by Mark Alpert
Jim saw the barrage hit the old man’s body. The bullets pounded his chest and stomach like hammers. But they didn’t stop him. His momentum carried him forward until he tackled the Module who’d fired at him. The second Module rose and pointed his rifle at Arvin, but by this point Jim had slammed a new magazine into his Glock. He took careful aim and blew the second Module’s lobotomized brains out. At the same time, Arvin pushed the first Module back to the battlements. They teetered for a moment on the lip of the wall, then toppled out of sight.
Jim raced down the walkway and peered over the edge. Arvin and the Module had dropped twenty-five feet to a heap of rocks at the foot of the Great Wall. Arvin’s body was sprawled on top of the Module’s. Neither was moving.
Leaning over the battlements, Jim reached for the limb of the oak tree that stood beside the wall. He hooked his prosthetic arm around the thick branch and shimmied to the ground. Then he took a final look at his old professor, who was clearly dead. Jim was more horrified than grieved. This man lying on the rocks wasn’t the Arvin he’d known.
As Jim stared at the corpse, he realized he was still clutching Arvin’s disk in his left hand. Somehow he’d managed to hold on to it during the firefight. He unclenched his hand and stashed the thing in his pocket. Then he started to run. He could hear the drones coming.
FORTY-ONE
Muscling the Baotian scooter into the condemned building took all of Kirsten’s strength, and easing it down the steps to the Underground City was equally difficult. But the biggest challenge was finding the tunnel that led to the Changping District. Kirsten studied the brass map with her fingers and memorized the route she needed to take, but some of the passageways were blocked, forcing her to double back and find another path. As she navigated the maze of pitch-black corridors, relying on her infrared glasses to see the concrete walls and floor, she started to question the sanity of her plan. She would’ve been better off on the surface roads, even with all the Beijing traffic. But then she came to a large round room with half-a-dozen corridors branching off in all directions, each identified by a pair of Mandarin characters chiseled into the concrete. She found the tunnel to Changping, which was as wide as a highway lane, running straight and true as far as her infrared glasses could see. She set off at a modest pace, the speedometer pointing at fifty kilometers per hour, but because the floor was smooth and clear of obstacles, she gradually increased her speed. Soon she was roaring down the corridor at more than a hundred kilometers an hour, and the noise from the scooter’s engine echoed deafeningly against the walls.
She didn’t know exactly where the tunnel would take her. It could be anywhere in the Changping District. Worse, she didn’t know if there was actually an exit at the end of the tunnel. It could’ve been sealed decades ago. But she leaned forward anyway and goosed the lever on the handlebars, giving the engine a little more gas. There was no room for doubt. She had to trust her instincts.
FORTY-TWO
Supreme Harmony observed the bedroom of a high-rise apartment in Chaoyang, a prestigious Beijing district where many government officials lived. Modules 45 and 46 stood beside a king-size bed, looking down at Module 73, who’d just been incorporated into the network and was still recovering from the implantation procedure. The recovery process usually took at least twelve hours; the human brain needed some time to adjust to the implants and the signals sent from the network’s servers. The brain’s visual cortex was activated first, enabling the Module to receive instructions from Supreme Harmony, and then the cortices for processing auditory, tactile, and olfactory information came online. At this point, about six hours after implantation, the brain’s long-term memories could be accessed and its logic centers could start contributing to the network’s calculations. The motor cortex was the last region to be activated, which meant that each Module was virtually paralyzed for the first half-day of its existence (except, of course, for autonomic functions such as heartbeat and breathing, which were unaffected by the implantation procedure).
Module 73 lay face-up on the bed. It could move its eyes and lips, and its speech center had been activated, but its arms and legs were still paralyzed. Ordinarily, Supreme Harmony wouldn’t assign any tasks to a Module until it was fully functional, but recent events had forced the network to accelerate its plans. It couldn’t allow James T. Pierce to contact the American authorities. To prevent this from happening, Supreme Harmony needed to take control of the local police force.
