Extinction

by Mark Alpert

  Jim was still staring at the image when Kirsten braked the scooter. He looked up, but of course he couldn’t see anything in the pitch-black tunnel. “What is it?” he asked. “Another bottleneck?”

  “Worse. The tunnel’s blocked.”

  Jim disconnected the flash drive and disk from his satellite phone. Then he turned on the phone’s flashlight function, which put a bright white display on the screen. Holding the phone in the air, he saw an earthen wall in front of them. It rose ten feet to the tunnel’s ceiling, where the concrete had buckled.

  He dismounted from the scooter and walked toward the wall of packed soil. Raising his prosthetic arm, Jim poked the dirt. Then he slammed his mechanical fist into it. The wall was solid, immovable. The tunnel’s ceiling had probably collapsed years ago and the dirt had been settling ever since. “Shit,” he said, turning to Kirsten. “This isn’t good.”

  “We’ll have to go back to Grand Central Station and pick a different tunnel.”

  Jim grimaced. It would take at least an hour to return to the maze of tunnels under central Beijing, and by then there was a good chance that Supreme Harmony would know where to look for them. Once the network tracked down Frank Nash, the Modules would find out where he’d hidden Arvin’s flash drive. Then they’d start searching the Underground City.

  Kirsten turned around. “Come on, let’s go. We don’t have a choice.”

  “Hold on.” Jim extended the knife from his prosthetic hand. He raised it high and sank the blade into the earthen wall. “I want to see if the wall’s solid all the way to the top.”

  He lifted himself off the floor, kicking toeholds into the dirt. It was a piece of cake compared with climbing the Great Wall. Soon his head brushed the tunnel’s ceiling. He raised his sat phone again and shone its light on the jagged breach in the concrete. Luckily, it wasn’t as wide as he’d thought. The concrete on the left side of the ceiling was still intact, and the dirt just below it was loose and powdery. Jim retracted his knife and plunged his prosthetic fingers into the uppermost part of the earthen wall, just below the intact section of the ceiling. He was able to sink his whole hand into the powdery dirt and sweep it to the floor.

  “Hey!” Kirsten yelled. “What’s going on up there?”

  “We might be able to get through. I have to do some digging.”

  “What can I do?”

  “You can help me keep my balance. Stand behind me and brace my legs.”

  Kirsten raised her hands and gripped the back of his thighs. Now he didn’t have to worry about falling backward.

  She let out a grunt. “I hate to tell you this, Jim, but you gained some weight.”

  “It’s the prosthesis. It’s a little heavier than a normal arm.”

  “It’s not your prosthesis. It’s your ass.”

  “All right, all right. I’ll start my diet tomorrow.”

  He started digging with his prosthetic arm. Its hard fingers clawed the wall like the teeth of a bulldozer, and the motors in his wrist and elbow hummed at a higher pitch as they shoveled out chunks of earth. He tried to sweep the dirt to the side, but some of it sprinkled on Kirsten’s hair. “Hey!” she yelled again. “Watch it!”

  “Sorry.”

  “Was that payback for the comment about your ass?”

  “Not at all. You can talk about my ass as much as you want.”

  Soon Jim established a steady rhythm. His tireless prosthesis excavated the dirt, making the hole deeper and wider. He held the phone in his left hand, using the light from the screen to guide his efforts. Kirsten stood behind and below him, supporting his legs. After a while she adjusted her grip, and her fingers dug into his hamstrings.

  “You know, I still don’t understand what you’re planning to do,” she said, her voice turning serious. “Tell me again why we’re going to Yunnan Province?”

  “That’s where the Supreme Harmony project started. The main servers for the network are in a lab complex there.”

  “And you’re aware how far away Yunnan is?”

  “About fourteen hundred miles. A little more if we avoid the main highways.”

  “That’s a hell of a long drive, Jim. Wouldn’t it make more sense to head for one of the U.S. consulates? There’s one in Shenyang.”

  Jim shook his head. “Supreme Harmony is taking over the Chinese government. The network already controls the Guoanbu, and it’s giving orders to the local police forces. They’ll be waiting for us in front of every U.S. consulate in the country, because that’s where the network expects us to go.”

