“I actually believe you, Logan. But you are changing, and we don’t know what you’re on your way to becoming.”
* * *
—
The first night in my vivarium reminded me of my first night in prison. The cell doors locking in unison. The sound of the big lights in the common area shutting off. The silence and darkness closing in around me as I faced the reality that my life was over, that these walls were my home for the next thirty years.
I lay down on the mattress and stared up at the glass ceiling.
My mother was alive.
I had so many thoughts and questions swirling in my head that it was hard to be still.
Where had she been?
What had she been doing for the last twenty years?
Why hadn’t she reached out to me?
Had she constructed this upgrade, which was light-years beyond the most sophisticated genetic engineering ever imagined?
And if what Edwin told me was true—what did a “significant upgrade” to the human genome even mean? My mother was, by orders of magnitude, the most ambitious person I’d ever known. But surely even she wasn’t crazy enough to try to force a species upgrade on Homo sapiens. What would that even look like? Something along the lines of what she had done to me?
But mainly, in a place I’d made a habit of not looking at too closely, I felt rage.
Betrayal and rage.
She’d been alive when I stood trial for her crimes.
She’d been alive the day I was convicted.
Alive and free that first night in prison, and all the nights after.
She’d been alive the day I regained my freedom.
Alive on my wedding day.
The night of Ava’s birth.
She had never bothered to contact me.
And as the final insult, it appeared that she had played god again. Not with crops and locusts. With me. Her own son.
The lights had gone out hours ago, and the only illumination came from the blinking LEDs in the terminal behind me. I knew someone somewhere was sitting at a monitor, watching my every move, my every breath, my every tear.
I had to get out of this place. I had no idea how.
* * *
—
Overhead lights tore me out of my troubled dreams.
I raised my arm to shield my eyes, wondering how long I’d slept.
An hour? Maybe two? And yet I felt surprisingly refreshed and sharp thanks to the upregulation of my BHLHE41=DEC2, NPSR1, and ADRB1 gene network.
I sat up and saw a man I had arrested seven years ago on a snowy night in the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming standing on the other side of the glass.
“Hello, Logan,” he said, his voice emitting through the speakers above me.
“Dr. Romero.”
“You remember me.” He seemed surprised.
“There’s rarely a day that I don’t think about that night.”
“Same,” he said sadly, and it was only for a fraction of a fraction of a second, but his lower lip tensed and a vertical line flashed in and out of existence between his eyebrows. He was still angry with me. And no doubt with good reason.
This was the third time I’d intuited someone’s emotional state based upon subtle facial cues. Another new attribute of my upgrade?
I stood and stretched.
“When did they let you out of prison?” I asked.
“Four years ago. Could you step over here, please?”
I could see that he was standing near two metal slots in the glass. One accommodated a food tray. The other was circular and just larger than a closed fist.
I walked over.
“Put your arm through the smaller one.”
He was holding a hypodermic syringe.
“Why?”
“I need to draw some blood. Going forward, we’re going to be analyzing your genome on a weekly basis.”
I didn’t move.
“Look,” he said. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
I stared at him through the glass, wondering how the GPA had convinced someone with a mind like Anthony Romero’s to work in a scientific black site.
I said, “You’re not putting a needle in my arm.”
He let out a sigh, set the syringe down on a tray beside him, and lifted a tablet. I couldn’t see the touchscreen, only his fingers moving.
A sound kicked on above me. I looked up at a vent in the glass wall, just below the ceiling. The cage began to vibrate as a motor behind the vent became louder and louder.
The first sensation was a tightness in my chest.
Though I was breathing faster and faster, I still felt like I was holding my breath.
The motor behind the vent went silent.
The only sound was my gasping.
I went to my knees.
Bright spots exploding and fading across my field of vision.
I fell over.
I could feel my extremities tingling as they starved for oxygenated blood, but it was nothing compared to the fire in my lungs and the explosive pounding in my head.
Each passing second was torment.
Darkness crept in from the sides.
My field of vision narrowing.
And then my dying brain observed a noise. At first, I thought it must be some auditory hallucination, but it kept getting louder and clearer.
The motor behind the vent was running again.
I opened my eyes.
The darkness was retreating.
The world brightening.
I was gasping again, but now the breaths were touching a place deep in my lungs with a satisfaction that far surpassed cold water to parched lips.
I sat up.
Dr. Romero traded the tablet for the syringe.
“It gives me no pleasure to hurt you,” he said, “but I’ve been tasked with studying what you are. What you’re becoming. You need to understand that your compliance is nonnegotiable. Now slide your arm through the hole, please.”
I complied.
As he drew my blood, I said, “I want to talk to my family.”
“I’m just here to track your evolution. If you have concerns, you should ask—”
“Ask who? I’m in a glass cell. Against my will. Can you be a human being for—”
“No. I can’t. I was once. You were a part of the apparatus that took my humanity away from me.”
“I’m sorry for that. Truly. I was just doing my job, and—”
“You didn’t have a choice? Neither do I.”
* * *
—
“Are you feeling alert?” Dr. Romero asked.
“Yes.”
“Would you like more coffee? I can have some brought in.”
“No thanks.”
“Are you hungry?”
“No.”
I was sitting at the desk in my cell facing Dr. Romero, who was seated at the exterior desk on the other side of the glass. He’d been a man in his prime when I’d arrested him, and unsurprisingly, the years had not been gentle. The skin under his eyes was dark and sagging, and there were burst capillaries around his nose, suggesting he’d been anesthetizing himself with too much alcohol. And the light in his eyes, which I’d seen in videos of his lectures in better times, had nearly been extinguished. He looked like a man in an impossible position, one whose soul was rotting inside him. Despite everything, I couldn’t help feeling sorry for him—another victim of Ramsay’s famine, intellectually starving right in front of me.
A laptop was open beside him, and on my desk I had a legal pad and several pens.
We began with verbal acuity. Analogies. Letter rearrangement into words. Puzzles.