Rollback

by Robert J. Sawyer

  “They thought maybe an experimental cancer drug was the culprit.”

  “Yes, they told me that. I’ve authorized them to spend whatever is necessary to try to get hold of a supply of it, or to synthesize it from scratch. But the researchers I’ve spoken to think the damage is irreversible.”

  “They’ve got to keep trying. They can’t give up.”

  “They won’t, Don. Believe me, this is a huge problem for them. It’s going to affect their stock price, if word gets out, unless they can find a solution.”

  “If you hear anything,” Don said, “please, let me know at once.”

  “Of course,” said McGavin. “But…”

  But don’t have unrealistic hopes; that was the implicit comment. McGavin had probably seen only an executive summary of the longer report Don had now pried out of Rejuvenex, but the bottom line would have been the same: no solution likely in the near future.

  “Anyway,” continued McGavin, “if there’s anything Sarah needs to help with the decryption work, or if there’s anything either you or she needs for anything else, just let me know.”

  “She needs to be rolled back.”

  “I am sorry, Don,” McGavin said. “Look, I’ve got to get on a plane. But we’ll keep in touch, okay?”

  –-- Chapter 12 --–

  BACK IN 2009, those who were part of the formal SETI endeavor had set up a newsgroup to share their progress in figuring out what the various parts of that first, original alien radio message said. It was rumored that the Vatican astronomers were working full-time on trying to translate the message, too, as was, supposedly, a team at the Pentagon. Hundreds of thousands of amateurs were taking a crack at it, as well.

  Besides the symbolic-math stuff, parts of the original message turned out to be bitmap diagrams; a researcher in Calcutta was the first to realize that. Someone in Tokyo chimed in shortly thereafter, demonstrating that many of the block-graphic diagrams were actually frames in short animated movies. A new symbol in the last frame of each movie was presumably the word to be used henceforth for the concept that had been illustrated: “growth,” “attraction,” and so on.

  The message also contained a lot about DNA—and, yes, there was no doubt that that was what it was, for its specific chemical formula was given. Apparently it was also the hereditary molecule on Sigma Draconis II—which immediately revived old debates about panspermia, the notion that life on Earth had begun when microorganisms from outer space had chanced to land here. The Dracons, some said, might be our very distant cousins.

  The message also contained a discussion of chromosomes, although it took a biologist—in Beijing, as it happened—to recognize that that’s what was being talked about, since the chromosomes were shown as rings, rather than long strings. Apparently, Sarah had learned, bacteria had circular chromosomes, and were essentially immortal, being able to divide forever. The innovation of breaking the circle to make shoelace-like chromosomes had led to the development, at least on Earth, of telomeres, the protective endcaps that diminished each time a cell divided, leading to programmed cell death. No one could say whether the senders had ringlike chromosomes themselves, or whether they were just depicting what they guessed to be either the universal ancestral or most-common kind. On Earth, in terms of biomass and number of individual organisms, chromosomal rings outnumbered the shoelace kind by orders of magnitude.

  Once that piece of the puzzle was solved, a bunch of people simultaneously posted that the next set of symbols outlined various stages of life: separate gametes, conception, pre-birth growth, birth, post-birth growth, sexual maturity, the end of reproductive capability, old age, and death.

  Lots of fascinating stuff, to be sure, but all of it seemed to be prologue, just a language lesson establishing a vocabulary. None of those early bits, except the tantalizing sample phrase that good was much greater than bad, seemed to actually say anything of substance.

  But there was lots of message left—the MOM, the meat of the message, a mishmash of symbols and concepts that had been established earlier, each one tagged with several numbers. Nobody could make sense of it.

  The breakthrough came on a Sunday evening. At Chez Halifax, Sunday nights were Scrabble nights, when Don and Sarah sat on opposites sides of the dining-room table, the fancy turntable set that Sarah had bought him many Christmases ago between them.

  Sarah didn’t like the game nearly as much as Don did, but she played it to make him happy. He, meanwhile, had less fondness for bridge than she did—or, truth be told, for Julie and Howie Fein, who lived up the street—but he dutifully joined Sarah in a game with them once a week.

  They were getting near the end of the Scrabble match; fewer than a dozen tiles were left in the drawstring bag. Don, as always, was winning. He’d already managed a bingo—Scrabble-speak for playing all seven of one’s letters in a single turn—making the improbable wanderous by building on his previous de, one of the many two-letter combos that Scrabble accepted as a word but that Sarah, in all of her forty-eight years, had never seen anyone actually use as a word. Don was an expert in what she called Scrabble babble: he’d memorized endless lists of obscure words, without bothering to learn their meanings. She’d given up long ago challenging any string of letters he played. It was always in the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, even if her trusty Canadian Oxford didn’t have it. Still, it was bad enough when he played something like muzjik, as he had just now, with both a Z and a J, but to get it on a triple-word score, and—

  And suddenly Sarah was on her feet.

  “What?” said Don, indignant. “It’s a word!”

  “It’s not just the symbol, it’s where it appears!” She was heading out of the dining room, through the kitchen, and into the living room.

  “What?” he said, getting up to follow her.

