Upgrade(28)

They would have to let me out if they wanted to test those, and when they did, I would have my chance.

I knew that my bone density and night vision had been augmented.

Apparently my pain tolerance had also been boosted.

How much pressure and force could my bones withstand now that my LRP5 gene network had been upgraded?

How strong had I really become?

Had my reflexes improved?

How fast could I run? How far and high could I jump?

I wanted answers to these questions, and I suspected they did too.



* * *



—

I was working out in the vivarium every day, teasing them with my burgeoning strength and coordination, but no one had so much as hinted that they might be interested in studying my physical abilities. And I couldn’t bring it up. Not directly at least.

Dr. Romero kept trying to peer into my evolving cognition, but devising questions that challenged me required minds at least as sharp as mine.

I suspected they wanted to know if my intelligence had plateaued before they would consider testing me outside my cage. No point in letting them know that I was still improving. The sooner they felt comfortable with my intelligence, the sooner they would devise a protocol to test me in a larger space. A tiny agency like the GPA couldn’t hold me here indefinitely without their bigger, meaner brothers becoming interested. The DoD was surely breathing down their neck already. How long before they took over?

During one test, as I pretended to struggle for an answer, I became consciously aware, for the first time, of a new sensation. Or, rather, multiple sensations— The whoosh of forced air blowing through the vent above me.

My own heartbeat.

The hairs on my arms wavering as micro-changes in air pressure disturbed them.

All the textures in my cell—glass, cloth, steel, porcelain—and all the textures beyond.

It was on the brink of overwhelming me, and it also created the intensely strange illusion of time slowing down.

What allows human beings to concentrate on things amid the maelstrom of infinite stimuli is a neurological process called sensory gating. It filters out low-relevance (redundant or unnecessary) stimuli in the brain from all possible environmental stimuli. If this didn’t happen, we would experience an overload of irrelevant information in the higher cortical centers.

Was my sensory processing changing?

Imagine walking through Times Square in New York City and registering each environmental stimulus equally and simultaneously. The tiny chip in the sidewalk underfoot being given the same priority as every last detail of every incoming pedestrian and the smell of exhaust and food trucks and steam venting out of the subway and urine and every snippet of passing conversation crashing through the auditory inputs right alongside an avalanche of distinct sights, sounds, smells, and tactile sensations of a city in full operation.

The absence of sensory gating is a key marker for schizophrenia, and actually contributes to making people go insane. An existence without gating would be torture.

Perhaps my sensory gating had been downregulated. I would have to reprogram my mind not to let the onslaught of stimuli overload me. Train myself to absorb more input while still maintaining full focus and concentration. And couldn’t I do that now that I was able to give my attention to two things fully and concurrently? Wasn’t I having this exact train of thought at the same moment I was calculating the square root of pi?

Maybe this modification explained why I was now seeing patterns everywhere.

For instance: Whenever Dr. Romero came for a session, he would first go to the terminal to log in his credentials. The minute muscle movements in his forearms and hands, and the sounds of the keyboard strokes—five with the left hand (the left pinkie finger softest [q, a, or z], the left ring finger slightly harder [w, s, or x; maybe 1]), six with the right (heavy strikes with the pointer and middle fingers [u, j, or n; then i, k, 8, or 9])—was like watching his username and password writ large on the wall before me.

Where it really helped was in reading body language.

When he was close enough, I was beginning to study the changes in his pulse rate and pupil dilation.

What made him breathe faster.

What made him relax.

I was finding that my own body language—the smallest of gestures—could arouse changes in his autonomic function.

As I studied these things in Romero and my other keepers, I also studied them in myself.

And the more aware I became of how external stimuli affected my vital signs, I saw how I might one day control them.



* * *



—

From a dream, I heard Edwin approaching my cage. I sat up, opened my eyes, saw him sitting down on the other side of the glass with the Washington Post.

I sat up and rubbed my eyes, then climbed out of bed and walked over to the sink.

Splashed water on my face.

“What’s in the news?” I asked as I brushed my teeth.

“The satellite war. China’s accusing us of sending a covert space team to hack one of their military satellites.”

I took a seat at the desk, the glass between us, said, “Sounds like us.”

Edwin inefficiently refolded the paper—it was almost painful to watch—and leveled his gaze on me. He was here to ask some new questions about my mother.

I said, “I’ve already told you, I don’t know—”