Extinction

by Mark Alpert

  The whole experience was so fascinating that Kirsten could’ve continued trolling through the files for hours, but she had a job to do. She navigated through the memories until she found an image of the Guoanbu agent whom she’d seen with Arvin at Tiananmen Square. This memory was linked to images of a laboratory complex hidden in the mountains and a pair of Mandarin characters: Tài Hé, Supreme Harmony. Kirsten’s horror grew as she jumped from memory to memory. She saw a man in a prisoner’s jumpsuit lying on an operating table. She saw a bone drill cutting into his shaved skull and shiny implants being inserted into his scalp and eyes. The final image was the most horrible of all: a control room filled with two dozen supine men, each twitching and jerking spasmodically as his retinal implants delivered a stream of surveillance video to his brain. Kirsten reached for the USB cable and ripped it out of her camera-glasses. The terrible image of the control room vanished and was replaced by the infrared display of the underground chamber where she sat.

  Rising to her feet, she put her phone and Arvin’s device in her pockets. She needed to find Jim. She had to contact him right away. Kirsten now had all the evidence they needed. All they had to do was return to the American embassy with Arvin’s flash drive, which was full of damning details about the Supreme Harmony project and its use of lobotomized prisoners. The diplomatic process would do the rest. The United States would confront China with the evidence and threaten to reveal it at a special session of the United Nations unless the Guoanbu abandoned the inhuman enterprise and returned Jim’s daughter. In all likelihood, the Chinese government would comply with the demands. So there was no need for Jim to shadow Arvin anymore.

  Kirsten dashed out of the chamber of Little Red Books and retraced her steps through the tunnels of the Underground City. Her satellite phone couldn’t get reception underground, so she ran through the concrete corridors to get back to street level. She was going to tell Jim to return to the embassy immediately. Judging from what she’d seen of Arvin’s memories, their mission was far riskier than she’d imagined.

  Following the three sets of footprints in the dust—two made by Frank Nash and one by herself—Kirsten made her way back to the mushroom plot and finally to the condemned building. She called Jim as soon as she climbed out the building’s ground-floor window, but there was no answer. She tried again, and then again. Still no answer.

  Something’s wrong, she thought. Her stomach churned as she stood in the trash-strewn courtyard. She felt a desperate urge to go to Jim’s aid, to rush to the Changping District where the Guoanbu agents had arranged their meeting with Arvin. But she knew she’d never get there in time. It was 7 P.M., and by now the evening traffic had locked down Beijing’s highways and ring roads. Changping was only thirty miles away, but driving there would take at least ninety minutes. The only way to beat the traffic would be to fly over it, and she didn’t have a helicopter.

  Then Kirsten had another idea. She ran out of the courtyard, banging through the unlocked gate. Looking right and left down the long, straight hutong, she saw an old woman lugging a shopping bag, a grizzled man pushing a wheelbarrow, and a pimply teenager riding a loud, gas-powered scooter. She reached into her pants pocket and pulled out a wad of 100-yuan notes, part of the ample stash of Chinese and American currency that she and Jim had brought into the country. Then she stepped into the middle of the alley and flagged down the scooter driver by waving the cash and yelling the Mandarin equivalent of “Hey! Want to make some money?”

  The teenager stopped, looking puzzled. Kirsten examined his scooter, which was a Baotian model, very popular in Beijing. It was a little battered and rusty, but it had a big 125-cc engine and the gas tank was full. “I want to buy your scooter,” Kirsten said, counting the 100-yuan notes in her hand. “I’ll give you 3,000 for it.”

  “What?” The teenager scowled, but his eyes focused on the money. The price, Kirsten knew, was a good one—3,000 yuan was equal to about $500, and the battered scooter wasn’t worth nearly that much.

  Kirsten finished counting the thirty notes, then waved them in the teenager’s face. “Do you want the money or not?” she shouted. With her other hand she grabbed the scooter’s handlebars, already claiming possession. “Come on, I don’t have all day!”

