Upgrade

Beneath the science-fiction and thriller conventions, the novel engages in a deep psychological exploration. The deaths of Logan’s father and twin brother devastated his family unit; Miriam, Logan, and Kara never fully recovered from these tragedies. Now Logan is irreversibly estranged from his own wife and daughter as a victim of the upgrade. All this is a heavy burden to bear, but he does not turn to cynicism or spirituality to deal with it. Instead, one of Logan’s survival mechanisms is the suppression of emotion. Because he has made exponential gains in intellect and has acute control over how he processes his thoughts and perceptions, he has learned to control his emotional state. When he first enters Kara’s home, which used to be Miriam’s home, he sees pictures, artifacts, and souvenirs from his childhood, which, he acknowledges, would normally have stricken him with sadness: “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” (230). Logan recognizes a distant feeling within himself, but it is not allowed to become anything more. Distant as it is, he has not entirely lost touch with the emotion that makes him human. Instead, he has learned to conquer emotion by compartmentalizing the experiences of his recent and distant past. The power of emotion returns in full when Logan visits his old home and sees his wife out with another man. The experience devastates him and further hardens his emotional defenses; however, even this moment does not entirely close him off from raw human emotion, as the reader will see later in the novel.

Logan also makes a significant point while discussing his upgrade with Kara. He tells her, “Higher intelligence doesn’t make you less greedy or self-centered or evil. It doesn’t necessarily make you a good person” (235). Logan here challenges Kara’s rationale that upgraded intelligence is the only solution to humanity’s problems, noting that an increase in overall intelligence does not by default correspond to an increase in ethical behavior. Kara has a single-minded focus on her mission. Stopping to consider the ethical ramifications of her behavior is not an option for her, and this is the primary difference between her and Logan. Even as Logan attains her supercharged physical and intellectual abilities, he still holds on to his ideals for humanity, which necessitates a balance between intelligence and emotion.