It was gray.

It would not respond.

It was, to use Dr.

Sather’s phrase, like a piece of meat out of a deep freeze.

And yet.

Inside that frozen shell, in the deep interior where the cold had penetrated more slowly and had found a physiological resistance it could not quite overcome, something persisted.

A heart beating twelve times per minute.

A brain doing whatever a brain does at the absolute minimum of its function.