Analog SFF, October 2006

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe. I—I'm just..."

  She reached across the dark polished wood of the table and touched his hand. “Scared?"

  It wasn't an accusation from Sarah; it was loving concern. “Yeah, I suppose. A bit."

  “Me, too,” she said. “But we'll be going through it together."

  He lifted his eyebrows. “Are you sure you could stand to have me around for another few decades?"

  “I wouldn't have it any other way."

  To be young again. It was a heady thought, and, yes, it was scary, too. But it was also, he had to admit, intriguing. He'd never liked taking charity, though. If the procedure had been something they could have even remotely afforded, he might have been more enthusiastic. But even if they sold their house, sold every stock and bond they owned, liquidated all their assets, they couldn't begin to pay for the treatment for even one of them, let alone for them both. Hell, even Cody McGavin had had to think twice about spending so much money.

  This stuff about Sarah being the one and only person who could communicate with the aliens struck Don as silly. But it wasn't as though the rejuvenation could be taken back; once done, it was done. If it turned out that McGavin was wrong about her being pivotal, they'd still have all those extra decades.

  “We'd need money to live on,” he said. “I mean, we didn't plan for fifty years of retirement."

  “True. I'd ask McGavin to endow a position for me back at U of T, or provide some sort of retainer."

  “And what will our kids think? We'll be physically younger than them."

  “There is that."

  “And we'll be doing them out of their inheritance,” he added.

  “Which was hardly going to make them rich anyway,” replied Sarah, smiling. “I'm sure they'll be delighted for us."

  The waiter returned, looking perhaps a bit wary of the possibility that he was going to be rebuffed again. “Have we made up our minds?"

  Don looked over at Sarah. She'd always been beautiful to him. She was beautiful now, she'd been beautiful in her fifties, she'd been beautiful in her twenties. And, as her features shifted in the light of the dancing flames, he could see her face as it had been at those ages—all those stages of life they'd spent together.

  “Yes,” said Sarah, smiling at her husband. “Yes, I think we have."

  Don nodded, and turned to the menu. He'd pick something quickly. He did find it disconcerting, though, to see the item descriptions but no accompanying dollar values. Everything has a price, he thought, even if you can't see it.

  * * * *

  Chapter 7

  Don and Sarah had had another discussion about SETI, a year before the original Sigma Draconis signal had been detected. They'd been in their late forties then, and Sarah, depressed about the failure to detect any message, had been worried that she'd devoted her life to something pointless.

  “Maybe they are out there,” Don had said, while they went for a walk one evening. He'd gotten religion about his weight a few years before, and they now did a half-hour walk every evening during the good weather, and he used a treadmill in the basement in winter. “But maybe they're just keeping quiet. You know, so as not to contaminate our culture. The Prime Directive, and all that."

  Sarah had shaken her head. “No, no. The aliens have an obligation to let us know they're there."

  “Why?"

  “Because they'd be an existence proof that it's possible to survive technological adolescence—you know, the period during which you have tools that could destroy your entire species but no mechanism in place yet to prevent them from ever being used. We developed radio in 1895, and we developed nuclear weapons just fifty years later, in 1945. Is it possible for a civilization to survive for centuries, or millennia, once you know how to make nuclear weapons? And if those don't kill you, rampaging AI or nanotech or genetically engineered weapons might—unless you find some way to survive all that. Well, any civilization whose signals we pick up is almost certainly going to be much older than we are; receiving a signal would tell us that it's possible to survive."

  “I guess,” Don said. They'd come to where Betty Ann Drive crossed Senlac Road, and they turned right. Senlac had sidewalks, but Betty Ann didn't.

  “For sure,” she replied. “It's the ultimate in Marshall McLuhan: the medium is the message. Just detecting it, even if we don't understand it, tells us the most important thing ever."

  He considered that. “You know, we should have Peter de Jager over sometime soon. I haven't played go in ages; Peter always likes a game."

  She sounded irritated. “What's Peter got to do with anything?"

  “Well, what's he best remembered for?"

