Rollback (9 page)

"Yes. My name is Donald Halifax."

"May I ask what this is about?"

"I'm the husband of Sarah Halifax."

"Ah, yes. The SETI researcher, no?"

"That's right."

"What can I do for you, Mr. Halifax?"

"I need to talk to Mr. McGavin."

"As you might imagine, Mr. McGavin's schedule is very full. Perhaps there's something I can help you with?"

Don sighed, beginning to get it. "How many layers deep am I ?"

"I'm sorry?"

"How many layers between you and McGavin? If I give you a message, and you decide it's worth passing on, it doesn't go to McGavin, does it?"

"Not normally, no. I'm the receptionist for the president's office."

"And your name is?"

"Ms. Hashimoto."

"And who do you report to?"

"Mr. Harse, who is the secretary to Mr. McGavin's secretary."

"So I have to get through you, then the secretary's secretary, then the secretary, before I get to McGavin, is that right?"

"We do have to follow procedures, sir. I'm sure you understand that. But of course things can be escalated quickly, if appropriate. Now, if you'll just tell me what you need...?"

Don took a deep breath, then let it out. "Mr. McGavin paid for my wife and me to undergo rejuvenation treatments—you know, rollbacks. But it hasn't worked for my wife, only for me. The doctor from Rejuvenex says nothing can be done, but maybe if she had a request directly from Mr. McGavin. Money talks. I know that. If he indicated he was dissatisfied, I'm sure—"

"Mr. McGavin has had a full report on this."

"Please," Don said. "Please, my wife ... my wife is going to die."

Silence. His words were probably more brutally honest than the receptionist to the secretary to the secretary to the president was used to hearing.

"I am sorry," Ms. Hashimoto said with what sounded like genuine regret.

"Please," he said again. "Surely whatever report he's seen came from Rejuvenex, and they've doubtless put a spin on it. I want him to understand what we—what Sarah—is going through."

"I'll let him know you called."

No, you won't
, he thought,
you'll just pass it on to the next layer.
"If I could just talk to Mr. McGavin, just for a minute. I just..." He hadn't begged for anything for decades—not since...

It hit him, just then. It hit him like a sucker punch to the gut.

Forty-five years ago. The oncology ward at Princess Margaret. Dr. Gottlieb talking about experimental therapies, about things that were new and untested.

And Don begging her to try them on Sarah, to try anything that might save her. The details were lost to time, but he did now recall the interferon treatment, not approved for use in the States. Gottlieb might have agreed to try it because of his begging, his insistent demands that she do everything that might help.

The experimental treatment had failed. But now, four decades on, its lingering effects were blocking another treatment, all—he swallowed hard—because of him.

"Mr. Halifax?" said Ms. Hashimoto. "Are you still there?"

Yes
, he thought.
Yes, I'm still here. And I'll still be here for years to come, long after Sarah's gone.
"Yes."

"I do understand that you're upset, and, believe me, my heart goes out to you. I'll flag this double-red. That's the best I can do. Hopefully someone will get back to you shortly."
 

Just as he had all those many years ago, when Sarah had been trying to translate the first Dracon message, Don stopped by from time to time to see how she was faring with decrypting the current one. But instead of working at the university, she was struggling with this one in the study—the upstairs room that had once been Carl's.

The Dracons' original message, the one picked up in 2009, had been divided into two parts: a primer, explaining the symbolic language they were using, and the meat of the message—the MOM, as it rapidly came to be known—which used those symbols in baffling ways. But eventually Sarah had figured out the purpose of the MOM, and a reply had been sent.

This second message from the aliens also had two parts. But in this case, the beginning was the explanation of how to decrypt the rest, assuming the right decryption key could be provided, and the rest, well, that was anybody's guess. Because it
was
encrypted, not even a single symbol that had been established in the original message was visible in the second part of this one.

"Maybe the aliens are responding to one of the unofficial responses," Don said, late one evening, leaning against the study's doorway, hands crossed in front of his chest. "I mean, even before you sent the official reply, didn't thousands of people send their own unofficial responses to the Dracons?"

Sarah looked ancient, almost ghostly, in the glow from her magphotic monitor, her thin white hair backlit from his perspective. "Yes, they did," she said.

"So maybe the decryption key is something that was in one of
those
messages," he said. "I mean, I know you worked very hard on it, but maybe the Dracons weren't interested in the official SETI-team response. Whoever they intended to have read their latest message might already have done so."

Sarah shook her head. "No, no. The current Dracon message
is
a response to our official reply. I'm sure of it."

"That might just be wishful thinking," he said gently.

"No, it's not. We put a special header at the top of the official reply—a long numeric string, to identify that message. That's one of the reasons we didn't post the entire reply we sent on the web. If we had, everyone would have the header, which would have defeated its purpose. The header was like an official letterhead, uniquely identifying the response we sent on behalf of the whole planet. And this reply to our response references that header."

"You mean it quotes it?" he asked. "But, then, doesn't everybody have it now? Any Tom, Dick, or Harry could send a new message to the Dracons and have it look official."

Her wrinkled features shifted in the cold glow as she spoke. "No. The Dracons understood that we were trying to provide a way to distinguish official responses from unofficial ones. They obviously grasped that we didn't want everyone who managed to detect their latest message to know what the header was. So the Dracons quoted every other digit from it, making clear to us that they were responding to the official reply, but without giving away what had distinguished the official reply in the first place."

"Well, there's your answer," Don said, quite pleased with himself. "The decryption key must be the
other
digits from the header, the ones the Dracons didn't echo back."

Sarah smiled. "First thing we tried. It didn't work."

"Oh," he said. "It was just a thought. Are you coming to bed?"

She looked at the clock. "No, I—" She stopped herself, and Don's stomach knotted. Perhaps she'd been about to say
I don't have time to waste on sleeping.
"I'm going to struggle with this some more," she finished. "I'll be along in a bit. You go ahead."
 

Don called McGavin's office four more times without any luck, but finally his datacom rang. His ring tone was the five notes from a forgotten film called
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
, the sort of aliens-come-to-Earth story that seemed quaintly passe now. He looked at the caller ID. It said "McGavin, Cody"—not "McGavin Robotics," but the actual man's name.

"Hello?" Don said eagerly, as soon as he'd flipped his datacom open.

"Don!" said McGavin. He was somewhere noisy and was shouting. "Sorry to be so long getting back to you."

"That's all right, Mr. McGavin. I need to talk to you about Sarah."

"Yes," said McGavin, still shouting. "I'm sorry, Don. I've been briefed on all this. It's just awful. How is Sarah holding up?"

"Physically, she's okay. But it's tearing us both apart."

His tone was as gentle as one's could be when shouting. "I'm sure."

"I was hoping you could speak to the people at Rejuvenex."

"I already have, repeatedly and at length. They tell me there's nothing that can be done."

"But there must be. I mean, sure, Rejuvenex has tried all the standard things, but there's got to be a way to make the rollback work for Sarah if you—"

He stopped talking, which was probably just as well. He'd been about to say, "if you just throw enough money at it." But McGavin wasn't listening. Don could hear him saying something to someone else; from the sounds of it, he'd placed a fingertip over
his
datacom's mike and was talking to a flunky standing beside him. At last McGavin came back on. "They're working on it, Don, and I've told them to spare no expense. But they're totally stumped."

"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?"
 

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—