Rollback

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."

"Bye." She put down the phone with her left hand while maneuvering her mouse with her right, and she soon had the message, a vast array of zeros and ones, on screen. Still dubious, she opened three more browser tabs and started searching for information about when and how the message had been received, what was known about it so far, and so on.

There was no mistake. The message was real.

No one was around to hear her speak, but she sagged back in her chair and said the words anyway, words that had been the mantra of SETI researchers since Walter Sullivan had used them as the title of his famous book: "We are not alone…"

"But Proffesor Halifax, isn’t it true that we might never be able to figure out what the aliens are saying?" the host — a woman named Carol Off — had asked back in 2009, during the As It Happens radio interview. "I mean, we share this planet with dolphins, and we can’t tell what they’re saying. How could we possibly understand what someone from another world is trying to say?"

Sarah smiled at Don, who was in the control room on the other side of the window; they’d discussed this before. "First off, there may in fact be no dolphin language, at least not a rich, abstract one like ours. Dolphins have smaller brains relative to their body weight than humans do, and they devote a huge amount of what they do have to echolocation."

"So we might not have figured out their language because there’s nothing to figure out?" said the host.

"Exactly. Besides, just because we’re from the same planet doesn’t necessarily mean we should have more in common with them than with aliens. We actually have very little in common with dolphins. They don’t even have hands, but the aliens must."

"Whoa, Professor Halifax. How do you know that?"

"Because they built radio transmitters. They’ve proven they’re a technological species. In fact, they almost certainly live on dry land, again meaning we have more in common with them than with dolphins. You need to be able to harness fire to do metallurgy and all the other things required to make radio. Plus, of course, using radio means understanding mathematics, so they obviously have that in common with us, too."

"Not all of us are good at math," said the host, amiably. "But are you saying that, by necessity, whoever sent the message must have a lot in common with the sort of person who was trying to receive it?"

Sarah was quiet for a few seconds, thinking about this. "Well, I — um, yes. Yes, I guess that’s so."

Dr. Petra Jones was a tall, impeccably dressed black woman who looked to be about thirty — although, with employees of Rejuvenex, one could never be sure, Don supposed. She was strikingly beautiful, with high cheekbones and animated eyes, and hair that she wore in dreadlocks, a style he’d seen come in and out of fashion several times now. She had arrived for her weekly visit to check up on Don and Sarah, as part of a circuit she did visiting Rejuvenex clients in different cities.

Petra sat down in the living room of the house on Betty Ann Drive and crossed her long legs. Opposite her was a window, one of the two on either side of the fireplace.

Outside, the snow had melted; spring was coming. She looked at Sarah, then at Don, then back at Sarah again, and finally, she just said it. "Something has gone wrong."

"What do you mean?" said Don at once.

But Sarah simply nodded, and her voice was full of sadness. "I’m not regressing, am I?"

He felt his heart skip a beat.

Petra shook her head, and beads woven into her dreadlocks made small clacking sounds. "I am so sorry," she said, very softly.

"I knew it," said Sarah. "I- in my bones, I knew it."

"Why not?" Don demanded. "Why the hell not?"

Petra lifted her shoulders slightly. "That’s the big question. We’ve got a team working on this right now, and—"

"Can it be fixed?" he asked. Please, God, say that it can be fixed.

"We don’t know," said Petra. "We’ve never encountered anything like this before."

She paused, apparently gathering her thoughts. "We did succeed in lengthening your telomeres, Sarah, but for some reason the new endcap sequences are just being ignored when your chromosomes are being reproduced. Instead of continuing to transcribe all the way up to the end of your DNA, the replicator enzyme is stopping short, at where your chromosome arms used to end." She paused. "Several of the other biochemical changes we introduced are being rejected, too, and, again, we don’t know why."