  “Maybe we should head for the border then. Mongolia is four hundred miles away. That’s a lot closer than Yunnan.”

  “No, that border’s guarded too well. We’d have a better chance of making it across the border between Yunnan and Burma. It’s a smuggler’s paradise down there.”

  “But you’re not planning to cross into Burma, are you? You want to go straight to Supreme Harmony’s headquarters, right?”

  Jim stopped digging. “I’m scared, Kir,” he admitted. “It’s not just about Layla now. We don’t have much time.” He looked down into the darkness where Kirsten stood, bracing his legs. “Let’s say we cross the border and make it back to the States. What’s gonna happen then? We’ll hand over our evidence to the NSA and their experts will start analyzing it. After a few days they’ll pass the ball to the White House, and then their experts will have a go at it. And by that time, Supreme Harmony will control the People’s Republic. It’ll have an army of three million men under its command, and a hundred long-range missiles armed with nuclear warheads.”

  Kirsten didn’t respond. Jim waited a few seconds, then resumed his shoveling. By now he’d carved out a hole the size of a desk drawer, penetrating almost three feet into the wall. He stretched his left arm into the hole, shining the sat phone screen inside, and spied a gap extending all the way to the other side of the earthen barrier. He’d done it. He’d broken through. Now he just had to widen the gap. “Hey, hey!” he shouted. “This is gonna work!”

  He expected Kirsten to let out a whoop or at least make a joke, but she remained silent. Jim shrugged, then continued digging. He scraped at the edges of the hole, steadily widening it.

  After five more minutes, Jim leaned into the gap to inspect his progress. It was nearly wide enough for them to wriggle through. Another minute of digging should do it, he thought. Then Kirsten broke her silence. “You’re making a mistake,” she said.

  Jim pulled his head out of the hole. “What did you say?”

  “You’re letting your fears about your daughter cloud your judgment. You can’t single-handedly attack a Chinese government facility. That’s insane. It’s suicide.”

  He peered into the darkness where Kirsten stood, still bracing his legs. He wasn’t surprised by the content of her remark. She was right—his plan was impractical, maybe even insane. He was pursuing it only because he couldn’t see an alternative. But what did surprise him was the tone of her voice. It was thick with anguish.

  “Kir, I…” He didn’t know what to say. “I can do this. I have a plan.”

  “Really? Well, lay it out for me.”

  Again he heard the anguish, unmistakable. Kirsten wasn’t worried about herself, he realized. She was worried about him. She was heartsick with worry. Until that moment Jim hadn’t realized how much she cared for him. He felt like an idiot for not seeing it before.

  He took a deep breath. He had his own hidden feelings, but this wasn’t the time to talk about it. Instead, he said, “I’m coming down,” and descended from his perch on the earthen wall. He stood in front of Kirsten and held the sat phone between them so he could see her face in the glow from its screen. “Supreme Harmony has a weakness,” he said. “Arvin told me about it just before he died. You’ve heard the term ‘Trojan horse,’ right?”

  “Of course. It’s a harmful piece of software hidden in a computer system.”

  “Right, it’s usually software. People are tricked into loading
the harmful program into their machines because it looks legitimate. Then the Trojan can delete their files or steal their data. But a Trojan can also be inserted into the hardware. If a hacker has access to a chip-design facility or a factory that makes computer equipment, he can slightly alter a few of the circuits imprinted in a microprocessor.”

  “And what’s the advantage of doing that?”

  “Well, you can usually detect a software Trojan if you run a diagnostic on your system. But there are billions of microscopic wires and transistors in a processor. If you rerouted the wiring in just a few places, the alteration would be virtually undetectable. The processor would function normally and the user wouldn’t suspect a thing until the Trojan was activated.”

  Kirsten cocked her head. Her glasses reflected the white rectangle of the sat phone’s screen. “Yeah, I heard something about this,” she said. “Weren’t there rumors a few years ago that the Israelis slipped a compromised chip into Syria’s radar system?”

