There were some very odd conversations in CryoSystem before the Truth got out. The thing that protected us for a long time was that the cryogenic waiting list had built up over a vast length of time. So when the newly-revived met each other in the street, they couldn’t tell other revivals like them from the general populace.

We briefed our customers to keep their medical history – at least this part of it – absolutely secret. We told them that a lot of people ‘like them’ had had unwelcome amounts of attention. The tabloids and other unscrupulous parties wanted to know all about the distant past, and what the revivals thought about this future they found themselves in.

Those people were put on show like circus animals, we said, and so they were best remaining anonymous. Even when two of them met and revealed their secret to each other, it was deemed to be a massive coincidence, a chance meeting, and so the charade continued. Even the doctors inside CryoSystem didn’t know, despite the fact they’d all put themselves on the waiting list at some point.

Sometimes I think that was one of the boldest plays on our part. The software running it all just had to emulate the right number of illnesses and injuries in our emulated population. We told our doctors that we needed them to work solely on CryoSystem patients, so the information loop stayed closed.

But inevitably one guy decided he’d rather like the attention, not to mention the anticipated money, from going public. From there it was a very short space of time indeed before all our revivals realised everyone in their world was a cryo. We were forced to come clean: we’d built the computer, CyroSystem, to house their minds. Their bodies were disposed of.

But frankly, what other option was there? If we’d revived every frozen corpse that we’d stored then the country would have been overrun in months!