  The teen hesitated. Then he snatched the money and dismounted from the scooter. As the boy walked away, Kirsten pushed the bike toward the unlocked gate. Although riding the scooter on Beijing’s highways would be faster than driving a car, the traffic would still slow her to a crawl. Instead, she hauled the bike across the courtyard to the condemned building. She remembered the brass plaque she’d seen in the Underground City, the map showing the maze of tunnels under the city and the long spokes stretching to the outlying districts. One of those spokes, she recalled, led to Changping.

  THIRTY-NINE

  The drive from the airport in Lijiang to the Yunnan Operations Center took about two hours. During the second hour the Chinese army truck slowed down and Layla’s ears popped from the change in altitude. She couldn’t see anything from the cargo hold, but she guessed they were in the mountains. When they finally stopped moving, the lobotomized PLA soldiers grasped her arms and took her out of the truck, escorting her across a huge garage crowded with military vehicles. A dozen soldiers wearing berets on their shaved heads were loading crates into a semitrailer truck. Layla noticed that the soldiers handled the crates gingerly, stacking them with great care in the trailer. Then the Modules led her through a doorway and down a long corridor.

  They passed a room with rows of lockers against the walls. Then they passed a computer room filled with terminals and screens. There were surveillance cameras everywhere, fixed to the ceiling above every doorway. Finally they came to a large bathroom. It had five toilets, four sinks, and one shower stall. The Modules let go of Layla’s arms once they entered the room. One of them closed the door and stood in front of it, blocking the exit. The other pointed at the shower stall. “Please remove your clothes and clean yourself,” he said.

  There was no doubt that Layla needed a shower. She still wore the clothes that had soaked in the waters of Gatun Lake. She reeked. But she scowled at the Module anyway. She needed to learn more about this thing, this Supreme Harmony. She needed to test it, challenge it, observe its reactions. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “You don’t like the way I smell?”

  As she said this she moved closer to the Module and lifted her arms. To her surprise, the Module wrinkled his nose and stepped backward. “Please remove your clothes and clean yourself,” he repeated.

  Layla glanced at the Module guarding the door and noticed that he wrinkled his nose, too, even though he stood at least twelve feet away from her. Interesting, she thought. The Modules shared everything they saw, heard, and smelled. And the network seemed to have inherited the visceral reactions of the people who’d been forced into it.

  She decided to take her experiment a step further. Looking the Module in the eye, she took off her shirt and threw it to the floor. Then she unhooked her bra. “A little privacy would be nice,” she said. “But I guess that would be too much to ask, huh?”

  “Please remove your—”

  “Yeah, I heard you the first time.” She took off her bra and dropped it next to her shirt. Then she unzipped her pants and peeled them off. The Module kept staring at her, but he showed no signs of interest. His eyes didn’t shift downward to look at her body, not even when she lowered her panties and kicked them aside. That’s odd, Layla thought. This Module was a young guy in his late teens, the prime years of sexual frenzy. Most of the other Modules she’d seen were also young men. If the network had inherited their visceral reactions, why wasn’t it responding to the sight of her naked body? She knew she wasn’t the most beautiful woman in the world, but she also knew that men were men. They responded very predictably to certain stimuli.

  She squared her shoulders and put her hands on her hips. “Okay, I removed my clothes. Satisfied?”

  The Module stepped towar
d her. Layla felt a jolt of fear—had she pushed things too far? But the Module didn’t touch her. Instead, he knelt on the tile floor and gathered up her discarded clothes. Then he stood up and pointed at the shower stall again, but this time he averted his eyes from her body. “Please clean yourself,” he said.

  Very interesting, she thought. As she entered the shower stall and turned on the water, she pondered the meaning of that gesture, the averted eyes. Maybe the network was suppressing the sexual responses of its Modules. Or maybe—and this was the more intriguing possibility—maybe Supreme Harmony felt sorry for her. Maybe it sensed on some level the indecency of what it was doing to her. And if that was true, if the network actually had a sense of morality, then maybe she could appeal to it.

