Extinction

by Mark Alpert

  Arvin leaned over the table and pressed a key on the laptop. Then he sat very still in his chair, staring at the audience. In a few seconds an image appeared on the screen overhead. The picture was fuzzy at the edges but clear at its center. It was a real-time image of the journalists and venture capitalists sitting in the front row of the auditorium. For a brief moment Jim saw himself on the screen. Every few seconds the image blacked out for an instant, disappearing in time with Arvin’s eyeblinks.

  “This is my visual perception of the auditorium,” Arvin explained. “The brain’s view, if you will, which is very different from a camera’s. Notice how my perception focuses on just one person at a time. And notice how quickly that center of focus darts around the room.” As Arvin surveyed the crowd, the image on the video screen leaped from one person to the next. “From a neuroscientist’s perspective, this is a remarkable breakthrough that will open up new avenues of research. Future studies can show us how animals perceive their environments. Or how schizophrenics view the world. But the potential for commercial applications is also remarkable. Watch this, please.”

  Arvin leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. The video screen went dark. After a few seconds, though, blobs of color flashed across the screen. Then a shape emerged, an image of a woman. It first appeared as a black-and-white silhouette and gradually became more detailed and colorful. The woman was heavyset and her hair was gray. She tilted her head and smiled, and then the image froze.

  Arvin opened his eyes and pointed at the screen. “Do you recognize her?” he asked. “I didn’t expect you to. She was never famous. And she died more than twenty years ago.” He pressed a different key on the laptop and another image appeared on the screen, framed in a window just to the right of the smiling gray-haired woman. This second image was eerily similar to the first—it was the same woman in a slightly different pose. “She’s my mother, Irma Conway. The image on the right is a photo of her that I took in 1971. And the image on the left is my visual memory of her.”

  The auditorium went dead silent. The crowd was too stunned to make a sound.

  “Yes, I knew you’d be intrigued,” Arvin said. Once more he tapped the silver implant on his scalp. “The Dream-catcher allows us to download visual memories from the brain.”

  The silence lasted for several seconds. Then someone started to clap. Others joined in, and soon the whole audience was applauding.

  Arvin rose to his feet and moved upstage. “Amazing, isn’t it?” he exulted. “With this system we can retrieve all the images in our heads, every vivid fantasy and fleeting recollection and fondly remembered face. We’ll be able to archive every moment of our lives.”

  The applause continued. Jim glanced at the journalists and businessmen in the crowd as they shared their delight in Arvin’s invention. The Dream-catcher was a potential bonanza, a technology that could make money in a hundred new ways. The venture capitalists were probably imagining the advertisements already: Store your memories on a hard drive! Share them on the Web! Although implanting a chip in the brain was major surgery, millions of people would surely pay for the privilege of retrieving their memories and broadcasting them to the world.

  Jim, though, recoiled at the thought. He had no interest in reliving his memories.

  Arvin beamed at the crowd, basking in their astonishment. But then he glanced at Jim again and his smile wavered. He abruptly turned to the left and mouthed a few words to someone offstage. Then he turned back to the crowd.

  “Well, that’s the gist of it,” he said. “If any of you are seriously interested in investing in Singularity, please come forward and speak to our general counsel, who will provide you with a prospectus covering all the financial details. And now I’m sorry, but I must get back to my lab. Thank you all for coming!”

  The audience applauded again. Arvin remained onstage for several seconds, waving at his admirers. Taking advantage of the moment, Jim advanced to the edge of the stage and called out to Arvin. But the old man ignored him and hurried toward the exit, escorted by a pair of bodyguards.

  Jim had planned to buttonhole Arvin, but now he had a better idea. He rolled up his right sleeve and opened a small compartment hidden in the crook of his prosthetic arm. This particular prosthesis was equipped with a radio transmitter. Jim was an avid backwoods hiker, so he’d built the radio into the arm to give himself an emergency rescue beacon. But the transmitter could be useful in other ways. Turning one of the two knobs inside the compartment, Jim set the radio’s frequency at 13.56 megahertz. Because he’d helped to develop the implant technology, he knew this was the frequency used by Arvin’s miniature cameras to transmit their video to the retinal implants. Then he turned the other knob on the prosthesis and sent out a silent blast of radio noise.