  “Y2K,” said Sarah.

  “Exactly!” he said.

  Peter de Jager lived in Brampton, just west of Toronto. He moved in some of the same social circles as the Halifaxes did. Back in 1993, he'd written the seminal article “Doomsday 2000” for ComputerWorld magazine, alerting humanity to the possibility of enormous computer problems when the year 2000 rolled around. Peter spent the next seven years sounding the warning call as loudly as he could. Millions of person-hours and billions of dollars were spent correcting the problem, and when the sun rose on Saturday, January 1, 2000, no disasters occurred: airplanes kept flying, money stored electronically in banks didn't suddenly disappear, and so on.

  But did Peter de Jager get thanked? No. Instead, he was excoriated. He was a charlatan, said some, including Canada's National Post, in a year-end summation of the events of 2000—and their proof was that nothing had gone wrong.

  Don and Sarah were passing Willowdale Middle School now, where Carl was just finishing grade eight. “But what's Y2K got to do with the aliens not signaling their existence?” she asked.

  “Maybe they understand how dangerous it would be for us to know that some races did manage to survive technological adolescence. We got through Y2K because of lots of really hard work by really dedicated people, but once we were through it, we assumed that we would have gotten through it regardless. Surviving into the year 2000 was taken as—what was your phrase?—'an existence proof’ that such survival had been inevitable. Well, detecting alien races who've survived technological adolescence would be taken the same way. Instead of us thinking it was very difficult to survive the stage we're going through, we'd see it as a cakewalk. They survived it, so surely we will, too.” Don paused. “Say some alien, from a planet around—well, what's a nearby sunlike star?"

  “Epsilon Indi,” said Sarah.

  “Fine, okay. Imagine aliens at Epsilon Indi pick up the television broadcasts from some other nearby star, um..."

  “Tau Ceti,” she offered.

  “Great. The people at Epsilon Indi pick up TV from Tau Ceti. Not that Tau Ceti was deliberately signaling Epsilon Indi, you understand; they're just leaking stuff into space. And Epsilon Indi says, hey, these guys have just emerged technologically, and we did that long ago; they must be going through some rough times—maybe the guys on Epsilon Indi can even tell that from the TV signals. And so they say, let's contact them so they'll know it's all going to be okay. And what happens? A few decades later Tau Ceti falls silent. Why?"

  “Everybody there got cable?"

  “Funny,” said Don. “Funny woman. No, they didn't all get cable. They just stopped worrying about somehow surviving having the bomb and all that, and now they're gone, because they got careless. You make that mistake once—you tell a race, hey, look, you can survive, ‘cause we did—and that race stops trying to solve its problems. I don't think you'd ever make that mistake again."

  They'd come to Churchill Avenue, and had turned east, walking by the public school Emily, who was now in grade two, attended. “But they could tell us how they survived, show us the answer,” said Sarah.

  “The answer is obvious,” said Don. “You know the least-best-selling diet book of all time? Losing Weight Slowly by Eating Less and Exercising More."

  “Yes, Mr. Atkins."


  He made his tone one of mock umbrage. “Excuse me! Going for a walk here! Besides, I am eating less, and more sensibly, way more sensibly than I was before I started cutting back on carbs. But you want to know what the difference is between me and all the others who lost weight quickly on Atkins, then put it back on as soon as they quit? It's been four years now, and I haven't quit—and I'm never going to. That's the other piece of weight-loss advice no one wants to hear. You can't diet temporarily; you have to make a permanent lifestyle change. I have, and I'm going to live longer for it. There are no quick fixes for anything."

  He ceased talking as they crossed Claywood, then began speaking again. “No, the answer is obvious. The way to survive is to stop fighting each other, to learn tolerance, and to put an end to the huge disparity between rich and poor, so that some people don't hate the rest of us so much that they'd do anything, including even killing themselves, to hurt us."

