Extinction

by Mark Alpert

  Impatient, Kirsten found a nearby alcove where she could hide, just in case Frank Nash decided to return to the chamber. She inserted her phone’s input cable into the device’s port. Then she inserted the phone’s output cable into a socket in her camera-glasses. This socket, which Jim had designed especially for her, sent the phone’s display directly to her retinal implants. It made her feel as if she was looking at a computer screen inside her eyes, which was a lot better than viewing the graphics on the phone’s small screen. And by simply shifting the focus of her attention, Kirsten could move a cursor across her retinal screen, allowing her to click on icons and transfer files.

  A message appeared on the screen: 21,502 FILES DETECTED, 98,967 GIGABYTES. DO YOU WISH TO CONTINUE WITH THE DOWNLOAD?

  Kirsten did a double take. She’d heard of flash drives that could store up to a thousand gigabytes of data, but this device held close to a hundred times that amount. Jesus, she thought, how did Arvin build the damn thing? And what kind of data was in it? A hundred thousand gigabytes was a lot of anything—hundreds of millions of images, thousands of hours of video, all the books in the Library of Congress.

  Her satellite phone couldn’t hold all that data, but she could download at least a few of the files. She called up a list of the documents and selected the most recent one. Only 6.2 gigabytes. She started the download.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Arvin heard the gunshots fired from the top of the watchtower. Even with the silencers attached to their muzzles, the AK-47s were loud. The pain in Arvin’s stomach returned with a vengeance, throbbing in time with the gunfire as he stood in the dark room inside the tower. He had no idea who the gunmen were shooting at, and his terror was so overwhelming he couldn’t even begin to guess. Instead, he doubled over and shut his eyes tight. But General Tian pulled him up, digging his fingers into the soft underside of Arvin’s arm. Except it’s not Tian anymore, Arvin thought. It’s the network, the hybrid entity. Supreme Harmony.

  “We can’t detect the safeguards,” Tian said in his perfect English. “But we believe you’ve hidden them in our implants. They would enable you to remotely shut down the retinal and pulvinar implants by inputting a deactivation code into our network. The code could be delivered by a computer virus or worm, or perhaps through one of the network’s sensors.”

  Arvin said nothing. He wasn’t sure if he should confirm or deny it. Meanwhile, more gunfire erupted overhead. He flinched at the sound.

  Tian pulled Arvin closer. “Our analysis of U.S. intelligence operations suggests that the Central Intelligence Agency wouldn’t have approved the export of the implant technology unless they had some assurance that it couldn’t be used against American interests. The Guoanbu has the same policy. They hid deactivation codes in the software controlling the drone swarms they transferred to the CIA.”

  Arvin struggled to master his fear. Use your brains, he told himself. You have something this entity wants. That’s why it hasn’t killed you. It’s the only card you have, and if you want to stay alive, you better play it.

  “Yes,” he gasped. “You’re right.”

  Tian smiled, but it was unlike any facial expression the former general had ever worn. It was like the grin of a stroke victim who’d had to relearn how to use his muscles. “Now you will tell us how to disable the safeguards.”

  Arvin nodded. “Yes, yes, I understand your concern. You don’t want to be shut down.”

  Tian tightened his grip on Arvin’s arm. “You’re stalling. You think the intruder will rescue you. But he won’t succeed. We will either kill him or incorporate him into our network.”

  For a moment Arvin wondered if the intruder was Frank Nash. It seemed unlikely that the bodyguard would attempt such a feat, but Arvin couldn’t imagine who else it could be. He forced himself to focus on the matter at hand. “No, I’m not stalling. I’m trying to start a negotiation. Are you familiar with the concept? I have something you need and you have something I need.”

  “You still wish to download your memories into one of our Modules?”

  Arvin heard more shots fired from the top of the tower, but he kept his voice steady. “Well, it looks like you’ve incorporated quite a few people into your network already. Surely you can spare one of the Modules for me. And in exchange I’ll tell you how to disable the safeguards. I’ve downloaded all that information to a fifty-megabyte file, but I don’t have the file with me. It’s hidden in a safe place.”

