Upgrade Read online

  Upgrade is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2022 by Blake Crouch

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Ballantine is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Crouch, Blake, author.

  Title: Upgrade / Blake Crouch.

  Description: First edition. | New York: Ballantine Books, [2022]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2022000423 (print) | LCCN 2022000424 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593157534 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593157510 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.

  Classification: LCC PS3603.R68 U64 2022 (print) | LCC PS3603.R68 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23/eng/20220107

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2022000423

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2022000424

  International edition ISBN 9780593500941

  Ebook ISBN 9780593157510

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Sara Bereta, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Christopher Brand

  ep_prh_6.0_140377055_c0_r1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Part Two

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Part Three

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Epilogue

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  By Blake Crouch

  About the Author

  You can stop splitting the atom; you can stop visiting the Moon; you can stop using aerosols; you may even decide not to kill entire populations by the use of a few bombs. But you cannot recall a new form of life.

  —Erwin Chargaff

  WE FOUND HENRIK SOREN at a wine bar in the international terminal, thirty minutes from boarding a hyperjet to Tokyo.

  Before tonight, I had only seen him in INTERPOL photographs and CCTV footage. In the flesh, he was less impressive—five and a half feet in his artificially distressed Saint Laurent sneakers with a designer hoodie hiding most of his face. He was sitting at the end of the bar with a book and a bottle of Krug.

  I commandeered the stool beside him and set my badge between us. It bore the insignia of a bald eagle whose wings enveloped the double helix of a DNA molecule. For a long moment, nothing happened. I wasn’t even sure he’d seen it gleaming under the hanging globe lights, but then he turned his head and looked at me.

  I flashed a smile.

  He closed his book. If he was nervous, he didn’t show it. Just stared at me through Scandinavian blue eyes.

  “Hi, Henrik,” I said. “I’m Agent Ramsay. I work for the GPA.”

  “What am I supposed to have done?”

  He was born thirty-three years ago in Oslo but had been educated in London, where his mother was a diplomat. I could hear that city around the edges of his voice.

  “Why don’t we talk about that somewhere else?”

  The bartender was watching us now, having clocked my badge. Probably worried about getting the bill paid.

  “My flight’s about to board,” Soren said.

  “You aren’t going to Tokyo. Not tonight.”

  The muscles in his jaw tightened and something flickered in his eyes. He tucked his chin-length blond hair behind his ears and glanced around the wine bar. And then beyond it, at the travelers moving through the concourse.

  “See the woman sitting at the high-top behind us?” I asked. “Long blond hair. Navy windbreaker. That’s my partner, Agent Nettmann. Airport police are waiting in the wings. Look, I can drag you out of here or you can walk out under your own steam. It’s your call, but you have to decide right now.”

  I didn’t think he’d run. Soren had to know the impossible odds of eluding capture in an airport crawling with security and surveillance. But desperate people do desperate things.

  He looked around once more, then back at me. With a sigh, he polished off his glass of champagne and lifted his satchel from the floor.

  * * *

  —

  We drove back into the city, with Nadine Nettmann behind the wheel of the modified company Edison and I-70 virtually empty at this hour of the night.

  Soren had been installed behind the passenger seat with his wrists zip-tied behind his back. I’d searched his carry-on—a Gucci messenger bag—but the only item of interest was a laptop, which we’d need a federal warrant to break into.

  “You’re Logan Ramsay, right?” Soren asked, his first words spoken since we’d escorted him out of the airport.

  “That’s right.”

  “Son of Miriam Ramsay?”

  “Yes.” I tried to keep my tone neutral. It wasn’t the first time a suspect had made that connection. He said nothing else. I could feel Nadine looking at me.

  I stared out the window. We were on the outskirts of the city center, doing 120 mph. The dual electric motors were almost silent. Through the wraparound NightShade glass, I saw one of the GPA’s new billboards shoot past—part of the latest public awareness campaign.

  In black letters against a white background:

  GENE EDITING IS A FEDERAL CRIME

  #GPA

  Downtown Denver loomed in the distance.

  The megatall Half-Mile Tower soared into the sky—an arrow of light.

  It was one A.M. here, which meant it was three back in D.C.

  I thought of my family, sleeping peacefully in our home in Arlington.

  My wife, Beth.

  Our teenage daughter, Ava.

