CRYEO - PART 3

By the seventh day, Godspeed Airlines was back and running. With Isaac’s help, a simple yet savvy viral campaign had been launched and the surprise resurrection of Devlin Cooper had broken the internet. It was the biggest story on social media by a country mile and yet Dev still hadn’t worked out how to turn on a mobile phone as much as he understood its function and significance as an essential tool of the current century. In the past he would only ever answer calls for a single hour, once every week. He still believed that this simple rule was the best approach for the current year of 2021 and his new phone which hadn’t stopped ringing since Issac helped turn it on for him proved his point perfectly.

From Jeff Bezos to Elon Musk, everyone wanted to meet with Dev to ask him how he had so successfully managed his cryopreservation, but right now, he was busy getting his affairs in order.

Speaking of affairs, Dev had never been a marriage kind of guy, but as he visited the graves of some of his ex-girlfriends, he felt a twinge of sadness. They were good buddies and they’d been part of his story along the way, but now here he was, still only 55 years old (technically 115) and even Isaac wasn’t sure there was a dating app that catered for souls that old, though there were enough freaks (Isaac’s words) that might overlook that concern.

With a new workforce in place and a strict compliance to dress code, Godspeed had skyrocketed on the stock index. Similar to Midas, everything Dev now touched seemed to turn to gold. In this way, nothing had fundamentally changed for him.

"Once a winner, always a winner."

The one question hanging over Dev and the company was an ethical one regarding whether his old fashioned values would bring everything to ruin eventually. In the age of woke, Dev was like a potential walking landmine, threatening to detonate a ruinous bomb each and every time he opened his mouth.

As a figure from the past, he held a special fascination to the contemporary crowd as he could either confirm their prejudices of the old patriarchy that helped shape the inbuilt systematic racism (as they saw it) of corporate America or surprise them with progressive values they doubted he possessed.

“I only know one colour and that’s green.”

But zingy one liners that sounded like something from a Dale Carnegie business seminar would only stave the wolves from the door for so long.

Sitting in his office, he felt free of the constraints of time. As long as he had his office, he believed anything was possible and felt relatively invincible.

But the bigger question for him now was purely existential. Had he woken up to find himself a stranger out of time in his own land? L.P Hartley once said “the past is a foreign country” and right now the only two places that felt familiar to him were his office and the Bell In Hand Tavern and he clung onto them both like a life raft.

Agreeing to a late night talk show interview, Dev was as surprised as the host to find the studio audience give him a standing ovation when he made his entrance. It was becoming apparent that he was fast becoming famous all over again.

“What made you want to do this?”

“Curiosity. Would the future look anything like I imagined it back in 1961.”

“Well, does it?”

“I have to say it’s both more terrifying and fascinating than I predicted it would be.”

Audiences loved him, but the media began to increasingly loathe him. They saw in Dev an opportunity to deride all that was wrong with the American past in human form and he now had a huge target on his back. But he shrugged it off, not believing anyone could touch him. If anything his cryogenic success had made him feel more like a God in many ways, and yet there was still very real human doubts that lurked in the shadowy corners of his mind.

Oblivious though he was to the tyrannical climate of partisanship in politics, culture and identity politics, he did begin to feel somewhat of a freak show, and one that would no doubt have an expiry date in the eye of the American public. In an age of quick sand like transience, he had quickly come to understand it was hard to conserve a legacy beyond the length of a 30 second viral video.

With pressures on the travel industry and increasing concerns around climate change, he’d landed in a serious ‘moment” and even by his standards, it was a tricky situation to manoeuvre out of.

Although his initial return had prompted a huge boost for the company, he now needed to start looking long term at plans for how to continue. Making money had been a benefit for his ambition but having personally cheated death, it held less sway over him than it did before in his “past life”.

The stubborn part of him hated being held at the mercy of the government and other countries' governments. He wanted to do something revolutionary that could act as a riposte to the madness he was witnessing all around him.

Yes, he felt resentful. He knew history teaches us that nothing ever really changes, Human nature is inherently flawed and yet he had observed his attachment to the past as a potent energy in itself.

How many more people wanted to travel backwards rather than forwards? And even if they didn’t literally want to do it. The sensibility of that concept was a powerful one.

It appeared everyone was so heavily invested in the future with all their projections of how they wanted it to be. Some even had the power to believe they could manipulate it so that it correlated with their ideology

He had been the same once upon a time.

But now, haven’t travelled through time, he wondered why no-one had invested in the past.

Taking a trip out to Walt’s Carolwood estate in the Holmby Hills, Los Angeles, he made enquiries as to what happened to the great genius of 20th century American culture. Lips were pursed and questions deflected as any mention of cryogenic sleep were disregarded as a conspiracy theory.

