Note: While this article presents one possibility for how the future may play out, it should not be taken as a specific prediction by either the author or the Brain Preservation Foundation.
Amy Robertson-Wong
August 18, 2085
‘My husband had only died because saving his life would have been too weird.’
Annabel Walker had this realisation earlier this year after watching a video of Marcus Chen, a retired primary school teacher, sitting on a bed. His face is slack with relief, and teary-eyed family members are seated all around him. The scene is striking, but not particularly shocking - unless one surmises that Chen has recently been revived from preservation, after having been legally dead for fifteen years.
Annabel barely made it to the toilet before vomiting.
Chen had been the mentor of her late husband Julian, who had died at sixty-four in 2076. Six months earlier, he'd been diagnosed with progressive bulbar palsy. The disease had taken him quickly. First came the slurred speech, then difficulty swallowing. A feeding tube. A neural interface for communication. Then one night, his breathing simply stopped.
“I thought of myself as someone who would have done anything for Julian,” Annabel tells me, sitting in the Preston home they shared for thirty years. “I researched experimental treatments. I learned to operate feeding tubes and neural interfaces. I would have given him my organs, years of my own life, whatever it took.”
After a pause, she continues shakily. “But I never thought about preservation. The doctors never mentioned it. I mean, I think I'd seen it once in a science-fiction show, but I didn't think it was real. I never even asked... I can't believe I never even asked…”
Annabel's anguish represents one face of a growing crisis. As revival from preservation moves from miracle to routine medical procedure, the world is grappling with an unprecedented form of collective trauma: the realization that millions of deaths over the past sixty years were preventable.
Available But Invisible
The bitter irony is that preservation wasn't a secret, hidden in covert laboratories or siloed in well-guarded, trillion-dollar research facilities. Speculation about the technology had existed since the early twentieth century, while serious scientific proposals had been explored from the 1960s onwards. By the 2020s, neuroscientists were developing protocols that could verifiably preserve brain structure. The first formal survey of neuroscientists, collected in 2024, found experts gave these methods a 40 percent chance of eventually enabling uploading, and the number only crept up with each survey repeat.
In fact, a preservation facility in Donnybrook, just thirty kilometres from Annabel and Julian’s home, had been operational since 2057. Yet when Julian was diagnosed with terminal illness in 2076, preservation never entered the conversation.
“Not one doctor mentioned it. Not the GP, not the neurologist, not the palliative care team,” Annabel says. “Only after, I realised we'd driven past that facility many times on the way to visit my relatives in the country. I thought it was a funeral home.”
As revivals are becoming widespread, it's not just family members that are experiencing anguish. Dr. Amanda Foster, who worked in palliative care at St. Vincent's Hospital from 2055 to 2080, estimates she treated over 4,000 terminal patients. She discussed preservation with none of them.
“It wasn't part of medical training. It wasn't in our protocols,” Foster explains by video call from her home in Bendigo, where she retired following the first successful revivals. “We were trained to help people die well, not to prevent death altogether. The idea seemed... fictional.”
A Growing Phenomenon
After Rohan Nguyen became the first successfully revived human in 2081, the technology quickly moved from miraculous to routine. While Nguyen's revival required an entire factory's worth of specialists and experimental equipment, the process has since scaled exponentially: one revival in 2081 became 42 in 2082, while last year saw over 150,000 people returned from preservation.
The numbers tell a stark story. Almost everyone preserved since 2034, when assisted dying via fixation perfusion became widely legal, has proven revivable. Preservation cases from earlier years show mixed results, but those lucky enough to have avoided long delays before procedure commencement and to have been spared significant brain damage have also been successfully revived.
Yet as these revivals become commonplace, the dark underside of these miracles is emerging: millions of people are realizing their loved ones could have been saved if they’d only been preserved.
The psychological impact of this shock varies wildly. Some, like Annabel, blame themselves.1
Others direct their anger outward. Dr. Michael Torres, who served on the Australian Medical Association's board from 2050 to 2065, requires security protection after receiving death threats. “[People] think we should have pushed harder for preservation,” he says. “But we had a responsibility to protect vulnerable patients from false hope. There were always claims of new miracle cures - stem cells, gene therapies, amyloid-blockers. Preservation looked exactly the same.”
When asked about the surveys showing a significant number of neuroscientists believed preservation might work in principle, Torres shifts uncomfortably. “There were always fringe scientists willing to believe anything. The consensus among serious researchers was clear.”
