Analog SFF, October 2006

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Just that would have cost a fortune—and Don and Sarah's provincial health plan didn't cover elective procedures performed in the States—but it was nothing compared to the actual gene therapies, which required the DNA in each of their bodies’ trillions of somatic cells to be repaired. Lengthening the telomeres was a key part of it, but so much more had to be done: each DNA copy had to be checked for errors that had intruded during previous copying, and when they were found—and there were billions of such errors in an elderly human—they had to be fixed by rewriting the strands nucleotide by nucleotide, a delicate and complex process to perform within living cells. Then free radicals had to be bound up and flushed away, regulatory sequences reset, and on and on, a hundred procedures, each one repairing some form of damage.

  When it was done, there was no immediate change in either Don or Sarah's appearance. But it would come, they were told, bit by bit, over the next few months, a strengthening here, a firming there, the erasing of a line, the regrowth of a muscle.

  And so Don, Sarah, and Carl returned to Toronto, with Cody McGavin again picking up the tab; the flights to and from Chicago had been the only times in his life that Don had flown Executive Class. Ironically, because of all the little surgeries and petty medical indignities, he felt much more tired and worn out than he had prior to beginning all this.

  He and Sarah would take twice-daily hormonal infusions for the next several months, and a Rejuvenex doctor would fly up once a week—all part of the service—to check on how their rollbacks were progressing. Don had vague childhood memories of his family's doctor making the odd house call in the 1960s, but this was a degree of medical attention that seemed almost sinful to his Canadian sensibilities.

  For years, he'd avoided looking at himself in the mirror, except in the most perfunctory way while shaving. He hadn't liked the way he'd looked back when he was fat, and hadn't liked the way he'd looked recently, either: wrinkled, liver-spotted, tired, old. But now, each morning, he examined his face minutely in the bathroom mirror, and tugged at his skin, looking for signs of new resiliency. He also examined his bald head, checking for new growth. They'd promised him that his hair would come back, and would be the sandy brown of his youth, not the gray of his fifties or the snow white of the fringe that remained in his eighties.

  Don had always had a large nose, and it, and his ears, had grown even larger as he'd gotten older; parts made of cartilage continue to get bigger throughout one's life. Once the rollback was complete, Rejuvenex would trim his nose and ears down to the sizes they'd been when he really had been twenty-five.

  Don's sister Susan, dead these fifteen years now, had also been cursed by the Halifax family schnoz, and, when she'd been eighteen, after begging her parents for years, they'd paid for rhinoplasty.

  He remembered the big moment at the clinic, the unwrapping of the bandages after weeks of healing, revealing the new, petite, retroussé handiwork of Dr. Jack Carnaby, whom Toronto Life had dubbed the finest noseman in the city the year before.

  He wished there had been some magical moment like that for this, some ah hah! revelation, some sudden return to vim and vigor, some unveiling. But there wasn't; the process would take weeks of incremental changes, cells dividing and renewing at an accelerated pace, hormone levels shifting, tissues regenerating, enzymes—

  My God, he thought. My God. There was new hair, an all-but-invisible peach fuzz spreading up from the snowy fringe, conquering the dome, reclaiming territory once thought irretrievably lost.

  “Sarah!” shouted Don, and, for the first time in ages, he realized he was shouting without it hurting his throat. “Sarah!” He ran—yes, he veritably ran—down the stairs to the living room, where she was seated in the La-Z-Boy, staring at the stone-cold fireplace.

  “Sarah!” he said, bending his head low. “Look!"

  She came out of whatever reverie she'd been lost in, and although with his head tipped he couldn't see her, he could hear the puzzlement in her voice. “I don't see anything."

  “All right,” he said, disappointed. “But feel it!"

  He felt the cool, loose, wrinkly skin of her fingers touching his scalp, the fingertips tracing tiny paths in the new growth. “My goodness,” she said.

  He tilted his head back to a normal position, and he knew he was grinning from ear to ear. He'd borne it stoically when he'd started to go bald around thirty, but, nonetheless, he found himself feeling inordinately pleased at this almost imperceptible return of hair.

  “What about you?” he asked, perching now on the wide arm of the couch near the La-Z-Boy. “Any signs yet?"

  Sarah shook her head slowly and, he thought, a little sadly. “No,” said his wife. “Nothing yet."

  “Ah, well,” he said, patting her thin arm reassuringly. “I'm sure you'll see something soon."

  * * * *

  Chapter 9

  Sarah would always remember March first, 2009. She had been forty-eight then, a breast-cancer survivor for five years, and a tenured professor at the University of Toronto for ten. She'd been heading down the fourteenth-floor corridor when she heard, just barely, the sound of her office phone ringing. She ran the rest of the way, glad as always to work in a field that never required her to wear heels. Fortunately, she'd already had her key in hand, or she'd never have gotten through the door before the university's voice-mail system grabbed the call. “Sarah Halifax,” she said into the beige handset.

  “Sarah, it's Don. Have you been listening to the news?"

  “Hi, honey. No, I haven't. Why?"

  “There's a message from Sigma Draconis."

  “What are you talking about?"

  “There's a message,” Don said again, as if Sarah's difficulty had simply been in hearing the words, “from Sigma Draconis. I'm at work; it's all over the wire services and the Internet."

  “There can't be,” she said, nonetheless turning on her computer. “I'd have been informed before any public announcement."

  “There is a message,” he repeated. “They want you on As It Happens tonight."

  “Um, sure. But it's got to be a hoax. The Declaration of Principles says—"

  “NPR's got Seth Shostak on right now, talking about it. Apparently they picked it up last night, and somebody leaked it."

  Sarah's computer was still booting. The handful of musical notes that Windows played on starting up issued from the machine's speakers.

  “What does the message say?"

  “No one knows. It's a free-for-all, with everybody, everywhere, scrambling to figure it out."

  She found herself tapping her fingers rapidly on the edge of her desk and muttering at the computer's slowness. Big icons were filling in on her desktop, and smaller ones were popping up in her system tray.

  “Anyway,” said Don, “I've got to go. They need me back in the control room. They'll call you for a pre-interview later today. The message is everywhere on the web, including Slashdot. Bye."

  “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 female host had asked that night, 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—"