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Scottsdale is the home of Alcor Cryonics, one of two companies to offer cryonic services in the US. Although Zoltan says he plans to sign up with Alcor, right now he’s too busy to visit the facility with me, so Friday morning I go along on their public tour without him.

Cryonics, sometimes also referred to as cryogenics, is an experimental area of research into the possibility of preserving human bodies at very low temperature with the hope of reviving the deceased at a time when future medical technology will be able to restore them to life and cure their ills.

Being frozen is not cheap: Alcor charges $200,000 plus yearly dues for whole-body preservation and $80,000 plus dues for just your head. People who choose the second option are called “neuros.” They believe that their body will be biologically recreated, or that they won’t need a human body at all: their head will be reattached to a robot.

The procedure, as it’s theorized, relies on preserving the recently deceased’s body as well as possible, as quickly as possible. Alcor recommends dying somewhere near their facilities. Once a corpse arrives, its blood is drained and replaced with antifreeze, in an effort to prevent tissue damage and ice crystals forming during the deep freeze at -196 degrees C.

Alcor’s Dewars, where suspended bodies and heads are stored.

Robert Ettinger, considered cryonics’ founder, was inspired to develop the technology by a story he’d read in Amazing Stories as a child. In “The Jameson Satellite,” a man’s corpse is sent into orbit, where it remains near absolute zero for millions of years until a race of cyborgs discovers it, defrosts its brain, and installs it on a robot’s body. After growing up to be a math and physics teacher, Ettinger turned his attention to making the sci-fi vision of cryonic suspension a reality. He called the procedure a form of “one-way medical time travel.”

In the early 1960s, Ettinger founded The Immortalist Society, the first of a small handful of clubs that would crop up across the country where people met to discuss their plans to achieve eternal life. By 1967, the first person was put into cryogenic suspension at the Cryonics Society of California. The procedure was performed by the Society’s president Bob Nelson, a former television repairman, aided by a physician and cryobiological researcher.

Over 1,000 people have already been frozen, or plan to be: Nick Bostrom, Ray Kurzweil, Peter Thiel, Aubrey de Grey, Larry King, and Simon Cowell are all reportedly Alcor customers.

Walking through Alcor’s facility is somewhat disquieting: the operating theatre where people are decapitated and drained of blood has an open doorway and a viewing window, through which family members can watch the grisly operation if they aren’t talked out of it. The walls are lined with photographs of members and the date on which they were put into suspension, most famously among transhumanists, the futurist FM-2030. A lab adjoining the OR is strewn with boxes and equipment, wires and machinery. A whirring 3D printer sits alongside a dummy used to model and explain the procedure to visitors.

A dummy at Alcor used to illustrate the facility’s decapitation procedure.

Alcor’s youngest client in suspension is two, and their oldest was just shy of 102 when they died. Both are female, though Alcor says its membership skews 75 percent male. After being frozen, clients are placed in giant stainless steel tanks called Dewars, where they hang upside down in sleeping bags, four to a pod. Neuro patients have their heads kept in “neuro-cans” which look like oversized lobster pots, stacked on shelves, also in Dewars.

Beyond the challenges of freezing dead bodies and thawing them back to life, Alcor faces more mundane contingencies: Dewars are cooled by liquid nitrogen, and their function is dependent on human upkeep. In the case of a catastrophic power failure, environmental disaster, earthquake, sabotage, or perhaps society’s total collapse, there is no back-up plan to keep the facility operational. Meanwhile, Alcor must remain solvent, and not be sued into non-existence, fall afoul of internal discord, or in any way go broke or cease operations for decades, or centuries. In an effort to stave off any financial trouble, Alcor says it services a $9 million patient care slush fund banked by its members.

Near the end of the hour-long tour, my mind is racing with all the ways in which being revived from suspension could go wrong. What do you do when everyone you knew and loved died centuries ago? What if you have no comprehension of the world you find yourself in and are driven spontaneously insane? What if you can’t earn this world’s money or speak its language? What if future cyborgs were hostile to human beings and revived them only to display them in zoos? I feel sweat gathering on my palms, even though this is the coldest place I might have ever set foot in.

