Everyone present knew that her eventual resurrection was a long shot, to say the least. Between her death in 1987 and her hopedfor revival at some indefinite time in the future, Dora Kent's head would remain frozen in a tank of liquid nitrogen, at a temperature of -- 186°C, and no one in the cryonics business was expecting that when defrosting time came the patient would just magically spring back to life. Cryonic suspension was clearly a last-ditch measure. "No one wants to be frozen," Saul Kent once said. "Being frozen is the second-worst thing that can happen to a person. The only thing worse is dying without being frozen."

Nevertheless, it wasn't as if they were expecting men from Mars to revive Dora Kent. The fact was that their expectations rested on nothing more than the normal and ordinary progress of science, just plain science, the plain, old-fashioned, everyday science and technology that had already accomplished so many stupendous feats, things that only a few years previously were regarded as "impossible": the moon landings, the heart transplants, the gene splicings, and all the other modern miracles. In the waning days of the twentieth century it did not take an especially gigantic leap of the imagination to think that at some point in the future it would be entirely possible to thaw out a frozen brain, implant it in a new body, shock it into conscious awareness, and restore it to normal functioning. In fact, the members of the suspension team had some rather specific notions about the precise science that would be required to accomplish the task. It was called "nanotechnology," and was already on the conceptual horizon.

Nanotechnology had been invented back in the 1970s by an MIT grad student by the name of Eric Drexler. As Drexler conceived of it, his invention, when it was perfected (thus far it was still in the idea stage), would give you complete control over the structure of matter. It would make possible the direct manipulation of matter at the atomic level -- "atom by atom," as he described it. This would be accomplished by an army of robots, each of which was roughly the size of an individual molecule.

A big enough collection of these tiny robots would be able to do anything that was capable of being done with matter. They'd be able to take molecules of ordinary carbon -- charcoal, for exam-

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