Rollback

by Robert J. Sawyer

  “Bye.” She put down the phone with her left hand while maneuvering her mouse with her right, and she soon had the message, a vast array of zeros and ones, on screen. Still dubious, she opened three more browser tabs and started searching for information about when and how the message had been received, what was known about it so far, and so on.

  There was no mistake. The message was real.

  No one was around to hear her speak, but she sagged back in her chair and said the words anyway, words that had been the mantra of SETI researchers since Walter Sullivan had used them as the title of his famous book: “We are not alone…”

  “BUT PROFESSOR HALIFAX, isn’t it true that we might never be able to figure out what the aliens are saying?” the host—a woman named Carol Off—had asked back in 2009, during the As It Happens radio interview. “I mean, we share this planet with dolphins, and we can’t tell what they’re saying. How could we possibly understand what someone from another world is trying to say?”

  Sarah smiled at Don, who was in the control room on the other side of the window; they’d discussed this before. “First off, there may in fact be no dolphin language, at least not a rich, abstract one like ours. Dolphins have smaller brains relative to their body weight than humans do, and they devote a huge amount of what they do have to echolocation.”

  “So we might not have figured out their language because there’s nothing to figure out?” said the host.

  “Exactly. Besides, just because we’re from the same planet doesn’t necessarily mean we should have more in common with them than with aliens. We actually have very little in common with dolphins. They don’t even have hands, but the aliens must.”

  “Whoa, Professor Halifax. How do you know that?”

  “Because they built radio transmitters. They’ve proven they’re a technological species. In fact, they almost certainly live on dry land, again meaning we have more in common with them than with dolphins. You need to be able to harness fire to do metallurgy and all the other things required to make radio. Plus, of course, using radio means understanding mathematics, so they obviously have that in common with us, too.”

  “Not all of us are good at math,” said the host, amiably. “But are you saying that, by necessity, whoever sent the message must have a lot in common with the sort of person who was trying to receive it?”

  Sarah was quiet for a few seconds, thinking about this. “Well, I—um, yes. Yes, I guess that’s so.”

  DR. PETRA JONES was a tall, impeccably dressed black woman who looked to be about thirty—although, with employees of Rejuvenex, one could never be sure, Don supposed. She was strikingly beautiful, with high cheekbones and animated eyes, and hair that she wore in dreadlocks, a style he’d seen come in and out of fashion several times now. She had arrived for her weekly visit to check up on Don and Sarah, as part of a circuit she did visiting Rejuvenex clients in different cities.

  Petra sat down in the living room of the house on Betty Ann Drive and crossed her long legs. Opposite her was a window, one of the two on either side of the fireplace. Outside, the snow had melted; spring was coming. She looked at Sarah, then at Don, then back at Sarah again, and finally, she just said it. “Something has gone wrong.”

  “What do you mean?” said Don at once.

  But Sarah simply nodded, and her voice was full of sadness. “I’m not regressing, am I?”

  He felt his heart skip a beat.

  Petra shook her head, and beads woven into her dreadlocks made small clacking sounds. “I am so sorry,” she said, very softly.

  “I knew it,” said Sarah. “I—in my bones, I knew it.”

  “Why not?” Don demanded. “Why the hell not?”

  Petra lifted her shoulders slightly. “That’s the big question. We’ve got a team working on this right now, and—”

  “Can it be fixed?” he asked. Please, God, say that it can be fixed.

  “We don’t know,” said Petra. “We’ve never encountered anything like this before.” She paused, apparently gathering her thoughts. “We did succeed in lengthening your telomeres, Sarah, but for some reason the new endcap sequences are just being ignored when your chromosomes are being reproduced. Instead of continuing to transcribe all the way up to the end of your DNA, the replicator enzyme is stopping short, at where your chromosome arms used to end.” She paused. “Several of the other biochemical changes we introduced are being rejected, too, and, again, we don’t know why.”

  Don was on his feet now. “This is bullshit,” he said. “Your people said they knew what they were doing.”

