Beyond the rain-smeared glass, I glimpsed a flash of green. Beth was coming down the sidewalk, sheltered under an umbrella that was held by the man she’d had dinner with. She was clutching his arm. No wedding ring on her finger. They were talking, but I couldn’t hear the words over the pattering of rain on the roof.
Most of her face was hidden by the umbrella, but I could see my wife’s mouth.
She was smiling.
Was this the last glimpse I’d ever have of Beth?
Asking for Old Logan.
They walked right past my window, and I caught a sliver of Beth’s laughter through the glass. High and melodic. Something about it had always made me think of sunlight.
Then they were gone—just one more couple in a sea of umbrellas. And I was struck, again, as an outside observer, by how much the members of our species needed one another. All these people out in the cold rain. To laugh and drink. To talk about nothing. It was almost as if that need for connection and touch was our…their…lifeblood.
I wasn’t lonely.
Old Logan was lonely. But he was dying.
I looked at the syringe.
And then I slipped the needle into my vein.
In the twenty-first century, the third big project of humankind will be to acquire for us divine powers of creation and destruction, and upgrade Homo sapiens into Homo deus.
—Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus
IT RAINED FIRE INSIDE my brain.
My eyes rolled back in my head, my body convulsed, arms curled in, foam bubbling out of my mouth.
The seizure passed.
It felt like my bones were melting, and as if something were trying to stab its way out of my skull with an ice pick. I reached the mercifully cool tile of the bathroom in my hotel suite and hauled myself over the side of the tub, which I’d filled with ice.
Settling into the freezing water, I groaned.
I hurt everywhere.
My cells were screaming.
As my hot skin melted the ice all around me, I thought: I’m going to die.
* * *
—
My mind was falling apart. No center to take things in. No prioritization of incoming stimuli. The arc angles of every hair on my arm raging at the same volume as the water dripping from the sink at forty-two-second intervals as the trowel strokes on the textured ceiling as the frequency of my blinking as the pattern of tiles on the wall and the thickness differentials in the grout as my pulse rate falling through the forties, thinking my thalamus, the subcortical relay for sensory information from periphery to cortex, which filters and organizes sensory information, the thalamocortical circuits that govern attentional control of sensory information by modulating and sustaining functional interactions within and between cortical areas…I had fucked it.
I had fucked it all.
Destroyed my own mind.
I whimpered.
Cerebral torture.
Time slowing toward an interminable crawl.
I was staring up into a deluge of slow-motion sensory information and all of it streaming down my face, my attention intensely attaching to every drop simultaneously, my consciousness dividing and dividing and dividing and— There was a scalding stone in the left side of my chest.
Getting hotter and hotter, and my blood gone still inside of me.
Organs straining.
Faltering.
Pain exploding everywhere. I couldn’t breathe…
* * *
—
…gulped in air, my heart beating again.
I’d been flatlined for 148 excruciating seconds and was still foundering in a maelstrom of sensory data, my own thoughts like a voice outside my body, like many voices, and my mind dividing and dividing.
Thinking eight things at once.
Then sixteen.
Then— Close your eyes.
Darkness.
Momentary relief.
* * *
—
I came to consciousness shivering in a bathtub of 68.5-degree Fahrenheit water. I gripped the sides and tried to haul myself to my feet, but I didn’t have the strength to even stand.
I looked around.
That sense of rudderless, mindless horror was gone, though whether it had really passed, or if I was in the eye of the genetic storm, remained to be seen.
* * *
—
Threads of searing light crept through the space between the curtains. I had no idea what day it was. How long I’d been in this room. All I knew was that I was desperately thirsty and still running a scorching fever.
I pulled myself up onto the bed, grabbed the nearest water bottle, and drank it down. I’d given myself an intravenous saline solution before inhaling the nanoparticles, but I’d thrashed around so much during the first seizure that I’d ripped out the IV port.
After two bottles of water, I tried standing.
Staggered over to one of the windows and peered outside, instantly shielding my eyes from the attack of light.
Gray, winter skies canopied the nation’s capital. From my eighth-floor suite, I could see the marinas of the Washington Channel and the distant white dome of the Jefferson Memorial.
Already, my strength was flagging.
I collapsed into a chair by the window.
* * *
—
My dreams that night were kaleidoscopic.
I witnessed my own mind rewiring and transforming itself.
I rode a knife-edge of pain and ecstasy.
I comprehended all the forces—genetic, environmental, my cascade of predestined choices—that had made me me in this moment. Saw myself as the inevitable solution to the equation of my existence. Finally understood that free will did not exist, because I could not choose my desires, only whether to pursue them.
I saw all the old versions of Logan through time.
Zygote to this moment.
I wondered who I had become.
What I had become.
I wept.
I screamed.
I laughed hysterically.
I clawed at my skin and ripped out my hair.
I wanted to die.
I wanted to live forever.
* * *
—
When I woke in the morning, I knew I was out of the storm. I climbed out of bed and padded into the main living area.
Looked around, letting it all wash over me.
I was still ultra-aware of every incoming sensory stimulus, but something had changed. Now I could intentionally divide my mind into more than just two threads of consciousness. And importantly, I could hold back the sensory onslaught if I wanted.
I ran a test, focusing on—
The way the central heating made the curtains appear to breathe like the lungs of an alien creature.
A fly buzzing manically inside a trash bin near the minibar.
The minifridge humming at 49 Hz because of a dirty compressor.
My intellect already turning its high-powered engine toward Kara.
My thirst—a neurological artifact that was actually the elicitation by angiotensin II acting on angiotensin II receptors in the subfornical organ, a brain region near the ventricles with high vascularization, in response to low blood volume.
My hunger—another sensory artifact that I was now blindingly aware was simply the serotonin （5-HT） and catecholamine neurotransmitters in my serotonergic neurons, intestinal myenteric plexus, enterochromaffin cells in the mucosa of the gastrointestinal tract, and blood platelets—telling me to eat.
The more thoughts and sensory input I allowed myself to receive and process, a curious thing happened.
Time seemed to elongate, to stretch. Similar to the fear reaction that activates the amygdala to lay down more memories, my multipronged consciousness was also laying down more memories by a factor of X, where X was the number of times I divided my consciousnesses. And this gave the illusion of time slowing down to a fraction that also corresponded to X.