Upgrade

“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.”

While later in the novel Logan identifies the time period as the mid-21st century, this quote does not feel as remote. In addition to setting a bleak tone, this description may feel relatable to the reader. Crouch employs this social commentary to suggest that Logan’s world is not so far from that of his audience.

“You do this out of obligation and guilt, and maybe that made sense in the beginning, but it’s been fifteen years since you were pardoned.”

Logan’s wife, Beth, says this to him after he has been injured in an explosion, questioning why he continues to put himself at risk. She pinpoints the motivation behind why Logan stays at a job he dislikes. Her assessment gives the reader insight into what kind of character Logan is: loyal, duty-bound, brave, motivated by guilt, and unhappy.

“She was presenting a lecture on crime in Lower Manhattan, which had become a massive homeless encampment since it flooded and was condemned

eight years ago.”

Lower Manhattan is flooded in the novel’s present time, indicating that sea level rise caused by climate change has already had monumental effects on the largest city in the United States—as well as on its inhabitants. Images of altered physical landscapes are common in the novel as a way of illustrating the urgency and irreversibility of climate change.

“‘I suspected my LRP5 gene had been upregulated, and perhaps modified.’ In the context of genetics, upregulation means the gene has increased its expression or effect.”

This quote provides an example of Crouch’s method of relaying complex scientific concepts without jarring the reader out of the scene. Especially when it comes to the field of genetics, Logan often uses scientific jargon and then rephrases it in layman’s terms to translate for the reader.

“I knew from my own experience in law enforcement that lie-detector tests don’t actually detect lies. They detect guilty feelings.”

In this scene, the lie-detector test has been administered with a tablet rather than the traditional machine, another of the book’s believable modifications to existing technology. Logan finds himself on the receiving end of questionable police tactics here. The implication that a police force is not to be trusted is another convention of the sci-fi genre.

“No one teaches you how to handle the death of a dream.”

Logan speaks this earnestly, and the quote carries a heavy emotional weight. It anticipates the dissolution of his family life. It also hints at the psychological imperative in the text that Logan ultimately must learn how to accept the death of his former self as he tries to forge a new identity after his upgrade.

“While most Americans thought they knew the full extent of the surveillance state they lived in, they had no idea of its full power and insidious integration into our daily lives.”

This comment draws dystopian elements into the novel. It carries a rather chilling undertone and follows a general pattern that Logan’s world is not beyond the scope of reality. It also anticipates the drastic measures Logan will have to take to remain undetected by the government’s many forms of surveillance.

“Feelings are also the core of compassion and empathy. We’re becoming capable of rationalizing anything. Maybe sentiment helps with the checks and balances.”

Logan is responding to Kara, who is questioning the necessity of human feeling and emotions. In his answer, Logan sees emotion and intuition as a counterforce to an unchecked intelligence and as a marker for what makes a human a human. Logan tends to opt for a worldview that esteems balance and devalues single-mindedness and oblivious ideologies.

“Being smart doesn’t make people infallible. It just makes them more dangerous.”

Once again, Logan offers this comment in response to his sister. Here, he again attempts to devalue the perception that human intelligence is superior to human emotion. He suggests that the ability to experience emotion, whatever kind, is what makes us human.

“Mostly I just sit by the kitchen window, watching the sea change. I’ve seen it at roiling gray and glittering stillness. Obscured as a storm slams into the continent (occurring today), and as a shiny, black lacquer under the moon.”

This is a passage from a letter Logan writes Beth, one that he will never send. The images he describes capture his mood, particularly the storm that is occurring at sea, which mimics the storm occurring in his life. The imagery is dark, reflecting his own outlook on life at this moment in the novel. Crouch frequently uses descriptions of landscapes to convey larger emotions.

“The Gulf Coast of Mississippi, which had been hit by two cat 7 hurricanes in the last decade and left with no economy to speak of […]”

This is another allusion to the advancing effects of climate change. Currently, a category 5 is the limit for hurricane classification, so Logan’s world has moved far beyond that classification system, making the scale of such a hurricane unimaginable. Linking the physical devastation with the economic fallout also illustrates the interaction between climate change and societal and government systems.

“It was a landscape of gentle desolation. Out on the plain, I would glimpse the occasional barn or schoolhouse weathering away in a sea of great wide nothing.”