  Arvin stumbled as he walked across the stage. He had to grab one of his bodyguards to stop himself from falling. Jim had used electronic jamming to get his old professor’s attention. The radio noise from his prosthetic arm drowned out the visual signals going into Arvin’s retinal implants, temporarily blinding him.

  As the crowd looked on, bewildered, Jim climbed onto the stage and stepped toward Arvin. He turned off his radio transmitter, but before the old man could gather his wits, Jim grabbed Arvin’s arm with his strong mechanical fingers.

  “Thanks for making the time, old friend,” he said. “We need to talk.”

  EIGHT

  Layla crossed the Mexican border at Nuevo Laredo. She’d learned from her friends on the InfoLeaks network that the Mexican guards at the Laredo checkpoint were easy to bribe, and this turned out to be true. She got across the border after showing the guards her borrowed driver’s license and a couple of crisp hundred-dollar bills. Then she drove for another ten hours across the Sierra Madre. She finally reached a fishing village on Mexico’s Pacific coast, and soon she was bargaining in Spanish with an old toothless fisherman named Felipe.

  Although Felipe didn’t look like much, he was a canny negotiator. He wanted five hundred dollars to take Layla on a one-hour excursion to a point in international waters, about twenty miles offshore. He obviously felt free to ask for a ridiculous sum because he assumed she was in the drug business, delivering either money or product to some smuggler in a speedboat. Slowly, patiently, Layla ratcheted the price down. She’d studied Spanish in high school and still remembered it pretty well. Her father, who’d learned Mandarin and Arabic while working overseas, had encouraged her to study those languages as well, but she never got around to it, and now she regretted her procrastination. It would’ve been nice to be able to read the Mandarin files that Dragon Fire had given her.

  Felipe finally agreed to do the job for two hundred dollars. While he filled up an extra tank with gasoline, Layla found a safe place to leave the Honda and took the zippered pouch from the car. Then she and the fisherman headed out to sea. The boat was little more than a dinghy, but it had a new 100-horsepower engine. Layla sat in the bow, facing backward.

  As she watched the shoreline recede, she thought of her father again. He’d always been so fanatical about her education. While other fathers read Dr. Seuss to their daughters, Layla’s father read Tolkien and Twain and Swift. When she was ten, he helped her build her first computer, using one device on his prosthetic arm as a soldering iron and another as a voltage tester. He spent nearly all his free time with her, forgoing friendshipes and hobbies and romances. Although his love for her had been suffocating at times, she’d always admired the way he’d responded to the deaths of her mother and brother. Instead of retreating into depression or bitterness, he’d dedicated his life to making things better.

  But he wouldn’t talk about what happened in Nairobi. He never went near the subject. By the time Layla entered her teens she wanted to know more about the embassy bombing, but her father refused to say a word. For a long time she quietly accepted this, but as the years passed she grew resentful. She decided to learn as much as she could about the terrorist attack, gleaning details from all the
sources available on the Internet. She was already quite adept at hacking, so she focused on infiltrating the network operated by the U.S. State Department.

  Her first big success came in her senior year of high school when she downloaded a State Department file describing the events leading up to the attack. From this document she learned that in the mid-1990s Al Qaeda had been looking for ways to retaliate against the CIA. The agency had already begun its rendition program, capturing Al Qaeda terrorists around the world and sending them to Egypt, where they were tortured by that country’s secret police. Then, in Layla’s sophomore year in college, she broke into the State Department network again and found a classified report on the renditions. This report mentioned that other government agencies helped the CIA catch the terrorists and transfer them to Egypt. One of those agencies was the NSA, and one of the key participants in the effort was then-Major James T. Pierce.