  Petra flinched, but then seemed to find some strength. She had a slight accent to his ears; Georgia, maybe. “Look,” she said, “I’m a doctor; I’m not in PR. We do know more about senescence and programmed cell death than anybody else. But we’ve done fewer than two hundred multidecade rejuvenation procedures on humans at this point.” She spread her arms a bit. “This is still new territory.”

  Sarah was looking down at her hands—her swollen-jointed, liver-spotted, translucent-skinned hands, folded in her lap. “I’m going to stay old.” It was a statement, not a question.

  Petra closed her eyes. “I am so sorry, Sarah.” But then she made her tone a bit brighter, although it sounded forced to Don. “But some of what we did was beneficial, and none of it seems to have been detrimental. Didn’t you tell me last time I was here that some of your day-to-day physical discomfort is gone?”

  Sarah looked at Don, and she squinted, as if trying to make out someone far, far away. He walked over to her and stood next to where she was seated, placing a hand on her bony shoulder. “You must have some idea what caused this,” he said sharply to Petra.

  “As I said, we’re still working on that, but…”

  “What?” he said.

  “Well, it’s just that you had breast cancer, Mrs. Halifax…”

  Sarah narrowed her eyes. “Yes. So? It was a long time ago.”

  “When we went over your medical history, prior to commencing our procedures, you told us how it was treated. Some chemotherapy. Radiation. Drugs. A mastectomy.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, one of our people thinks that it might have something to do with that. Not with the successful treatment, which you told us about. But he wanted to know if there were any unsuccessful treatments you tried before that.”

  “Good grief,” said Sarah. “I don’t remember all the details. It was over forty years ago, and I’ve tried to put the whole thing out of my mind.”

  “Of course,” said Petra, gently. “Maybe we should speak to the doctors involved.”

  “Our GP from back then is long dead,” Don said. “And the oncologist treating Sarah was in her sixties. She must be gone by now, too.”

  Petra nodded. “I don’t suppose your old doctors transferred records to your new doctor?”

  “Christ, how should we know?” said Don. “When we changed doctors we filled out medical histories, and I’m sure we authorized the handing over of files, but…”

  Petra nodded again. “But this was in the era of paper medical records, wasn’t it? Who knows what’s become of them after all these years? Still, the researcher at our facility looking into this uncovered that about that time—early 2000s, right?—there were some interferon-based cancer treatments here in Canada that weren’t ever approved by the FDA in the States; that’s why we didn’t really know about them. They’re long off the market; better drugs came along by 2010. But we’re trying to find a supply of them somewhere, so that we can run some tests. He thinks that if you had such a treatment, it might be what’s caused our process to fail, possibly because it permanently eliminated some crucial commensal viruses.”

  “Jesus, you should have screened more carefully,” Don said. “We could sue you.”

  Petra rallied a bit and looked up at him defiantly. “Sue us for what? A medical procedure that you didn’t pay for that had no adverse effect?”

  “Don, please,” said Sarah. “I don’t
want to sue anyone. I don’t…”

  She trailed off, but he knew what she’d been about to say: “I don’t want to waste what little time I have left on a lawsuit.” He stroked her shoulder reassuringly. “All right,” he said. “All right. But can’t we try again? Maybe another round of treatments? Another attempt at rolling back?”

  “We have been trying again,” said Petra, “with tissue samples taken from your wife. But nothing is working.”

  He felt bile climbing his throat. God damn—God damn everyone. Cody McGavin, for bringing this crazy idea into their lives. The people at Rejuvenex. The bloody aliens on Sigma Draconis II. They could all go to hell.

  “This is ridiculous,” said Don, shaking his head back and forth. He lifted his hand from Sarah’s shoulder, and then clasped both his hands behind his back and started pacing the length of the narrow living room, the room that had been home to him and his wife, the room his children had first learned to crawl in, the room that held so much history, so many memories—memories that he and Sarah had shared, decade after decade, good times and bad, thick and thin.

  He took a deep breath, let it out. “I want you to stop the process for me, then,” he said, his back briefly to the two women.

