"If the Durona Group doesn't step in," said Mark, "the inevitable end game is that this place will go to the city or the Prefecture, or to Fuwa.  And in either case, patron intake stops.  The life of one person isn't long enough to see this venture out."

"Although that might change in the future," Kareen observed.

"Or cryofreezing will become obsolete technology, and this whole demographic mess Kibou has created for itself will be naturally swept away," said Mark.

"I'm not so sure of that," said Miles thoughtfully.  "If people start getting frozen at eight hundred instead of eighty, the game will still go on, just set to a new equilibrium.  Although at eight hundred, it's hard to guess how people will think.  At twenty, I could not have imagined myself at almost-forty.  I can't imagine eighty even now."

Suze snorted.

Mark shrugged.  "That will be for them to decide, however many decades or centuries from now.  I expect death will still be cheap and always available, doesn't take high tech."

"During the initial transition period," Kareen said, wrenching things back from this flight of speculation to the practical present, "treatment actually will be free, if the subject is willing to sign up for the experimental protocols and give the legal releases.  And anyone coming in can give their own permissions."  Not needing, this implied, any cooperation from Madame Suze and company.  "I expect the Group will prefer to have a few more healthy live subjects to start on, before tackling the more difficult complications from death trauma and cryorevival.  Although they'll certainly want data on those as well."

Suze growled.  Tenbury scratched his beard.

Kareen regarded her fingernails, looked up, smiled.  Miles wasn't sure if anyone else caught Mark's small gesture, two fingers held out and then curled once more atop his stomach.  The pair had the good-cop-bad-cop routine down to an art, Miles thought with admiration, and it would be a naïve observer who concluded that all the bad-cop ideas came from Mark—or the good-cop ones from his partner, for that matter.  Kareen continued serenely, "The Durona Group will be doing a lot of local hiring, if this goes through.  For example, if you, Madame Suzuki, were to sign up for the first round of protocols, and they proved to work as well as we hope, the position of Director of Community Relations could be made open for you.  Which would put you in place to work on these problems on an on-going basis, right from here.  This is all too complex to be solved in a night, but that doesn't mean it's too complex to be solved ever."

"Buy me off with an empty title?  Oh, as if I haven't seen how that works before!"