial dreams or lost memories lodged deep within that dead tissue - or whether this entire archive is immediately erased the moment that the body fails. He began to think of people in a new light; how everyone's just little more than that frightened, fragile brain stem surrounded by meat and physics. Too terrified to recognize the sum of their parts, insulated in the shells of their skulls and lower middle class houses: afraid of change, afraid of decisions, afraid of pain, stuck in traffic listening to terrible music.