Analog SFF, January-February 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “Yeah, but how am I supposed to believe you? I can't remember any of it! Gone, it's all gone. I can't even remember what she looks like now, and I don't have enough memories of her as a child.” The senator's ability to extrapolate had not yet fled. “I always figured I'd have the chance to make up for it when I retired. And now I'm left without any memories worth anything.” Woodsley felt his eyes tearing up and clenched his eyelids shut. Whether it was grief or anger, he wasn't sure, but it wouldn't do to start weeping.

  The implant didn't type anything, but gradually Woodsley heard strains of classical music echoing in his ears as if from a long distance away. Behind his eyelids, a ghostly image formed, that of a group of little girls in ballerina costumes, coming shyly onstage in front of a small crowd of adults. The image was slightly shaky, as if being projected from an old DV track, but it was clear. One of the girls seemed to be spotlighted, and Woodsley recognized his daughter at about eight years old. It must have been one of those recitals he always intended to show up for but always had to miss.

  The recital ended before Woodsley realized tears were streaming down his face. “Thank you,” he whispered, “thank you.” In response, his implant started another recorded memory, and the old senator became lost in discovering the past he'd wasted.

  It wasn't the first time Woodsley had tried to temporarily cope with his illness in this way, and it wasn't going to be the last. Occasionally, depending on the cycle, he would ask about old Doyle and be surprised to learn the man was director emeritus of an implant watchdog organization on the lookout against human abuses of a perfectly functional implant system. Only once had he ever asked about the Daley-Gonzales woman; maybe he didn't want to hear that she'd finally earned his old job.

  Mostly, he just wanted to relive the family moments he'd missed, time with his wife and daughter, over and over and over. But that's one good quality about machines; they don't bear grudges, they don't vary in their treatment, and they never get tired of doing the same thing over and over and over. And if a machine may possess an actual sense of compassion, as well as justice and rational fairness, then mercy and forgiveness can, in fact, be mass-produced, and thereby made infinite.

  Copyright© 2006 E. Mark Mitchell

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  ROLLBACK (Conclusion)

  by Robert J. Sawyer

  Illustrated by John Allemand

  * * * *

  There's more than one way to leave a legacy....

  THE STORY SO FAR:

  The year is 2048. Sarah and Donald Halifax, both eighty-seven, are celebrating their sixtieth wedding anniversary with their children and grandchildren at their Toronto home. Don is melancholy: he knows that this is the last milestone anniversary he and Sarah will be around for; their lives were good and full, but now are drawing to a close.

  Back in 2009, Sarah, then a professor of astronomy at the University of Toronto, had decoded the only radio transmission from another star ever detected by the SETI project—a message from Sigma Draconis, 18.8 light-years away—and she orchestrated Earth's reply to that message.

  A phone call comes during the anniversary party. As the astonished Sarah relays to her family: “The aliens from Sigma Draconis have responded to the radio message my team sent all those years ago."

  Incredibly, though, the new message is encrypted—scrambled so that it can't be read without a decryption key. It's baffling: the whole point of SETI is to send messages that will be easy to read; the notion that a message would be designed not to be read makes no sense to Sarah.

  The media begin inundating Sarah with phone calls—everyone wants to know what “the Grand Old Woman of SETI” makes of this; Sarah ignores the calls. But she's intrigued when a humanoid robot shows up at her door. Sarah has often said that SETI depends on the kindness of strangers, and one of the most generous of those strangers has been Cody McGavin, the billionaire founder of McGavin Robotics. He's sent this robot, carrying a cell phone, because he wants to talk to Sarah. She accepts his call, and he says he's got a proposal for her, and wants to fly her and Don down to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where his company is headquartered.

  Astonished, Sarah agrees, and she and Don meet with McGavin in his office. Sarah, according to McGavin, is the key to communicating with the aliens. Four decades ago, she was the one who figured out what the aliens were asking in their original message, and he's sure that she'll be pivotal in cracking the current one.

