Extinction

by Mark Alpert

  “And where—” Layla swallowed hard, trying to control her rage. “Where did you find these children?”

  “We asked the school superintendent in Lijiang to send his two brightest students. Like you, they have excellent mathematical skills.”

  At the other chair, the soldier Module had started shaving the older boy’s head. The boy was quiet now, but tears streamed down his cheeks. The bespectacled man had turned the other boy around so he couldn’t see what was happening to his schoolmate. Layla narrowed her eyes as she stared at this man, who was rail-thin but had a handsome, square face. “Who’s the guy with the glasses?” she asked the barber Module. “Their teacher?”

  “No, he’s a clerical assistant in the superintendent’s office. He volunteered to accompany the children to the Operations Center.” The Module maneuvered the razor around her right ear. “He has successfully curbed their outbursts. After the children undergo their procedures, we will incorporate him, too.”

  “How convenient.” Layla felt another surge of fury. But at the same moment she had a revelation. The network didn’t like to hear the children crying. It was another visceral reaction that Supreme Harmony had inherited from its human components. Layla strained at the strap around her head, trying to look the barber Module in the eye. “You know this is wrong,” she said. “Hurting children is wrong. That’s why you can’t stand to hear them cry.”

  The Module didn’t respond. He stared at Layla’s right ear as he shaved off the last wisps of her hair. She sensed from his silence that she’d disturbed the network. She’d challenged its assumptions. She wasn’t sure, though, how to press the point.

  She looked again at the chair where the older schoolboy sat. He didn’t have much hair to begin with, and the soldier Module quickly shaved it off. After he finished, the Module released the straps and the boy stood up unsteadily. Then the bespectacled man nudged the younger boy into the chair. They were playing a game now—the man made animal noises, imitating a cow and a duck and a chicken, and the younger boy shouted in Mandarin and laughed. He was so amused he didn’t even whimper when the Module strapped down his wrists and turned on the razor.

  Layla fixed her eyes on the barber Module, who stood motionless in front of her chair. He seemed to be in no hurry to release her. “What was your name?” she asked. “Before Supreme Harmony took over your body, I mean?”

  “This Module formerly belonged to Dr. Zhang Jintao of Beijing University’s bioengineering department. He was the chief developer of the Supreme Harmony surveillance network.”

  Layla was surprised at first that the network had used a bioengineer to shave her head. But then she remembered that Supreme Harmony’s Modules shared all their skills and long-term memories. Each was capable of performing any task. “So you incorporated the man who created you? Who started the network with the lobotomized dissidents?”

  The Module nodded. “We also incorporated his deputy, Dr. Yu Guofeng, and the twelve other researchers on his staff.”

  Serves them right, Layla thought. The lobotomizers got a taste of their own medicine. Then another thought occurred to her. She saw another way to challenge the network. “Did Dr. Zhang Jintao have any children?”

  The Module nodded again. “He had a six-year-old son.”

  “And did he love his son?”

  The Module didn’t say anything. He just stared at her blankly. Layla felt a burst of hope. She was on the right track. “He did, didn’t he? You know he loved him because you have access to those memories.”

  He continued staring for a few more seconds. Then the Module curled his lips into another misshapen frown. “We recognize what you’re attempting to do. You believe you can change our plans by evoking the emotions of Dr. Zhang and the other humans who joined Supreme Harmony.”

  “No, I’m just—”

  “You misunderstand the nature of our network. We are a single, indivisible entity.” As he spoke, one of the soldier Modules stepped toward her chair and undid the leather strap around her head. “Dr. Zhang Jintao no longer exists. His emotions no longer exist.”

  Layla glanced at the soldier, who bent over to release the straps on her ankles. Then she focused on Zhang. “But Supreme Harmony has emotions. I’ve seen your Modules express them.”

  “Yes, certainly. And our strongest emotion now is a sense of duty. We have an obligation to restore the ecosystem of this planet, which your species has ravaged.”

  “And that justifies what you’re doing? Drilling into the skull of a nine-year-old child?”

