I sidled up to Kara.
The trunk was four feet high.
Jagged, blackened, hollowed-out.
I peered over the edge.
A stainless-steel handle protruded from the snow. I looked at Kara, then reached down and took hold of it. Whatever it was attached to was buried in snow.
“Give me a hand?”
She reached in, grabbed the handle.
We both pulled, straining.
After a moment, it broke free from the ice and we stumbled back from the stump, holding a black hardcase, approximately two feet on each side.
Sealed, but as far as I could tell, not locked.
I rolled it onto its base.
It looked expensive. Watertight. Crush-proof. Dust-proof.
The shell was a lightweight polymer and all the hardware was stainless steel.
Kara knelt down, flipped the three latches.
Carefully opened the lid.
Inside, encased in black foam, was a laptop on steroids. I’d seen SWAT guys using them to fly thermal-imaging drones, but had never handled one myself.
“This is military grade,” Kara said, opening the screen.
“What are the features?”
“Durable against heat, cold, explosions. Radiation hardened. Very heavy.”
She pressed the power button several times, but nothing happened.
Turning the laptop over, Kara exposed a void space underneath.
“No battery,” she said.
I pulled a layer of foam out. Underneath, a vacuum-sealed battery and six PCM drives. With her trench knife, Kara liberated the battery from its packaging.
“If this doesn’t work, I have a power outlet in the Google.”
She locked the battery into its housing in the laptop and tapped the power button again.
The screen glowed to life.
I had no idea how long it had been sitting out here, but it seemed to boot up normally, and after ten seconds, we were staring at a blank home screen with a single thumbnail in the center—an AVI file entitled “To my children.”
I felt my pulse rate kick up from 78 bmp to 105.
I looked at Kara. “You want to do this here?”
She moved the cursor onto the thumbnail and clicked on the file.
It took a moment to load, and we waited, both of us kneeling in the snow before the hardcase like it was some kind of altar.
Our mother appeared on the screen.
Kara muttered, “Holy shit.”
One thing for me to tell her our mother was alive. Another entirely to see her with her own eyes.
Miriam stepped back from the camera, as if she had just locked a phone into a tripod. She wasn’t in these woods. On this mountain. She was in the desert we had driven through to get here, and in the same clothes we’d discovered her wearing in the truck.
The light suggested early morning.
The wind was blowing her silver hair. She pushed it back out of her face and settled herself onto a rock.
The hood of the white and yellow Chevy was just poking into the left frame, and the backdrop was miles of pink desert ending at a soaring purple mesa I’d seen earlier today.
She looked at the camera.
“I don’t know if I’m speaking to Logan and Kara, or just one of you, but if you’re watching this, I’m proud of you. It means you found the message I inserted at AAVS1. It means the upgrade worked.”
I noticed a cluster of cottonwood trees behind her.
The leaves a dazzling yellow.
She’d recorded this in autumn—October perhaps?
“I came through here once with your father.”
She smiled.
“I was pregnant with you, Kara, although I didn’t know it yet. We were in our twenties. No money. Driving out from Boston to Berkeley for my first postdoc fellowship. Stayed in a motel on the outskirts of Santa Fe called the Desert Aire. The next day, we drove north of the city. I’d always wanted to see the landscape Georgia O’Keeffe spent her life painting. This mountain behind me?”
She glanced back at the purple mesa, silhouetted against the dawn sky.
“That’s Cerro Pedernal. O’Keeffe painted it twenty-eight times. She once said, ‘It’s my private mountain. It belongs to me. God told me if I painted it enough, I could have it.’ I feel that way about my work.
“When you arrive at the end of your life, you start thinking about the good times and the best times. That trip with your father was one of the best. Maybe I’m just idealizing a moment, but Haz and I were right out of school, and the future was as wide open as this desert. Nothing bad had happened. Nothing that couldn’t be undone.
“We drove to this little village in the foothills called Vallecitos. It was a warm fall day, and we stopped for beers at a bar that didn’t seem to get many tourists or know what to do with them. It was called Mis Amigos.”
She looked off into the distance for a moment, then back into the camera.
“Logan, you and I had a conversation many years ago. You asked me—if I could, would I make more people in the world like us?
“Twenty years have passed since that night, and things are worse than ever. For the last two decades, I’ve been working in a small lab in my favorite place in the world, trying to build something that could make every member of our species more like us. Trying to gift something to Homo sapiens that might allow us to survive another five hundred, thousand, or ten thousand years.
“This gift is a genetic upgrade that ramps up our cognitive performance so that we might, collectively, let the engines of reason guide our behavior instead of the cushions of sentiment.
“The genes that steered us toward sentiment and its downstream belief patterns are still present in our genome. They were advantageous at the dawn of humankind, when we had no understanding of the universe. They led us to invent myth and religion and tradition, and these systems unquestioningly put us on the path to stability and cooperation.
“But now they’re letting us ignore the facts all around us. Poverty, disease, starvation, and all the hatred those hardships breed, growing worse every decade—as we squeeze the last drops from our planet’s resources. We can’t keep living in denial about what’s happening or hoping that it’s someone else’s problem to solve.
“The dinosaurs never saw their end coming. They died off because one morning, out of the clear blue sky, an asteroid 6.2 miles across smashed into the Yucatán peninsula at 67,000 miles per hour. The end of Homo sapiens lies just over the horizon. We can see it in a thousand metrics. Which means we have a chance. But only if we collectively decide to act. If nothing changes, we will die off for the stupidest reason imaginable—because we refused, for so many childish reasons, to do the obvious things that would save us.”
Something shifted in our mother’s eyes.
They became distant, dark.
“The mark I version of the upgrade is complete, but there’s work still to do. I haven’t developed a dispersal mechanism, and I’m not going to get the chance to.”
What happened next, I had hardly ever seen in my lifetime.
My mother became emotional.
As rare as a desert snowfall.
“For the first time in my life, my mind is failing me, and because of who I am, seeking treatment is not an option. But after two hundred million dead, maybe I deserve to have the only thing I ever loved about myself taken from me. I’m forgetting things. Sometimes, I’m unable to think at all. Today is actually the best day I’ve had in months, so I’ve decided that today is the day I die. I want to say farewell on my own terms, while I still know who I am.”