  “In the message! The part that doesn’t make sense!” She was speaking as she moved. “The rest of the message defines an…an idea-space, and the numbers are coordinates for where the symbols go within it. They’re relating concepts to each other in some sort of three-dimensional array…” She was running down the stairs to the basement, where, back then, the family computer had been kept. He followed. Sixteen-year-old Carl was seated in front of the bulky CRT monitor, headphones on, playing one of those damned first-person-shooter games that Don so disapproved of. Ten-year-old Emily, meanwhile, was watching Desperate Housewives on TV.

  “Carl, I need the computer—”

  “In a bit, Mom. I’m at the tenth level—”

  “Now!”

  It was so rare for Sarah to yell that her son actually did get up, relinquishing the swivel chair. “How do you get out of this damn thing?” Sarah snapped, sitting down. Carl reached over his mother’s shoulder and did something with the mouse. Don, meanwhile, turned down the volume on the TV, earning him a petulant “Hey!” from Emily.

  “It’s an X-Y-Z grid,” Sarah said. She opened Firefox, and accessed one of the countless sites that had the Dracon message online. “I’m sure of it. They’re defining the placement of terms.”

  “On a map?” Don said.

  “What? No, no, no. Not on a map—in space! It’s like a 3-D page-description language. You know, like Postscript, but for documents that don’t just have height and width but depth as well.” She was pounding rapidly at the keyboard. “If I can just figure out the parameters of the defined volume, and…”

  More keystrokes. Don and Carl stood by, watching in rapt attention. “Damn!” said Sarah. “It’s not a cube…that’d be too easy. A rectangular prism then. But what are the dimensions?”

  The mouse pointer was darting about the screen like a rocket piloted by a mad scientist. “Well,” she said, clearly just talking to herself now, “if they’re not integers, they might be square roots…”

  “Daddy…?”

  He turned around. Emily was looking up at him with wide eyes. “Yes, sweetheart?”

  “What’s Mommy doing?”

  He glanced back. Sarah h
ad a graphing program running; he suspected she was now glad they’d sprung for the high-end video card that Carl had begged for so he could play his games.

  “I think,” Don said, turning back to his daughter, “that she’s making history.”

  –-- Part Two --–

  –-- Chapter 13 --–

  TO BE YOUNG again! So many had wished for it over the years, but Donald Halifax had achieved it—and it felt wonderful. He knew his strength and stamina had ebbed these past several decades, but because it’d happened gradually he hadn’t been conscious of how much he’d lost. But it had all come rushing back over the last six months, and the contrast was staggering; it was like being on a caffeine jag all the time. The term that came to mind was “vim and vigor”—and, although he’d played “vim” often enough in Scrabble, he realized he didn’t actually know precisely what it meant, so he asked his datacom. “Ebullient vitality and energy,” it told him.

  And that was it! That was precisely it! His energy seemed almost boundless, and he was elated to have it back. “Zest,” another word only ever employed on the Scrabble board, came to mind, too. The datacom’s synonyms for it—keen relish, hearty enjoyment, gusto—were all applicable, but the cliché “feeling like a million bucks” seemed woefully inadequate; he felt like every one of the billions of dollars that had been spent on him; he felt totally, joyously, happily alive. He didn’t shuffle anymore; he strode. Just walking along felt like the way he used to feel on those motorized walkways at airports—like he was bionic, moving so fast that it’d all be a blur to onlookers. He could lift heavy boxes, jump over puddles, practically fly up staircases—it wasn’t quite leaping tall buildings in a single bound, but it felt damn near as good.

  And there was icing on this delicious cake: the constant background of pain that had been with him for so long was gone; it was as though he’d been sitting next to a roaring jet engine for years on end, always trying to shut out the sound, to ignore it, and now it had been turned off; the silence was intoxicating. Youth, the old song said, was wasted on the young. So true—because they didn’t know what it would feel like once it was gone. But now he had it again!

  Dr. Petra Jones confirmed that his rollback was complete. His cell-division rate, she said, had slowed to normal and his telomeres had gone back to shortening with each division, a new set of growth rings was starting to appear in his bones, and so on. And the follow-up work had been completed, too. He had new lenses, a new kidney, and a new prostate, all grown from his own cells; his nose was restored to the merely honker-esque proportions it’d had in his youth; his ears had been reduced; his teeth had been whitened and his two remaining amalgam fillings replaced; and a few nips and tucks had tidied up other things. For all intents and purposes, he was physically twenty-five once more, and aging forward normally from that point.

  Don was still getting used to all the wonderful improvements. His hearing was top-notch again, as was his vision. But he’d had to buy a whole new wardrobe. After the recalcification treatments and gene therapies, he’d regained the two inches he’d lost over the years, and his limbs, which had been reduced to not much more than skin and bones, had beefed up nicely. Ah, well; his collection of cardigans and shirts with buttons would have looked silly on a guy apparently in his twenties.

  He’d had to stop wearing his wedding ring, too. A decade ago, he’d had it reduced in size, since his fingers had gotten thinner with age; now, it pinched painfully. He’d been waiting until the rollback was over to get it sized back up, and he’d get it done as soon as he found a good jeweler; he didn’t want to trust it to just anyone.