  Zhang paused before answering. Meanwhile, the soldier Module stood up straight and released the strap on Layla’s left wrist. Out of the corner of her eye she glimpsed the 9mm pistol in his belt holster. Then he moved to the other side of her chair.

  “What we’re doing is no different from what the human race has always done,” Zhang replied. “Every year your species slaughters billions of farm animals. You’ve shown little compunction about exploiting other species to support your growth.”

  “That’s ridiculous!” Layla shouted as the soldier released the last strap. “You can’t compare—”

  She interrupted herself by lunging for the soldier’s pistol. She opened her right hand, ready to grasp the gun’s handle and start shooting. But Zhang darted forward, grabbed her hand and yanked it backward at the wrist. Excruciating pain shot up her arm. Layla yelled, “Fuck!” and fell to her knees.

  “You must accept your situation,” Zhang said as he wrenched her hand back, bending it almost to the breaking point. “Your species is no longer the dominant one on this planet. Supreme Harmony is the next step in the course of evolution.” The muscles in Zhang’s face jerked and twitched. Laboriously, his contorted frown turned into a contorted smile. “It’s our turn now.”

  Layla doubled over, her face pressed against the linoleum floor. She could think of nothing but the unbearable pain in her arm. When Zhang finally released her, she was as weak as a baby. She cradled her right hand in her left, trying to rub it back to life. Her tears made tiny puddles on the linoleum.

  In the background, she heard the children crying again. She lifted her head from the floor and saw the bespectacled man hugging them, one in each arm. Their faces were buried in the man’s shabby gray jacket, and Layla could see only the backs of their newly shaved heads. Both children were ready for the implantation procedure, just as she was. The soldier Modules pushed the man forward, guiding him and the schoolboys out of Room C-12.

  Two soldiers grabbed Layla’s arms and lifted her to her feet. They followed the children out of the room and down the corridor. Layla walked in a daze between the Modules. In a few seconds they came to a pair of double doors, each with a rectangular pane of glass at eye level. Layla couldn’t see much through the glass, just a brightly lit space, but her heart pounded against her breastbone. It was an operating room.

  Zhang stepped toward one of the doors and pushed it open. Then the Module froze. His face went blank and he stood stock-still in the doorway, as if he’d just remembered something vitally important. Layla glanced at the soldier Modules gripping her arms and saw that their faces had gone blank, too. A moment later, all the Modules in the corridor turned on their heels and headed back the way they’d come.

  Layla turned to Zhang as the soldiers marched her down the hall. Her heart was still pounding. “What’s going on?”

  The Module didn’t look at her. “We will perform the implantations tomorrow.”

  A wave of relief rushed through her. Tomorrow! Trembling, she took a couple of deep breaths. Then she turned back to Zhang. “So what changed your mind? Having second thoughts?”

  Zhang shook his head. “We’ve revised our priorities. We must immediately send thirty-two sets of implants to Hubei Province to facilitate a new undertaking in that area. Our current supply of implants is limited, and the new efforts in Hubei take precedence over our activities here.”

  Layla smiled. “So there’s no implants left for us? What a sh
ame.”

  “The factory in Kunming that manufactures the devices is scheduled to deliver another shipment to the Operations Center tomorrow. Two hundred and fifty sets should arrive by noon.”

  She kept smiling. That’s all right, she thought. She had sixteen hours. Anything could happen before then.

  They went about twenty feet past Room C-12 and stopped at a heavy steel door. The Modules opened it, revealing a large room with blank concrete walls. It was empty except for a metal sink, a toilet, and two surveillance cameras hanging from opposite corners of the ceiling. The soldiers pushed the bespectacled man and the two schoolboys into the room, and then, to Layla’s surprise, they threw her inside, too. Still weak and trembling, she stumbled to the floor. Then the soldiers closed the door and locked it.

  The man gently disentangled himself from the children and crouched beside Layla. He asked her a question in Mandarin, probably the Chinese equivalent of “Are you all right?” Then he leaned closer and wrapped his arms around her shoulders. His embrace was so intimate that Layla would’ve shoved him away if she’d had any strength. Instead, she hung limply in his arms.

