Upgrade(64)

I retreated soundlessly into the bottom of the ditch and waited.

His footsteps approached.

I could hear the dirt crunching under his boots.

He stopped several feet away.

I could hear him breathing.

I could see the barrel of his gun.

One of his fellow soldiers shouted, “Anything?”

He hesitated for a moment, still scanning the landscape.

“No,” he said finally and started back toward them. “They must’ve circled back into town. Put the word out.”

I climbed up the side of the ditch and watched as they vanished into the trees.

I lay there for a moment, my chest heaving against the cold dirt, every breath an explosion of agony. Before my upgrade, this level of pain would have decimated me. Even now, it came close.

It took everything I had, but I shoved the pain aside and started the long, slow crawl across the field, thinking of the residents of Glasgow.

Those who had died.

Those who’d been left behind—terrified, confused, devastated.

They didn’t know—they couldn’t possibly have known—that in their grief, they were living a momentous moment in the history of our planet.

For every great war, there’s a first battle.

The Nazi invasion of Poland, which started World War II.

Fort Sumter for the Civil War.

Lexington and Concord for the Revolutionary.

The drone swarms that hit Taiwan when China invaded.

The Battle of Glasgow wasn’t a war of armaments. It was a war of genes and mutations. A war with natural selection.

The first attack had already happened, and no one even knew it, the violence raging at the cellular level of every Glasgow resident my sister had managed to infect.

The stakes were bigger than ideology, territory, or even religion.

The stakes were the future of our species.

Where we were going.

What we would become.

Kara had started the Gene War.





I REACHED MY SPRINTER as dawn was breaking on the prairie. It was a soft, easy light, except on the extreme eastern horizon, which was reddened at the edges as if the night itself had had a hard night.

I approached the van carefully, on alert for the possibility that someone might be waiting for me.

The National Guard.

Or more of my sister’s people. They had successfully predicted how I would infiltrate Glasgow. Perhaps they were waiting near my van.

But it was undisturbed, and the only footprints I saw in the immediate vicinity were mine.

I climbed in, groaning as I removed my hazmat suit. Then I pulled off my shirt, which was drenched in sweat.

I didn’t know how many, but I was certain that several ribs were bruised from the fight.

The solar batteries were at full charge, and I’d already hooked them into the automated microfluidic DNA prep and digital nanopore sequencer. Loading in the samples from Tiffany and Chris, plus my own, and some DNA from a non-upgraded human as controls, the machine began its protocol.

After purifying the DNA, it would read each nucleotide, strand by strand, record every base pair in sequence, then upload the readout to a software engine that would construct a complete de novo genomic alignment. The full sequencing and especially the analysis of these samples would take between eight and ten hours.

As the sequencer systems began the genomic reads and assembly, I started the EV and put Glasgow in my rearview mirror.



* * *



—

Silverton was a thousand miles away—a sixteen-hour drive due south, through Montana, Wyoming, and finally the southwest reaches of Colorado.

I had just crossed the Wyoming border when my body and focus gave out. I pulled over at a rest stop outside Ranchester, got some morphine out of my emergency kit, shot a few milligrams into my arm—

and the pain

just

melted.

I pulled my sleeper down, stripped out of my clothes and boots, climbed into bed.

I hadn’t been this tired since Kara had tried to kill me in New Mexico and I’d been forced to flee the hospital in the middle of the night.

But for a blissful moment, all my hurt fell away.

I watched the midday light streaming through the dirty windshield until I couldn’t hold my eyes open any longer.

And I floated away to the comforting clicks and whirs of the DNA sequencer.



* * *



—

When I woke, it was night, and silent in the van.

I sat up slowly, took a tentative breath.

The morphine had worn off, and the pain was back, although less all-encompassing than before.

I climbed out of bed, grabbed three Advil from the emergency kit, and walked over to the DNA sequencer, which was humming quietly.

I woke the touchscreen, saw a message: Sequence A Uploaded and Analyzed. Analyzing Sequence B. Time remaining: 51 minutes.

I drank three glasses of water and settled into the banquette that also served as my office.

I turned on my laptop and opened the analysis engine, a software program called LifeCode. Sequence A was the sample of Tiffany’s DNA, and because I had meticulously sequenced and annotated my genome, I knew precisely what to look for. I had a list of genes and gene pathways that had been mutated to change their predicted activity and expression levels as a result of the upgrade my mother had forced on me. In fact, I’d already broken into the analyzer’s source code and written a far superior program using my DNA sequence as a template to align and compare other genomes.