  After a few minutes she turned off the water and dried herself with a towel hanging on a nearby hook. Both Modules, she noticed, were averting their eyes now. She saw a pair of slippers and a pile of fresh clothing folded on a bench next to the shower. On top of the pile was a pair of clean underpants, which she gratefully slipped into. Then she picked up what looked like a blue cotton robe. When she shook it out, she saw it was a hospital robe, the kind that patients wear for an operation.

  All at once, her courage deserted her. Her eyes stung and her throat tightened. With trembling hands, she put on the robe, tying the strings at the back. Then she stepped into the slippers and approached the Modules. “Please don’t do this,” she said. “I’ll cooperate with you. I’ll tell you everything you want to know about securing your network.”

  The Module standing at the door observed that she was ready. He opened the door while the other Module grasped Layla’s arm. “Now we will proceed to Room C-12,” he said.

  “C-12? What’s that?”

  “The preoperative room. We must shave your head.”

  FORTY

  Jim and Arvin ran a thousand feet along the top of the Great Wall, dashing down the steep walkway toward the bottom of Juyongguan Pass. Then the AK-47s erupted behind them and the rounds ricocheted off the walkway. Jim glanced over his shoulder and saw the two Modules on top of the highest watchtower, pointing their assault rifles downhill. Supreme Harmony must’ve revived them by implementing a countermeasure to his radio jamming.

  “Come on!” he yelled at Arvin, but the old man couldn’t run any faster. His face was pale and his mutilated hand bled fiercely. Jim hooked his prosthetic arm around Arvin’s waist and hustled him forward. They finally reached the second-highest watchtower and took cover behind it. But as they leaned against the tower’s stone wall, panting, Jim saw two brawny figures about a quarter mile farther down the walkway. They wore dark suits and carried AK-47s just like the Modules at the summit, but they were bigger and in better shape. They raced up the walkway, leaping over the stone steps in perfect synchrony. At the same time, Jim heard the buzzing of the cyborg flies. The swarm was close.

  “Get in the tower!” he shouted, pushing Arvin through an archway carved into the tower’s wall. They stumbled into a dark, dank room almost identical to the one inside the tower at the summit. This room, though, had only one entrance and no windows. While Arvin collapsed on the stone floor, Jim uncapped his canister of parathion and sprayed the area, filling the tower with a fog of insecticide. Ten seconds later, the drones at the leading edge of the swarm poured through the archway. Jim stepped back but kept spraying. Hundreds of flies hit the floor immediately, while the rest spiraled in drunken circles before dying. The rotten-egg smell of parathion permeated the room, making Jim dizzy. He couldn’t keep this up. The insecticide was poisoning him, too. He stopped spraying and pulled up his shirt to cover his mouth and nose. “Arvin!” he yelled. “Cover your mouth!”

  Arvin lay in a heap, blood pumping from his left hand. He could barely raise his head. But his right hand still held the knife he’d used to stab the general. He gripped it so tightly that Jim could see the veins bulging between his knuckles. “Pulvinar,” he gasped. “The throne… of the soul.”

  “I said cover your mouth! This stuff is toxic!”

  “Cushion… that’s what it means… a cushioned throne.”

  “Jesus!” Jim crouched behind Arvin and lifted him off the floor. On the other side of the room was a stone ledge, about three feet high. Jim hauled Arvin to the ledge and propped him against the wall, which elevated him above the thickest concentrations of insecticide. “Can you hear me, Arvin? Try to stay with me, okay?”

  Arvin shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. My soul…”

  The old man’s voice trailed off. He needed medical attention, fast. Jim pulled out his satellite phone and tried to call the American embassy, but he couldn’t get a connection. Radio noise blocked his signal. Shit, he thought. Supreme Harmony can jam communications, too. Cursing, he yanked off Arvin’s jacket and ripped out the lining to make a bandage.

  Arvin allowed Jim to field-dress his left hand. His body was limp. “My soul… can leave its throne. I have… another.”

  Jim focused on the bandage, wrapping it over the stumps of Arvin’s severed fingers. “Stop worrying about your soul,” he said. “The bleeding isn’t so bad. You’re gonna be fine.”

