“You told them I was killed in a raid, didn’t you?”
All he said was, “I’m sorry.”
And walked away.
* * *
—
I got undressed and stepped into the shower. The stall was tiny and glass-walled. No privacy or space. I knew someone somewhere was sitting at a monitor, watching my every move.
I couldn’t bring myself to think about Beth and Ava. Imagining them mourning me would have broken me.
So as the hot water beat down on me, I thought about Mom, wondering where she was at this moment. Wondering what her endgame might be. Had she also exposed herself to this upgrade?
A memory bubbled to the surface—a conversation I’d been present for that summer in China before everything went wrong.
On the rare occasion Miriam wanted to blow off steam and get her postdocs out of the lab, we’d all go to this Belgian beer bar in the Nanshan District called the Stumbling Monk.
Before Denver and the upgrade to my autobiographical memory, I would never have recalled this moment with such crystalline perfection, but one night, many drinks in, our group was going back and forth in a spirited debate, which had been started when my mother posed a hypothetical question: What is the greatest threat to our species?
Everyone was drunk and happy and loud, chiming in with—
Rising oceans.
Desertification.
Failing ecosystems.
Dangerous CO2 levels.
Basri, the postdoc who was my mother’s number two, had said, “All the existential threats to our existence live under the umbrella of climate change.”
My mother had been quietly watching us all debate from the head of the table, sipping from a chalice of Westvleteren 12, her big, enigmatic eyes missing nothing.
She said finally, “You’re all wrong.”
The table went silent, everyone turning toward her. Miriam had barely raised her voice. There was no way we all should’ve heard it over the din of the bar, but there was something almost magical about my mother in a crowd of her acolytes.
“You don’t believe climate change is the greatest threat to our species?” Basri asked.
She’d fixed him with her gaze. “The greatest threat to our species lies within us.”
Everyone exchanged uncomfortable glances, unsure of what she meant.
Standing in this microshower in my vivarium, twenty years later, I could vividly recall not having the foggiest idea of what she was talking about, and sinking a bit inward as even more evidence of my shortcomings piled on top of me.
My mother had said, “Hunger, disease, war, warming—these threats loom over us like building storm clouds. But ninety-nine percent of humanity reads about our crumbling world in the morning headlines, then ignores it and gets on with their day.” She looked around the table. “You’re all here with me in Shenzhen, trying to do your part to solve crop failure, which might be a step toward solving hunger and famine. Trying to be part of the solution.”
She leaned forward, suddenly energized. “If more people were like us, imagine what we could accomplish. New crops to feed the millions going hungry. Stopping pandemics from raging across our world. Ending most disease and all poverty and all war. No more mass extinctions. Clean, renewable, limitless energy. Spreading into the solar system.”
Twenty years later, as the hot water beat down on my back, I felt a chill run through me.
“So you’re saying people are too stupid?” Basri asked.
“Not just that,” Miriam said. “It’s denial. Selfishness. Magical thinking. We are not rational beings. We seek comfort rather than a clear-eyed stare into reality. We consume and preen and convince ourselves that if we keep our heads in the sand, the monsters will just go away. Simply put, we refuse to help ourselves as a species. We refuse to do what must be done. Every danger we face links ultimately back to this failing.”
I finished my shower, and as I got dressed, one of my keepers—what else to call them?—came in with breakfast.
I sat at the interior desk as the good, rich smell of coffee filled the vivarium.
My thoughts were still racing.
After the beer bar, I’d shared a cab with my mother back to the house we were renting in Bao’an District, on Qianhai Bay.
I’d had two beers too many, and the lights of Shenzhen were streaming by in something of a blur.
I’d glanced over at my mother, who was staring out the window, her mind undoubtedly on tomorrow’s work. Always the work.
And because I wasn’t myself, I just asked her—something I would never have done sober, “If you could do it, would you? Make people more like us?” I quickly corrected myself. “Like you?”
She looked at me, and maybe because her head was spinning as well, she was candid with me in a way I’d experienced only once or twice in my lifetime.
“Yes,” she said. “I would.”
“But it’s just a dream, right? Just an idea?”
She shrugged. “Whenever someone signs up for The Story of You, they have to complete a 350-question personality test and use our imaging app to submit a full-body scan that gives us mountains of data. I have the genomic code of seventy-nine million diverse people and more than twenty-three thousand phenotype data points for each of them. From all over the world. If I could develop a sufficiently powerful AI to handle this data set, and ask the right questions, who knows what I might accomplish.” And then she looked at me with a frightening intensity. “It’s one thing to build a new life-form, cure illness, or even attempt the work we’re doing now with our locusts. But to change how members of a fully sentient species think is surely the ultimate expression of the power of gene editing.”
In light of what had just happened to me, that conversation took on a whole new relevance. My mother had tried to edit a few rice paddies and ended up killing two hundred million people. What havoc could she wreak—intentionally or through unintended consequences—by attempting to change something as fundamental as how Homo sapiens think?
* * *
—
I dreamed of Beth and Ava.
We stood on a flat, featureless plain.
The sky was the same stark gray as the land, and there would’ve been no dimension to the space at all—no horizon, no sense of depth—if the ground hadn’t been darker by the slightest degree.
Suddenly, it broke open between us.
A black chasm spreading wider.
Wider.
I wanted to jump across and join them, but the distance was already too great.
And so we just stood there, watching as we drifted farther and farther apart.
* * *
—
I rose from the depths of a deep unconsciousness, and even before I was fully awake, I became aware of a sound.
A muffled boom boom boom.
Gunfire?
I sat up, opened my eyes.
I was alone in my vivarium, and though the room was dark, I could still see.
I heard a distant scream—dampened by the exterior walls and the glass of my cell.
A man crashed through the door beside the terminal.
I recognized him instantly, even in the low light—he was one of the men who had shown up on the fourth floor of Constitution Center to apprehend me. The short, wide one. I hadn’t seen him during my time here. He had a pistol in one hand, and he was panting and holding his side with the other, blood leaking through his fingers, bloody footprints in his wake.