40 pages • 1 hour read
Blake CrouchUpgrade
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 3, Chapter 13-EpilogueChapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3, Chapter 13 Summary
Logan experiences a seizure from the second upgrade, followed by symptoms similar to those he experienced after the first. When he regains his health, his sensory perception is even keener than before; most notably, he can slow down and speed up his perception of time.
He enacts a plan to stop Kara, the first step being a surprise reunion with his former boss, Edwin. He shows up at Edwin’s bedside and waits for him to wake up. When he finally does, Edwin frantically reaches for his gun, but Logan already has it. Edwin notices a needle and syringe sticking out of his arm; Logan explains that he has injected a time-release pathogen. Should anything happen to Logan, the pathogen will kill Edwin. Edwin becomes apologetic, which Logan perceives as authentic. When he reveals that Kara is behind the Glasgow outbreak, Edwin agrees to help him.
Logan is reunited with Nadine and given access to MYSTIC, a super-advanced search engine, which he uses to track down Kara’s associates, whom he locates in Brooklyn. Logan then requests that Edwin round up a SWAT team and supplies and travel to Miami, where he thinks Kara is hiding.
Part 3, Chapter 14 Summary
Upon arrival in Miami, Logan abruptly changes course. He and Nadine head for New York City. When Nadine asks him why, he says that he thinks “Edwin’s compromised” (285). They board a train that travels at the speed of sound. Soon after departure, Logan confronts Nadine, asking her how and when Kara got to her. Nadine pretends that she doesn’t know what he’s talking about—until she realizes she can’t fool Logan, with his new ability to detect lying. Nadine tells him that she met Kara while on vacation and spent a weekend with her. By the end of their time together, Kara had detailed her plan for saving humanity. Accepting Kara’s logic, Nadine agreed to become part of the plan.
Feeling cornered, Nadine reaches into her handbag and releases two Asian hornets, genetically modified to target Logan’s specific pheromone secretions and kill him with venom. Logan, using his newfound ability to slow time, pinches each of the two hornets and kills them, much to Nadine’s amazement. Logan reads off a list of Kara’s potential New York City partners, which he had Edwin compile using MYSTIC, and reads Nadine’s expressions to determine the correct partner.
Part 3, Chapter 15 Summary
Though Logan has the assistance of an NYPD SWAT team, he insists on breaching the building Kara has been using as her operations base on his own. He chooses to use his newfound strength to climb as far up the skyscraper as he can, figuring that there will be heavy security at ground level. He climbs to the ninth floor, then launches an explosive at a window to create an opening. As he orients himself, he receives a text from Edwin alerting him to the involvement of the Department of Defense. Edwin tells Logan that he has nothing to do with their arrival and that the DOD probably tracked him to get to Logan and Kara. Now it is a race against time as Logan maneuvers around booby traps and other security measures throughout the building, ascending to the 34th floor as quickly as possible before the DOD arrives. As he continues his climb, Logan hears all kinds of commotion and gunfire throughout the building. He then hears a loud explosion and sees a Black Hawk helicopter breaking apart as it crashes to the ground.
When he reaches Kara, he is confronted by one of her guards, kills her off, and finally shoots his sister in the leg as she tries to make her escape. Seeing that she is not yielding, he shoots her again, this time fatally. The two share a few words, expressing their mutual misery at their unfortunate lives and the love they still have for each other. Kara dies, and Logan uses her parachute to escape the building. He lands in the water that has overrun Lower Manhattan from climate-change-related flooding and rising sea levels. After some struggle, he extricates himself from the parachute and finds a temporary safe haven. Edwin sends coded texts to determine if Logan is alive and suggests that the DOD is on the hunt for him. Logan requests that Edwin and the GPA treat Nadine better than Logan was treated after his upgrade. He also tells Edwin that the injection he used to threaten him was just saline.
Epilogue Summary
Logan has finally decided to reunite in person with his family. He secretly attends Ava’s graduation. At the end of the ceremony, he approaches Beth, Ava, and John, the man Logan saw Beth on a date with in Chapter 12. He tells John that he harbors no ill will toward him. Beth asks John for some privacy, and the three of them speak in their car. Logan informs them that time is limited; he planted a bug in the CCTV cameras for cover, and it will likely be resolved in 15 minutes. Ava pleads with Logan to come back, but Logan refuses for fear that it will put them all in danger. Logan has left a package for them at their home, a collection of the letters that he wrote to them but never sent, in which he explains the circumstances surrounding the upgrade and his race to stop Kara. He then sadly parts ways with Ava and Beth for the final time. The Epilogue concludes with a letter that Logan wrote the previous night expressing his remorse and explaining that he has been working on a potential solution to the ever-present catastrophe that the world faces. He calls it the “compassion upgrade” (335).
Part 3, Chapter 13-Epilogue Analysis
Part 3 accelerates the action while simultaneously attempting to reconcile the ethical dilemma at its heart. As Logan and Nadine, who has been upgraded herself, head via train to New York City from Miami and his suspicions that Nadine is working for Kara are confirmed, their conversation reveals the true quandary at the thematic core of the novel. Logan says to Nadine, “A billion people, Nadine. Any person who catches the upgrade virus and dies—that’ll be on you. People you know and love will die” (288). Logan is attempting an appeal to Nadine’s ethics here, perhaps adding a context that she had not fully considered. However, her reply to Logan reveals her own fixed position: “If you stop this […] you may well be responsible for the extinction of Homo sapiens. That’ll be on you” (288). What emerges is a binary view of how to properly modify human behavior to prevent extinction. Nadine sees the sacrifice of actual human lives in the process as a necessary casualty. She asks Logan, “Would you rather have no world at all?” (289). Logan answers by pointing out the logical error in this way of thinking: “That’s a false binary. We are in trouble, but that doesn’t mean this is the only solution” (289). Later, after the climactic scene in which Logan kills Kara, he tells her, “You can’t kill humanity to save humanity. Human beings are not a means to an end” (320). Here, the novel takes a clear moral position: Killing many human beings to save more human beings is not a viable or acceptable solution to the monumental challenges humanity faces.
As the Epilogue illustrates, Logan’s view is not one of resignation. He crafts a possible alternative to the false dilemma Nadine and Kara present, fusing the beneficial aspects of genetic engineering with the need to widen humanity’s capacity for compassion for cultures outside individual clans. In his letter to Beth and Ava, Logan details the biological explanation for humanity’s inherent—but not insurmountable—selfishness, explaining that it has essentially been genetically encoded and that humanity has not yet evolved beyond it. His mission to spread a “compassion upgrade” (335) is in some ways an attempt at interfering with and speeding up evolution. He theorizes that changing the way humans perceive mass-casualty events—such as wars, natural disasters, and pandemics—so that they have the same personal effect as singular-casualty events can help humans become more compassionate for larger numbers of people at once. His theory utilizes both science and hope to transcend Kara’s either/or proposition that drives the action of the novel.
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By Blake Crouch
