As human civilisation entered the 21st Century CE developments in technology were preoccupied with the possibilities offered by mass digitisation. Internet, Big Data, digitised media, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence all offered a combined opportunity for global knowledge sharing and collaboration - without the need for global travel. In addition, in the early 2000’s the full Human Genome had been mapped and an age of radical developments in disease prevention and improvements in the human condition were also expected.
So FVR was not the kind of technical innovation that anyone had predicted would dominate humanity’s progress through the middle and latter years of the 21st Century. This was a technology that operated in the physical rather than the digital realm — emphasising human corporeality rather than a digital alternative. Yet however unexpected, or out of place, once it arrived FVR became the dominant force in shaping the development of human society for decades to come.
FVR was created and innovated by Nuvorm Incorporated under Oscar Nuvorm’s leadership. Building upon existing freeze-drying and vacuum-packing technologies (implemented at scale for the food industry by Oscar’s father, Viktor Nuvorm), Nuvorm Inc. made advances in human centred biotech that would revolutionise the transport industry and society as a whole.
Upon his father’s death in 2021, Oscar inherited a healthy, profitable business, but he also inherited his father’s eagerness for innovation and business adventurism. So rather than continuing Nuvorm's role within the food industry with a conservative and steady hand, Oscar sought to build and expand - redirecting the company's R&D team outside the confines of the food packing industry. A relationship between space exploration and specialised freeze-drying and vacuum-packing of food was long standing and it was this aspect of the business which captured Oscar’s adventuristic spirit.
It’s unclear where, how and why the idea originated, but in the mid 2020s Nuvorm’s R&D team started to explore opportunities in freeze-drying and vacuum-packing live tissue with the intention of re-hydrating and re-animating it at a later point. They combined stem cell research, cryogenics and experiments in nano-technology.
The first freeze-dried vacuum-packed human was successfully processed and restored to life on May 15 2033, when Oscar Nuvorm himself was freeze dried at 06:43 EST and reanimated at 19:29 EST. The official Nuvorm name for the process was “Freeze-drying, Vacuum-Packing and Re-animating” (FVR).
Oscar Nuvorm had hoped that the technology would revolutionise space travel, but the R&D team were clear that the freeze-dried state could only be maintained for 18hrs maximum - nowhere near the months and years that it would take to travel to distant planets using the rocket technology available at the time. (See Chapter 4 for more detail regarding how the impasse was eventually broken in the early part of the 22nd Century CE). So Nuvorm was left with a revolutionary capability but with no practical or purposeful application.
Eager to find a buyer for the technology Nuvorm entered into dialogue with the military, health professionals and representatives of the legal and justice system. A number of uses were provisioned, but none that would offer a return on Nuvorm’s significant financial and personal investment.
However through dialogue with Mercury Aerospace Systems the idea of FVR-Flying emerged. On October 1st 2037 the first paying customers boarded the purpose refitted Mercury ZERO1 aircraft and set off on a flight from Dubai to Frankfurt.
Each of the passenger’s bodies was freeze-dried and vacuum-packed in a hangar at Dubai International Airport and reanimated at a mirror facility housed at Frankfurt Airport. The flyers queued inside the hangar, each carrying the semi-transparent latex body bag which had been handed to them by the operating staff. The bag had their passport sealed on its front, alongside details of their flight number and destination. Guided by operating staff they took turns to enter the FVR capsule. They removed their clothes and jewellery and placed them into a pocket on the front of the body bag. Then stepped naked into the bag, attached the waste-release apparatus to their mouth, genitals and rectum (allowing air, vomit and excreta to be expelled as the body went through initial compression). Once ready they pressed a button marked ‘Freeze’ - large and red so that they could still see it through the translucent plastic of the sealed bag. The pressing of the button was largely performative - the FVR process was actually initiated by operating staff, but the Nuvorm and Mercury legal teams insisted that the volition indicated by the user pressing the button themselves would be advantageous in litigation cases, should they arise.
The re-animation process was just as crucial and potentially more consequential than the freeze-drying and vacuum-packing. Each cell had to be restored to its previous state, and all body fluids replaced. This entailed a re-setting of hormone, cholesterol and glucose levels.
The first flight proceeded without significant issue. Within a year Mercury-FVR flights were opened to the public.
Flight costs to the consumer were not initially lower than traditional flights and the mental and physical advantages were neither known nor advertised, so initial uptake was largely just by the curious, adventurous and those who wanted a good story to tell (there was a particular uptake by “Stag Do’s” where groups of men would partake in otherwise undesirable activities as a mark of passage into married life). But when 2 years later costs dropped to 5% below the traditional alternative, uptake soared.