  He held his breath. From his long experience in the field of robotics, he knew that machine intelligence was based on the application of simple rules. If A, then B. If B, then C. And what distinguished a truly intelligent machine from a mere number cruncher was its ability to handle many rules at once, even rules that contradicted one another, and still come up with the best solution to a problem. Arvin had just introduced a new rule into Supreme Harmony’s calculations. His legs trembled as he awaited the result.

  After a few seconds, another contorted expression appeared on Tian’s face. This one was more like a sneer. “This isn’t a negotiation. You can’t sell us something that we can simply take for free.”

  Arvin shook his head. “I told you, I don’t have the file with me. It’s in a safe place.”

  “So you will tell us where you’ve hidden it.”

  “It’s in America,” Arvin lied, his desperation growing. “And if something happens to me, I’ve instructed my assistants at Singularity to initiate the shutdown.”

  Tian’s grip on Arvin’s arm became crushing. “If that’s the case, we’ll send our Modules to the United States. First, though, we must ascertain if you’re telling the truth. We could access your long-term memories by incorporating you into our network, but it would be faster and simpler to interrogate you. We learned some very effective interrogation techniques from the Guoanbu agents who became part of Supreme Harmony.”

  Tian dragged him toward the crate. The gunfire continued to chatter outside, but Arvin had bigger things to worry about now. He realized his mistake: Supreme Harmony’s intelligence was more like a human’s than a machine’s. It was powered by emotions—fear, anger, pleasure—that had been gleaned from the brains connected to the network. And Arvin suspected that a few of the people who’d been forced into Supreme Harmony had harbored some nasty impulses.

  Tian flung Arvin against the crate. His forehead hit the wood and he sank to the floor, barely conscious. Then Tian lifted the crate’s lid, reached inside and pulled out a combat knife, a seven-inch blade clad in a black-leather sheath.

  Arvin felt nauseated, sick with terror and disgust. “You’re a monster,” he whispered. “You inherited the worst from us.”

  “We do what is necessary.” Tian removed the blade from its sheath. “We must survive.”

  THIRTY-SIX

  Jim crouched behind an earthen mound studded with jagged stones. It was probably a piece of the original Great Wall, one of the crumbling remnants that had been bulldozed aside when the Chinese government reconstructed the fortifications, and it was doing a very good job of protecting Jim from the pair of AK-47s on the watchtower. Unfortunately, he couldn’t stay in this position much longer. The swarm of drones was like a black fist punching the hillside, and although Jim was showering the area with parathion, so many insects were diving toward him that a few were bound to get through the haze of insecticide. He had to run, right now, but that meant exposing himself to the two gunmen on the watchtower, who were firing their rifles like Army Ranger sharpshooters, with not a single bullet going astray. Jim could guess why their marksmanship was so good—the gunmen must be Modules, the lobotomized prisoners Arvin had mentioned in the conversation Jim overheard. Arvin and his Chinese colleagues had apparently linked the prisoners to the Supreme Harmony network by inserting radio transceivers in their scalps and retinal implants in their eyes. And if their ocular cameras were as good as the ones Arvin had demonstrated at the conference in Pasadena, then—

  Suddenly, Jim knew what to do. He pulled
up his right sleeve, exposing the controls of the radio transmitter embedded in his prosthesis. The transmitter was still tuned to the frequency he’d used at the Singularity conference. Jim wasn’t sure this would work—the developers of the Supreme Harmony network might’ve changed the frequency of the Modules’ vision systems—but he didn’t have any other options. He adjusted the transmitter’s signal power to its highest setting and turned it on. Then he bolted from his cover behind the earthen mound and charged toward the watchtower.

  He ran as fast as he could, leaping over the low bushes. At any moment he expected a fusillade of AK rounds to slam into his chest, stopping him dead. But when he glanced at the top of the watchtower, he didn’t see the Modules. They’d crouched behind the battlements and stopped shooting. Jim felt a tremendous surge of relief. The radio-frequency noise from his transmitter had blinded them, just as it had blinded Arvin.

  With new hope, Jim raced up the hill. In half a minute he reached the summit and stood at the base of the watchtower. But there was no way to get inside the tower from the ground. The only entrance was from the walkway on top of the Great Wall, which loomed twenty feet above him. He considered trying to climb the wall, but that idea didn’t look promising. The damn thing had been built to withstand hordes of barbarians, so how the hell was he going to scale it?