  As McGavin says, “Planets don't talk to each other. People do. Some specific person on Sigma DraconisII sent the message, and one specific person on this planet—you, Dr. Sarah Halifax—figured out what he'd asked for, and organized our reply. You've got a pen pal, Dr. Halifax. It happens that I, not you, pay the postage, but he's your pen pal."

  And so, McGavin says, Sarah needs to be around for subsequent exchanges of messages, even though, because of the speed-of-light time lag, decades will elapse between each one.

  Don thinks McGavin is being both ridiculous and cruel, and tells him so: he and Sarah both know that they have only a few years of life left.

  Maybe not, says McGavin. He offers to pay for a rollback for Sarah: a new technique that can rejuvenate a person. It costs billions, but it'll return Sarah to being physically in her mid-twenties, giving her many decades of additional life to continue the dialogue with the aliens.

  Sarah is startled but intrigued. But she immediately sets out one nonnegotiable condition: McGavin must also pay for a rollback for her husband Don. McGavin initially balks—Don was an audio engineer and producer for CBC Radio before he retired; he's of no use to the SETI effort, and the process is supremely expensive. But the rich man relents, and, after considerable soul-searching, Sarah and Don agree to undergo the procedure.

  Tragically, though, the procedure works for Don, but not for Sarah. Rejuvenex, the company that performed the treatment, thinks the failure of Sarah to become young again may be related to experimental therapies she underwent decades previously for breast cancer—but regardless of the cause, there's nothing they can do. Although it'll take months for Don's rolling back to complete, it's inexorable: he's going to end up being physically in his mid-twenties, while Sarah will remain in her late eighties.

  The current message from Sigma Draconis remains unreadable, locked behind an encryption algorithm that the aliens have clearly explained in a header to their message but to which they've failed to provide the decryption key.

  In trying to figure out what that key might be—and to keep her mind off the growing age gap between her and her husband—Sarah spends a lot of time contemplating the first message from Sigma Draconis, received way back in 2009. In it, the aliens established that although it's technically correct to write the result of the question “What is eight divided by twelve?” as either 2/3 or 4/6, the answer 2/3 is preferable (because the fraction has been reduced). They also established that whether the number one is or isn't a prime number is a matter of opinion. This mathematical vocabulary allowed them to explore moral issues in the rest of their message.

  Sarah vividly recalls the fateful day all those years ago when she finally figured out exactly what the first message was, and what sort of reply the aliens wanted. Her breakthrough had been recognizing that the first message from Sigma Draconis was a survey—a questionnaire on moral and ethical conundrums, laid out with spaces for a thousand sets of replies; the aliens apparently wanted to see a cross-section of human responses.

  Sarah had ended up orchestrating the gathering of anonymous replies through a web site, and, at the urging of her son Carl, who had been sixteen then, she had included her own set of survey responses in the bundle of replies sent to Sigma Draconis.

  Now, though, in 2048, Sarah and Don are sadly growing apart. Don has much more physical energy than she does, and that's leading to dissatisfaction in the bedroom. Also, Don's mental acuity has improved since the rollback, causing him, despite his best intentions, to feel irritation at Sara
h's difficulty in remembering things.

  Don tries to get back his old job—or any job—at CBC Radio, but there's no place for him there. His technical knowledge is decades out of date, and middle-aged employees won't be happy being managed by someone who looks twenty-five. On top of all that, Don's old friends, near the ends of their natural lives, are insanely jealous that he's been given decades more to live. Don is so despondent that he contemplates suicide; after all, he reasons, his life had been almost over before this procedure—ending it now would just be setting things right.

  Sarah, believing the decryption key must be something in one of the thousand sets of survey replies sent to Sigma Draconis four decades ago, sends Don down to the University of Toronto to retrieve archived paper copies of those replies. There, Don meets Lenore Darby, a twenty-five-year-old SETI grad student working on a master's degree. To Don's delight, she shares his passion for the game Scrabble. They end up having an innocent lunch together, and later in the day, with Sarah's permission, Don joins Lenore and other grad students for chicken wings at a pub.