In the early years, FVR-Flyers (frequently dubbed, ironically, as "Fryers"), were still required to wait in line within specially constructed hangars to complete the FVR procedure, but continued innovation over the next 5 years resulted in significant improvements. By the mid 2040’s “Fryers” could simply walk through a door in a departure airport lounge, be administered a blast of psychotropic laced air, and then be guided by operating staff, semi-conscious through the remaining process with no recollection afterward. The passenger would be aware of walking through a door in one location and then immediately walking into a room on the other side of the world. Hours would have passed, but they would have no recollection or awareness.
The FVR-Flying process was soon franchised to all commercial passenger airlines - any airline that didn’t adopt the process effectively put themselves out of business. This opened up airline specific adaptations of the process. So for example, some budget airlines eschewed convenience for the customer and offered to cut costs by shifting more of the operational burden onto the passenger. This included tasks like disposing of their own bodily waste after landing. But the industry at large, along with the vast majority of consumers, quickly embraced each improvement in convenience.
It’s important to remember the increased efficiency now available to the airlines. Rather than having passengers seated in heated cabins, the FVR bags (passengers), were a light, easy to pack baggage item which could not only survive in, but actually needed the sub 50C degree temperature of an unregulated cabin. Rather than having a heated cabin filled with seats, furnishing and just 300 people, that same plane could now fit over 30,000 FVR passengers.
Once it was discovered that bodily waste, fluid and hormones, could be mixed with existing bio-fuel the energy costs and carbon footprint of FVR-Flying also dropped dramatically. By the end of the 2040s fares were just over 3% of previous levels, passenger numbers were fifty times higher, yet the total number of flights had fallen to a tenth and the environmental impact to 5%.
Global travel for many was now a daily event. They could live in Paris and work in New York - particularly as one of the first psycho-physical benefits found from FRYing was that thanks to the reanimation process, 8hrs on a flight was significantly more restful and restorative than 8hrs sleep. The human coming out of re-animation was refreshed and rebalanced at cellular level - an optimal version of their prior state.
Cities increasingly became active through a 24hr clock as occupants arrived and departed with indifference to timezone. Immigration/Emigration were no longer conducted as singular moves, but more a flow of people to where resources and opportunity were available at that specific time. Concerns around differences in culture were forgotten as a truly global community arose. Homelessness became an acceptable and even desirable phenomenon - life was increasingly digitized, possessions minimised and it was often cheaper to fly every night than it was to pay for a house to sleep in. The resource drain of accommodation, food production and health maintenance were vastly reduced. Countries opened their borders freely as people and resources, cultures and life as a whole flowed with increasing pace and ease. By the late 2050s global society, economy and culture had been transformed.
The first of the secondary industries to form around FVR was that of designer body bags. The craze began with simple branded or personalised flight bags in a range of styles. However, the industry really took off when technology advanced to allow bespoke shaping of the body during the freeze-drying process.
In the early years of FVR, the body was simply allowed to crumple in an ad hoc, unstructured way as it was compressed and dehydrated. One commentator at the time remarked that “Fryers”, looked like "large bags of crisps" (a popular 20th and 21st-century snack food) with all the air sucked out. But as efficiency became a priority, and the goal shifted to packing more bodies into each flight, new bag designs emerged. These restricted the body during drying, forcing it into more compact, regular forms — making it easier to stack and transport.
This opportunity was seized upon by style-conscious and influential Fryers, who began to fly in bags that would stylise the body's form as it dried, shaping it into recognized clothing brand logos — Nike and Gucci among the names we would recognise today. Later still, a myriad of niche subcultures formed which would have the body shaped into love hearts, crucifixes, teddy bears and other culturally significant symbols.
It’s easy to look back with incredulity as to why FVR flyers would care about their freeze-dried body, especially as it would only ever be seen by operating staff. But this dissociation was indicative of a wider reaction to the process and technology. The oblivious disregard for the aspects of the FVR process which challenged the erstwhile deeply held views of human sanctity - the preciousness of human consciousness, its connection to a body which had continued physical integrity from birth to death. The intimacy of this body in a state of personal ownership was potentially shattered by the reality of the FVR process, but thanks to the perceived benefits collective attention was diverted to the manufactured glamour, attached to the process by marketers and influential Fryers. Moreover, the wider commercial sector and state actors played their part in this distraction, each for their own gain.
In the early years it was only thanks to a concerted effort by all parts of the industry that the disturbing details of the FVR process were kept from the public. But by the late 2040s when anti-Nuvorm activists released footage of the reality of the freeze-drying and vacuuming warehouses, the public was dependent on FVR-Flights and quite simply did not want to see. The footage of excrement covered floors, body bags being thrown around by operating staff, both physical and sexual abuse of bodies during the FVR state did not negatively impact the numbers of people who were FVR Flying on a regular basis.
