Preservation

Joe Gray

Publication date: 4 May 2025

Bielsa Parzán, the cylinder's inventor, had been a huge fan of the Star Wars saga—the first part of which came out 120 years before she was born. And while the effect of her creation's novel process was not nearly as visually dramatic as carbonite freezing, its efficacy was comparable.

Parzán was unremarkable as a child. But her intellect bloomed at university, with the rapidity of desert flowers after rain, and by her late twenties she was known internationally for her ingenuity. "Is Parzán the 22nd Century's Blackstock?" asked the world's most-eyeballed holofeed, with reference to the physicist whose research team had, in 2059, forced open a wormhole, somewhere inside the orbit of Mars, for three whole seconds. Yes: Contrary to the negative predictions of Peak Technology skeptics, science in the 21st Century had continued to develop with the leaps and bounds that defined its gait in the 20th.

Humanity's knowledge of species extinctions, for instance, had reached levels not previously thought possible. It was true that technological efforts to slow the actual rate of loss had as yet proved unfruitful (if anything, the speed was increasing), but the accuracy with which biologists could predict impending extirpations was truly extraordinary. The work that underpinned their data-hungry models—including some major advances in DNA-based inventories—had already yielded three separate Nobel Prizes.

Like most of history's great innovators, Parzán was able to dovetail her own discoveries with the emerging work of other disciplines. Thus, when, in 2134, she patented the Life Suspender—a self-powered titani-glass cylinder with the length of an adult's forearm and the diameter of a digital artifact known as the compact disc—the models used by extinction ecologists were at the front of her unparalleled mind. Following protracted negotiations behind closed doors, the International Committee on Extinction agreed to issue Parzán's biotech firm with extraction licences for a single individual from any species whose probability of extinction within one year (their pE[1y]) exceeded 99.5 per cent. It came as a relief to them after decades spent shutting down captivity-based preservation programmes in zoos because of economic futility. Buoyed by the new hope offered up with Parzán's invention, the committee's leaders exchanged phrases like "unprecedented service to science" and "profound benefit to humanity."

Parzán's career-defining product came with a guarantee of 500 years' viability. Once thawed, to use the language of the lay press, the reanimated organism would live for somewhere between a few minutes and half an hour. During this time there could be no return to stasis.

The costs involved both in the manufacture of the product and in the acquisition of target organisms were high, but the first model that was auctioned—a cylinder containing a live-preserved European robin—fetched three times its associated expenditure (not including the enabling research). Similarly high prices were achieved by the sales of an American pine squirrel and a greater stag beetle.

It soon became apparent, however, that the real value of the Life Suspenders lay in their rarity. The marketplace, it turned out, could only sustain eight in total. To create and release a ninth would probably, for the time being at least, tip the value below the necessary outlay.

At present, then, there are capsules on mantle pieces in the homes of an octet of the world's richest people holding in suspended animation the last few minutes of life of eight species. As with ancient whiskey, destined never to be drunk, it seems unlikely that any of the owners will enter their PIN to release the stasis. But the fact that they could is what makes these possessions so captivating. ■

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