Frozen Death

by Umino Jūzō · 2026-03-31

Seven days had passed since Furuhata, a young and ambitious scientist, awoke in his coffin.

"What could have happened? Someone should have knocked on the coffin lid by now."

He had been eagerly awaiting a knock from outside the coffin. It wasn't the plain wooden coffin we know, but a magnificent five-layered coffin made of a refractory molybdenum alloy, a splendid metal called MO-902. The interior wasn't as cramped as a wooden coffin; a spacious area stretched out within. It was about the size of a ten-tatami-mat room with a high ceiling, lined with various machines such as a bed, a freezing machine, a temperature regulator, a gas generator, a power generator, and a signal device. It also contained daily necessities like reference books, an ashtray, a toothbrush, and a safety razor. In other words, it was like a laboratory and a study packed into one place.

Furuhata had already undergone over a thousand years of cryogenic sleep in this peculiar coffin. Cryogenic sleep is a technology that freezes humans alive and leaves them in that state for the necessary number of years. This is an extremely difficult technique, especially in adjusting the speed of freezing. If it fails, one dies forever. However, if successful, the life of the frozen human is preserved, whether it's three days later, a hundred years later, or even a thousand years later, as in Furuhata's case. Then, at the appropriate time, the freezing can be undone, and they can be revived. This technique is also difficult, but in Furuhata's case, both were completely successful.

This experiment was not achieved by his efforts alone, but through the cooperation of a group of scientists with the long-winded name "One-Thousand-Year Human Cryogenic Project Research Committee." The interior of the coffin was a square room, but the exterior was spherical, designed to withstand pressure from any direction.

Seven days had passed since Furuhata awoke after a millennium, and his fatigue had completely recovered. He remembered the moment he entered the coffin as if it were yesterday. Indeed, he had slept well for a thousand years. But had he truly slept for a thousand years? The radium clock on the wall proved it. This clock was designed to measure the decay caused by radium radiation and record long periods of time. Furuhata immediately rushed to the clock after getting up and checked the elapsed time. He found that he had slept a little longer than a thousand years. The clock displayed the 1,169th day, which corresponded to February in the winter of 3600 AD. In other words, there was an error of 169 days in the coffin's machinery. However, an error of 169 days over a millennium was not significant. Especially considering that Furuhata was able to perfectly preserve his life in a frozen state for a thousand years, the excellence of the machinery was certainly commendable.

However, the anxiety he harbored was that someone must appear a thousand years later to knock on this coffin from the outside. But that knock had not yet been heard. According to the specifications, this strictly thousand-year-unopenable coffin was designed to never open unless it was opened from the outside. It had to be that way to make the coffin's structure robust.

"What happened? Did the person who was supposed to open the door go on a trip somewhere because I woke up 169 days late?"

Being assailed by such anxiety within an unopenable sealed room was a terror even more intense than a death sentence. He suspected there might be a malfunction in the signal device, so he went over to it and checked it repeatedly. However, no malfunction was found. In that case, his awakening should have been transmitted by radio waves to the three cities of Tokyo, New York, and Khabarovsk.

"What in the world is going on that no one is coming to help?"

If no one came to open the door, Furuhata, who had just awakened, could survive for about another thirty days, but after that, there was absolutely no prospect of him continuing to live. More than regretting his own life, he found it incredibly regrettable to be reborn into a world a thousand years later only to die without ever seeing it.