  If all went smoothly tonight, I’d be back in time for dinner tomorrow evening. We were planning a weekend trip to the Shenandoah Valley to see the fall colors from the Skyline Drive.

  We passed another billboard:

  ONE MISTAKE CAUSED

  THE GREAT STARVATION

  #GPA #NEVERFORGET

  I’d seen that one before, and the pain hit—an ache in the back of my throat. The guilt of what we’d done never failed to hit its mark.

  I didn’t deny it or try to push it away.

  Just let it be until it passed.

  * * *

  —

  The Denver field office of the Gene Protection Agency was located in an unremarkable office park in Lakewood, and to call it a field office was generous.

  It was one floor of a building with light admin support, a holding cell, an interview room, a mol-bio lab, and an armory. The GPA didn’t have field offices in most major cities, but since Denver was the main hyperloop hub of the West, it made sense to have a dedicated base of operations here.

  We were a young but quickly growing agency, with five hundred employees compared to the FBI’s forty thousand. There were only fifty sp
ecial agents like me and Nadine, and we were all based in the D.C. area, ready to parachute in to wherever our Intelligence Division suspected the existence of a dark gene lab.

  Nadine drove around the back of the low-rise building and pulled through the service entrance to the elevators. She parked behind an armored vehicle, where four bio-SWAT officers had their gear spread out on the concrete, making last-minute weapons checks for what would hopefully be a predawn raid based on the intel we were about to extract from Soren.

  I helped our suspect out of the back of the car, and the three of us rode up to the third floor.

  Once inside the interview room, I cut off the zip ties and sat Soren down at a metal table with a D-bolt welded into the surface for less compliant suspects.

  Nadine went for coffee.

  I took a seat across from him.

  “Aren’t you supposed to read me my rights or something?” he asked.

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

  “Fascists.”

  I shrugged. He wasn’t exactly wrong.

  I placed Soren’s book on the table, hoping for a reaction.

  “Big Camus fan?” I asked.

  “Yeah. I collect rare editions of his work.”

  It was an old hardback copy of The Stranger. I thumbed carefully through the pages.

  “It’s clean,” Soren said.

  I was looking for rigidity in the pages, signs they’d been wet at some point, infinitesimal circular stains. 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. Even a short novel like The Stranger could hold a near-infinite amount of genetic information, with each page hiding the genome sequence for a different mammal, a terrifying disease, or a synthetic species, any of which could be activated in a well-equipped dark gene lab.

  “We’re going to put every page under a black-light lamp,” I said.

  “Great.”

  “They’re bringing your luggage here too. You understand, we’re going to tear it apart.”

  “Go nuts.”

  “Because you already made the delivery?”

  Soren said nothing.

  “What was it?” I asked. “Modified embryos?”

  He looked at me with thinly veiled disgust. “Do you have any idea how many flights I’ve missed because of nights like this? Some G-man showing up at my gate, hauling me in for questioning? It’s happened with the European Genomic Safety Authority. In France. Brazil. Now I’ve got you assholes wrecking my travel. In spite of all this harassment, I’ve never been charged with a single crime.”

  “That’s not quite true,” I said. “From what I hear, the Chinese government would very much like a word with you.”

  Soren grew very still.

  The door behind me opened. I smelled the acrid, burned aroma of yesterday’s coffee. Nadine swept in, kicking the door shut behind her. She sat down next to me and placed two coffees on the table. Soren reached for one of them, but she smacked his hand.

  “Coffee is for good boys.”

  The black liquid smelled about as appetizing as Satan’s piss, but it was late and there was no sleep in my immediate future. I took a wincing sip.

  “I’ll get right to it,” I said. “We know you drove into town yesterday in a rented Lexus Z Class SUV.”

  Soren’s head tilted involuntarily, but he kept his mouth shut.

  I answered the unvoiced question: “The GPA has full access to the DOJ’s facial-recognition AI. It scrapes all CCTV and other surveillance databases. A camera caught your face through the windshield on the off-ramp at I-25 and Alameda Avenue at 9:17 A.M. yesterday. We took the loop out here from D.C. this afternoon. Where were you coming from?”

  “I’m sure you already know I rented that car in Albuquerque.”

  He was right. We did know.

  “What were you doing in Albuquerque?” Nadine asked.

  “Just visiting.”

  Nadine rolled her eyes. “No one just visits Albuquerque.”

  I took a pen and pad out of my pocket and placed it on the table. “Write down the names and addresses of everyone you saw. Every place you stayed.”

