Upgrade(67)

There was a time when these images would have shattered me—artifacts of a doomed family. Today, I only felt the distant thunder of emotion, and it was so faint, so far beyond my emotional horizon, as to barely register.

Is this where my mother had lived in hiding, after the world believed she’d driven her car off the coast of California?

There was a chip on the piano’s lid, which I recognized. Decades ago, when this piano had sat in our home in Berkeley, I had accidentally crashed into it on a scooter as Kara chased me around the house.

I imagined Miriam sitting here, playing the music she had performed for us in happier times, staring at all of those frozen, unreachable moments.

I unlaced and removed my shoes, then headed out of the solarium and down the wide corridor that bisected the first floor, my heart thrumming 5 bpm faster in the thin, high-altitude air as the sound of my sister in the kitchen became audible.

Eight Vermeers hung on the walls on the right-hand side of the corridor, and the subtle patina on the surfaces of the paintings suggested they were all originals.

Four massive O’Keeffe’s adorned the left-hand side—luminous in the glow of the accent spotlights that pulled out every molecule of vibrancy.

In the great hall, exposed timber beams crossed the vaulted ceiling. A fire burned in a two-story stone hearth that was open both to the living room, where I stood, and the kitchen on the other side.

I tightened my grip on the Kimber Micro and edged up to the side of the hearth.

I took a breath, then stepped around the corner, putting my sister in the sights.

She was still standing at the island, dicing an onion faster than I’d ever seen anyone dice an onion.

She didn’t look at me right away, even though I was sure she’d seen me.

“Is Andrew dead?” she asked, by way of greeting.

“No. But I wouldn’t say he’s well.”

As far as I could tell, Kara was unarmed. She was wearing yoga pants and a tank top. Her hair was shorter than the last time I’d seen her, and it looked as if she’d performed additional self-augmentation to her face.

“Is it—”

“Just me here,” she said, speaking faster than the last time we’d been together.

Or maybe I wasn’t used to communicating with another enhanced human.

“I’ve been waiting for you, brother.”

There was something else I was getting from her body language that I couldn’t quite put a finger on.

“Planning to shoot me?” she asked as she moved to the stovetop and scraped the onion into a pan of shimmering butter.

“Depends.”

She quickly sliced spears of asparagus on the butcher block, placed them in a ceramic baking dish, drizzled everything with olive oil, and slid it into the hot oven.

“Let’s have a meal together,” she said. “You can always shoot me later. I’m unarmed. But either kill me now or stop pointing that fucking gun at me.”

I lowered the gun. Kara motioned for me to sit across from her at the island. She pulled down a saucepan and went to the refrigerator, grabbed a package of chicken.

“So this was Mom’s place,” I said.

“She had others. Squirreled away millions before the government seized her assets. How was Glasgow?”

“Got some samples of your handiwork.”

“So far, 2,016 people have received the upgrade. There have been 274 confirmed cases of prion-like disease.”

“By design?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I don’t know why 13.6 percent developed prion instead of the upgrade.”

Kara expertly butterflied two chicken breasts and rolled them in a spice mix. Her movements were pinpoint, with a speed and precision I’d never seen from professional chefs. Most of the time, even while cutting, her eyes never left mine.

I held the Kimber out of sight, just below the granite ledge.

“You knew I’d turn up in Glasgow?” I asked.

“I hoped you would, assuming you had survived New Mexico. I sent Andrew there in case you did.”

To point me here.

“I sequenced the Glasgow samples,” I said. “The upgrade wasn’t transmissible.”

“Had to be sure the upgrade was performing first,” she said.

“So it’s back to the drawing board?”

“No, I can live with a 13.6 percent defect rate. With a gene therapy of this intensity, side effects and off-targeting are inevitable. I’m surprised that number isn’t higher.”

Kara went to the range, poured white wine onto the sautéing onions. Clouds of evaporating alcohol perfumed the kitchen.

“Do you have a transmissible version yet?” I asked, part of me afraid to hear the answer.

“Soon.”

Dear god. I’d suspected as much, but to hear it confirmed…

She said, “I’m using modified HEK293 cells to grow high titers of the upgrade-carrying virus.”

I nodded. HEK293 was a strain of human embryonic kidney cells, widely used for decades in the gene-tech industry because of how easily they were grown and how efficiently they could be transfected with foreign DNA. Exactly what I would’ve used.

She placed the chicken on the stovetop’s cast-iron griddle.

“What’s the projected R-naught number?”