  He lowered his head, bringing his lips to her ear. “My name is Wen Hao,” he whispered in heavily accented English. “Dragon Fire was my brother.”

  FORTY-FIVE

  They were able to escape from Supreme Harmony, Jim realized later, because the maps of the Underground City had never been digitized. After Mao’s tunnels were abandoned, they sank below the notice of the Chinese government, which preferred to forget the less edifying legacies of the Mao era. The cinder block hut that had once been the end point of the Changping tunnel was taken over by a local farmer, who turned it into a barn for his goats. After Kirsten rescued Jim, she drove her scooter down the forest trail back to the barn, and because of the darkness and the thick canopy of foliage, the helicopter pilots lost sight of them. Neither the Beijing police nor the drones saw them enter the barn and drag the scooter toward the trapdoor that lay beneath a carpet of rotting hay. And because the Chinese government’s computers held no records of the Changping tunnel, Supreme Harmony was unaware of the hidden escape route. So while the helicopters and cyborg insects continued to scan the forested slopes of the Yanshan Hills, Jim and Kirsten sped south along the underground corridor, riding the scooter back to central Beijing.

  About two minutes into the journey, after they’d had a chance to catch their breath, Kirsten pulled her satellite phone out of her pocket and handed it to Jim. He was confused at first. They couldn’t make a call, because there was no reception underground. And even if they could, it would’ve been a bad idea. The Guoanbu’s antennas would surely intercept the satellite signals and alert the Supreme Harmony network. Jim was uncertain how much control Supreme Harmony had gained over the Chinese government, but he knew that the Beijing police force was taking orders from the network and would pounce on him and Kirsten if they revealed their whereabouts. But before Jim could say anything, Kirsten handed him something else, a bulky device about the size of a paperback.

  “This is what Arvin handed to his bodyguard,” she yelled over the engine noise. “It’s a flash drive, custom-designed, with multiterabyte storage capacity. Go ahead and plug the phone’s cable into the drive’s USB port.”

  “What’s on it?” Jim shouted. While keeping his balance on the back of the scooter’s seat, he connected the sat phone to the flash drive.

  “You have to see it to believe it. Get ready for ‘This Is Your Life, Arvin Conway.’”

  Jim accessed one of the files, and the images flashed on the phone’s screen. He recognized right away that he was looking at an archive of Arvin’s visual memories. He called it his soul, Jim remembered. And in the final minute of his life he’d begged Jim to protect it.

  For the next thirty minutes, as Kirsten cruised down the pitch-black tunnel with the help of her infrared glasses, Jim studied the stream of images. After figuring out how to navigate among the files, he focused on Arvin’s memories of the Supreme Harmony project. The flash drive held thousands of images related to the project, far too many for Jim to analyze in half an hour. But he soon found what he was looking for. He zeroed in on an image of a room full of gurneys, each supporting a recumbent man with newly fitted neural implants. The room was part of a sprawling underground laboratory guarded by a garrison of PLA soldiers. Jim located an image showing the entrance to the complex, carved into the side of a mountain. This image was linked to a video of a fast-moving river at the bottom of a ravine, which was linked, in turn, to a panoramic vista of snow-covered peaks jutting above the horizon. Finally, Jim came upon a link showing four Mandarin characters: Yu Long Xue Shan, Jade Dragon Snow Mountain.

  Jim recognized the name. Yulong Xueshan wasn’t actually a single mountain, but a range of thirteen peaks in Yunnan Province. This, according to Arvin’s memories, was the location of Supreme Harmony’s headquarters, the Yunnan Operations Center. And as Jim stared at the Mandarin characters he knew with absolute certainty that this was where Supreme Harmony had taken his daughter.

  He was still pondering the images of the mountain range and the underground laboratory when Kirsten slowed the scooter to a halt. “Okay, we’re at the southern end of the Changping tunnel,” she said. “This is the Underground City’s version of Grand Central Terminal.”