Having been turned away at nearly every point of enquiry, Dev decided to look around the city he had built his empire from.

Unrecognisable from the place he knew in 1961, shops and businesses were now boarded up and there was an increasing amount of homeless people on every street corner. The collective despair was palpable.

As he wandered through his old haunts he came to an old coffee shop/bar he used to hang out at. Schwabs Pharmacy had now been turned into a shopping mall and not a very good one at that. It was a depressing conclusion to a golden age that had turned to rust.

Dismayed at the decay of everything in the city of angels as he had always known it, he found himself feeling genuinely pessimistic for the first time in his life.

He was developing a desire to return to 1961 more actively than he ever felt about travelling to 2021 originally when he first considered cryopreservation.

Stuck in time, he wondered whether he had stumbled into purgatory and kicked himself at not considering the consequences of such a seismic life decision as this before embarking on such an untested voyage.

“Spare us some change mister?” The toothless homeless man on the street corner said to the mogul as Dev walked past deep in thought.

Happy for some distraction from his  own introspection, he stopped and turned to the poverty stricken man and reached into his pockets.

“You know. I don’t have any change. But maybe I have something of value that can be of use to you.”

As he reached into his jacket pocket he pulled out the golf ball and handed it to him.

“This might fetch something. It once belonged to Walt Disney.”

The toothless man took a hold of the golf ball and stared back at Devlin.

‘Walt Disney?”

“Yeah, you’ve heard of him I’m assuming?”

The homeless man nodded and then muttered under his breath.

“I should have heard of him.”

“What’s that?” Dev said somewhat taken aback at the tramp’s reply.

“I said I should have heard of him.”

“I agree. He’s probably still the most famous man in America.”

“So famous you almost walked right past him.”

Dev almost did a cartoon double take as it became apparent to him that the bedraggled figure on the ground before him was his old friend Walt.

“Walt! You old son of a gun!”

“I read about you in the papers.”

“You did?”

“Funny thing about newspapers. You have no interest in reading them, in fact you go out of your way not to and yet they still blow into your face.”

Dev was still in a state of disbelief that Disney was here in front of him, a wreck of his former glory.

“Let me buy you some lunch.”

Walt nodded. His pride wasn’t so great he would refuse a bowl of soup or a sandwich right now.

Sat in a retro style 1950’s diner which might have seem superficially authentic were it not for the fact the oweners were simply trying too hard to recreate an era they had not lived themselves.

Dev and Walt did and so found it mildly amusing in a anachronistic way to be sitting in this place, listening to old hits from yesteryear.

“What happened?”

“The future happened. What can I say? It hit me hard.”

Judging by the gaunt hollowed look of Walt’s face that statement was already blindingly obvious.

“I can relate to that. It’s like a cultural jet lag that you can never shake off.”

“Tell me about it. I never felt anxious about anything before this. Well, maybe I did, but not to this extent.”

Dev took a bit of a hamburger shortly followed by a look of disappointment.

“The future isn’t all it’s cracked up to be eh?”

“It’s Hell! I tell you this Dev no word of a lie. I would give anything to be back in our own time. Even with all the madness we faced back there.”

Dev considered Walt’s words carefully as he took a sip of his bourbon milkshake.

And then, as if designed by fate for this exact moment, Les Baxter’s Unchained Melody started to play on the jukebox and the sweet, melancholy music covered for the awkward silence between the two elders.

“Well, looks like its just you and me pal. Only you and me can relate to this unusual predicament.”

As Disney drained his bowl of soup, he wiped his mouth with a napkin.

“We better stick together then.”

There had been huge amount of mystery surrounding the launch of a Disney/Godspeed collaboration and when it finally arrived it didn’t disappoint.

“Journeys to the Past” promised flights to major resorts dotted around the globe that preserved the golden age as Dev and Walt saw it.

Customers were invited to return to a place that existed somewhere between history and memory and provided a safe haven from the divisiveness of the present.

It wasn’t a computer simulation but a tangible destination that could be enjoyed as a luxury respite from the madness of the dystopian 21st century.

Back on the golf course, the two men were more equals than they had ever been, although Dev still had the upper hand with his swing which was no surprise as he had professional coaching from Byron Nelson.

“You wanna know why I love golf so much Dev?”

“I’m sure you’re gonna tell me.”

“Because out here on the green, while we’re in the moment, nothing else appears to exist outside of this moment.”

“I think you’re onto something.”

“The past is our home but the present is our reality. As for the future? It’s a crap shoot.”

And with that, Walt struck the gold ball with a focused swing that whooshed through the air and landed on the green, headed directly toward the cup where it made a satisfactory sound of hollow descent, like a woodpecker that had reached the end of a trunk.

“Now that’s magic!”