  “Dear, no,” said Sarah. “Don’t do that.”

  He turned around and started pacing toward them. “It’s the only thing that makes sense. I never wanted this in the first place, and I sure as hell don’t want it if you’re not getting it, too.”

  “But it’s a blessing,” said Sarah. “It’s everything we talked about: seeing our grandchildren grow up; seeing their children. I can’t—I won’t—let you give that up.”

  He shook his head. “No. I don’t want it. Not anymore.” He stopped walking, and looked directly at Petra. “Undo it.”

  Petra’s brown eyes were wide. “I can’t. We can’t.”

  “What do you mean, you can’t?” said Don.

  “Your treatment has been done,” Petra said. “Your telomeres are lengthened, your free radicals are flushed, your DNA has been repaired, and on and on. There’s no way to undo it.”

  “There must be,” he said.

  Petra lifted her shoulders philosophically. “There hasn’t been a lot of research funding for finding ways to shorten the human lifespan.”

  “But you must be able to arrest the rejuvenation, no? I mean, right, I understand that I can’t go back to being eighty-seven physically. Okay, fine. I’m—what?—I suppose I look about seventy now, right? Just stop the rollback here.” He pointed his index finger straight down, as if marking a spot. Seventy he could live with; that wouldn’t be so bad, wouldn’t be an insurmountable gulf. Why, old Ivan Krehmer, he was married to a woman fifteen years younger than himself. Offhand, Don couldn’t think of a case in their social circle where the woman was a decade and a half older than the man, but surely these days that was common, too.

  “There’s no way to stop it early,” said Petra. “We hard-coded into the gene therapy how far back the rollback will go. It’s inexorable once begun. Each time your cells divide, you’ll get physically younger and more robust until the target is reached.”

  “Do another round of gene therapy, then,” Don said. “You know, to countermand—”

  “We’ve tried that with lab animals,” Petra said, “just to see what happens.”

  “And?”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “It kills them. Cell division comes to a complete halt. No, you have to let the rollback play out. Oh, we could cancel the planned follow-up surgeries—fixing your teeth, your knee joints, getting you that new kidney once you’re strong enough to stand going under the knife. But what would be the point of that?”

  Don felt his pulse racing. “So I’m still going to end up physically twenty-five?”

  Petra nodded. “It’ll take a couple of months for the rejuvenation to finish, but when it does, that’ll be your biological age, and then you’ll start aging forward again from that point, at the normal rate.”

  “Jesus,” he said. Twenty-five. With Sarah staying eighty-seven. “Good Jesus Christ.”

  Petra was looking shell-shocked, and she was slowly, almost imperceptibly, shaking her head back and forth. “What?” demanded Don.

  The doctor looked up, and it seemed to take her eyes a moment to focus. “Sorry,” she said. “I just—well, I just never thought I’d end up having to apologize for giving someone another sixty or seventy years of life.”

  Don crouched down next to his seated wife. How excruciating doing that would have been just a short time ago—and yet it gave him no pleasure now to be able to do it with ease. “I am sorry, honey,” he said. “I am so sorry.”

  But Sarah was shaking her head. “Don’t be. It’s going to be all right. You’ll see.”

  How could it be all right? he wondered. They’d spent their lives in synch, born the same year, growing up with the same events in the background. Both remembered precisely where they were when Neil Armstrong set foot upon the moon during the year they’d each turned nine. Both had been teenagers when Watergate happened; in their twenties when the Berlin Wall fell; in their thirties when the Soviet Union collapsed; in their forties for the first detection of alien life. Even before they’d met, they’d been marching through the stages of life together, jointly aging, and improving, like two bottles of wine of the same vintage.

  Don’s head was swimming, and so, it seemed, was his vision. Sarah’s face appeared blurred, the tears in his eyes doing what Rejuvenex’s sorcery couldn’t, erasing her wrinkles, smoothing out her features.

