Rollback

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—

And suddenly Sarah was on her feet.

"What?" said Don, indignant. "It’s a word!"

"It’s not just the symbol, it’s where it appears!" She was heading out of the dining room, through the kitchen, and into the living room.

"What?" he said, getting up to follow her.

"In the message! The part that doesn’t make sense!" She was speaking as she moved. "The rest of the message defines an… an idea-space, and the numbers are coordinates for where the symbols go within it. They’re relating concepts to each other in some sort of three-dimensional array…" She was running down the stairs to the basement, where, back then, the family computer had been kept. He followed.

Sixteen-year-old Carl was seated in front of the bulky CRT monitor, headphones on, playing one of those damned first-person-shooter games that Don so disapproved of. Ten-year-old Emily, meanwhile, was watching Desperate Housewives on TV.

"Carl, I need the computer—"

"In a bit, Mom. I’m at the tenth level—"

"Now!"

It was so rare for Sarah to yell that her son actually did get up, relinquishing the swivel chair. "How do you get out of this damn thing?" Sarah snapped, sitting down.

Carl reached over his mother’s shoulder and did something with the mouse. Don, meanwhile, turned down the volume on the TV, earning him a petulant "Hey!" from Emily.

"It’s an X-Y-Z grid," Sarah said. She opened Firefox, and accessed one of the countless sites that had the Dracon message online. "I’m sure of it. They’re defining the placement of terms."

"On a map?" Don said.

"What? No, no, no. Not on a map — in space! It’s like a 3-D page-description language. You know, like Postscript, but for documents that don’t just have height and width but depth as well." She was pounding rapidly at the keyboard. "If I can just figure out the parameters of the defined volume, and…"

More keystrokes. Don and Carl stood by, watching in rapt attention. "Damn!" said Sarah. "It’s not a cube… that’d be too easy. A rectangular prism then. But what are the dimensions?"

The mouse pointer was darting about the screen like a rocket piloted by a mad scientist. "Well," she said, clearly just talking to herself now, "if they’re not integers, they might be square roots…"

"Daddy…?"

He turned around. Emily was looking up at him with wide eyes. "Yes, sweetheart?"

"What’s Mommy doing?"

He glanced back. Sarah had a graphing program running; he suspected she was now glad they’d sprung for the high-end video card that Carl had begged for so he could play his games.

"I think," Don said, turning back to his daughter, "that she’s making history."

Part Two

Chapter 13

To be young again! So many had wished for it over the years, but Donald Halifax had achieved it — and it felt wonderful. He knew his strength and stamina had ebbed these past several decades, but because it’d happened gradually he hadn’t been conscious of how much he’d lost. But it had all come rushing back over the last six months, and the contrast was staggering; it was like being on a caffeine jag all the time. The term that came to mind was "vim and vigor" — and, although he’d played "vim" often enough in Scrabble, he realized he didn’t actually know precisely what it meant, so he asked his datacom. "Ebullient vitality and energy," it told him.