Everyone present knew that her eventual resurrection was a long
shot, to say the least. Between her death in 1987 and her hoped-
for 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 "nanotech-
nology," 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 con-
ceived 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-

-2-