Upgrade

by Blake Crouch

It is a supremely cruel thing to have your mind conjure a desire which it is functionally unable to realize.

Never before had I seen Homo sapiens so clearly—a species, at its most fundamental level, of storytellers. Creatures who overlay story on everything, but especially their own lives, and in so doing, can imbue a cold, random, sometime brutal existence, with fabricated meaning.

Humans have had 300,000 years on this planet. We lived from the Stone Age to the space age. We split the atom and sequenced our own DNA and built machines that could think. But for all our progress, ten million people die of hunger every year. We have hyperloops and rampant nativism. Phones more powerful than the computers that took us to the moon, but no more coral reefs. And year after year, nothing really changes.

I suspect that, if we all had perfect memory, we would all grieve the older versions of who we used to be the way we grieve departed friends.