Like many here, Freitas is a nanotechnologist. Nanotechnology is the Holy Grail of what's to come for cryonics—the thing that will make bringing patients out of cryosuspension possible. He talks about a future in which an array of intelligent nanodevices will be dispatched into our bodies like so many Fantastic Voyage Raquel Welches, their sole mission our intracorporeal perfection. Many of the methods he cites are theoretically feasible: chromosome-replacement therapy (microscopic cell-by-cell damage repair); respirocytes (artificial red blood cells that would enable us to sink to the bottom of a pool and hold our breath for four hours); microbivores (artificial white blood cells that would be one hundred times more effective than the real thing). All of these, says Freitas, could potentially restore us to the perfection of our youth.

"A rollback to the physiology of your late teens might be easier than your 10-year-old self," he says, "and more fun. We could live about 900 years." A terrifying prospect, since everyone else would also be 18 again, and that ruthless food chain of those miserable years would reign once more. Only this time, high school would be nine centuries long. That's close to a millennium's worth of blackheads.

The grand fantasy of cheating death, the underlying myth at the heart of this conference, is as old as humanity itself. Most every culture has a cautionary tale about some soul who aspires to godlike immortality and is brought low as a result. Not surprisingly, the disastrous hubris of Icarus is not invoked here. What is brought up repeatedly as a worthy precedent is a letter Benjamin Franklin wrote to a friend in 1773: "I should prefer to an ordinary death, being immersed with a few friends in a cask of Madeira wine, until that time, then to be recalled to life by the solar warmth of my dear country!"

The intervening twenty-three decades since Franklin's missive have done little to make that dream practical. What becomes clear over the course of the conference is that even these eminent scientists don't have much of a plan. Perhaps that's why I never see anyone else in the hotel gym. You would think I would be jogging beside my fellow health-crazed attendees. You would be wrong. I am the only one in the fitness center doing this particular tap dance along the mortal coil. Instead of breathless conversation, my soundtrack is the whir of my solitary treadmill—and the Fox News Channel on the television placed too high up for me to change. I have heard the future and it sounds like Hannity Colmes. It also might explain why the conferees don't seem overly concerned with diet and nutrition. Lunch one day is mashed potatoes, beef in gravy, chicken in cream sauce, and white-flour rolls, and on the next, a life-extending Mexican buffet, all eaten with great alacrity. I have tasted the future and it is gooey with melted Jack cheese. I am reminded of that moment in Sleeper when one of the scientists of 2173 is amazed to hear that Woody Allen, a health-food-store owner revived out of cryosuspension after 200 years, knows nothing of the salubrious properties of hot fudge.

Putting aside for a moment the overweening narcissism of wanting to live forever or the sheer implausibility of "reanimation" ever working, what defies my comprehension is why anyone would seek this out. I just cannot get past thoughts of the crushing loneliness of waking up years hence in a world without my loved ones. Gregory Benford, a physicist and science-fiction writer, suggests having one's "context"—friends and family—frozen alongside one, although he argues that the future would be no worse than a new infancy: "When we're born, we don't know anybody. Others know us, though. It's like being a star."