Rollback

Canada had turned two hundred this past summer, and it was celebrating this centennial the same way it had the last one: by hosting a world’s fair. Don remembered visiting the first one as a child with his parents, and being amazed by giant lasers, touchtone phones, monorails, and a massive geodesic sphere filled with American space capsules. That fair, like this one, had been called Expo 67, with only a two-digit year; just two-thirds of a century into the new millennium and the lessons old Peter de Jager had tried to teach the world were totally forgotten. But, also like the original, this fair was at least in part a showcase for the latest and greatest technology, some of which had been derived from the artificial womb and incubator plans the Dracons had beamed to Earth.

Don pulled the van into traffic. A few other drivers honked politely and waved; Amphion and Zethus were famous, the hulking green Dracmobile was unmistakable — and the Manitoba vanity plate that said STARKIDS didn’t hurt.

Don had been six years old when Canada had turned one hundred in 1967. Back then, the government had contacted people who were born the same year the nation was, and arranged for school visits by those who were well enough. Even after all this time, Don vividly remembered meeting his very first centenarian then, an impossibly ancient man confined to a wheelchair.

But now a hundred more years had passed, and Don himself was a centenarian; in fact, he was a hundred and six, and soon would turn a hundred and seven. People younger than him — men and women born in 1967 — were touring schools now, among them Pamela Anderson. She’d been the first baby born in her hometown in British Columbia on the actual day of Canada’s hundredth birthday, and her own rollback, performed just a few years ago when the price had fallen enough that mere TV stars could afford it, had left her as lovely as when she’d first graced the pages of Playboy.

Don no longer looked that young; physically, he was now forty-four or so. His hair was mostly gone again, but that was fine with him. He was feeling better this time around than when he’d gone through his forties originally; it had been six decades since he’d had his one and only heart attack.

Lenore also was in her mid-forties — but doubtless not middle-aged. The cost of rolling back would continue to drop; seven million people had already undergone the procedure. By the time she needed it, they’d be able to pay for a rollback for her, and — the thought was staggering, but doubtless true — they’d be able to afford a second rollback for Don.

As they drove along, Amphion and Gillian were bickering, while Zethus was just looking out the window at the crowded streets of Toronto. Despite being named for twins, the Draclings had grown up to be distinct individuals. Amphion had blue-black skin and two small fluted crests running down the back of his head, while Zethus had teal and silver skin and three crests. Each boy was distinct in character, too. Amphion was adventurous and outgoing, and incapable of letting even the smallest irony go unremarked upon, while Zethus was cautious and shy with strangers but enjoyed word games almost as much as his father did.

Don looked at them in his rearview mirror. "Amphion," he said, "stop teasing your sister."

Amphion swiveled two of his four eyes to look at Don. "She started it!" Each Dracon eye had a unique visual range: two saw to varying degrees into the ultraviolet, the third saw into the infrared, and the fourth saw into both but not in color; the combination of eyes the boys chose to bring to bear on an object not only affected what it looked like to them but also how they felt about it. They also possessed a sense that had no terrestrial analog, enabling them to detect heavy objects even when they were out of view.

Amphion and Zethus each had five limbs: three legs and two arms. If their embryonic development was a reliable echoing of their evolutionary history, the two front legs had evolved from what had been pelvic fins in an earlier aquatic form, and the thicker rear leg was derived from what had been a tail fin. The arms, meanwhile, had developed not from pectoral fins, as in humans, but rather from the complex array of bones that had supported two ancestral gills.

Dracons had only three fingers on each of their two hands, but they nonetheless came honestly by the base-ten counting system used in their radio messages. The boys each had ten feeding tendrils around their mouth slits — two pairs of them above and a row of six below; Zethus was using his tendrils just now to maneuver a hunk of cotton candy that Gillian had passed through a small airlock to him. Because their four eyes were recessed in bony sockets, Dracons couldn’t actually see their own tendrils, so whatever help they were in math involved some mental picture of their deployment, rather than actually counting them.