  Ontario had mandatory driver retesting every two years starting at one’s eightieth birthday. Don had failed the last time. He hadn’t missed it, and, besides, Sarah was still able to drive when they really needed to go somewhere. Now, though, he probably should take the test again; he had no doubt he’d pass this time.

  At some point, he’d also have to get a new passport, with his new face, and new credit cards, also with his new face. Technically, he’d still be entitled to seniors’ discounts in restaurants and at movies, but there’d be no way to claim them without convincing incredulous waiters and clerks. Too bad, really. Unlike, he was sure, every other person who had undergone a rollback, he really could use the break.

  Despite all the good things, there were a few downsides to being young again. Sarah and Don were spending double on groceries now. And Don slept more. For at least ten years, he and Sarah had been doing just fine with six hours’ sleep each night, but he found he needed a full eight again. It was a small price to pay: losing two hours a day, but gaining an extra sixty years. And, besides, presumably as he aged the second time, his sleep and food requirements would lessen again.

  It was now a little after 11:00 p.m., and Don was getting ready for bed. Usually, he was quick in the bathroom, but he’d gone out today, and it had been hot and muggy. Toronto in August had been unpleasant when he’d been a kid; these days, the heat and humidity were brutal. He knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep well if he didn’t first have a quick shower. Carl had installed one of those diagonal support bars for them several years ago. Sarah still needed it, but Don now found it got in the way.

  He shampooed, quite enjoying the sensation. He now had a full head of inch-long sandy-brown hair, and he just loved the feel of it. His chest hair was no longer white, either, and his other body hair had lost its grayness.

  The shower was sensuous, and he luxuriated in it. And, as he cleaned himself down there, he felt his penis growing a little stiff. As the water ran over him, he idly stroked himself. He was thinking of finishing himself off—that seemed the most expedient course—when Sarah entered the bathroom. He could see her through the translucent shower curtain; she was doing something over by the sink. He rinsed the soap off, his erection fading as he did so. Then he turned off the water, pulled back the shower curtain, and stepped out of the tub. By now, he was used to being able to swing his legs one after the other over the side without it being painful, and without—as he’d been doing in the preceding few years—sitting on the edge of the tub while doing so.

  Her back was to him. She was already dressed for bed, wearing, as she always did in summers, a long, loose red T-shirt. He grabbed a towel from the rack and vigorously dried himself off, then headed down the short corridor to the bedroom. He’d always been a pajama man, but he lay naked on top of the green sheets, looking up at the ceiling. After a moment, though, he felt cold—their house had central air conditioning, and an outlet vent was directly above the bed—and so he scurried under the sheets.

  A moment later, Sarah entered. She turned off the light as she did so, but there was enough illumination seeping in from outside that he could see her moving slowly to her side of the bed, and he felt the mattress compressing as she climbed in. “Good night, sweetheart,” she said.

  He rolled over on his side, and touched her shoulder. Sarah seemed surprised by the contact—for the last decade or so, they’d had to plan sex in advance, since Don had needed to take a pill beforehand to kick-start his lower regions—but soon he felt her hand gently on his hip. He moved closer to her and brought his head down to kiss her. She responded after a moment, and they kissed for about ten seconds. When he pulled away, she was lying on her back, and he was looking down at her while leaning on one elbow.

  “Hey,” she said, her voice soft.

  “Hey, yourself,” he said, smiling.

  He wanted to bounce off the walls, to have wild, athletic sex—but she wouldn’t be able to stand that, and so he touched her gently, softly, and—

  “Ouch!” she said.

  He wasn’t sure what he’d done, but he said, “Sorry.” He made his touch even lighter, more feathery. He heard her make a sharp intake of breath, but he couldn’t tell if it was in pain or pleasure. He shifted positions again, and she moved slightly, and he actually heard her bones creak.

  The activity was so slow, and her touch so weak, that he f
elt himself going soft. While looking into her eyes he vigorously stroked himself, trying to get his erection back. She looked so vulnerable; he didn’t want her to think he was rejecting her.

  “Tell me if this hurts,” he said as he climbed on top of her, making sure that his own arms and legs were bearing almost all his weight; he wasn’t the least bit fat, but he was still much heavier than he’d been before the rollback. He maneuvered carefully, gently, looking for a sweet compromise between what his body was now capable of and what hers could endure. But after only a single thrust, one that seemed oh-so-gentle to him, he could see the pain on her face, and he quickly withdrew, rolling onto his back on her side of the bed.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said, softly.

  “No, no,” he said. “It’s fine.” He turned onto his side, facing her, and very gently held her in his arms.

  –-- Chapter 14 --–

  SARAH HAD LEAPT from her chair in the basement on that fateful night all those years ago, and Don had hugged her, and lifted her up so that her feet weren’t touching the ground, and he’d swung her around, and he kissed her hard, right there, in front of the kids.

  “My wife the genius!” Don declared, grinning from ear to ear.

  “More like your wife the plodding researcher,” replied Sarah, but she was laughing as she said it.

  “No, no, no,” he said. “You figured it out—before anyone else did, you figured out the meat of the message.”