Rollback

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 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.