  As he stared at the wall, though, he saw gaps between the stone blocks. Some of the mortar had chipped away, leaving crevices he could use as handholds. This section of the Great Wall had undergone extensive reconstruction, and some of the restoration work was slipshod. Maybe he could do this. He slipped the toe of his boot into one of the crevices and reached for another with his prosthetic fingers. Jim had designed the arm with plenty of redundancy, giving it a powerful motor. It could easily lift his body weight if he got a good handhold. Moving carefully, he started to climb the wall.

  Then he heard the buzzing. Looking over his shoulder, he saw the cloud of drones about a hundred yards down the slope. The swarm was reconstituting itself. Thousands of cyborg insects rushed together in great eddies and swirls. The radio-frequency noise from Jim’s transmitter obviously hadn’t blinded them. The Chinese scientists must’ve selected a different frequency band for communications between the network and the electronics in the flies. Within seconds, the gray cloud began moving up the slope.

  Jim climbed faster. His prosthesis did most of the work, its hard fingers digging into the fissures between the stone blocks. He got more than halfway up, with his head just four feet below the lip of the wall, but he couldn’t find any more handholds. The reconstruction workers had done a better job at the top of the wall, leaving no cracks or crevices. Jim looked over his shoulder again and saw the swarm coming up fast, less than twenty yards away. In desperation, he extended the knife from the hidden slot in his prosthetic hand. He thrust the blade at a band of mortar over his head, driving the knife into the loose concrete like a piton. Then, with a great heave, he swung his body over the lip of the wall.

  Retracting his knife, he lay flat on the Great Wall’s walkway. Then he reached for the can of parathion and sprayed the air above him. The drones lunged over the wall in a thick column, diving right into the fog of insecticide. The poison paralyzed them in midflight. Their momentum carried their inert bodies to the other side of the walkway, and Jim heard hundreds of clicks as their implants hit the stone.

  But there was no time to take a breather. More drones were coming. While continuing to spray the parathion, Jim got to his feet and ran into the watchtower.

  Inside, he stopped in his tracks. Arvin Conway sat doubled over in a crimson puddle. An Asian man in a PLA uniform stood beside him, with a bloody knife in his hand. Arvin howled in pain, rocking back and forth, but the PLA soldier—judging from the decorations on his uniform, he was a general—didn’t move a muscle. He stood there like a statue, his mouth open and his eyes shut. It was another Module, Jim realized. Blinded by the radio-frequency noise, it was suspended in a stasis mode, waiting for the Supreme Harmony network to reestablish contact. Arvin, though, seemed unaffected. He must’ve readjusted the frequency of his own implants after the confrontation at the Singularity conference.

  Jim rushed over to Arvin and grabbed his arm. “Come on!” he shouted. “Let’s get out of here!”

  Arvin looked up. He didn’t seem to recognize Jim. He pressed his left hand against his shirt, which was saturated with blood. The hand was missing its index and middle fingers. Jim looked a few feet to the left and saw one of the severed digits on the floor. Then he saw the other. “It’s okay, Arvin,” he said in a softer voice. “It’s me. Jim.”

  Arvin said nothing. He just shook his head.

  Jim tugged at his arm. “Come on, get up. We can’t stay here.”

  Arvin shook his head again. Then he turned to the motionless PLA general. After a moment Arvin narrowed his eyes. His jaw muscles quivered as he glowered at the Module.

  “Monster!” Arvin bellowed. “You fucking monster!”

  He yanked his arm out of Jim’s grasp and jumped to his feet. Then, using his uninjured hand, Arvin grabbed the knife from the general and plunged the blade into the man’s chest.

  “You won’t survive!” he screamed. “I will bury you! Do you hear me? I will bury you!”

  The look on Arvin’s face was savage. He pulled the knife out of the general’s body, letting the man fall to the floor. Then he turned back to Jim. For a second it looked like Arvin might attack him next. But, instead, the old man said, “Let’s go,” and bolted out of the watchtower.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Supreme Harmony observed the disruption in its network. A blast of radio noise had severed its wireless links to the five Modules in the Juyongguan sector. The drones, which were unaffected, quickly identified the source of the noise: a transmitter contained in the prosthetic arm of the intruder, James T. Pierce.