In fact, FVR-Flying took on a romantic, glamorous aura which had been lost from the aerospace industry since its heyday in the 1960s. Designer body bags were just the beginning. Chip embedding into the buttocks was initially adopted as a streamlined means of identification (replacing passports), but the small indentation and darkened pigmentation caused by the chip insertion was eventually worn as a badge of honour by Fryers, who requested the chip be placed on forearms, hands and face. Likewise destination body stamps (which wore off after a few days), were worn and displayed deliberately by the bearer. And when frequent flyers started to see an increase in red pigmentation around the neck and face (caused by the inability of the re-animation process to compensate for the burst blood vessels which occurred in the first instances of freeze drying), this too was worn as a mark of status, taking on the moniker of ‘the Fry-Tan’, amongst influencers and business execs.
The FVR process opened up the opportunity for beauty treatments and anti-aging techniques that could be applied during the process at additional costs. These ranged from simple post re-animation exfoliation, pedicure, botox injections and hormone adjustments to the pseudo-science of zinc and magnesium lined body bags (to aid skin and muscle regeneration), alongside mystic practices such as mid-flight laying on of hands by in-flight gurus and spiritual healers.
More systemically, a full cellular body scan was performed as part of the FVR process and this was able to identify diseases much earlier than previously possible. Moreover, the reanimation process offered the opportunity to apply corrective curing during the re-animation process - offered at an additional cost and/or if the appropriate health insurance was in place.
Government and health organisations also seized the opportunity to apply vaccinations and other disease preventative corrections during the re-animation process. In some situations this was done without prior consent, or even knowledge thereafter by the consumer. There was some initial resistance, but in time the majority of flyers accepted the benefit, need and convenience of these procedures. When governments levied taxes on flyers who opted out of the health applications, uptake became universal very quickly.
However, it was the reformation of the microbiome in the gut after its inevitable destruction during the FVR process which had the most surprising and deep impact on society as whole. In order to have a microbiome to reinstate upon reanimation, Nuvorm developed a general and universal-microbiome (UMB), designed to be reproducible at low cost in lab conditions but "suitable for all”. It was produced and installed in the gut post re-animation. However, it was later found that the UMB had a gender, race, age and culture bias and it was feared that this was leading to an over homogenization within society - not only did preferred global diets lean increasingly toward western dishes, but sexual preferences became more heterosexual, gender more cisgender and political leanings and general outlook and expectancy mediated toward a central norm.
Once discovered, conspiracy theories abounded regarding Nuvorm’s intentionality in producing UMB - most notably the ‘The Great Rebiome’ which claimed that Nuvorm had formed UMB from the gut of Oscar Nuvorm in a bid to create a willing and supplicant population - but no proof was found that the biases within the design of UMB had been anything other than technical oversight born from lack of care and forethought.
Irrespective, what many scientists had suspected was now confirmed - microbiome had a profound impact on the individual’s behaviour, outlook and interaction with the world and over time could lead to quite specific life outcomes.
In order to produce a more tailored microbiome the profession of “Biom Incubator” emerged. Initially, FVR Flyers purchased microbiome from a local human who was most aligned to their own culture and way of life (the biom was quite simply extracted from the incubator’s stool). Increasingly however, the profession developed in specialization and optimisation. Professional incubators lived a life of extreme adherence to their specialization, including diet, sleep and fitness regimes, but increasingly psychological, sexual and spiritual practice. Incubators would open up their lives to 24/7 monitoring and observation by their clients to instill confidence in the quality of their product. Top-tier incubators would charge sums far larger than the cost of flights and would offer subscriptions for frequent flyers.
Choosing the right microbiome became the quickest way to both affiliate oneself to a lifestyle but also adopt that lifestyle - tastes, appetites, thought processes, mood, energy levels, and over time body shape, intelligence, success levels, social status.
Schools, Universities, employers and landlords very quickly set entry criteria which mandated certain types of microbiome. Before long, your microbiome was determining where you could live and what job you could obtain and where your children could go to school. Individuals could be more self selective in terms of their body and mind development, but only if they had the money to pay for the right microbiome.
The initial boundary defying integrations introduced by the increased and continuous flow of a global community was now greatly offset by the stratification of society by their access to quality microbiome.
To conclude, the 21st Century began with the anticipation of transformation via digitisation, Artificial Intelligence and Genetic Modification. Beyond these risk bound opportunities, global nations felt the threat of climatic implosion, and the rise of extreme nationalism in the face of the perceived threats of unmitigated migration. However, as we have seen, while each of these technological, geopolitical and environmental forces still held their sway, the real transformation came in a different guise altogether - Oscar Nuvorm’s Freeze-dried vacuum-packed Humans.
As we know, what would finally replace FVR-Flights not only as a mode of transport, but also as the dominant technology shaping humankind, was far more in keeping with the predictions of 20th Century futurists. In the next chapter we will see how quickly FVR-Flying, with its continued reliance on the biological and physical domain was replaced toward the end of the 21st Century, and how it was this replacement that set us on the path to the world we know today.
Revolutions in 2nd Millenia Technology - Chapter 2
A thought experiment.