We were suddenly moving over the shoulder and onto the road.
Kara toggled the accelerator.
Wild, rushing speed.
We raced through the countryside without headlights.
Though my night vision was vastly improved, I wouldn’t have felt comfortable driving as fast as Kara was on these winding roads, guided only by moonlight. But she seemed perfectly adept.
I looked over at my sister, and anticipating my question, she launched in.
“Last summer, on the porch of my Montana cabin, a bee stung me.” She took a hairpin curve so fast we must have pulled a couple of g’s. “Pain was brief, no swelling, but two nights later, I woke with the worst fever I’d ever had—drenched sheets, delirium. After three days in the hospital, I stabilized.”
She spoke blazingly fast.
I said, “They ran tests, nothing conclusive?”
She nodded.
“Decided you’d caught some strain of influenza and recovered?”
“Exactly.”
Kara slowed as we entered Luray, Virginia, a sleepy town at the foot of the mountains. Main Street was dead at this hour. Traffic signals blinking yellow at the intersections and the moon bright enough to light the sky and reveal a black wall to the west—the escarpment of Shenandoah.
“Sixteen days later,” Kara said, “this woman I’d picked up the night before was getting orange juice from the fridge. The tablet on the island was showing the news, which she was partially watching. Between her divided attention and the drinking glass she’d set on the edge of the island, I saw how she was going to close the refrigerator door, turn, and with the arm that was holding the juice, knock the glass off with her elbow. This wasn’t a suspicion. It was like a physics equation written across the surface of reality just for me. All these variables pointing toward an inevitable outcome. I see these equations everywhere now. This entire thought process unfolded as I flipped a pancake and saw her reach into the fridge in the reflection of the window over the kitchen sink. The pancake hit the pan; I dropped the spatula, reached down, caught the glass mid-fall, a split second before it would have exploded on the tile.”
“When did you notice all the other changes?”
“Before, it had been a slowly warming awareness. But in that moment, they all screamed out at me in unison. Better concentration, night vision, memory, less sleep, increased muscle mass, higher pain tolerance.”
“Reading people in a way you never could before?”
She nodded.
“The bee was a drone,” I said.
Kara smiled. “It hadn’t decomposed at all.”
After twenty-five days of interacting with—what to call them? Normals?—it was glorious to converse with someone whose mind moved as swiftly as mine.
We reached the crest of the Blue Ridge as dawn exhaled a lavender breath across the sky. The light came, views lengthening toward horizons. I saw the next valley over cloaked in a shallow layer of mist. The lights of towns and cities glowing in the distance.
Kara said, “Figured I’d been targeted for some kind of genetic alteration. I headed for you.”
“Why?”
“I knew whoever was behind this, there was no way they chose me by coincidence. It was because I’m a Ramsay—because of Mom. So either you had something to do with it or you’d be on their list too.”
“So you put me under surveillance.”
“I needed to understand your pressure points in case you didn’t want to help or tried to arrest me. That’s how I learned you’d been targeted just like me, and that your employer was watching you.”
“What tipped you off that I was changing?”
“Chess.”
“You texted that the GPA was onto me?”
“It was apparent to me you were changing. I knew they’d catch on soon enough. Sorry. I should’ve reached out to you sooner.”
“Mom did this to us,” I said.
It became very quiet in the car.
Kara looked at me, and I swatted down what she was thinking.
“She’s not dead,” I said. “She wants to unleash a major genomic upgrade.”
“On whom?”
“The human race.”
And then I told her everything.
* * *
—
At 7:30 A.M., Kara pulled into the parking lot of the Maple Leaf Motel in Kingwood, West Virginia.
It was flurrying snow, the roads just beginning to frost over.
We both donned balaclavas to shield our faces as we made the short jog to our room, painfully aware that there was CCTV everywhere.
The DOJ’s wiretapping and surveillance program, while not necessarily a state secret, had never been publicly confirmed. And while most Americans thought they knew the full extent of the surveillance state they lived in, they had no idea of its full power and insidious integration into our daily lives. For every one hundred people in the United States, there were 48.7 surveillance cameras, and behind them a government network of AI-driven facial-recognition search engines, paired with deeply eroded privacy laws.
After what had happened last night, Edwin would be out of his mind to find me, though I doubted he’d put out an APB to other law enforcement agencies. What would he say? A GPA agent I was illegally holding in a black site escaped. By the way, he’s extensively genetically upgraded, and, oh, his last name is Ramsay.
No, this would be handled in-house.
But it would only take one hit on a sliver of my face for some algorithm to issue an alert on my location.
The room had two double beds. Small table by the window. Old heat pump droning away. A décor of warring flower prints.
I used one of Kara’s laptops to order dermal fillers, paying a small fortune for drone delivery within twenty-four hours.
Then I collapsed onto one of the beds. It was a lumpy mattress, but after three weeks in the vivarium, it felt like resting on a cloud.
“What you did back at the farm was incredible,” I said. “Always been that good or is this a new development?”
“Always been a badass.” Kara laughed, and for a split second she sounded like her old self. “Whatever upgrade I was given just ramped up my abilities.”
“What’s it like?” I asked. “Fighting like that.”
“Ever been in one?”
“Two in prison.”
“How’d you fare?”
“Got my ass kicked.”
“Happened fast, right?”
“So fast. My body froze up. I felt paralyzed.”
“Now, when my adrenaline levels reach a threshold, the opposite happens. Time slows toward a standstill. I notice every detail of my surroundings. I saw those men coming at me at half speed. My ability to read body movements has been enhanced. The tiniest muscle twitches telegraphed their every intention. Putting them down took almost no effort.”
Of course, I’d experienced the same thing.
The idea that the brain speeds up during stressful situations is a myth. When a person is afraid, their amygdala becomes more active, laying down extra memories that coincide with the normal memories of everyday life. It’s the richer, additional memories that give the illusion of time slowing down. But I suspected that, like me, Kara’s sense of time dilation was more than an illusion brought on by a fear reaction. With our sensory gating downgraded, stimuli would come flooding in during moments of intense focus. So long as our brains weren’t overwhelmed by the onslaught, this genuinely would allow us to anticipate and react at superhuman speed.