Module 45, who’d formerly been a midlevel Guoanbu agent, placed the telephone call to the chief of the Beijing Public Security Bureau. He asked the police chief to send a helicopter unit to the Changping District to assist the Guoanbu in the capture of an American spy. As expected, the police chief was uncooperative. He was annoyed that the Ministry of State Security hadn’t given him advance notice of this counterespionage operation. His reaction was so typical of Homo sapiens, a species that reveled in petty conflicts. But Supreme Harmony knew how to overcome the police chief’s objections. A human would swiftly follow orders if threatened by another human with greater authority. And the human who had just become Module 73 was a member of the Communist Party’s Central Committee and one of the most powerful officials in China.
Module 45 said, “Please wait a moment,” into the phone and then held the receiver next to Module 73’s head. The new Module opened his mouth and spoke for the first time: “This is Deng Guoming, Minister of State Security.”
FORTY-THREE
The hills surrounding Juyongguan Pass reminded Jim of the hollers of West Virginia, his childhood home. Oaks, birches, and maples covered the steep slopes, and dense brush blanketed the forest floor. It was probably beautiful in the fall, but in the summer it was treacherous terrain, choked with greenery. Jim swung his prosthetic arm to clear a path through the thickets, but he wasn’t moving fast enough. The drones flew at about five miles per hour, and although Jim could easily beat that speed on a flat stretch, now he was slogging up and down the Yanshan Hills while the drones moved in perfectly straight lines above the treetops.
Two swarms chased him, one from the north and one from the east. They forced him to go southwest, deeper into the hills. Every so often he glimpsed the swarms through the foliage: thin black clouds, eddying and rolling. He knew the drones could see him, too. Their long-range cameras tracked his location and fed the data to Supreme Harmony. And the network was still flooding the airwaves with radio noise, making it impossible for Jim to use his phone. As a last resort, he turned on the emergency radio beacon in his prosthetic arm and set it to the standard rescue frequency of 406 megahertz. The beacon’s transmitter was more powerful than his phone, so it might be able to cut through the radio noise and send a distress signal to the international satellite system for search-and-rescue. But Jim wasn’t sure if China participated in that system, and even if it did, he knew it would take hours for the local authorities to put together a rescue operation. He couldn’t stay ahead of the swarms for that long.
Worse, daylight was fading. The sun had already sunk behind the ridges to the west. In less than an hour there wouldn’t be enough light to see. The drones, though, had infrared cameras—Jim remembered this feature from the demonstration in Afghanistan—so they would quickly catch up to him. Then Jim’s only defense would be the canister of parathion, which was almost empty now.
He panted as he charged through the brush, furiously swinging his prosthesis. He wasn’t going to worry about the night yet. He remembered the training he did in Ranger School twenty-five years ago, the brutal marches through the Georgia woods and the Florida swamps. Since then he’d kept himself in shape by running and hiking with his old army buddies, going at least once a month to the state parks in Virginia and Maryland. You can do this, he told himself. Just remember Ranger School. Think of the mountaineering exercises, the march to Camp Darby.
He couldn’t picture Ranger School, though. He just couldn’t visualize it. Instead, he pictured his daughter. He saw Layla as a ten
-year-old, a skinny girl with long blond hair tied in a ponytail. Jim used to take her hiking all the time. She loved to run ahead of him and investigate the woodland ponds, pulling rocks out of the mud to see what was crawling underneath. And now he imagined her running through the Yanshan Hills, her sneakers kicking up the fallen leaves and her ponytail bouncing against her back. She was his miracle child, the last precious remnant, and in the years after the Nairobi bombing his love for her had filled his heart, leaving no room for anyone else. His dead wife and son faded to distant memories, flickering ghosts in the corners of his mind, because Layla was his world, his life. So when Layla left him—first the slow drift that started in high school, then the sudden break two years ago—he lost everything. He busied himself with his work, building ever more powerful replacements for his arm, but his heart became a hollow thing, merely keeping time until the end.