On our way out we are given a folder of membership information, which lets us know just how affordable cryonics is, and some free issues of Cryonics magazine. Staring out from the cover of one issue, I see a familiar face: it’s Roen. Inside, he is quoted as not being signed up for cryonics, preferring to leave any money he ever made to Aubrey de Grey’s SENS Foundation. “People believe in an afterlife,” Roen says. “Wishful thinking. Strive for eternal life. Nothing is more important than your existence.”

The quest for physical immortality is maybe as old as humanity itself. The 4,000-year-old Epic of Gilgamesh, one of literature’s earliest known works, concerns the hero’s want for everlasting life. The Fountain of Youth, the Philosopher’s Stone, the eternal-life-granting stones and jewels of Hindu and Buddhist scripture, modern esoteric belief systems like Theosophy, all promise various paths to victory over death.

For all its scientific trappings, transhumanism exists in this lineage. Age reversal, impossible cures, resurrection: these are all things that human beings have been attempting to achieve for centuries with whatever the most advanced sciences of their time were. But a faith vested in theoretical science is still a faith vested in hope. When we look to an imagined future today, our predictions are predicated on the present: transhumanism sees a fantastic future of techno-utopia because we live in a technological age.

No one is sure why every living thing on the planet will die, or why nearly all living things that have ever existed already have. Whether death is a feature of evolution or a byproduct is the focus of intense debate. Meanwhile, the idea that aging is a disease forms the basis of research at places like the SENS Foundation, Calico Labs, and Sierra Sciences, where hundreds of millions of private funding dollars are spent in the ongoing search to extend human life.

There is one animal which appears to resist death and so has achieved physical immortality: during times of crisis, the Turritopsis dohrnii jellyfish reverses its cell aging and asexually reproduces, creating thousands of clones of itself. The turritopsis gives anti-aging researchers hope for everlasting life. It is also seen as an invasive species. Turritopsis jellyfish have spread in great numbers across the world’s oceans, hitching rides on cargo ships. There is now no way to keep their numbers down, no way to stop them from multiplying further, forever.

After my visit to Alcor, I call Max More. More signed up as an Alcor client in 1986, before he co-founded the extropians list and began publishing his thoughts on a transhumanist philosophy. In 2011, he became Alcor’s CEO.

I ask More when he, along with the rest of the Alcor clients, expects to be brought back to life. “It’s not something you can forecast,” he tells me. “My speculative guess is that it won’t be sooner than 50 years, but I would be surprised if it was longer than 150 years from now.”

More doesn’t dispute that cryonics is in its infancy. However, he says, “the fact that we can’t do it today doesn’t make it pointless at all, we just have to wait until we have that kind of technology.”

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To date, Alcor’s most successful revival from -80 degrees Celsius was the C. elegans worm, a 1mm-long nematode with no circulatory or respiratory systems. I ask More if anyone has ever donated their body or brain to be frozen and thawed in order to advance the company’s research.

“No one has come forward yet to do that,” More answers. “We’ll have to do it on animals first and show that it works before we even try it on a human being.”

Bobby Kasthuri is a neuroscientist and adjunct professor at the University of Chicago’s department of neurobiology. While he believes that there are many worthwhile things that could come as the result of transhumanist projects, like attempting digital brain mapping and improving organ preservation, he also says that many of the claims advanced by cryonics advocates are wildly outlandish and that their end goal of resurrection will almost certainly never be realised.

“Could we keep the structure of the brain? I haven’t seen enough data to say that it’s possible to do that. But let’s just assume that [Alcor] can,” he explains over the phone. “A brain is not just how one cell communicates with another, there’s a lot of circulating things. A lot of what makes up the brain is the ‘soup’ it’s in — hormones, dopamine, adrenaline — these don’t all have a precise anatomical location, but they’re all in the bath of the brain.”

That “soup” is a key component of what could make up our consciousness. Alcor currently replaces it with antifreeze.

Kasthuri is dubious of transhumanism’s ultimate aims, and shares an outlook common to many of its critics: the success of the movement hinges on a scare campaign to make people horrified of their own death. There is no appeal in cryonics unless you really, really don’t want to die.

“For centuries progressive philosophical and religious ways of thinking have worked out that is the worst possible state for a human being to live in,” he says. “That if you’re constantly afraid of dying, that’s the least alive, the least human, that you will ever be.”

