Rollback Page 5

  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 tim
e: 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 private 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.

  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 th
e 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.”