Here’s the scenario. You’re out doing some cross-country skiing when tragically you slip down a frozen crevasse. Oops. You wake up in a white room (with black curtains…near the station) feeling like you’ve drunk Tennessee dry the night before. You can’t move your arms or legs. There are odd looking machines hooked up to you all around you.
A masked woman enters and tells you in an accent you can’t place that you’ve been in an accident and are in a medical facility recuperating. You ask about your travelling companions, but black out.
Time passes and you’re feeling better, but still immobile. Eventually the doctor tells you that your body was recovered recently and revived with future technology. She shows you newspaper articles about your accident and search efforts.
Many years have passed - more than a century, less than a millennium is what you’re told. The bad news is that future microbes will kill you - you cannot leave this room. Your arms and legs were too badly damaged for recovery and cybernetic prosthesis will be incompatible with your life support machines. Future historians have been chomping at the bit for just a few minutes with you, but the doctor realises that this existence may be intolerable and will pull the plug if you request it. What’s your next move?
ETA; If you’re a lady don’t be offended by the thread title, just a nod to this song.
Eh. My brain works. Whoever my captors/rescuers may be, they appear to be treating me reasonably well under the circumstances. If they’ll hook me up with unlimited access to whatever the internet has become and throw in some cool games, I’ll hang out and chat with their historians. If they can provide reasonable simulations of hookers and blow, I might even be reasonably truthful about history as I remember it.
Same here. As long as I wasn’t in any pain, I’d give it a go before I decided to be taken off life support. I’d also be super curious and want to know how the future works. Being an amateur genealogist, I’d like the chance to meet future generations of my family too.
So, no functioning arms or legs, not able to leave the room and by the sound of it no real legit interaction with others. Sounds seriously sucky.
I’d be inclined to hang in for a bit, at least until I scoped out what I could about what has happened while I was frozen and what’s the place like now.
If I’m able to interact and learn at least virtually, then I’ll stick around for a bit. If they only want me as a lab experiment, pull the plug.
Couldn’t they make me some sort of mobile bubble to travel around in? I think I’d ask (and answer) questions before asking for the plug to be pulled. I’m a miracle of medical science for Pete’s sake!
They can probably borrow the Spacepope’s Popemobile for the purpose; good thinking. Although your interaction with the world will still be fairly limited.
Seems a bit premature to pull the plug now. I’ve basically just been transported to the future, I’m going to have a look. I’m not buying that prosthetics haven’t improved sufficiently in a few hundred years, but whatever, if you say so.
Presumably, they’re able to provide some form of control hookup–if not for cybernetic limbs, then certainly enough to control a computer and screens. (We seem to be close to being able to do that nonintrusively now, and they’ve advanced enough to revive a long-frozen corpse.) As long as they hook me up, I’ve got over a century of books, movies, games, and general noodling to catch up on. Between that and chatting with historians, I think I could stay occupied for a long time while hoping for them to overcome various medical hurdles to improving my quality of life. Maybe I’ll even study indeterminate-future-medicine and work on finding solutions myself.*
Call me crazy, but talking to historians sounds fun. I’d try to catch up on world events, use the aforementioned Space Popemobile to do a bit of sightseeing - maybe even get into space if it’s a common enough tourist-y thing to do now - and experience whatever cool futuristic stuff is out there. There will always be books, shows, and whatnot from the early 21st century if I get tired of feeling like a stranger in a strange land, and Dr. Who will probably still be going strong. If it turns out to not go as well as I expected, hey, pull the plug. Until then it sounds fascinating.
I would love to do this and chat with their historians. There’s presumably internet and I can still talk and use voice recognition and eye tracking to communicate with the whole world, and have drones do my interactions with the outside world for me. Why not?