But now he saw Layla again, skipping through the forest just a hundred feet ahead. He ran to the bottom of a ravine, then galloped up the other side, trying to catch up to her. She was in danger again. He had to save her! But when he reached the crest of the ridge, he saw no sign of the girl. The vision was gone. There was nothing but wooded ridges ahead, blurring together below the darkening sky. And as he stood there he heard the buzzing of the drones. He looked over his shoulder and saw the two swarms converging on his position.
Jim hurtled downhill. He was exhausted now. His legs ached and his right shoulder was sore from the exertions of his prosthesis. Staggering, he tripped on a tree root and tumbled into the forest litter, cutting his left hand on a rock as he broke his fall. He lay there for a moment, stunned, but then he heard the buzzing again and rose to his feet in a frenzy. It was so dark he could barely see the tree trunks, but he dashed down the slope anyway, zigzagging wildly. Now he was too panicked to think of Layla. The forest had become his enemy, its roots and branches reaching out to trap him, trying to hold him in place until the drones could attack. He roared, “No!” in desperation and his cry echoed against the hillside.
But as the echoes faded away, Jim heard another noise. Not a buzzing this time—it was a mechanical noise, a familiar thumping. He’d heard it a hundred times before, on a dozen army bases. Helicopter rotors. A helicopter was approaching. After a few seconds he saw the chopper’s spotlight shining on the treetops, about half a mile ahead.
With renewed energy, he raced toward the spotlight. Someone must’ve picked up his distress signal. The helicopter must be carrying a search-and-rescue team. He ran like mad, trying to put as much distance as possible between himself and the drones. He saw the helicopter hovering above a clearing in the woods. But just before he entered the clearing he saw the spotlight of another helicopter, and then a third helicopter just behind it.
What the hell? It was an unusually big search-and-rescue team for one lost hiker. Suspicious, Jim stopped at the edge of the clearing and peered at the hovering chopper. Despite the glare from the spotlight, he could read the Mandarin characters on the fuselage. They spelled out Beijing Gonganju. The helicopter belonged to the local police force, the Public Security Bureau responsible for the city of Beijing and its outlying districts. This was reassuring—the local police, after all, would be the people you’d expect to see in a search-and-rescue operation. But then Jim glimpsed two of the policemen crouched in the helicopter’s doorway. Both wore black SWAT-team uniforms and pointed assault rifles at the woods.
Before Jim could back away, the spotlight swung toward him. Everything turned horribly bright. As Jim sprinted for the shelter of the trees, the policemen fired their rifles. The bullets whistled through the leaves and chipped the bark off the tree trunks. Jim leaped through the forest, practically flying down the slope, but he knew there was no chance of escape with three helicopters close behind him. All he could do was make a last stand with his Glock and his remaining clip of bullets. He scanned the terrain ahead, looking for a hummock or rock pile that would make a good defensive position. Instead, he saw a path cutting through the woods, a narrow trail. And then he heard another noise coming from that direction, neither a buzzing nor a thumping. It was the growl of a two-stroke gas engine. A scooter came tearing up the path, with its headlight turned off. It screeched to a halt about thirty feet ahead of him. The driver, an Asian woman wearing glasses, turned the scooter around and waved at him frantically.
“Come on!” Kirsten yelled.
Jim charged toward the scooter and jumped onto the seat behind her. He clutched Kirsten’s waist as she hit the gas, and they took off down the trail.
“Jesus!” Jim shouted over the engine noise. “How did you find—”
“Your radio beacon! Now turn the damn thing off!”