  Layla immediately confronted her father with this discovery. As she expected, he became angry and defensive. The terrorists were plotting against America, he said. There wasn’t enough evidence to prosecute them in the United States, so sending them to Egypt was the only solution. But Layla was unconvinced. She’d previously seen her father as simply a victim of the bombing, but now she knew he was partially responsible. “You knew there was a war going on,” she told him. “And you put your own family right in the middle of it.” Her father reacted furiously: “I had no idea there was any danger in Nairobi! None of the intelligence reports showed any warning signs there!” But Layla was equally furious. “There were signs,” she told him. “But you were too arrogant to see them. You didn’t see the consequences of what you were doing until they blew up in your face.”

  That argument was the breaking point for Layla and her father. Soon afterward she dropped out of college and started working for InfoLeaks, devoting herself to the ideals of truth and transparency. But now she realized she was also driven by a self-destructive impulse. She liked to cause trouble. It had become her main way of expressing herself. And now she was in very big trouble indeed.

  After an hour at sea, the Mexican shoreline was no longer visible. Layla turned around, facing forward, and on the western horizon she saw a boat. At first it was just a silhouette, but as they drew closer the size of the vessel became apparent. It was a motorized megayacht, more than two hundred feet long, bristling with antennas and satellite dishes. Christened the Athena, it had a catamaran-like double hull and a pair of turbojet engines that could reach speeds as high as seventy knots. The Athena was the mobile headquarters of InfoLeaks, and it was designed to outrun even the fastest patrol ships.

  Layla had arranged this rendezvous by e-mail, using a computer at a copy shop in Monterrey nine hours ago. Felipe stared at the yacht, astonished, as he maneuvered his dinghy next to the starboard hull. Then Layla said goodbye to the fisherman and boarded the Athena, climbing a stairway to the top deck. Waiting there to greet her was Gabriel Schroeder, owner of the Athena and founder of InfoLeaks. Layla had met him several times before; he was a slender, boyish forty-year-old with lanky blond hair and freakishly pale skin. He’d made his fortune in the German software business and still dressed like a computer programmer, in frayed jeans and an old T-shirt, but he’d used his money to surround himself with gorgeously chic assistants. He was flanked by two women, a willowy blonde in a sundress and an athletic brunette in a red bikini. Although Layla admired what Schroeder had done with InfoLeaks, she wasn’t so enamored of the man himself. He seemed to be interested in only two things: pissing off powerful men and bedding beautiful women.

  Schroeder stepped forward and kissed her on both cheeks. “Good to see you again, liebchen. We were starting to worry.” He glanced at the pouch in her hands. “Is this the package you mentioned in the e-mail?”

  Layla unzipped the pouch and removed the specimen jar. “Do you have any technical staff on this boat?”

  “Ja, of course.” He squinted at the fly inside the jar. “What on earth is that thing?”

  “It’s a microdrone. Apparently developed by the Chinese. We need to photograph it and post the pictures on the Web site. But tell your people to use tweezers when handling it. The bug is dead, but it has a mechanical stinger that still works.” She handed the jar to Schroeder, then gave him the flash drive. “And we need to translate these two Mandarin files into English. One of them seems to be a technical document describing the electronics implanted in the fly. The other file I can’t make heads or tails of.”

  Schroeder smiled. “As always, you’re very efficient, Fraulein Pierce.” He gave her an admiring glance, his eyes roving up and down her body. Then he pointed to the brunette on his left. “As it turns out, we have a Mandarin speaker right here who can translate the files. Let me introduce you to one of my assistants, Angelique Laplace. Her father is French and her mother is Chinese.”

  Angelique had a figure that belonged on a magazine cover. She nodded at Layla, then took the flash drive from Schroeder. “I’ll get right on it,” she said, her face serious. She turned around and headed for the lower decks, where all the computers were.

  Layla frowned. She had a prejudice against beautiful women. Schroeder turned to the other one, the blonde, and told her to take the specimen jar to the Web site manager’s cabin. A moment later, the Athena’s turbojet engines started up with a roar. The boat began to skim over the Pacific, heading south.

