Upgrade(27)

“You just happen to know the Fibonacci sequence off the top of your head?”

“No, I learned it my sophomore year of college.”

“Would you have remembered this before the incident in Denver?”

“Definitely not.”

“Would you say you now have the ability to access everything you’ve ever read or learned?”

Huh. I considered it. “I don’t know if I’m comfortable saying absolutely everything, but many things. Most things.”

“Did you study a foreign language in high school or college?”

“French.”

“Before Denver, what was your fluency level?”

“I’d lost most of it.”

Romero spent the next ten minutes quizzing me on French grammar, and I found that I could now speak fluent French and read it as well.

“Everything I learned in college is available to me again,” I said. “I’m probably more fluent now than at my peak in university.”

Dr. Romero presented me with numerical sequences of increasing difficulty.

After an hour, I finally met one whose pattern I couldn’t suss out.

“Congratulations,” I said. “You finally stumped me.”

Dr. Romero closed his laptop.

“So I guess I didn’t ace it?” I asked.

“No, the test ended forty-five minutes ago. You scored perfectly. I just wanted to see how complex a sequence you could handle. And before you ask, I have no idea what your IQ is. All I know is that it’s beyond two hundred, which is the limit of what the test I just administered can measure.”

“Say that again?” I said.

I’d heard him. I just didn’t believe what I was hearing.

He leaned toward the glass. “Your IQ is at least two hundred. That’s as high as the test can measure. And your memory appears to be preternatural.”

He got up and left.

I didn’t move.

When I was fourteen, I took an IQ test before starting high school, which according to my mother, was simply a tool to help us understand how I learned.

I scored a 118. Above average. In the top fourteen percent of the world’s population.

My mother hid it well, but she must have been severely disappointed.

Her IQ was rumored to be in the low 180s.

I got straight As in high school.

Into Berkeley, the college of my choice.

I was disciplined. I tried.

And then I met O chem. Organic chemistry. I didn’t fail or anything. It just didn’t come easily. Plenty of students washed out. The top few in my class breezed through, and I should’ve been one of them considering my ambitions, but my B? was hard fought.

After completing my undergrad degree in biochemistry and genetics, I asked my mother if I could spend the summer with her in Shenzhen, working in her lab. She agreed that I could come.

So it was me, Mr. 118, surrounded by über-geniuses who were trying to change the world. The more I was around them, understanding only a fraction of what they were attempting to do, the clearer I saw the writing on the wall I’d been avoiding all my life.

It said—

You will never be your mother’s intellectual equal.

Of course my mother knew. She’d known when I was a child that I didn’t have her hardware or anything close to it. All I had ever wanted was to follow in her footsteps. I’d been chasing them all my life. And that summer in Shenzhen, those footsteps ran full speed into the brick wall of my limitations. Into the DNA code I’d been born with.

It is a supremely cruel thing to have your mind conjure a desire which it is functionally unable to realize.

No one teaches you how to handle the death of a dream.

But that wasn’t my fate any longer. My mind was becoming a diamond.



* * *



—

Three nights later, I had wild dreams—like my brain had been infected by Salvador Dalí on mushrooms.

Ecstasy.

Euphoria.

Horror.

Terror.

Joy.

And new emotions I had never experienced, which were a hybrid of excitement for the future and loss for the past.

I dreamed of who I used to be.

Of who, or what, I might become.



* * *



—

Handstands, with minimal practice, became effortless. I even managed to do them on one hand.

On my first attempt, I performed a perfect backflip off the bed.

I did one hundred push-ups in the middle of the vivarium, only breaking a sweat on the last ten, then transitioned into one-handed push-ups, which I’d never had the strength for.

I practiced squatting on the floor and leaping onto the surface of the desk.

I hoped they were watching. I hoped my newfound physical prowess was beginning to pique their curiosity.

The vivarium itself was completely secure. I had examined every square inch and no amount of muscle tone would allow me to punch through the ballistic glass or tear bolted-down furniture out of the concrete.

Thus far, they had only been studying the changes to my mind, and that could be done while keeping me locked inside. But the list Edwin had read off to me my first day here suggested that a number of physical changes were taking place as well, things that couldn’t be measured through glass in a tiny vivarium.