Upgrade(24)

I grew lightheaded.

And then she spoke: “The GPA and its foreign counterparts are destroying scientific research and discovery.” Her voice. No question in my mind. “If substantive policy changes aren’t enacted immediately, including letting universities and private businesses return to responsible genetic research, I will take matters into my own hands. I’ll release a viral gene drive.”

As Edwin took his phone back, he said, “We ran the print on the wineglass and tested the DNA from the hair she deliberately left behind. There’s no question it’s her.”

My vision swarmed.

Chest tightening, hands tingling.

“Are you all right?” Edwin asked. “They’re telling me your heart rate is soaring.”

I was shaking with rage.

“I understand you’re upset.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because I didn’t know if you were working with her. I didn’t know if she would try to reach out to you. I had your phones tapped. Your house bugged. You’ve been under surveillance for almost ten months.”

I wanted to spring across the table and get my hands on him. I felt confident he’d be dead before the guards got inside the vivarium.

“How did you not tell me this!” I shouted.

The guards started toward the vivarium, but Edwin waved them away.

I had grieved for her. I had processed her death as well as such a thing can be processed.

I choked down a gulp of air, utterly destroyed.

Edwin said, “Soon after, she sent me an encrypted message with her demands. I responded, asking what species she would target with her gene drive.”

“Homo sapiens.”

“Bingo.”

“With what sort of changes?”

“She wasn’t specific. Just called it a significant upgrade. She also promised to give me a demonstration of her abilities.”

I was the demonstration. Of course, I couldn’t know this for sure. But I knew.

I could feel my emotions evolving from the shock of seeing my mother to the horror of what she was threatening.

A gene drive is the most powerful genetic engineering tool ever conceived. Normally, when a child is born, it gets one copy of each gene from both parents, either one of which might end up being the dominant one of the pair. But if you can insert a gene-drive-targeting system in one parent, you can upend those normal laws of heredity. The gene-editing mechanism—CRISPR-Cas9, Scythe, or whatever it might be—is passed on from the targeted parent into the child’s DNA, along with instructions to sneakily rewrite the other parent’s copy of the targeted gene as the embryo develops. Say the mother has brown eyes, the father blue. With a gene drive, you can overwrite the mother’s genes for eye color in the embryo, thus guaranteeing that their child will have blue eyes. But the real kicker is that the child will pass on the targeting system to their children in turn. All of their children will now have blue eyes too, and so on.

Within a few generations, the gene drive will pervade the entire population—and the natural, unedited copy of the gene will be wiped out completely. All Homo sapiens will have blue eyes.

A gene drive can be used for immense good. Before the Ramsay famine, one was used to make all of the offspring of the malaria mosquito male. Since only female mosquitoes of the Anopheles genus are capable of transmitting human malaria, this eradicated the spread of that disease, and eventually that species of mosquito.

Gene drives could also be used to great detriment, because they don’t just alter the genetic makeup of one person, plant, or animal. They have the power to alter the evolutionary trajectory of an entire species.

“If you’ve been surveilling me,” I said, “then you know I haven’t had any contact with her. So why am I here? I’m not working with my mother. I didn’t know she was alive until five minutes ago. You test me every few years. You can’t possibly think I’m stupid enough to have altered my own genome.”

“I actually believe you, Logan. But you are changing, and we don’t know what you’re on your way to becoming.”



* * *



—

The first night in my vivarium reminded me of my first night in prison. The cell doors locking in unison. The sound of the big lights in the common area shutting off. The silence and darkness closing in around me as I faced the reality that my life was over, that these walls were my home for the next thirty years.

I lay down on the mattress and stared up at the glass ceiling.

My mother was alive.

I had so many thoughts and questions swirling in my head that it was hard to be still.

Where had she been?

What had she been doing for the last twenty years?

Why hadn’t she reached out to me?

Had she constructed this upgrade, which was light-years beyond the most sophisticated genetic engineering ever imagined?

And if what Edwin told me was true—what did a “significant upgrade” to the human genome even mean? My mother was, by orders of magnitude, the most ambitious person I’d ever known. But surely even she wasn’t crazy enough to try to force a species upgrade on Homo sapiens. What would that even look like? Something along the lines of what she had done to me?

But mainly, in a place I’d made a habit of not looking at too closely, I felt rage.