Upgrade(52)

I’d be pulling them into my impossible situation.

I was sure I had earned the secret top spot on the Gene Protection Agency’s most wanted list. They didn’t know it was my sister who had broken me out of the farm, although if they were smart, they might have suspected as much and tried to track her down. But she was just an unsub. And my accomplice. From their perspective, I had killed numerous agents and security contractors, broken out intent on working with my mother to usher in a genetic upgrade for all humankind.

The mere act of letting my family know I was alive would be putting their lives at hazard.

And still—my weakness almost prevailed.

I only wanted to ease their pain, to let them know I was alive.



* * *



—

It seemed like such a small act.

But my way back to my family, my way home, was not through the front door of our house. Only through finding and stopping Kara, through putting the Ramsay curse to rest, could I ever go home again.

At least that’s what I told myself. But a deeper, harder, more painful truth had already begun to whisper itself to me.

Maybe you’ve already flown too far from home. Maybe there is no way back.



* * *



—

I was on the move.

Nomadic.

I went to parts of the country I had never seen.

The Ozarks.

The White Mountains of New Hampshire.

Seeing America from the road—the out-of-the-way places, the backwaters, the Main Streets—was a profound experience. I understood our collective suffering now in a new light. The empty storefronts and barren shelves. The hard and hopeless stares from front porches I drove past.

There was a stark unevenness to the quality of life.

You could stand in downtown D.C. and think you were living in the bright and shining future. Then drive to the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, which had been hit by two cat 7 hurricanes in the last decade and left with no economy to speak of, and wonder how people found the will to go on.

In too many places, there was just grim survival.

And beneath it: rage.

I could’ve stayed in one place, but my curiosity pulled me on down the road.

I spent a month on a lake in Wisconsin, where the light of my lonely summer evenings stretched past ten o’clock, the water like glass until a fish leaped and the sun lingering, lingering—a guest who wouldn’t leave.

One afternoon in mid-October, driving through the Smoky Mountains, I saw a sign for an overlook where I’d stopped with my family three years ago on a long weekend.

Pulling into the parking area, I turned off the motor.

The view looked out across a pyrotechnic forest that blanketed the oldest mountains in the world.

I hopped over the stone wall, descended a steep meadow.

Moving into the forest, I soon detected the noise of running water.

It was a small stream, the air cooler, sweeter-smelling near the bank. Three years ago—1,115 days to be exact—I’d sat in this precise spot. I remembered perfectly the experience of watching the stream flowing through this primeval forest. I’d found it sublime. I’d been deeply moved by the tranquility of this place, swelling with joy as I listened to Ava and Beth talking on the other side.

But, in truth, I hadn’t really seen any of it. This place had only been a mirror—reflecting my own fragile, emotional state back at me.

I was no longer that man.

The things that had moved him no longer moved me.

Today, I saw the literal components that created this scene.

The metamorphosed sandstone boulders in the current. The stream velocity. The erosion pattern on the far side of the bank, which showed evidence of a summer flood. The four brook trout standing in the current—two of them afflicted with whirling disease. The way the light refracted off the water at innumerable angles, and the equations behind the shadows they created, and every falling, vivid, dying leaf, pushed by a delicate breeze, which evaporatively cooled the back of my neck, and the strong smell of the essential oils in the thickets of rhododendron and mountain laurel and the autumn-death scent of sugars and organic compounds breaking down in a billion leaves, and beneath it all the fainter, insidious decay—which I could only smell when the wind shifted slightly from the north—identifying the remains of a deer or rodent a quarter mile away.

I spent an hour just observing.

I could’ve spent a year studying how all the constituent pieces of this insignificant tract of land pieced together.

And I felt a twinge of loss for that Logan, for the man I had been 1,115 days ago, who had simply enjoyed an idyllic place.



* * *



—

I turned to online poker. It was harder without the benefit of reading faces, but I found the purity of the math relaxing. I made sure to lose enough to keep the algorithms from banning me, but a few big pots per week was enough to live on, all payable in crypto. Money held no interest for me beyond the freedom it provided.

I hired private investigators in every state to find my sister.

I put myself in her shoes and tried to imagine the things she would need in order to complete our mother’s work.

I thought back to my conversations with Edwin.

The same things I’d told him my mother would require to distribute her upgrade Kara would also need: a BLS-4 lab, crew of two to five, although considering her lack of experience, possibly more. People fluent in molecular biology. Virology. Computational genetics. Security.