Upgrade(35)

I could put my feelings inside this cage, deep within the recesses of my mind.

I could close the door.

And with an extraordinary effort, I could even lock it.

I could exist apart from those feelings.

It was an unsettling ability that felt like cheating, and it made me wonder—had this upgrade also targeted the heart of my mother’s complaint about our species’ flawed genome? Had she discovered a way to recalibrate Homo sapiens’ balance between sentiment and reason?

The shower cut off.

I tossed the phone back into the bag and zipped it closed.



* * *



—

Kara got out one of her laptops.

I had Romero’s credentials, but I feared the moment I logged in, we’d have thirty minutes, maybe less, before agents showed up at our motel.

So over the next nine hours, I downloaded and read five books on internet architecture and cruised through numerous message boards, where people were more than happy to dole out “hypothetical” tips for clandestinely accessing a government server.

In my life before, it would’ve taken me months to absorb this mass of disorganized information and misinformation, and I would’ve perished from boredom in the process. But my new ability to effortlessly maintain focus saw me through.

I connected to the internet through a VPN. I didn’t care so much that they knew someone was accessing their servers with Romero’s credentials. I’d rip what I wanted before they had time to react. I just couldn’t have them knowing their servers were being accessed from Kingwood, West Virginia.

In addition to securing the traffic between Kara’s laptop and servers, the VPN would also mask my IP address and location—for a bit. All that remained was to perform a key exchange undetected, which I executed with an assist from a dark-web algorithm.

There was a single folder entitled “Ramsay, Logan.”

As I started perusing my very own GPA file, Kara pulled on her wool coat and balaclava, and left to get us some much-needed food.

The file contained the results of my polygraph (I passed). The tests Dr. Romero had administered. A log of my sleeping patterns. Feeding charts. Observational notes from Edwin and Romero detailing our every interaction. Medical records from my hospital stay in Denver and my internist in D.C. The psychologist’s notes from our three sessions. Surveillance audio and video of my home in Arlington.

But I was mainly interested in the file of my genomic changes.

It was enormous.

As I opened my genomic-code analysis, the thought bubbled up again—a whisper in the deepest recess of my mind.

Mom never did anything without a reason.

If she’d just wanted to scare the GPA, there was no point in upgrading Kara too. And she couldn’t possibly have counted on changing GPA policy. She wanted to scare them, maybe, but she wouldn’t have shown her hand just for that. There had to be something more. Some endgame Edwin and the others weren’t seeing.

She had a plan for us. Which meant that somewhere, somehow, she’d have left a breadcrumb behind. Some clue as to what we should be doing now. I was scrolling through page after page of my genome analysis—three billion letters—and the mysteriousness of the moment was undeniable: I was a conscious being reading the instructions for my own creation.

I stopped.

Just stared at the screen.

The prickling of an idea was bubbling to the surface.

There was a knock at the door. I felt a stab of panic that the GPA had somehow tracked me. But no, the GPA wouldn’t knock. They would break the door down.

I went to the peephole, saw Kara standing in the snow. Unlocked the chain, let her in. The black wool of her coat was frosted, and her hair was wet. She cradled two paper bags, which she dropped on my bed.

“Charge-station gourmet. It was the only thing open.”

I pawed through the groceries—junk food, sandwiches, burritos.

“Any progress?” she asked.

“Not really, but I have an idea.” I tore open a bag of chips and inhaled several handfuls. “Did you know you can write words in DNA?”

“No.”

“In terms of data-storage capacity, DNA’s information density is a million times greater than a standard hard drive.”

“You think Mom left a message in our DNA?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

Kara looked immensely skeptical.

“Isn’t our genome three billion letters long?”

“It is.”

“So finding a message from Mom in there would be the definition of looking for a needle in a haystack.”

“More like looking for a specific atom on a needle in a sea of needles,” I said.

I sat back down at the laptop.

“So where to start?” she asked.

“If I wanted to write a message in your genetic code, I couldn’t just do it anywhere.”

“Why?”

“Because I might damage something vital. Suddenly an organ stops working. Or the genetic mutations give you cancer or ALS. If Mom did this to us—still a big if—she probably would have inserted her message into a genomic safe harbor.”

I could tell she had no idea what I was talking about.

“Think of our body as a massive biological computer program,” I said. “If you jump in there and start messing with the code, something important might break. Safe harbors are natural regions of the genome that scientists discovered can accommodate the integration of new genetic material without harming other genes or causing bad alterations to the host genome.” I started typing. “I think I’ll write a query for all locations where my genome was changed, but limit the search returns to putative safe harbor regions. That should narrow things down dramatically.”