Upgrade(30)

Nod.

“Virtual?”

No response. But yes.

I’d heard rumors of this happening in extreme cases with foreign bioterrorists, but I felt a pang of deep disappointment and shame to hear it confirmed by a man I used to respect. They were interrogating Soren in a virtual world, using military-grade DNI. They would’ve hacked the amygdala and prefrontal and limbic regions of his neocortex to trick his mind into experiencing all manner of pleasure and pain. Virtual torture had been banned a decade ago by the United Nations, but because it was so hard to track or prove, the ban was nearly impossible to enforce.

“I suppose there’s no point in reminding you that he’s an American citizen,” I said. “Oh, wait. So am I. Certainly no point in reminding you that he’s a human being. So what have you learned from him?”

“Nothing. Looks like he really didn’t know.”

Edwin stood, gathered up his newspaper.

“Edwin,” I said. “I just answered your questions. I didn’t have to do that.”

“I know.”

“I would like my family to know that I’m okay. I’d like to speak with them. See their faces.”

The way he looked at me—lips pursed, eyebrows raised—belied a sadness just below the surface. I could see his pulse thrumming in his carotid artery. Bumping along much faster than it had been…129 bpm. I wasn’t sure how I knew the number. I wasn’t consciously counting. I just…knew. I possessed a specific, detailed awareness, where none had been before.

Edwin was sad and nervous I had caught him out. And in that moment, I knew—what he’d said to me my first day here had been a lie. He hadn’t told my family I’d been detained under suspicion of self-editing.

My mind instantly served up a 16K movie of my funeral. Closed casket. Beth and Ava crying. Edwin comforting them about what a hero I was. The silence of our home after all the mourners had left and the real grief set in.

“You told them I was killed in a raid, didn’t you?”

All he said was, “I’m sorry.”

And walked away.



* * *



—

I got undressed and stepped into the shower. The stall was tiny and glass-walled. No privacy or space. I knew someone somewhere was sitting at a monitor, watching my every move.

I couldn’t bring myself to think about Beth and Ava. Imagining them mourning me would have broken me.

So as the hot water beat down on me, I thought about Mom, wondering where she was at this moment. Wondering what her endgame might be. Had she also exposed herself to this upgrade?

A memory bubbled to the surface—a conversation I’d been present for that summer in China before everything went wrong.

On the rare occasion Miriam wanted to blow off steam and get her postdocs out of the lab, we’d all go to this Belgian beer bar in the Nanshan District called the Stumbling Monk.

Before Denver and the upgrade to my autobiographical memory, I would never have recalled this moment with such crystalline perfection, but one night, many drinks in, our group was going back and forth in a spirited debate, which had been started when my mother posed a hypothetical question: What is the greatest threat to our species?

Everyone was drunk and happy and loud, chiming in with—

Rising oceans.

Desertification.

Failing ecosystems.

Dangerous CO2 levels.

Basri, the postdoc who was my mother’s number two, had said, “All the existential threats to our existence live under the umbrella of climate change.”

My mother had been quietly watching us all debate from the head of the table, sipping from a chalice of Westvleteren 12, her big, enigmatic eyes missing nothing.

She said finally, “You’re all wrong.”

The table went silent, everyone turning toward her. Miriam had barely raised her voice. There was no way we all should’ve heard it over the din of the bar, but there was something almost magical about my mother in a crowd of her acolytes.

“You don’t believe climate change is the greatest threat to our species?” Basri asked.

She’d fixed him with her gaze. “The greatest threat to our species lies within us.”

Everyone exchanged uncomfortable glances, unsure of what she meant.

Standing in this microshower in my vivarium, twenty years later, I could vividly recall not having the foggiest idea of what she was talking about, and sinking a bit inward as even more evidence of my shortcomings piled on top of me.

My mother had said, “Hunger, disease, war, warming—these threats loom over us like building storm clouds. But ninety-nine percent of humanity reads about our crumbling world in the morning headlines, then ignores it and gets on with their day.” She looked around the table. “You’re all here with me in Shenzhen, trying to do your part to solve crop failure, which might be a step toward solving hunger and famine. Trying to be part of the solution.”

She leaned forward, suddenly energized. “If more people were like us, imagine what we could accomplish. New crops to feed the millions going hungry. Stopping pandemics from raging across our world. Ending most disease and all poverty and all war. No more mass extinctions. Clean, renewable, limitless energy. Spreading into the solar system.”

Twenty years later, as the hot water beat down on my back, I felt a chill run through me.