Beth stares at the package, uncertain. While it’s true I don’t have time to linger, I’m also terrified of what they’ll say when they learn what I’ve done.
“We’re having a little party back at the house,” Ava says.
“I can’t, honey. I’d put all your guests in danger. I’m sorry.”
She nods, holding back tears.
“You took my name,” I say.
“I’m not ashamed of it. Are you still?”
“No.”
“Good. You shouldn’t be. I mean, you kind of saved the world.”
It takes everything in my power not to break down. I had stopped using my emotional Faraday cage months ago. To save humanity, I needed my humanity.
I lean forward, touch Beth’s hand. “Does he make you happy?”
She smiles through her tears. “Very much so. But I miss you. I’d rather have you.”
I stare through the glass, breathing through the hurt. The loss. All the moments we would never have. All the chess games I’d missed with Ava. The ten thousand dinners with Beth. Late-night soaks in the bathtub, just talking. I would take a bullet over this pain. Would hand back my beautiful mind and return to the 118-IQ Logan of old in a second.
The urge to wall myself off from the ache is acute. But I want to feel it. If I lose the ability to hurt, I also lose my grasp on joy—those brief moments of contentment that make consciousness worth the voyage.
Beth says, “You could’ve left this package at the front door.”
“I came for Ava. And to see you.”
“You may have transcended to another level of being, but I still know you. So let’s try that again. Why did you really come? Why take the risk?”
“I should let you get back to your celebration,” I say.
She looks me in the eyes.
I hesitate.
“Logan.”
I just stare at Beth.
She says, “I know they might never let you come back to us. And even if they did, you’ve changed in ways I can’t understand.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“I’m not saying it doesn’t hurt—badly—but we’ll make it. So whatever it is you need to do, go do it. We’ll be okay.” She looks at our daughter, gesturing to her graduation gown, and behind the tears, I detect a spark of defiant happiness. Resilience. “Because as hard as it’s been, life went on.”
I look at my daughter.
Her eyes are filling with tears, but she says, “I love you, Daddy.”
“I love you too.”
Silence. More tears. For all of us.
I finally open the door. We step out of the car, and I go to my daughter and wrap my arms around her. Beth comes over, and we all hold one another in the parking lot, the sodium lamps humming softly above us.
I want to tell them I still love them, and also how that love has been changed and deepened—made infinitely more complex by the intimacy of being able to relive every memory of them in perfect detail.
But I have no words. Or none that would be sufficient.
And so I settle for dividing my consciousness and decelerating my perception of time to the slowest possible crawl, savoring every elongated second of their touch, their warmth, their smell, their presence.
As I walk across the parking lot, away from the two most important people in my life, I feel more alone than I’ve ever felt before.
But also—more at peace.
* * *
—
My Beth.
My Ava.
Kara and my mother believed they could stop humanity from destroying itself by increasing our collective intelligence and reason. They built an upgrade to ramp up those abilities, and despite Kara’s massive intellect, she was still willing to kill a billion people.
But my sister was right about one thing—we will die out in the next century if nothing changes. And I think I discovered why our species seems so willing to let this happen.
One child dies in a well, the world watches and weeps. But as the number of victims increases, our compassion tends to diminish. At the highest number of casualties—wars, tsunamis, acts of terror—the dead become faceless statistics. They call this compassion fade, but in reality, it’s our genetic inheritance—old adaptations from our ancestors persisting in our DNA.
In the late-twentieth century, an anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist named Robin Dunbar proposed a theory that Homo sapiens can only care about, identify with, and maintain stable relationships with 150 people. This number correlates to the size of the social groups in our evolutionary past. When we were Homo erectus, we lived in small hunter-gatherer groups bonded by sociality. Back then, only caring about our immediate group was advantageous. It helped us defend our tribe. It helped us advance, and survive.
But that limitation carried forward. Today, in a given tragedy, we can overlay the faces of our family, friends, and co-workers on only 150 people. Beyond that, compassion fades, but not because we’re evil. Our emotional hardwiring can’t cope with it. We’re living in a global community of ten billion, with brains that can only feel compassion for our immediate clan.
Other factors come into play, such as distance. A tragedy across the world is harder to feel compassion for than one in our own neighborhood. People who don’t look like us are more challenging to identify with.
And if our species has a problem with apathy, and feeling compassion for the pain of others in real time, how can we expect ourselves to conjure compassion for a tragedy that hasn’t even happened yet? The victims of Homo sapiens’ demise haven’t even been born. What emotional incentive do we have to make the sacrifices that will save future generations, if our brains aren’t capable of caring about them sufficiently?
My mother once posited that we are not rational beings. We read about all the looming threats in the paper, we watch it on the news, and then we get on with our day. And, yes, some of that is thanks to our ability to hide from reality with denial, with cognitive dissonance, with magical thinking.
But she forgot the most important thing: In the absence of compassion, selfishness is the most rational response of all.
Our species’ superpower is not caring. We merely exercised that ability.
We don’t have an intelligence problem. We have a compassion problem. That, more than any other single factor, is what’s driving us toward extinction.
After Kara’s death, I spent a year poring over my mother’s genetic data from The Story of You, with a focus on gene systems connected to compassion. I found one that programs the volume of key prefrontal cortex subregions, which determine an individual’s mentalizing skills, which determines the size of our social group, which directly controls the ability to feel compassion. I also found one that controls dorsal portions of the medial prefrontal cortex, which light up when people feel empathy for strangers. Our brains evolved to help in-group members for a very good reason, but what we need to survive as a species is the ability to care about strangers. Especially people who haven’t been born yet.
So I built a compassion upgrade.
Our beta group experienced increases in compassion and curiosity. They presented a heightened concern for strangers, and an almost compulsive need to understand one another.
Ten months ago, after extensive testing, I sent a hundred people to the ends of the earth, all infected with a viral vector that carried my upgrade.