  Jim nodded. “That’s right. The chip turned off the radar just before the Israeli Air Force flew a bombing raid against a Syrian nuclear plant. The way it works is that the hacker waits until the right moment, then sends a specific code to the system. The code trips the altered circuit in the computer chip and initiates a new set of instructions. It could order the computer to erase every file in its memory. Or it could simply shut down the system.”

  Kirsten paused, thinking. She raised her right hand to her chin. “So did Arvin put a Trojan in the processors of his implants?”

  Jim nodded again. “He said he hid a shutdown switch in the circuitry. And there’s a code for activating it, a shutdown code, but it’s a little unusual. The code is incorporated into an image. Arvin’s exact words were, ‘It will turn them to stone.’ He meant that if a Module saw this image, the code would shut down its retinal implants and break its connection to Supreme Harmony.”

  “Wait a second. How could that happen?”

  “When a Module views the image, his retinal implants convert it to a stream of data, millions of zeroes and ones. And Arvin designed the image so that the stream contains the shutdown code, a particular sequence of zeroes and ones buried somewhere within the data. When this sequence passes through the implant’s processor, it trips the altered circuit and disables the chip.”

  Kirsten gave him a skeptical look, pursing her lips and lowering her eyebrows. “And did Arvin show you this image?”

  “No, but I found it in his visual memories. It’s a picture of Medusa, from Greek mythology. Arvin liked the symbolism, I guess.” He held up the satellite phone. “I downloaded it into my phone, but I’m not going to show it to you. I’m afraid it might shut down your implants, too.”

  She still looked skeptical. She didn’t say anything for a while, and the silence of the Fangshan tunnel settled over them. Jim didn’t like this silence. It was heavy, oppressive. It was, literally, the silence of the grave.

  Finally, Kirsten let out a sigh. “Are you sure about this, Jim? It seems like a convoluted way to deliver the shutdown code. Wouldn’t it be easier to just transmit the code wirelessly to the network?”

  “That wouldn’t work. Supreme Harmony probably has a heavy-duty firewall that would filter out any suspicious transmissions from outside the network. But Arvin’s shutdown code is designed to go under the firewall. It slips through the network’s defenses by pretending to be just another piece of visual information for the Modules to process and analyze.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. Even if you’re right, I don’t see how this can help us. Let’s say the Medusa image can shut down the implants. Can you really use it to take down the network? Are you going to walk up to the Modules with that picture in your hand and say, ‘Hey, guys, take a look at this’?”

  “No, that wouldn’t work either. According to Arvin’s memories, showing Medusa to one of the Modules will disable its implants before it can share the image with the rest of Supreme Harmony. To shut down the whole network, we have to disconnect every Module. So we need to deliver the shutdown code to all of them at once.”

  “And how the hell are you gonna do that?”

  Jim didn’t have an answer. He hadn’t thought that far ahead yet. He wanted to say something to convince Kirsten that he knew what he was doing, that they had at least a slim chance of defeating Supreme Harmony. But, instead, he just stood there, biting his lip, and the tunnel’s silence settled over them again.

  And then, just as the silence was becoming unbearable, Jim heard something. It was a low, familiar buzzing, echoing down the tunnel from the direction of central Beijing.

  FORTY-NINE

  Supreme Harmony observed the bed where Franklin B. Nash’s mangled body lay. The sheets were dark red, soaked with his blood. Before revealing the location of Arvin Conway’s flash drive, Nash had endured forty-seven minutes of interrogation, which was far longer than the network had predicted. Given that Nash was merely Conway’s employee, Supreme Harmony hadn’t expected him to show such loyalty. Had Nash realized, perhaps, that the network would kill him anyway as soon as he gave up his secret? So he’d resisted the questions and endured the torture simply to stay alive for a few minutes longer? It was impossible to know. In some cases, Supreme Harmony acknowledged, human behavior was inexplicable.