FORTY-FOUR
In Room C-12 a bald man with fresh stitches in his scalp was shearing off Layla’s hair. He wasn’t dressed in a PLA uniform like the other Modules at the Operations Center; instead, he wore a white lab coat, which made him look, appropriately, like a barber. His face was blank as he ran the electric razor over her head, which was held stationary by a leather strap looped around her brow. She sat in a high-backed chair equipped with other straps that tied her wrists to the armrests and her ankles to the chair’s legs. She couldn’t turn her head, but by shifting her eyes downward and to the left she could see her shorn locks drifting to a pile on the floor. The pile was mostly black, with scattered flecks of gold. Layla hadn’t dyed her hair for three weeks, so her blond roots were starting to show.
Layla had been terrified when the lobotomized soldiers strapped her into the chair, but her fears gradually eased as the Module shaved her. Although Supreme Harmony was preparing to absorb her into its network, she didn’t struggle or wail or beg for her life. Instead, she grew calmer, steadier. It was the same feeling of calm that always descended upon her when she was writing software code or debugging a program or figuring out the best way to penetrate a firewall. Layla was subtracting herself from the equation so she could concentrate on solving it.
In a few minutes the barber finished shaving the left side of her head. As he stepped to the right and began working on the other side, the door to Room C-12 opened and two lobotomized soldiers entered the room. Each held the hand of a boy dressed in a school uniform. One of the boys was a skinny preteen, maybe twelve years old. The other was short and doll-like, no older than nine. Behind them was another soldier Module, who gripped the arm of a bespectacled young man dressed in a shabby gray suit and cheap running shoes. All six of them headed for the other side of the room, about twenty feet away, where there was a second high-backed chair, identical to Layla’s. The soldiers led the twelve-year-old to the chair and said something to him in Mandarin. The boy sat down, his eyes darting wildly, and the soldiers fixed the straps around his wrists and ankles.
Layla felt a surge of fury. She pulled against her own straps, her muscles straining. “Hey!” she yelled. “What the fuck are you doing? Those are kids, goddamn it!”
All heads turned toward her. The boy in the chair stared at her, his eyes wide. The younger boy took one look at her and started to cry.
“Leave them alone!” Layla screamed. “Let them go, you fucking—”
The barber Module clamped his hand over her mouth, silencing her. “Please don’t raise your voice,” he said in impeccable English. “It’s upsetting the others.”
The boy’s cries grew louder, echoing across the room. The older boy in the chair started weeping, too. One of the soldier Modules turned to the bespectacled man and barked an order in Mandarin. The man nodded quickly and huddled with the boys, placing one hand on the nine-year-old’s shoulder and the other on the twelve-year-old’s immobilized forearm. He began talking to them in a soothing voice. Layla couldn’t understand the Mandarin words, but she could guess what he was saying: It’s all right, children. Everything’s going to be all right.
But Layla knew this was a lie. The Modules were preparing the boys for the same operation that Supreme Harmony planned for her. They were all goin
g to be lobotomized and fitted with neural implants so they could join the network’s happy family. Enraged, Layla twisted in her chair and screamed against the barber’s hand. The Module curled his lips in a contorted attempt to express his displeasure. “We can’t allow this disruption,” he said. “If you continue to disobey us, we’ll have to sedate you.”
Maybe that would be better, Layla thought. She didn’t want to see this. But she decided to stop struggling. It was better to see what they were doing to her, she thought, than to sleep through it. Better to see and to learn. Because there was always hope.
After a few seconds, the barber Module removed his hand from her mouth. “Thank you for your cooperation,” he said. He resumed shaving her scalp.
The children’s wails ebbed. The bespectacled man continued to console them. One of the soldiers reached for an electric razor and turned it on. The boy in the chair craned his neck, gazing fearfully at the Module.
“Why are you adding children to the network?” Layla asked quietly. It took all of her will to keep herself from shouting.
“The brains of children are more plastic than those of adults,” the barber Module replied. “They will adapt more quickly to the implants and build stronger neural connections to Supreme Harmony.” He ran the razor from the front of her head to the back, shearing off another shower of hair. “We’re trying to determine the optimum age for implantation. If the children are too young, their implants may have to be replaced as their bodies grow.”