  Soren just smiled.

  “What are you doing in Denver, Henrik?” Nadine asked.

  “Catching a flight to Tokyo. Trying to catch a flight to Tokyo.”

  I said, “We’ve been hearing chatter about a gene lab in Denver. Sophisticated operation engineering ransom bioware. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that you happen to be in town.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Nadine said, “We know, everyone knows, that you traffic in high-end genetic elements. Gene networks and sequences. Scythe.”

  Scythe was the revolutionary, biological DNA modifier system—now extremely illegal—discovered and patented by my mother, Miriam Ramsay. It had been a seismic leap forward that left the previous generations of technologies—ZFNs, TALENs, CRISPR-Cas9—gasping in the dust. Scythe had ushered in a new era of gene editing and delivery, one that brought about catastrophic results. Which was why getting caught using or selling it for germline modification—the making of a new organism—came with a mandatory thirty-year prison sentence.

  “I think I’d like to call my lawyer now,” Soren said. “I still have that right in America, don’t I?”

  We were expecting this. Frankly, I was surprised it had taken this long.

  “You can absolutely call your lawyer,” I said. “But first you should know what will happen if you go down this path.”

  Nadine said, “We’re prepared to turn you over to China’s Gene Bureau.”

  “America doesn’t have an extradition treaty with China,” Soren said.

  Nadine leaned forward, her elbows on the table, the black coffee steaming into her face.

  “For you,” she said, “we’re going to make an exception. The papers are being drawn up as we speak.”

  “They don’t have anything on me.”

  “I don’t think evidence and due process mean quite the same thing over there,” she said.

  “You know I have dual Norwegian and American citizenship.”

  “I don’t care,” I said. I looked at Nadine. “Do you care?”

  She pretended to think about it. “No. I don’t think I do.”

  Actually, I did care. We would never extradite an American citizen to China, but bluffing criminals is part of the gig.

  Soren slouched back in his chair. “Can we have a hypothetical conversation?”

  “We love hypothetical conversations,” I said.

  “What if I were to write down an address on this notepad?”

  “An address for what?”

  “For a place where a hypothetical delivery might have been made earlier today.”

  “What was delivered? Hypothetically.”

  “Mining bacteria.”

  Nadine and I exchanged a glance.

  I asked, “You made the delivery to the lab itself? Not a random drop location?”

  “I didn’t make any delivery,” Soren said. “This is all hypothetical.”

  “Of course.”

  “But if I had, and if I were to share that address with you, what would happen?”

  “Depends on what we hypothetically find at this address.”

  “If, hypothetically, you found this gene lab you’ve been hearing about, what would happen to me?”

  Nadine said, “You’d be on the next flight to Tokyo.”

  “And the China Gene Bureau?”

  “As you pointed out,” I said, “we don’t have an extradition treaty with China.”

  Soren pulled the pen and pad to his side of the table.
/>
  * * *

  —

  We followed the stealth SWAT vehicle in blackout mode through deserted streets. The address Soren had scribbled down was on the edge of Denver’s gentrified Five Points neighborhood, where at this hour of the night the only things open were a few weed bars.

  I rolled down the window.

  The October air streaming into my face was more revitalizing than the coffee we’d downed back at the station.

  It was late fall in the Rockies.

  The air smelled of dead leaves and overripe fruit.

  A harvest moon perched above the serrated skyline of the Front Range—yellow and huge.

  There should’ve been snow on the highest peaks by now, but it was all dry, moonlit rock above the timberline.

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

  Africa alone had four billion people, most of whom were food insecure and worse. Even here in America, we were still crippled by rolling food shortages, supply-chain disruptions, and labor scarcity. With the cost of meat having skyrocketed, most restaurants that had closed during the Great Starvation never reopened.

  We lived in a veritable surveillance state, engaged with screens more than with our loved ones, and the algorithms knew us better than we knew ourselves.

  Every passing year, more jobs were lost to automation and artificial intelligence.

  Parts of New York City and most of Miami were underwater, and an island of plastic the size of Iceland was floating in the Indian Ocean.

  But it wasn’t just humans who’d been affected. There were no more northern white rhinos or South China tigers. The red wolves were gone, along with countless other species.

  There were no more glaciers in Glacier National Park.

  We had gotten so much right.

  And too much wrong.

  The future was here, and it was a fucking mess.