  Modules 64 and 65 had already inspected the chamber in the Underground City where Nash said he’d hidden the flash drive. Although they didn’t find the device, the Modules detected trace evidence—human hairs, clothing fibers, and footprints in the dust—indicating recent activity in that chamber and the nearby tunnels. Expanding their search, the Modules discovered tire tracks in the tunnels leading to the Changping and Fangshan districts. What’s more, the width of the tracks matched the width of the tires on the Baotian scooter pushed by Kirsten W. Chan in the surveillance video from Xidamo Hutong. The evidence suggested a solution to a puzzle that had been plaguing Supreme Harmony—how did James T. Pierce escape from the police helicopters searching for him in Changping? Now the network knew the answer.

  Unfortunately, there was little information about the Underground City on the government’s servers. The digital archives held no maps of the abandoned tunnels, so Supreme Harmony had to rely on the surveillance of its Modules and drones. Over the past hour, the network had dispatched seventeen Modules to the Underground City, but their operations were slowed by the difficulty of establishing radio links in the tunnels. The Modules needed to install radio repeaters in the Fangshan tunnel before they could pursue Pierce and Chan. But the drones were capable of autonomous navigation. They could fly out of radio range and carry out preprogrammed instructions.

  Supreme Harmony ordered a swarm of two thousand drones to fly to the end of the Fangshan tunnel. Their cameras were tuned to the infrared frequency band, and they were programmed to lock onto any target with a heat signature of 37 degrees Celsius—human body temperature. Given the average speed of the drones, they would reach their targets very soon.

  FIFTY

  Jim grabbed Kirsten by the waist and hoisted her up to the hole he’d dug in the earthen wall. She stretched her arms into the gap and struggled to get a handhold. Jim wished he’d widened the hole a few inches more, but it was too late for that now. He gave Kirsten a boost, planting his hands on her butt and literally shoving her into the wall. After a couple of seconds she managed to wriggle her head and shoulders into the gap. Then he grabbed her feet and positioned her heels on his shoulders so she could use her leg muscles to push herself forward. The buzzing of the drones grew louder and closer. The noise filled the tunnel, echoing off the concrete walls.

  “Go, go, go!” Jim shouted. “Push through!”

  With a terrific grunt Kirsten slid through the gap. Then Jim reached for his canister of parathion and sprayed the last of the insecticide at the drones. It ran out after six seconds. The poison in the air was so diffuse he could barely smell its rotten-egg odor. He heard some scattered clicks, the sound of a few dozen
drones hitting the tunnel’s floor, but most of the flies kept coming.

  “Jim!” Kirsten yelled from the other side of the wall. “What are you waiting for?”

  Another thought occurred to him. He threw away the canister and pulled out his satellite phone, clicking on the file he’d downloaded from Avin’s flash drive. The image of Medusa reappeared on the screen. But even as he held the phone in the air, with the screen turned toward the approaching swarm, he knew this wasn’t going to work. The electronics in the cyborg flies were simple brain electrodes, not retinal implants, and they’d been designed by Chinese scientists, not Arvin Conway. The buzzing intensified, coming from all sides now.

  “Goddamn it!” Kirsten screamed. “Move your ass!”

  Out of options, he pocketed the phone, extended the knife from his prosthetic hand, and clambered up the wall again. Groping blindly, he used his prosthesis as a pivot and turned himself around so he could thrust his feet into the hole. Then he slid backward into the gap, frantically squirming. But, as he’d feared, the gap wasn’t wide enough. His feet kicked through to the other side of the wall, but his hips wedged into the dirt. He was stuck, and the drones were swarming toward him. Their infrared cameras had triangulated his position, and their implanted electrodes were steering the insects straight to his head.

  Reflexively, he waved his prosthesis in front of his face. His mechanical hand swatted away one of the drones, and the pressure sensors under his palm detected a sudden, sharp sting. It was the drone’s bioweapon, the paralyzing dart. An instant later, he batted two more drones with the back of his hand and three more with his palm. Their darts couldn’t penetrate the hand’s polyimide skin, but the drones were coming in fast, too fast for Jim to swat them all. He tried to push himself backward with his left hand, but his body wouldn’t budge. The buzzing was in his ears now, a high-pitched grinding, horribly close.