As Logan drives to Glasgow, Montana, this is the description he offers. The images suggest oblivion and human insignificance in the face of the force of nature. The human-made objects are slowly degraded by time and erosion. This reiterates the idea that action must be taken to preserve ways of life and even the existence of the species itself.

“It sat in a high valley surrounded by the jagged, broken peaks of a thirty-million-year-old mountain range formed when two continental plates slammed into each other.”

Logan describes the town of Silverton, Colorado, where he has traveled to confront Kara. Once again, the temporal scope and the geological forces mentioned here magnify human insignificance. This also serves to heighten the urgency of Logan’s mission; on the brink of extinction, humanity could disappear in the relative blink of an eye if no action is taken.

“Once upon a time, the forests would’ve been green. But the wildfires of overlong summers had crisped them.”

This passage reveals another signal that climate change has wrought devastation. Color serves an important function here, indicating a changing landscape. The forest once was a lush and thriving green and represented life and virility. Now, because it has been burned out, it represents desolation and ruin.

“There was a time when these images would have shattered me—artifacts of a doomed family. Today, I only felt the distant thunder of emotion, and it was so faint, so far beyond my emotional horizon, as to barely register.”

Logan comments on his response when he sees family pictures hanging on the walls in Kara’s home, which was once Miriam’s hideout. While Logan has learned to control his emotions, it is significant that although the thunder is distant, it is still there, and he can hear it. He has not lost all touch with his emotional self even as he works to subdue it.

“The desert lay under a fragile inch of snow, and all around me were red mesas and pinnacles that had existed for hundreds of millions of years before humans ruled the Earth and would continue to exist long after we were gone.”

Human insignificance is once again the theme of this quote, as it presents humanity as a lesser force than that of nature. It also serves as a reminder that climate change is ultimately more of a threat to humanity’s survival than the planet’s. The vast scale of geologic time mentioned in the passage suggests that humanity occupies only a short interval in comparison.

“It felt like my bones were melting, and as if something were trying to stab its way out of my skull with an ice pick.”

This quote, highly visual and figurative, describes the after-effects of Logan injecting himself with his second upgrade. The use of simile and personification help bring his pain to life. It also implies that Logan feels newly inhabited by an entity beyond himself, having become, in a sense, superhuman.

“There was something unnerving about the forest of featureless, black monoliths that now comprised Lower Manhattan.”

Logan describes the abandoned buildings of Lower Manhattan. The word “monolith” suggests an extinct civilization. Logan uses irony when he refers to the abandoned buildings as forests, especially in relation to the burned-out forests he witnesses while in Colorado (see Quote 15).

“You can’t kill humanity to save humanity. Human beings are not a means to an end.”

Logan speaks this to his dying sister after he shoots her. This is the definitive position of the text, as it is spoken by Logan after he prevails over his sister, who represents the antithesis of his belief. His suggestion that individual human lives are precious goes on to inform his development of the compassion upgrade, which would enable humans to view cultures outside their own in terms of individual people rather than as unknowable masses.

“I felt something go out of her. Whatever I was holding wasn’t my sister anymore.”

Logan says this immediately after Kara dies. He is ambiguous here, which leaves the question of what the something is that leaves her body open for the reader’s interpretation. The novel does not take a position on whether there is such a thing as a soul, but Logan seems to suggest here that there is.

“To feel nothing about my sister’s death seemed like crossing a frontier I couldn’t return from. The tears came. Streaming.”

After Logan escapes and the understanding of what he did sets in, he realizes that the best course of action is not to banish the emotions that are welling up in him; instead, he understands the need to free them up. He discovers at last that this is part of what makes him human.

“We were a monstrous, thoughtful, selfish, sensitive, fearful, ambitious, loving, hateful, hopeful species. We contained within us the potential for great evil, but also for great good. And we were capable of so much more than this.”

Logan offers an objective conclusion on humanity, showing its inherent complexities with carefully chosen contradictory adjectives. His words offer hope and show faith in the power of goodness within humanity. The sentiment here echoes Logan’s views of his mother, in that she was not evil, just flawed.

“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.”

Logan shows true emotional growth in the realization he has here. He understands the delicate balance between suffering and joy and suggests that one cannot exist without the other. While he seems to understand this at various points in the novel, his pain previously caused him to consider whether he should shut himself off from it entirely.