Doctor Nathaniel Sheehan is shot on the streets of Los Angeles. His wife Mary Sheehan is part of the small but fanatical cryonics movement. She decides in the heat of the moment to cryonically preserve her husband's head, the only part of him that hasn't been damaged by the shooting. She hopes one day to be reuinited with him, but the technology doesn't become available until 60 years later, when a group of scientists in Phoenix attach the head to a donor body.
They are the Dr. Frankensteins of the 21st Century and are not always acting to the letter of the law. In other words, a lot of their work is being done under the radar of the current authorities in the United States.
More by luck than expectation, the experiment works and Dr. Sheehan is resuscitated. He is a miracle in the flesh, but his recovery is far from perfect and there is no neuronal attachment between the brain and the body's nervous system. Thus begins Dr. Sheehans slow waking.
The agony of his creation seems impossible at first and the scientists who brought him back, barely know what to do with him. Bit by bit, he progresses and when he does finally wake up as a sentient human being, he assumes that it is still 2006 and that his wife will be by his side, and the life that he once led as a rich and priveleged doctor in Los Angeles, is lying in wait just outside the hospital gates. But that couldn't be further from the truth.
Everything has changed beyond recognition, the world he used to inhabit, the family and friends he used to know, all gone with the passage of time. Global warming, the very thing so debated and feared, has all but arrived. People are leading very different lives from the time when Dr. Sheehan thrived and in order to contain the calamities that have beleaguered the earth, the world has grown more merciless and authoritarian.
The Waking follows Dr. Sheehan's extraordinary journey, from being barely alive to gathering strength as he discovers the inner sanctum of the facility and the scientists who revived him, and the horrors of the outside world that awaits him.