  “But we need a quick fix,” said Sarah. “With terrorists having access to biotech and nuclear weapons, we can't just wait for everyone to get enlightened. You have to solve the problem of high-tech terrorism really quickly—just as soon as it becomes a problem—or no one survives. Those alien races who have survived must have found a solution."

  “Sure,” said Don. “But even if they did tell us their answer, we wouldn't like it."

  “Why?"

  “Because,” he said, “the solution is that time-honored sci-fi cliché, the hive mind. On Star Trek, the reason the Borg absorb everyone into the Collective, I think, is that it's the only safe path. You don't have to worry about terrorists, or mad scientists, if you all think with one mind. Of course, if you do that, you might even lose any notion that there could be other individuals out there. It might never occur to you to even try to contact somebody else, because the whole notion of ‘somebody else’ has become foreign to your way of thinking. That could explain the failure of SETI. And then if you did encounter another form of intelligent life, perhaps by chance, you'd do exactly what the Borg did: absorb it, because that's the only way you can be sure it'll never hurt you."

  “Gee, that's almost more depressing than thinking there are no aliens at all."

  “There's another solution, too,” said Don. “Absolute totalitarianism. Everyone's still got free will, but they're constrained from doing anything with it. Because all it takes is one crazy person and a pile of antimatter, and—kablooie!—the whole stinking planet is gone."

  A car coming toward them beeped its horn twice. He looked up and saw Julie Fein driving by and waving. They waved back.

  “That's not much better than the Borg scenario,” Sarah said. “Even so, it's so depressing not to have detected anything. I mean, when we first started pointing our radio telescopes at the sky, we thought we'd pick up tons of signals from aliens, and, instead, in all that time—almost fifty years now—not a peep."

  “Well, fifty years isn't that long,” he said, trying now to console her.

  Sarah was looking off into the distance. “No, of course not,” she said. “Just most of a lifetime."

  * * * *

  Chapter 8

  Carl, the elder of Don and Sarah's two children, was known for his theatrics, so Don was grateful that he didn't spurt coffee all over the table. Still, after swallowing, he managed to exclaim “You're going to do what?” with vigor worthy of a sitcom. His wife Angela was seated next to him. Percy and Cassie—in full, Perseus and Cassiopeia, and, yes, Grandma had suggested the names—had been dispatched to watch a movie in Carl and Angela's basement.

  “We're going to be rejuvenated,” repeated Sarah, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

  “But that costs—I don't know,” said Carl, looking at Angela, as if she should be able to instantly supply the figure. When she didn't, he said, “That costs billions and billions."

  Don saw his wife smile. People sometimes thought their son had been named for Carl Sagan, but he wasn't. Rather, he was named for his mother's father.

  “Yes, it does,” said Sarah. “But we're not paying for it. Cody McGavin is."

  “You know Cody McGavin?” said Angela, her tone the same as it would have been if Sarah had claimed to know the Pope.

  “Not until last week. But he knew of me. He funds a lot of SETI research.” She shrugged a little. “One of his causes."

  “And he's willing to pay to have you rejuvenated?” asked Carl, sounding skeptical.

  Sarah nodded. “And your father, too.” She recounted their meeting with McGavin. Angela stared in open-mouth wonder; she had mostly only known her mother-in-law as a little old lady, not—as the news-sites kept calling her—"the Grand Old Woman of SETI."

  “But, even if it's all paid for,” said Carl, “no one knows what the long-term effects of—of—what do they call it?"

  “A rollback,” said Don.

  “Right. No one knows the long-term effects of a rollback."

  “That's what everyone says about everything new,” said Sarah. “No one knew what the long-term effects of low-carb dieting would be, but look at your father. He's been on a low-carb diet for forty years now, and it's kept his weight, cholesterol, blood pressure, and blood sugar all normal."

  Don was embarrassed to have this brought up; he wasn't sure that Angela knew that he used to be fat. He'd started putting on weight during his Ryerson years, and, by the time he was in his early forties, he'd reached 240 pounds—way too much for his narrow-shouldered five-foot-ten frame. But Atkins had taken it off, and kept it off; he had been a trim 175 for decades. While the others had enjoyed garlic mashed potatoes with their roast beef this evening, he'd had a double helping of green beans.