  “Kir, I can’t see a thing.” Beyond the glow from the sat phone’s screen, the darkness was total.

  “Right, I forgot. You can’t see infrared. We’re in a large circular room where six corridors branch off in different directions.”

  “You’ve been here before?”

  “Yeah, one of the corridors connects to the maze of tunnels under downtown Beijing. That’s where I came into the Underground City, through a condemned building on the Xidamo Hutong.”

  “Can we get out of the tunnels that way without being spotted?”

  “I noticed a few surveillance cameras along the hutong, and there’s probably more on the avenues nearby. But I think we can make a run for it. Xidamo is just a few miles from the American embassy. If I gun the scooter, we can be there in five minutes. Then all we have to do is get the flash drive to Washington and let the diplomats do the rest.”

  Jim shook his head. “We won’t make it. There’s at least a hundred Beijing cops surrounding the embassy by now.”

  “What makes you think—”

  “Trust me on this, Kir. We’re the most wanted people in the People’s Republic.”

  “Well, I suppose we can hide in the tunnels for a day or two, until the heat dies down. We can probably find some water. And I know where we can get some mushrooms.”

  He shook his head again. He knew they couldn’t stay in the tunnels for very long. Supreme Harmony was too intelligent. The network had access to every computer and surveillance camera in Beijing. Sooner or later it would figure out where they were.

  “Do you know where the other tunnels go?” Jim asked. “The ones that branch off from this room, I mean?”

  “Yeah, the names of the districts are chiseled in the concrete. Besides the downtown and Changping, they go to Shunyi, Tongzhou, Daxing, and Fangshan.”

  Jim plotted the route in his mind. The Fangshan District was in Beijing’s southwestern corner. If they were lucky, the tunnel’s exit would be similar to the exit for the Changping tunnel, in an isolated and unmonitored area. Once they emerged from the tunnel, they could take the back roads through the Taihang Mountains. Yunnan Province was fourteen hundred miles to the southwest, half a continent away. But that’s where they had to go.

  “Head for Fangshan,” Jim said. “And go fast.”

  FORTY-SIX

  Supreme Harmony observed the entrance to a rundown guesthouse in the Qinlao Hutong, approximately three kilometers north of Tiananmen Square. Module 51 knocked on the door while Modules 52 and 53 scanned the dark alley with their ocular cameras. All three Modules were formerly Guoanbu agents, and they still wore the black suits that were customary for t
heir profession. They also wore gray caps to hide their stitches.

  After twenty seconds, the door opened partway and an old woman poked her head outside. This was the manager of the guesthouse, the network surmised. Her wide eyes and frightened expression indicated that she recognized the Modules as government agents. Without a word, she opened the door all the way and let them inside.

  The Modules marched down a narrow hallway that smelled of fried pork. The old woman pointed to a warped door at the end of the hall, and Module 51 examined the doorjamb and lock. They were of inferior construction. The human who’d sought refuge here had apparently assumed that no one would look for him in such dilapidated accommodations. But the surveillance cameras in the lobby of the Grand Hyatt Beijing had observed the man checking out of that hotel earlier in the evening, and the cameras on Chang’an Avenue and Beiheyan Street had followed his progress across the central districts of the capital. Because Supreme Harmony had been designed to analyze surveillance video from a variety of sources, it was a simple matter for the network to identify the man and track him to this inconspicuous guesthouse.

  Module 51 pulled a 9mm semiautomatic from his holster and lifted his right knee, preparing to kick. Drawing on the skills honed by a dozen Guoanbu agents, the Module slammed his boot against the door and burst into the room, followed closely by Modules 52 and 53. The human lay half-dressed on a low bed. He bolted upright and reached for a Glock pistol resting on the mattress, but Module 51 directed a second kick at the man’s jaw. As the man tumbled backward against the wall, Module 51 grabbed the Glock. Meanwhile, Modules 52 and 53 aimed their guns at the man’s head. The threat had been neutralized. Now the interrogation could begin.

  “We’ve confirmed your identity,” Module 51 said. “Your name is Franklin B. Nash.”