  Schroeder turned back to Layla, his eyes running over her body again. “You arrived just in time. We need to make a quick getaway.”

  “What do you mean? We’re being pursued?”

  He pointed toward the yacht’s stern. “Two U.S. Navy warships are shadowing us. One is a destroyer, the U.S.S. Dewey. The other is the U.S.S. Freedom, a coastal patrol boat.”

  Layla craned her neck, scanning the horizon behind the boat. “I don’t see anything.”

  “They’re sixty kilometers away. We see them on the radar and in the satellite photos.”

  “They wouldn’t intercept us in international waters, would they?”

  “The rumor we’ve heard is that they’re planning to accuse us of drug-running. They’re probably fabricating the evidence right now, so it’ll be ready by the time the Pentagon holds its press conference.” He frowned. “But they’re in for a surprise. The Freedom is one of the fastest ships in the navy, but the Athena is faster.”

  As if to back up Schroeder’s words, the boat’s engines throttled up to a higher pitch and the twin hulls leaped over the waves. The wind on the deck grew so strong that Layla had to grab the railing. Schroeder led her to a sheltered spot behind one of the Zodiac lifeboats. “Unfortunately, we have another problem,” he said. “The satellite photos show two more warships in this part of the eastern Pacific. They’re a thousand kilometers southwest of here and moving rapidly in this direction. They appear to be working in concert with the Dewey and the Freedom, trying to trap us.”

  “What kind of boats are they? Destroyers?”

  “Yes, but they’re not American. They’re the Lanzhou and the Haikou. From the Chinese navy.”

  Shit, Layla thought. This was bizarre. She could understand the Chinese government dispatching a few agents to America to stop her from revealing their secrets. But sending warships? And cooperating with the U.S. Navy? They must have one hell of a motivation.

  “I don’t get it,” she said. “What do they want?”

  “Both the Chinese and the Americans seem determined to shut us down. But we still have a chance. Our captain came up with a plan to slip out of the trap. We’re going to cruise south for four hundred kilometers, then turn to the southeast. Then we’ll make a dash for the Panama Canal. If we’re lucky, we’ll reach the Pacific entrance to the canal by tomorrow afternoon, a few hours ahead of the American and Chinese ships.”

  “But we’ll have to slow down at the canal’s locks. They’ll catch up to us.”

  Schroeder shook his head. “The U.S. Navy would have no qualms about intercepting us on the
high seas, but there are international treaties assuring free passage through the canal. They won’t attempt to board us there, and they won’t let the Chinese warships stop us either. Once we reach the Caribbean side of the canal, they’ll be able to chase us again, but we’ll have a better chance of shaking them off there.”

  Layla looked askance. “I don’t know. It sounds desperate.”

  “I’m willing to consider alternatives, fraulein. Do you have any?”

  She turned away from him and stared at the ocean. Creating a map in her head, she pictured the U.S. ships to the north and the Chinese ships to the southwest. Meanwhile, Schroeder waited patiently beside her, sneaking looks at her ass. In the end, she concluded he was right. She couldn’t see any alternatives.

  She was just about to admit defeat when Angelique suddenly reappeared on the top deck. Breathless, she ran to Schroeder. “Gabie, you have to see this.”

  Layla was surprised. “You finished translating the files already?”

  “No, no, I just skimmed them. But I think I found what the Chinese are so worried about.”

  “Is it in the document about the cyborg insects?” Layla asked.

  Angelique raised her hand to her chest and took a couple of deep breaths. “No, that file has nothing but engineering details. The only interesting thing about it is the file’s distribution list. A copy of the document was sent to a CIA agent with the code name ‘Hammer.’” She unfolded a piece of paper with some scribbled notes on it. “But the second document is different. It lists the names of twenty-nine Chinese dissidents who’ve been detained by the Guoanbu over the past year. They were pro-democracy activists, mostly from Xinjiang and the other western provinces.”