Upgrade(31)

“So you’re saying people are too stupid?” Basri asked.

“Not just that,” Miriam said. “It’s denial. Selfishness. Magical thinking. We are not rational beings. We seek comfort rather than a clear-eyed stare into reality. We consume and preen and convince ourselves that if we keep our heads in the sand, the monsters will just go away. Simply put, we refuse to help ourselves as a species. We refuse to do what must be done. Every danger we face links ultimately back to this failing.”

I finished my shower, and as I got dressed, one of my keepers—what else to call them?—came in with breakfast.

I sat at the interior desk as the good, rich smell of coffee filled the vivarium.

My thoughts were still racing.

After the beer bar, I’d shared a cab with my mother back to the house we were renting in Bao’an District, on Qianhai Bay.

I’d had two beers too many, and the lights of Shenzhen were streaming by in something of a blur.

I’d glanced over at my mother, who was staring out the window, her mind undoubtedly on tomorrow’s work. Always the work.

And because I wasn’t myself, I just asked her—something I would never have done sober, “If you could do it, would you? Make people more like us?” I quickly corrected myself. “Like you?”

She looked at me, and maybe because her head was spinning as well, she was candid with me in a way I’d experienced only once or twice in my lifetime.

“Yes,” she said. “I would.”

“But it’s just a dream, right? Just an idea?”

She shrugged. “Whenever someone signs up for The Story of You, they have to complete a 350-question personality test and use our imaging app to submit a full-body scan that gives us mountains of data. I have the genomic code of seventy-nine million diverse people and more than twenty-three thousand phenotype data points for each of them. From all over the world. If I could develop a sufficiently powerful AI to handle this data set, and ask the right questions, who knows what I might accomplish.” And then she looked at me with a frightening intensity. “It’s one thing to build a new life-form, cure illness, or even attempt the work we’re doing now with our locusts. But to change how members of a fully sentient species think is surely the ultimate expression of the power of gene editing.”

In light of what had just happened to me, that conversation took on a whole new relevance. My mother had tried to edit a few rice paddies and ended up killing two hundred million people. What havoc could she wreak—intentionally or through unintended consequences—by attempting to change something as fundamental as how Homo sapiens think?



* * *



—

I dreamed of Beth and Ava.

We stood on a flat, featureless plain.

The sky was the same stark gray as the land, and there would’ve been no dimension to the space at all—no horizon, no sense of depth—if the ground hadn’t been darker by the slightest degree.

Suddenly, it broke open between us.

A black chasm spreading wider.

Wider.

I wanted to jump across and join them, but the distance was already too great.

And so we just stood there, watching as we drifted farther and farther apart.



* * *



—

I rose from the depths of a deep unconsciousness, and even before I was fully awake, I became aware of a sound.

A muffled boom boom boom.

Gunfire?

I sat up, opened my eyes.

I was alone in my vivarium, and though the room was dark, I could still see.

I heard a distant scream—dampened by the exterior walls and the glass of my cell.

A man crashed through the door beside the terminal.

I recognized him instantly, even in the low light—he was one of the men who had shown up on the fourth floor of Constitution Center to apprehend me. The short, wide one. I hadn’t seen him during my time here. He had a pistol in one hand, and he was panting and holding his side with the other, blood leaking through his fingers, bloody footprints in his wake.

“What’s happening?” I asked.

As he turned to look at me, the door burst open again and a deafening noise accompanied most of his head disappearing in a red mist.

Someone strode through the door in a black coat. They carried a tactical shotgun and wore a fencing mask, and immediately I could sense something different in how they moved. Something right. No wasted effort. No inefficiency. Lately, I couldn’t escape how awkward and imprecise Romero, Edwin, and my other keepers were with their movements. Like giant, rambling babies, their bodies telegraphed everything.

And while it was admittedly a weird thing to notice in this particular moment, I was blown away by the elegance of this person’s physicality.

They made a tiny finger movement.

I knew exactly what they wanted.

Moving to the far side of my cell, I dragged the mattress off my bed and used it as a shield, crouching down behind it on one side of the vivarium.

The sound of the shotgun cycling rounds was earsplitting—slugs crunching through bulletproof glass, the spray of shards tearing into the mattress and raining down on me.

When the shooting stopped, I threw the mattress aside and came to my feet.

The ballistic glass of my vivarium had been no match for the shotgun slugs.

I stepped out of the cage for the first time in twenty-five days.