One afternoon in mid-October, driving through the Smoky Mountains, I saw a sign for an overlook where I’d stopped with my family three years ago on a long weekend.
Pulling into the parking area, I turned off the motor.
The view looked out across a pyrotechnic forest that blanketed the oldest mountains in the world.
I hopped over the stone wall, descended a steep meadow.
Moving into the forest, I soon detected the noise of running water.
It was a small stream, the air cooler, sweeter-smelling near the bank. Three years ago—1,115 days to be exact—I’d sat in this precise spot. I remembered perfectly the experience of watching the stream flowing through this primeval forest. I’d found it sublime. I’d been deeply moved by the tranquility of this place, swelling with joy as I listened to Ava and Beth talking on the other side.
But, in truth, I hadn’t really seen any of it. This place had only been a mirror—reflecting my own fragile, emotional state back at me.
I was no longer that man.
The things that had moved him no longer moved me.
Today, I saw the literal components that created this scene.
The metamorphosed sandstone boulders in the current. The stream velocity. The erosion pattern on the far side of the bank, which showed evidence of a summer flood. The four brook trout standing in the current—two of them afflicted with whirling disease. The way the light refracted off the water at innumerable angles, and the equations behind the shadows they created, and every falling, vivid, dying leaf, pushed by a delicate breeze, which evaporatively cooled the back of my neck, and the strong smell of the essential oils in the thickets of rhododendron and mountain laurel and the autumn-death scent of sugars and organic compounds breaking down in a billion leaves, and beneath it all the fainter, insidious decay—which I could only smell when the wind shifted slightly from the north—identifying the remains of a deer or rodent a quarter mile away.
I spent an hour just observing.
I could’ve spent a year studying how all the constituent pieces of this insignificant tract of land pieced together.
And I felt a twinge of loss for that Logan, for the man I had been 1,115 days ago, who had simply enjoyed an idyllic place.
* * *
—
I turned to online poker. It was harder without the benefit of reading faces, but I found the purity of the math relaxing. I made sure to lose enough to keep the algorithms from banning me, but a few big pots per week was enough to live on, all payable in crypto. Money held no interest for me beyond the freedom it provided.
I hired private investigators in every state to find my sister.
I put myself in her shoes and tried to imagine the things she would need in order to complete our mother’s work.
I thought back to my conversations with Edwin.
The same things I’d told him my mother would require to distribute her upgrade Kara would also need: a BLS-4 lab, crew of two to five, although considering her lack of experience, possibly more. People fluent in molecular biology. Virology. Computational genetics. Security.
Her people would have to know what they were creating. They would have to be willing to risk incarceration. How would I find those people?
It’d be tough, and I came from that world.
If I still worked for the GPA and had access to its resources, I’d plug into MYSTIC—try to find Kara using the CCTV facial-recognition database.
I kept returning to the exascale or quantum-annealing processor she would need.
The rest of the lab equipment she could buy on the black market, and those transactions would be nearly untraceable. But the processors weren’t something she’d have to buy on the sly. There was nothing illegal about it. They were just very expensive and not terribly commonplace. But she’d know I’d be on the lookout. She’d try to cover her tracks.
Only eight companies in the world built the type of hardware she would need: Atom Computing, Xanadu, IBM, ColdQuanta, Zapata Computing, Azure Quantum, and Strangeworks.
I hired corporate PIs to find client lists and purchase orders, knowing, of course, that there was another possibility.
Our mother might’ve already had a lab set up with everything we would need to bring her upgrade to fruition. Its location may have been tucked away in the hardcase she left for us in that New Mexico wilderness, including contacts for the crew.
If that was the case, then Kara was already well on her way to finishing our mother’s work and beginning the next phase.
* * *
—
Now that I had the brain I always wanted, I decided to fact-check my mother’s claim: The end of Homo sapiens lies just over the horizon. We can see it in a thousand metrics. Of course I believed it. But I wanted to truly know it—to understand those metrics for myself.
There were several lifetimes’ worth of data to catch up on, and no point, with my sensory gating downregulated, to ever read just one book at a time again.
I could read a book with my eyes while simultaneously listening to an audiobook, and comprehend each one to a seventy percent degree of accuracy.
I read everything. I read constantly. I read fast. I barely slept.
Thousands of scientific journals, and the studies behind the articles, and the data behind the studies.
I looked at anthropogenic global catastrophic risks—those caused by human behavior—as opposed to natural risks, such as supervolcanoes, asteroids, and other cosmic threats: nuclear terrorism. Bioterrorism. Natural and engineered pandemics. Nanotechnology accidents. Superintelligent AI. Famine. Fires. Floods. Sea-level rise. Ocean and global warming. Extreme weather. Crop failure. Agricultural collapse. Deforestation. Desertification. Massive water pollution and scarcity. Mineral resource exhaustion. Power-grid failure. All manner of warfare （cyber, nuclear, civil, genetic, orbital）。
Except for a runaway superintelligence or nanotech outbreak, it would be a combination of threats, all working in concert, to degrade human civilization to the point of extreme endangerment.
My mother’s famine had wiped out just two percent of the global population, but twenty years on, we were still struggling to feed people. The downstream effects had killed millions more and left even the upper tiers of civilization in a shambles.
And the threats themselves couldn’t be evaluated in a vacuum. Cognitive biases had to be factored into the labyrinthine equation: scope insensitivity—the notion that humans are bad at distinguishing between two hundred dead and two million. Hyperbolic discounting—the tendency to value lower, short-term rewards over greater, long-term rewards, or to make choices today that our future self would prefer not to have made. There was the affect heuristic, where current emotions influence critical decision-making. The overconfidence affect where a person’s confidence in his or her judgments are much greater than the objective accuracy of said judgments. And that was just the start.
The more information I consumed, the more I began to truly grasp what my mother saw when she considered the state of humanity.
We were a bunch of primates who had gotten together and, against all odds, built a wondrous civilization. But paradoxically—tragically—our creation’s complexity had now far outstripped our brains’ ability to manage it.
Put simply: Our situation was fucked, and we weren’t doing enough to un-fuck it.
For all her arrogance, ambition, and reckless pride, my mother wasn’t wrong about where we were heading.