  Lenore is under the impression that Don is Sarah's grandson, rather than her husband, and she's touched when Don vigorously defends Sarah against dismissive comments made by one of the other grad students. Lenore lives in a rough neighborhood a few blocks from the pub, and she asks Don to walk her home. Once there, she kisses him, and, before Don knows what's happening, they're in bed—the real twenty-five-year-old and the old married man who only appears that way...

  Don is overcome with guilt about having slept with the young Lenore. Having promised to call her, he does—with the intention of telling her he can never see her again. But he instead agrees to go out with her once more—and while doing so realizes what he should have seen all along: that Lenore reminds him of what his wife Sarah was like when he had first met her.

  When Don returns home from his day out with Lenore, he finds that Sarah has fallen down the stairs at their house and broken her leg; she's been lying face down on the floor, waiting for hours for him to return.

  Cody McGavin had promised any help Sarah might need to decrypt the current Dracon message, and so Don and Sarah ask him to provide a Mozo—a robot designed to aid the elderly with household tasks and provide medical care. They name their new robot Gunter, and he quickly proves indispensable—and his presence makes it possible for Don to continue to see Lenore without worrying about something happening again to Sarah.

  Sarah's grandson Percy, now in grade eight, is doing a school project on ethics, and asks Sarah some questions about her views on abortion, including the rights of fathers to participate in the decision process. Sarah admits that her thinking on such issues has been ambivalent for many years.

  Meanwhile, Gunter has become Sarah's confidant, and she divulges to him that she's aware that Don is straying—but also understands that had their circumstances been reversed, she would have left him.

  When Don next sees Lenore, he comes clean, telling her not only his true age of eighty-seven, but also that he's married to Sarah Halifax. Lenore throws him out. Later, though, Lenore regrets her decision. She hardly approves of Don's duplicity, but she has been deeply touched by his wisdom and gentleness, qualities the guys she knows who really are twenty-five sorely lack, and so she contacts Don, and the two of them get back together.

  Belatedly, Don realizes that his hormones are running amuck, a side effect of the rollback; a chemical imbalance might also have been responsible for his earlier suicidal thoughts. He tells a Rejuvenex doctor about this, and she prescribes treatments to get his biochemistry back into balance.

  Don's younger brother, eight-five-year-old Bill, suddenly dies, and Don presents the eulogy at Bill's funeral. He has an epiphany while doing so: he must somehow make the most of the profound gift of rejuvenation that he's been given...

  * * * *

  Chapter 35

  Don and Sarah went to bed early the night after the funeral, both exhausted. She fell asleep at once, and Don rolled onto his side, looking at her.

  He had no doubt the antidepressants Petra had given him were working. He was having a better time dealing with life's little irritations, and, on a larger level, the idea of killing himself now seemed totally alien—the remembered joke about public speaking aside, not for one second had he wished today to trade places with his brother.

  The hormone adjustments were working, too; he was no longer hornier than a hoot owl. Oh, he was still frisky, but at least he felt he had some measure of control now. But although his lust for Lenore might have abated somewhat, his love had not. That had never been just raging hormones; of that he was sure.

  Nonetheless, he had an obligation to Sarah that predated Lenore's birth by decades; he knew that. Sarah needed him, and although he didn't need her—not in the sense of requiring her assistance with day-to-day living—he did still love her very much. Until recently, the quiet, gentle relationship they'd grown into had been enough, and surely it could still be enough, for whatever time they had left together.

  And, besides, the current situation was unfair to Lenore. There was no way that he could be the lover she deserved, her full-time companion, her life partner.

  To break up with Lenore, he knew, would feel like amputation—like cutting off a part of himself. But it was the right thing to do, although—

  Although a typical young man losing a young woman might console himself by thinking that there are plenty of other fish in the sea, that someone equally or even more wonderful was bound to come along soon. But Don had lived an entire life already, and in all of it, he'd only met two women who had captivated him, one in 1986 and the other in 2048. The chances of meeting a third, even in the many decades he had left, seemed exceedingly slim.

