It comes from the plasticity of the human notion of death. Once, we thought death was what happened when your heart stopped and your brain flatlined. Now we know you can be brought back from that. In fact we use that state in combination with cooling to allow for explantation surgery, where an organ is removed from the body and treated for disease in a way which would not be possible if it was still in place, and then returned to the cavity, the damage repaired around it. Without surgical stasis techniques, there would be no time: the patient would bleed out. With a proper stasis chamber one might have as long as half a day. That’s long enough to do impossible things, to repair someone who is emphatically dead and return them to life. It can even be used to treat massive organ failure resulting from poisoning—that opposition politician in Kazakhstan, they changed his blood and sluiced out his system seven times, then had to graft cloned cells on to his organs and keep him in a medical coma for a month, but he lived. He plays tennis now.