Rollback by Robert J. Sawyer Read Free Book Online Page B

Atkins had taken it off, and kept it off, he had been a trim 175 for decades. While the others had enjoyed garlic mashed potatoes with their roast beef this evening, he'd had a double helping of green beans.
    "Besides," continued Sarah, "if I don't do this, nothing else I start today will have any long-term effects—because I won't be around for the long term. Even if twenty or thirty years down the road this gives me cancer or a heart condition, that's still twenty or thirty additional years that I wouldn't have otherwise had."
    Don saw a hint of a frown flicker across his son's face. Doubtless he'd been thinking about when his mother had cancer once before, back when he'd been nine. But it was clear he had no comeback for Sarah's argument. "All right," he said at last. He looked at Angela, then back at his mother. "All right." But then he smiled, a smile that Sarah always said looked just like Don's own, although Don himself couldn't see it. "But you'll have to agree to do more babysitting."
 
    After that, everything happened quickly. Nobody said it out loud, but there was doubtless a feeling that time was of the essence. Left untreated, Sarah—or Don, for that matter, although no one seemed to care about him—might pass away any day now, or end up with a stroke or some other severe neurological damage that the rejuvenation process couldn't repair.
    As Don had learned on the web, a company called Rejuvenex held the key patents for rollback technology, and pretty much could set whatever price they felt would give their stockholders the best return. Surprisingly, in the almost two years the procedure had been commercially available, fewer than a third of all rollbacks had been for men and women as old as or older than he and Sarah—and over a dozen had been performed on people in their forties, who had presumably panicked at the sight of their first gray hairs and had had a few spare billion lying around.
    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