Upgrade

by Blake Crouch

GENE EDITING IS A FEDERAL CRIME #GPA

ONE MISTAKE CAUSED THE GREAT STARVATION #GPA #NEVERFORGET

Gene Protection Agency

five hundred employees

only fifty special agents like me and Nadine,

all based in the D...

“Under the Gene Protection Act, we can hold you for seventy-two hours just because.”

Vast amounts of DNA, or plasmids, could be hidden on the pages of a normal book—dropped in microliter increments and left to dry on the pages, only to be rehydrated and used elsewhere.

Scythe was the revolutionary, biological DNA modifier system—now extremely illegal—discovered and patented by my mother, Miriam Ramsay.

the Great Starvation

Beth.

Ava

enucleated

Remove the nucleus from (a cell).

modded

modified

comic-book character, Kingpin,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingpin_(character)#:~:text=The%20Kingpin%20(Wilson%20Grant%20Fisk,cover%2Ddated%20July%201967).

intensivist.”

An intensivist is a medical practitioner who specializes in the care of critically ill patients, most often in the intensive care unit.

I’d applied to work for the GPA straight out of prison.

fléchettes.

A type of ammunition resembling a small dart, shot from a gun.

somatically

1.Of,relatingto,oraffectingthebody,especiallyasdistinguishedfromabodypart,themind,ortheenvironment;corporealorphysical. 2.Oforrelatingtothewallofthebodycavity,especiallyasdistinguishedfromthehead,limbs,orviscera. 3.Oforrelatingtotheportionofthevertebratenervoussystemthatregulatesvoluntarymovement. 4.Oforrelatingtoasomaticcellorthesomatoplasm.

exedra

A room, portico, or arcade with a bench or seats where people may converse, especially in ancient Roman and Greek houses and gymnasia, typically semicircular in plan.

Officially, it was also called the Shenzhen Famine. Informally, it was Ramsay’s Famine.

“In an ocean, there is a smack of jellyfish,” Dr. Romero said. “Every day, the group doubles in size. If it takes ninety days for the jellyfish to cover the entire ocean, how long would it take for the jellyfish to cover half of the ocean?”

A group of jellyfish is called a smack. Maybe. Classic puzzle.

“Everything I learned in college is available to me again,” I said. “I’m probably more fluent now than at my peak in university.”

I predict on page 92 here, that in the end, we find his mother has designed the change to have an ending and reversal. I was totally wrong.

preternatural.”

Beyond what is normal or natural.

What allows human beings to concentrate on things amid the maelstrom of infinite stimuli is a neurological process called sensory gating. It filters out low-relevance (redundant or unnecessary) stimuli in the brain from all possible environmental stimuli. If this didn’t happen, we would experience an overload of irrelevant information in the higher cortical centers.

The absence of sensory gating is a key marker for schizophrenia,

The average person speaks 100 to 130 words per minute.

Google Roadster coupe.

future car. ugh.

dawn exhaled a lavender breath

When a person is afraid, their amygdala becomes more active, laying down extra memories that coincide with the normal memories of everyday life. It’s the richer, additional memories that give the illusion of time slowing down.

putative

Generally considered or reputed to be.

Being out in the world with my upgrade

suddenly a portrait of the man materialized. He’d fought in Ukraine,

whirling disease.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myxobolus_cerebralis

scope insensitivity—the

this refers toa cognitive bias which makes people incapable of properly understanding the size of problems. This can cause their response to problems to be disproportionate to the size of the problems.

Hyperbolic discounting—the

Hyperbolic discounting refers to the tendency to value immediate though smaller rewards more than long-term larger rewards.

affect heuristic,

The affect heuristic describes how we often rely on our emotions, rather than concrete information, when making decisions. This allows us to reach a conclusion quickly and easily, but can also distort our thinking and lead us to make suboptimal choices.

overconfidence affect

when people's subjective confidence in their own ability is greater than their objective (actual) performance

Human nature will be the last part of Nature to surrender to Man.

To save humanity, I needed my humanity.

this compassion fade,

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Dunbar Dunbar's number, a measurement of the "cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number By using the average human brain size and extrapolating from the results of primates, he proposed that humans can comfortably maintain 150 stable relationships.

In the absence of compassion, selfishness is the most rational response of all.

If there’s a solution, it has to lie in rescuing us from our ambivalence. Our apathy.

What do you call a heart that is simultaneously full and breaking? Maybe there’s no word for it, but for some reason, it makes me think of rain falling through sunlight.

The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis,

In the classicThe Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis, the most important Christian writer of the 20th century, sets out to persuade his audience of the importance and relevance of universal values such as courage and honor in contemporary society. Both astonishing and prophetic,The Abolition of Manis one of the most debated of Lewis’s extraordinary works.National Reviewchose it as number seven on their "100 Best Nonfiction Books of the Twentieth Century." https://www.amazon.com/Abolition-Man-C-S-Lewis-ebook/dp/B002BXH5RU/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=