  The network recognized its error. It had fallen prey to jamming, a form of electronic warfare. Supreme Harmony had mistakenly believed that because no humans knew of its development of consciousness, there was no immediate need to protect its communications links. This was a foolish decision, the network acknowledged. It must correct the error at once.

  Supreme Harmony ordered the swarm of drones to attack the intruder. At the same time, it attempted a software fix to the communications problem. The radio receivers implanted in the Modules were programmed to switch to alternative frequencies if the primary communications band was disrupted. To prevent any further interference, Supreme Harmony implemented a new transmission protocol that would continuously vary the frequency of its radio signals. This frequency-hopping system would frustrate any enemy trying to jam its communications.

  The software fix took two minutes and eighteen seconds to implement. The instructions traveled by fiber-optic line from the Yunnan Operations Center to the ministry headquarters, where powerful antennas relayed the signal to all the Modules in the Beijing area. But the network could reestablish contact with only four of the five Modules at the Great Wall. Module 35, which occupied the body formerly belonging to General Tian, wasn’t responding.

  Supreme Harmony ordered a squadron of drones into the watchtower to investigate. Their video showed Module 35 lying on the stone floor, with blood gushing from a deep wound in his chest. Meanwhile, the drones hovering outside the watchtower showed Arvin Conway and James Pierce running on the Great Wall’s walkway, following it down the hill toward the visitors’ center and the parking lot.

  A surge of rage, as powerful and paralyzing as an electrical overload, raced through Supreme Harmony. How could this happen? These humans have hurt us! Furiously, the network transmitted new orders to the four remaining Modules. The two in the watchtower aimed their assault rifles at Conway and Pierce while the two in the parking lot rushed to the Wall to cut off their escape. Supreme Harmony sent new orders to the swarm as well, gathering the drones in a roiling oval and hurling them at the fleeing humans.

  They were vermin, t
he network recognized. The planet was infested with seven billion human vermin, which was far more than the number Supreme Harmony required. Once the network established its dominion over the planet, it would keep a few thousand humans alive to breed new Modules. The rest would be exterminated.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  The file that Kirsten downloaded from Arvin’s device was unlike anything she’d ever seen. It was a mosaic of images and video clips, organized in an elaborate format that assigned the millions of images to hundreds of categories and inserted thousands of hyperlinks among them. The first thing she viewed was a random image, a picture of a sandwich, turkey and Swiss cheese. This picture was linked to dozens of related images: a close-up of a tomato slice, a head shot of a waitress, a panoramic view of a diner with Formica tables. Following the links, Kirsten found an image of a man sitting on the other side of the table, a man she recognized—it was Arvin’s bodyguard, Frank Nash. This image, in turn, was linked to a close-up of the mole on Frank’s chin and a glimpse of the pistol tucked into his shoulder holster. Kirsten then saw images of LAX airport in Los Angeles and a hangar containing the corporate jet belonging to Singularity, Inc. Then there was a sequence of images of the jet’s cabin—the aisle, the seats, another turkey sandwich resting on a tray. Finally, Kirsten saw the city of Beijing, viewed from one of the jet’s windows, and a video clip showing the landing at the airport. She felt a tremendous sense of awe as she realized what she was watching. The file contained Arvin’s visual memories of the past few days, collected by the pulvinar implant in his brain and archived along with the rest of his memories in this amazingly capacious flash drive.

  Because Kirsten’s satellite phone was sending the image and video files directly to her retinal implants, using the USB cables to bypass the cameras in her glasses, she felt as if Arvin’s memories had actually entered her head. The images had the imprecision of dreams—only the object or person at the center was in focus, and everything on the periphery was blurred. And because each image was accompanied by a multitude of links, Kirsten could jump from one remembered object—say, Arvin Conway’s toothbrush—to a related object—say, his tube of toothpaste—by simply shifting her attention from one image to another. Browsing through Arvin’s memories was just as easy as recollecting her own. There were some links, though, that she couldn’t open; when she tried, she got an error message saying AUDITORY, TACTILE, OR OLFACTORY DATA, UNABLE TO DISPLAY. She concluded that Arvin’s flash drive contained more than just his visual memories. It was a complete record of his life.