  –-- Chapter 10 --–

  LIKE MOST SETI researchers, Sarah had worked late many nights after that first alien transmission had been received back in 2009. Don had come to see her in her office at the University of Toronto on one of those evenings, after he’d finished his work at the CBC.

  “Anybody home?” he’d called out.

  Sarah had swung around, smiling, as he came through the door carrying a red-and-white Pizza Hut box. “You’re an angel!” she crowed. “Thank you!”

  “Oh,” he said. “Did you want something, as well?”

  “Pig! What did you get?”

  “A large Pepperoni Lover’s…’cause, um, I like pepperoni, and we’re lovers…”

  “Awww,” said Sarah. She actually preferred mushrooms, but he couldn’t stand them. Coupling that with his dislike for fish had given rise to the little speech she’d listened politely to him give on numerous occasions, a pseudo-justification that he thought was witty for his eating choices: “You should only eat food that’s as evolved as you are. Only warm-blooded animals—mammals and birds—and only photosynthesizing plants.”

  “Thanks for coming by,” she said, “but what about the kids?”

  “I called Carl, told him to order a pizza for him and Emily. Said he could take some money out of my nightstand.”

  “When Donald Halifax parties, everybody parties,” she said, smiling.

  He was looking around for somewhere to set the pizza box. She leapt to her feet and moved a globe of the celestial sphere off the top of a filing cabinet, setting it on the floor. He placed the box where the globe had been and opened its lid. She was pleased to see some steam rising. Not too surprising; the Hut was just up on Bloor Street.

  “So, how’s it going?” he asked. This wasn’t the first time he’d brought food to her office. He kept a plate, knife, and fork in one of the office cupboards, and he got them now. Sarah, meanwhile, pulled out a piece of pizza, severing the cheesy filaments with her fingers.

  “It’s a race,” she said, sitting down in the chair in front of her workstation. “I’m making progress, but who knows how it compares to what everyone else is achieving? I mean, sure, there’s a lot of sharing of notes going on online, but I doubt anyone is revealing everything yet.”

  He found the other office chair—a beat-up folding one—and sat next to her. She was used to the way her husband ate pizza, but couldn’t actually say she liked it.
The crust wasn’t part of his diet—of course, the greasy Pizza Hut deep-dish crust probably shouldn’t be part of anyone’s diet, although she found it impossible to resist. He got the toppings off with a fork, swirling it in the molten cheese almost as though he were eating spaghetti. He also ate sandwiches a similar way, digging out the fillings with cutlery while leaving the bread behind.

  “Anyway, we’d always expected that math would be the universal language,” Sarah continued, “and I guess it is. But the aliens have managed something with it that I wouldn’t have thought possible.”

  “Show me,” Don said, moving his chair closer to her workstation.

  “First, they establish a pair of symbols that everybody working on this agrees serve as brackets, containing other things. See that sequence there?” She pointed at a series of blocks on her computer screen. “That’s the open bracket, and that one there”—pointing at another place on the screen—“is the closing bracket. Well, I’ve been doing a rough-and-ready transliteration of everything as I go along—you know, rendering it in symbols we use. So, here’s what the first part of the message says.” She flipped to another window. It was displaying this:

  {} = 0

  {*} = 1

  {**} = 2

  {***} = 3

  {****} = 4

  {*****} = 5

  {******} = 6

  {*******} = 7

  {********} = 8

  {*********} = 9

  “See how clever they are?” said Sarah. “The brackets let us tell at a glance that there’s nothing in the first set. And see what they’re doing? Establishing digits for the numbers zero through nine—the aliens are using base ten, which may mean they’ve got the same number of fingers we have, or it might just mean that they’ve decoded some of our TV, and have seen that that’s how many fingers we’ve got. Oh, and notice that this chart gives us their equals sign, too.”

  He got up and helped himself to another slice; when you skipped the crust, you went through pizza awfully quickly.

  “Anyway,” she continued, “they immediately give us the basic mathematical operators. Again, I’ve rendered them in familiar notation.” She rotated the wheel on her mouse, and this scrolled into view: