“What are the chances this cipher could have spit out random numbers that just happen to be GPS coordinates for a real place?”
“Infinitesimal. She spelled out point, west, and north.”
“But this is the middle of nowhere. I don’t see any buildings or infrastructure.”
“There could be something we’re missing in the shadows, or maybe it’s just an old image.”
Kara looked at the coordinates again. “One second of latitude is a hundred and one feet. One second of longitude equals eighty.”
“These coordinates only encompass eight thousand square feet,” I said. “Not a large area.”
“What is this?” Kara asked.
“I don’t know. Want to take a drive to New Mexico and find out?”
Kara’s computer flashed an alert—a drone had just left my package of dermal fillers in front of our motel room door.
* * *
—
I cut and dyed my hair at the bathroom sink. Went with black—a departure from the gray it had become after I turned forty. And having unintentionally gone more than three weeks without shaving since my imprisonment on the farm, I had a decent beard that still contained a blend of white, gray, and black. I dyed it all black to match.
The hair color change would help to conceal me from human eyes, but the CCTV-and drone-driven world of facial-recognition software didn’t scan for markers as mundane as hair or eye color. They measured more sophisticated, unchangeable aspects of physical features. Eye and earlobe shape. Millimeter distance between the corner of an eye and the corner of a mouth. Bone structure.
I’d sat through two seminars on emerging facial-recognition technologies in the last five years, and now had access to every single word in the memory landscape of my mind.
I used semipermanent eyeliner to artificially extend the length of my eyes and to create the illusion that they were larger and closer together.
As opposed to Botox （a neurotoxin that causes wrinkle-defeating paralysis in targeted areas of the face）， dermal fillers simply filled age-related void spaces with a soft, gel-like substance that was injected subcutaneously.
Compared to my clandestine hacking of the GPA servers, getting up to speed on fillers was much, much scarier. Due to the risk of aesthetic and health-related complications, self-injection was forewarned again and again.
I watched every tutorial video I could find, with a focus on patients looking for dramatic facial changes. I studied how medical professionals held the syringes, which products were recommended for which features, appropriate injection doses, and locations.
It was finally time.
I prepared the syringes and gave myself injections at my philtrum （the vertical groove between the base of the nose and the border of the upper lip）， my eyebrows and earlobes, and at the corners of my mouth.
No single injection seemed to make much of a difference; however, the cumulative effect was profound.
I stared at the end result in the cracked mirror of the motel room.
I did not look like myself. And while I wouldn’t have been comfortable risking the intense security and surveillance of an airport or loop station, I felt confident I could go undetected to where Kara and I needed to be.
I finally called to my sister. “I’m done! Ready to change your face?”
WE MADE IT TO St. Louis by nightfall, parked at a charge station, and went out in search of an open restaurant among all the shuttered storefronts.
The last remnant of the Gateway Arch—a teetering, seventy-foot spire wrapped in a skin of stainless steel—was blinding in the setting sun. It had been destroyed in a windstorm seven years ago. Instead of rebuilding, the governor had argued that the millions would be better spent on food stamps and assistance to other St. Louis neighborhoods destroyed by the storm.
Being out in the world with my upgrade was a jarring experience—like how I imagined it might be to see color for the first time.
Everything bolder and brighter. The contrast heightened.
People especially drew me in.
We passed a street musician wailing on a saxophone, and I couldn’t stop processing every tiny detail: the sunspots on his face, his respiration rate, his clothing, the tattered hat turned over for donations, the plethora of shrapnel scars down his neck, how he favored his left leg in a way that suggested an old injury—I could practically see the grenade blast he’d taken to his right side, and that was before I clocked part of a tattoo peeking out from under his left shirtsleeve, the anchor from the Marine Corps EGA emblem—and suddenly a portrait of the man materialized. He’d fought in Ukraine, been wounded, came home to a denuded VA, paltry benefits, shit healthcare, and— A woman passed by in a red bodycon dress, heels, sunglasses, with a tautness in her face: cheeks drawn, heart racing, the palimpsest of wiped-away tears. Nineteen seconds ago, I’d seen her emerge from a bar on the next block, where a relationship of some sort had just ended.
The struggle was to not become swamped by the crush of new stimuli. Aside from the people, the complexity of the ever-changing city—barges, drones, pedestrian traffic, air traffic, ground traffic—all pulled at my focus and curiosity, challenging me to grasp new patterns, to notice things I never had before.
Of course, it was a sensory gating issue.
It wasn’t a matter of turning down the volume but of learning to process everything simultaneously. Of learning to live and breathe as I absorbed everything.
I felt endlessly curious.
A wood-fired pizza place was the only open restaurant. It overlooked the Mississippi and the seven bridges that spanned the river in the vicinity of downtown.
We ate quickly, anxious to get back on the road.
* * *
—
It was now my turn to drive.
We took I-44 through Missouri as night fell.
I was glad to be driving in the dark, with less incoming stimuli to pull my attention from the road.
Kara was asleep within the hour, and then it was just me and my thoughts and the pavement streaming under the headlights of the near-silent car.
I thought about my mother.
She had returned to America after things got away from her in China. In my ignorance, I had no idea how badly we’d screwed up. I’d just assumed the locust experiment had failed.
Of course, she’d known exactly what was coming.
She was living in our family’s Elmwood house in Berkeley, which I found odd and immeasurably sad. With Dad and Max gone, and Kara deployed overseas, the silence in the house only served to remind me of all we’d lost.
A time capsule of how far the Ramsays had fallen.
There was pain in the perfection of the memory.
I would never have come if Mom hadn’t summoned me.
She makes us dinner, and we sit at the old dining room table in a kind of tragic silence.
We don’t talk about Shenzhen or what our locusts are doing to the rice paddies.
Mom is rarely nostalgic, but tonight proves an exception.
She asks about my favorite moments growing up here.
She even shares some of hers.
And then she tells me something that even my average mind didn’t let me forget: “Life never really goes the way you want or expect. Usually, even getting exactly what you want turns out not to have been what you really wanted. So, my son, if you ever find a sliver of happiness and peace, just be thankful and live. Don’t reach for more, because a sliver is more than most people ever find.”