Pressed on whether there were ever actual reviews performed on preservation research, he becomes defensive. “I relied on the expert committees. That's how medicine worked - we couldn't all be experts in everything. At the time, without any successful revivals, it would have been irresponsible to recommend an unproven technology.”
The Historical Context
Dr. Sarah Miklowitz, a grief researcher, has been tracking the psychological fallout since the first revivals. From her office overlooking Parkville, she explains why this particular medical tragedy cuts deeper than those that came before.
“Every major medical advance creates a retroactive tragedy," she begins. "For example, think of the millions who could have been saved if antibiotics had been discovered in the nineteenth century instead of the twentieth.”
But Miklowitz's research suggests preservation grief operates on an entirely different psychological level. Unlike a cure that didn't exist yet, preservation was available, accessible, and relatively affordable. The only barrier was credibility.
“When someone died of an infection in 1860, their family could say 'there was nothing to be done.' That was a clean grief, however painful,” Miklowitz explains. “But imagine if antibiotics had existed in 1860, sitting in hospitals, and doctors simply didn't believe they worked. Imagine if your loved one died because their doctor thought antibiotics were science fiction.”
Of course, providing preservation in the 2030s wasn't as obviously beneficial as prescribing antibiotics for an infection. Without demonstrated revivals, preserving the dying constituted a long-term clinical trial with an uncertain outcome.
Yet for other diseases without established treatments, doctors frequently enrolled patients in trials for unproven therapies with low success rates. The difference wasn't medical or scientific; it was cultural. Experimental cancer therapies felt like medicine, while preservation felt like fantasy.
“The tragedy is that all the markers of legitimate science were there. Preservation made specific, testable predictions about brain structure preservation. It was based on established neuroscience, not mysticism. The preserved brains could be examined - and were examined - and showed intact neural structure. It wasn't asking for faith, just for patience.”
Miklowitz pauses, then continues with a darkly amused tone. “But because it pattern-matched to science fiction and religion, to cryogenic freezing plots from old movies, the medical establishment never gave it the scrutiny they gave to any other treatment hypothesis. They dismissed it the same way they'd dismiss crystal healing or prayer - without actually examining whether it belonged in that category. Ultimately, without proof of revival, they were never going to take it seriously.”
“As a result,” Miklowitz concludes, “We're not just grieving the dead. We're grieving our own failure of imagination. And that's a grief our psychological frameworks aren't equipped to handle.”
The End of Preservation
Within three to five years, the backlog of preserved individuals will be cleared. The last preserved person from the early decades will be restored to consciousness, and then there will be no more reunions.
For those who've been revived, and their family and friends, this brief era marks the beginning of something extraordinary. The combination of synthetic-soma-enabled life extension with the Citizen's Dividend means individuals alive today have access to the health and resources needed to enjoy each other's company for as long as they please.
But for those like Annabel, facing an indefinite future alone just makes their loved ones' absence feel all the more permanent. Eight years of carefully constructed acceptance have crumbled into raw grief, as fresh as the day Julian died - except now it comes with the unbearable knowledge that this loss was preventable.
“They say in a few years, all this will be over. The preserved will be revived, and we'll move on,” she informs me, while standing in what was Julian's study. “But I'll still wake up every morning knowing my husband died because I was close-minded and uninquisitive. How do you move on from that?”
She slowly walks me to the door, past displays flicking through photos of Julian at school camps, on their wedding day, holding their infant daughter. At the threshold, she adds one more thought:
“Once, I couldn't imagine a world without Julian. Now, because of my failure of imagination, I'm stuck in it.”
The most problematic reaction occurs in some cases of denial, for example as seen by the surge of illegal doppelganger deployment presented as real revivals. These AI constructs, trained on data created by and about individuals, can convincingly mimic a person's behavior. While legal for private use, deploying them in physical bodies outside one's home is illegal in Australia. Yet enforcement agencies have reported a ten-fold increase in violations this past year.
“People are desperate” explains Detective Lisa Park of Melbourne's Identity Unit. “Last month, we had a case where a woman introduced her doppelganger 'husband' to their adult children. We're used to confiscating units from fraudsters and identity thieves, not distraught spouses.”
Thank you for this article, Ariel. Despite a few things that bothered me, the article is extremely good.
This kind of "report from the future" can be quite helpful in shifting people's perceptions. Good job!