  “Besides,” continued Sarah, “if I don't do this, nothing else I start today will have any long-term effects—because I won't be around for the long term. Even if twenty or thirty years down the road this gives me cancer or a heart condition, that's still twenty or thirty additional years that I wouldn't have otherwise had."

  Don saw a hint of a frown flicker across his son's face. Doubtless he'd been thinking about when his mother had cancer once before, back when he'd been nine. But it was clear he had no comeback for Sarah's argument. “All right,” he said at last. He looked at Angela, then back at his mother. “All right.” But then he smiled, a smile that Sarah always said looked just like Don's own, although Don himself couldn't see it. “But you'll have to agree to do more babysitting."

  * * * *

  After that, everything happened quickly. Nobody said it out loud, but there was doubtless a feeling that time was of the essence. Left untreated Sarah—or Don, for that matter, although no one seemed to care about him—might pass away any day now, or end up with a stroke or some other severe neurological damage that the rejuvenation process couldn't repair.

  As Don had learned on the web, a company called Rejuvenex held the key patents for rollback technology, and pretty much could set whatever price they felt would give their stockholders the best return. Surprisingly, in the almost two years the procedure had been commercially available, fewer than a third of all rollbacks had been for men and women as old as or older than he and Sarah—and over a dozen had been performed on people in their forties, who had presumably panicked at the sight of their first gray hairs and had had a few spare billion lying around.

  Don had read that the very first biotech company devoted to trying to reverse human aging had been Michael West's Geron, founded in 1992. It had been located in Houston, which made sense at the time: its initial venture capital had come from a bunch of rich Texas oilmen eager for the one thing their fortunes couldn't yet buy.

  But oil was so last millennium. Today's biggest concentration of billionaires was in Chicago, where the nascent cold-fusion industry, spun off from Fermilab, was centered, and so Rejuvenex was based there. Carl had accompanied Don and Sarah on the trip to Chicago. He was still dubious, and wanted to make sure his parents were properly looked after.

  Neither Don nor Sarah had ever been to a priva
te hospital before; such things were all but unheard of in Canada. Their country had no private universities, either, for that matter, something Sarah was quite passionate about; both education and health care should be public concerns, she often said. Still, some of their better-off friends had been known to bypass the occasional queues for procedures at Canadian hospitals and had reported back about luxurious facilities that catered to the rich south of the border.

  But Rejuvenex's clients were a breed apart. Not even movie stars (Don's usual benchmark for superwealth) could afford their process, and the opulence of the Rejuvenex compound was beyond belief. The public areas put the finest hotels to shame; the labs and medical facilities seemed more high-tech than even what Don had seen in the recent science-fiction films his grandson Percy kept showing him.

  The rollback procedure started with a full-body scan, cataloging problems that would have to be corrected: damaged joints, partially clogged arteries, and more. Those that weren't immediately life-threatening would be addressed in a round of surgeries after the rejuvenation was complete; those that required attention right now were dealt with at once.

  Sarah needed a new hip and repairs to both knee joints, plus a full-skeletal calcium infusion; all that would wait until after the rejuvenation. Don, meanwhile, really could use a new kidney—one of his was almost nonfunctional—but once he was rejuvenated, they'd clone one for him from his own cells and swap it in. He'd also need new lenses in his eyes, a new prostate, and on and on; it made him think of the kind of shopping list Dr. Frankenstein used to give Igor.

  Using a combination of laparoscopic techniques, nanotech robotic drones injected into their bloodstreams, and traditional scalpel work, the urgent structural repairs were done in nineteen hours of surgery for Sarah and sixteen for Don. It was the sort of tune-up that doctors normally didn't recommend for people as old as they were, since the stress of the operations could outweigh the benefits, and, indeed, they were told that there had been a few touch-and-go moments while work was done on one of Sarah's heart valves, but in the end they came through the various surgeries reasonably well.