  “I knew… I might die here. So I made a copy… of my soul.”

  Jim looked up from the field-dressing and stared at him. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “A hundred thousand gigabytes. All downloaded… from my pulvinar implant. Nash can tell you where… the flash drive is hidden.”

  Jim remembered what he’d overheard Arvin say about downloading his memories. He also remembered the radio-emitting device carried by Frank Nash, Arvin’s bodyguard. “This flash drive, does it have a radio tracker?”

  Arvin nodded. “Yes. To help you find it.” His voice rose, growing firmer. “And now I’ll give you… something else. Medusa. The Gorgon’s head. It will kill Tài Hé.”

  “Medusa? What the—”

  A sudden volley of AK rounds blasted the watchtower. The bullets streaked through the archway and slammed into the opposite wall, and stone chips flew through the air like shrapnel. Stooping low, Jim waited for a pause in the gunfire, then sidled toward the archway and peeked outside. The pair of brawny Modules crouched on the walkway about a hundred yards from the tower, at a point where the Great Wall curved sharply to the right. This geometry allowed the Modules to take cover behind the wall’s battlements and fire at the tower’s entrance. Jim noticed that an oak tree stood beside the curving section of the wall, and one of its limbs angled above the battlements. If we could just get past those gunmen…

  Then Arvin let out a scream. Jim spun around and saw a bloody gash on the side of Arvin’s head, above his right ear. At first Jim thought that a ricocheting bullet had grazed the old man, or maybe one of the stone chips had nicked him. But then he noticed that the knife in Arvin’s hand was dripping fresh blood. Lying on the ledge beside Arvin was a small metal disk, about the size of a nickel, speckled with bits of gore. Jim recognized the thing—he’d seen it once before, at the Singularity conference in Pasadena, when Arvin had pulled back his long white hair. It was the processor he’d called the Dream-catcher. It received the signals from the pulvinar implant in his brain and converted them to digital images that could be downloaded and archived. Arvin had just cut the device out of his scalp.

  The old man pointed the tip of his bloody knife at the disk. “Medusa is stored in here… because I memorized it. The image… will turn them to stone. Go ahead, pick it up. I’m too weak… to go any farther.”

  Jim recoiled as he stared at the device. He fought an urge to vomit. “My God. What have you done?”

  “It will turn them to stone!” Arvin’s voice grew louder. Although his whole body was trembling, he managed to slide off the ledge and land on his feet. “When they see the image… their implants will convert it… to a stream of data. And in that stream… is the shutdown code. It will trigger the Trojan horse… that I hid in the circuitry.” Arvin dropped the knife and picked up the disk. Then
he pressed it into Jim’s left hand, his living hand. “Kill Tài Hé. And protect my soul. Even if you think… it’s not worth protecting.”

  Arvin turned away from Jim and stepped toward the archway. Jim, sensing what Arvin planned to do, grabbed the old man’s shoulder. “Wait a second! Before we try to get out of here, I gotta lay down some covering fire. Let me—”

  “No!” With surprising strength, Arvin slapped Jim’s arm away. Then he raised his uninjured hand and pointed to his forehead. “Medusa is in here, too, in my long-term memory. And so are all the details of how the code works. If Tài Hé captures me, the network will know how to prevent the shutdown.” He closed his eyes for a moment, as if suppressing a sharp pain. “I can’t… let that happen. I have to die… so my soul can live.”

  Jim tried to grab him again, but Arvin was too fast. He barreled through the archway and out of the watchtower.

  The Modules fired their AK-47s, but Arvin hunched over as he charged toward the gunmen and their bullets skimmed over his head. Jim leaned into the archway and fired his Glock at the Modules, who ducked behind the battlements. Meanwhile, Arvin kept running, hurtling down the walkway like a madman, without a trace of fear or caution. Jim lay down a steady stream of fire over the Great Wall, pulling the trigger of his Glock again and again to prevent the gunmen from rising. But after ten seconds he ran out of ammo and had to reload. Then one of the Modules popped up and shot point-blank at Arvin.