When I talk to More I ask him why he would want to live forever, to which he replies, “I could turn it around on you and say: why do you want to die?”

Bernadeane

“It’s a great night to be physically immortal!” The crowd hollers and cheers and calls back, “Yes!” and “Right on, right on.”

“Who says we have to die anyway? Where’s the proof? Just because everybody else has died doesn’t mean it’s right, or that it’s right on or that it should happen!”

They stand and raise their hands together, “Yes! Yes!”, clapping and whistling and here and there some people are already crying, their faces turned up adoringly towards the stage.

“When I’m here for a thousand years they’re still going to say, Oooh, it’s not possible!”

People are up on their feet now. The woman delivering this sermon is Bernadeane, and she has eyes that look to be made of a pure blue fire. Her diminutive frame jerks about, arms flailing to emphasize a point. Bernadeane — who goes only by her first name — runs People Unlimited, a for-profit self-development outfit, with her partner, Jim Strole. Together they look like retro futuristic game show hosts, all platinum white hair at alarming angles and porcelain smiles and sharp cut blue suit jackets, black lace tops, and sparkling jewelry. Jim and Bernadeane intend to be the first human beings to live forever through the power of positive thinking.

Zoltan has chosen People Unlimited, just a 10-minute drive across town from Alcor, as the last stop on this leg of his tour. He, along with Jim and Bernadeane, is on the Coalition For Radical Life Extension Steering Committee.

Twice a week, a congregation gathers at People Unlimited to take in the gospel of “physical immortality.” It’s Friday night, and the crowd has dressed up accordingly: women are poured into tight, revealing cocktail dresses and heels; men wear suits or collared shirts unbuttoned to the chest. Hair is coiffed to impressive heights and sharp fragrances mingle in the air.

Earlier while waiting for the room to fill, I leafed through People Unlimited’s magazine, Living Unlimited, where I learned how to get my sexual energy moving and read a spirited defense of sex, which goes some way towards explaining why the feeling in the room is roughly analogous to a marketing seminar crossed with a key party.

People Unlimited charges between $12–$750 for a variety of workshops where people come to learn all about how the power of positive thinking will allow them to live a life in which they never have to die. A full membership will give you access to everything for only $245 per month, which includes three-day-weekend-long parties that everyone says are a total blast. 

Jim Strole and Bernadeane

When Charles Paul Brown died in October of 2014, it caused a great sadness among his friends and family, and a great inconvenience for People Unlimited. Prior to passing away at 79 from complications arising from Parkinson’s, Brown was Jim and Bernadeane’s third and founding partner, as well as Bernadeane’s husband. Jim and Bernadeane believe it was a lack of exercise that brought about Charles’ Earthly end. His ashes were scattered in a private ceremony.

I see Zoltan sitting among the crowd in rapt attention. He had spent the last couple of days warning me that People Unlimited is “kind of a cult,” but now he is just as enthralled as everyone else. Once Jim and Bernadeane are done whipping the room into a near frenzy with their proselytizing, Zoltan takes the stage to introduce the basic tenets of transhumanism via Powerpoint, which, as they mainly concern the various ways we will live forever, go down an absolute treat. By the time he leaves the stage, the room is cheering loudly and Zoltan has an enormous and almost ecstatic smile on his face.

During the Q&A, eight-year-old Avi Bejarano asks Zoltan about the universe’s role in immortality. He also asked about sharks.

“Wow,” he will say later, beatifically flushed and sitting alone in the now empty auditorium. “That was intense.”

After these Friday meetings, most participants will head out to a local restaurant or bar for a long night of socializing. Some people have brought along their small children, who are running around chasing each other between their parents’ legs. I overhear snippets of conversation, amiable chatter about weekend plans, office jobs, home renovations, kids’ basketball games. It feels like being at an elaborately overdressed neighborhood social, only instead of meeting to discuss a community garden, everyone here has paid a fee to bond over their fear of death.

Above all else, the People Unlimited audience strikes me as being incredibly happy. Perhaps they’re also super weird, but at least they are very much alive in the present. Or maybe I’ve just been on the bus too long. Eventually, everyone files out into the hot, dry Arizona night. I see Bernadeane, who is 78 years old, peel away at the wheel of a slingshot yellow Chevy SSR.