Upgrade

by Blake Crouch

“What were you doing in Albuquerque?” Nadine asked. “Just visiting.” Nadine rolled her eyes. “No one just visits Albuquerque.”

And I was struck again with the awareness that I was alive in strange times. There was a palpable sense of things in decline.

Our ability to read out this sequence of our own genome has the makings of a philosophical paradox. Can an intelligent being comprehend the instructions to make itself? —John Sulston

I parked several blocks away from a building that had once been an abandoned Walmart,

It had once been an abandoned Walmart? Or once been a Walmart?

She looked up into my eyes. I saw compassion. Pity. Mostly fear. But that was natural in her position—seeing me for the first time in over a year, wondering what I’d become. Wasn’t it?

Human nature will be the last part of Nature to surrender to Man. The battle will then be won. We shall have “taken the thread of life out of the hand of Clotho” and be henceforth free to make our species whatever we wish it to be. The battle will indeed be won. But who, precisely, will have won it? —C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

I look at my daughter. “Number three in your class.” “It’s perfect,” she says, finally finding her voice. “The top two had to make speeches. I hate public speaking.”

Exactly what I thought in my case

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.

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.