[ WP ] You are sentenced to serve a prison term of 254 years . You actually serve 254 years .

John McMillan was a lucky man. 
 
 When the trial had first begun, the public wanted his head on a platter. Not that he could blame them-he had caused the city of Chicago more unrest than any one man since Al Capone. But his ill-gotten wealth had bought him good lawyers, and the judge was easily swayed with a few well-placed threats. The death penalty had been negotiated down to 254 years-life, effectively. But the taxpayers would pay for the upkeep of John ’ s aged body, and this gave him a measure of satisfaction. He resigned himself to spending the rest of his waning days in a white-collar prison in rural Illinois, with regular visits from his grandchildren and a mark of fear left on his desolate hometown. 
 
 That changed with the diagnosis. 
 
 It was cancer, the doctor told him. In fact, it was esophageal cancer, a stubborn type that had not been solved by the advances of the last thirty years. He had five months, the doctor said, to say goodbye to his loved ones. John hired a lawyer to push for compassionate release, but to no avail-this judge had a stronger constitution. The irony was striking, he thought: he had survived thirty years of firefights, police raids, and assassination attempts, only to be taken down by his own body. But he was an angry man, and he wouldn ’ t let it take him without a fight. 
 
 Eventually, the perfect weapon came within his reach: Dr. Morgan. Her experiments on temporary stasis had been quite successful on small mammals-she had kept a rat suspended for a year with no ill effects. But her ambitions were bigger: human-sized, in fact. John McMillan, an old man with nothing left to lose, was the perfect guinea pig. The procedure was simple, she said: he would be anesthetized, placed in a stasis chamber, and awoken when a cure for his disease had been found. And so with John ’ s consent, he became the first human being to undergo stasis on May 10th, 2050, a mere four years into his sentence. 
 
 But Dr. Morgan was not a lucky woman. At only 37, she had not been expecting the heart attack, and neither had her colleagues. Without her expertise, they were forced to shut the stasis project down. And John McMillan remained in a basement, among Dr. Morgan ’ s papers and beside her famous rat. The world forgot about him, preoccupied with a string of man-made disasters that created a Dark Age across the Western Hemisphere. But as society rebuilt itself in a new Renaissance, so did medicine, and the doctors of the twenty-third century built on the knowledge of the twenty-first to cure a number of common diseases. And as an archaeological team explored the lost region of Illinois, they discovered something strange-an antique stasis chamber, powered and regulated by a future-proof solar backup generator. Beside it was a note in archaic English stating its purpose and giving instructions for the waking of its inhabitant. And so on April 8th, 2300, the chamber was opened. 
 
 John McMillan was a lucky man.