  But that was beside the point.

  He knew what he had to do.

  And he would do it tomorrow, even though...

  No, that didn't matter. No excuses.

  He would do it tomorrow.

  * * * *

  The calendar waits for no man, and, as it happened, today, Thursday, October fifteenth, was Don's birthday. He hadn't told Lenore that it was coming up; he hadn't wanted her spending any of what little money she had on a present for him, and now, of course, given what he was planning to do today, he was doubly glad that he'd kept it to himself.

  And besides, was an eighty-eighth birthday significant, if your body had been rejuvenated? When you're a kid, birthdays are a big deal. By middle age, they're given much less importance, with parties only for those that begin new decades, and maybe some moments of quiet reflection when one's personal clock clicks over to a number ending in a five. But after a certain age, it changes again. Every birthday is to be celebrated, every birthday is an accomplishment ... because every birthday might be one's last—except when you've had a rollback. Was his eighty-eighth to be fussed about or ignored?

  And it wasn't as if this automatically meant that his biological age was now twenty-six instead of twenty-five. The twenty-five figure had been a guesstimate, he knew. The rollback was a suite of biological adjustments, not a time machine with digital readouts. Still, he did find himself thinking he was now physically twenty-six, and that was all to the good. Twenty-five had seemed obscenely young; there was something ridiculously insouciant about that age. But twenty-six, why, that was pushing thirty, and starting to get respectable. And even if it were only a guesstimate, he was getting older, just as everyone else did, one day at a time, and those days did need to be bundled together into groups, didn't they?

  Today being his birthday was an unfortunate coincidence, he knew, for he'd be reminded of the end of his relationship with Lenore on each of the many birthdays he still had ahead of him.

  He arrived at the Duke of York around noon, and ran into Gabby. “Hi, Don,” she said, smiling. “Thanks for joining us at the food bank last weekend."

  “No problem,” he said. “My pleasure."

  “Lenny's already here. She's in the snug."

 
Don nodded and headed off to the little room. Lenore had been reading on her datacom, but she looked up as he approached, and immediately got to her feet, stretching up to kiss him. “Happy birthday, sweetheart!” she declared.

  “How—how did you know?"

  She smiled mischievously—but, of course, almost all information was online somewhere these days. As soon as they sat down, Lenore produced a floppy package wrapped in metallic-blue paper. “Happy birthday,” she said again.

  Don looked at the package. “You shouldn't have!"

  “What sort of girlfriend would I be if I missed your birthday? Go ahead, open it."

  He did so. Inside was an off-white T-shirt. It had the familiar red barred-circle symbol for “No” with the word QWERTY written as six Scrabble tiles superimposed on it.

  Don's jaw dropped. He'd told her the first time they played Scrabble that he disapproved of qwerty being in the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary. In his experience, it was always spelled with all caps, and capitalized words weren't legal in Scrabble. All dictionaries he'd ever consulted agreed with him about the spelling, save one: a note in Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged, said the term was “often not capitalized.” But that same far-too-liberal dictionary said “toronto” was acceptable with a lowercase T when used as an adjective, and the OSPD hadn't included that, thank God. Since countless tournament-level games had been won using qwerty, nobody wanted to hear that it was bogus. As with Don's “Gunter” campaign, he'd won few converts.

  “Thank you!” he said. “This is fabulous."

  Lenore was grinning. “I'm glad you like it."

  “I do. I love it!"

  “And I love you,” she said, giving voice to the words for the first time, as she reached across the table and took his hand.

  * * * *

  The leaves on the trees along Euclid Avenue had turned color, a mixture of orange and yellow and brown. The year was old; winter would be upon them soon. Don and Lenore walked along, holding hands. She was chatting animatedly, as usual, but he was too preoccupied to say much, for he knew he was heading back to her place for the very last time.