Extinction

by Mark Alpert

  “Fuck!” he roared into the darkness. “You fucking—”

  Then he felt Kirsten’s hands around his ankles. She gave them a tremendous yank and pulled Jim through the gap. They both tumbled backward onto a mound of dirt on the other side of the wall.

  Jim lifted his head, dizzy and disoriented. He turned on the flashlight function in his phone, and in the glow from the screen he saw the hole he’d just slid through. For a moment he considered trying to plug it, but there was no time. The first drones were already pouring through the gap.

  Kirsten jumped to her feet and pulled him up. “Come on! Let’s go!”

  They sprinted down the tunnel. Kirsten led the way, keeping a tight grip on Jim’s hand. This section of the tunnel was in a state of general collapse; the concrete walls had buckled in dozens of places, and mounds of dirt covered most of the floor. The footing was treacherous, but they ran like mad and managed to pull ahead of the drones. The buzzing grew fainter. But it didn’t disappear.

  After about ten minutes, Kirsten stopped running. She halted so abruptly that Jim nearly bowled into her. Both of them were too winded to talk, so Jim simply raised his sat phone in the air. Just ahead was a stairway leading upward.

  “Hallelujah!” Jim shouted. “Let’s get out of here!”

  They raced up a flight of steps, then two more. At the top of the third flight was a cramped crawl space, ten feet wide and less than three feet high. The walls and floor were concrete, but the ceiling was a patchwork of wooden boards. Jim slid along the floor and inspected the low ceiling, shining the light from his sat phone all over the boards, but he didn’t spot any handles or hinges. All he saw were the rusted ends of nails that had been hammered from above. “Shit!” he cried. “They sealed off this exit!”

  “Okay, calm down,” Kirsten said, although she sounded just as frantic. “Maybe the boards aren’t so strong. Try punching them with your prosthesis.”

  Jim studied the ceiling for a moment. The boards were rectangular and nailed at the corners, so the weak spots should be midway along the edges. Jim lay with his back on the floor and positioned himself under one of the weak spots. Then he closed his prosthetic hand into a fist and slammed it against the ceiling.

  The impact jarred his whole body, but the boards didn’t budge. In fact, they hardly vibrated. The sound of the punch was a dead, flat thump. He slammed the board again, but the result was no different. The ceiling felt thick and solid. In all likelihood, there was another layer of boards on top of this one. “Damn,” he muttered. “This is bad.”

  “Try a different spot,” Kirsten urged.

  He slid to another weak spot, this one a little closer to the center of the ceiling, and positioned his fist under it. But again the boards didn’t budge, and the dead thump echoed in the crawl space. As it faded away, Jim could clearly hear the buzzing of the drones. The swarm was closer now. It would reach the stairway very soon.

  Desperate, Jim punched the same spot again and again. His prosthesis pumped up and down like a piston. After a dozen punches, though, all he’d done was make a few inch-wide indentations in the wood. And when he looked at his mechanical hand, he saw that he’d scraped the polyimide skin off its knuckles, exposing the hinge joints underneath. He’d lost the temperature sensors in the middle two fingers, and the pressure sensors indicated that the hand was at the breaking point. If he kept pounding the boards like this, the steel fingers would warp and he wouldn’t be able to open his hand anymore.

  “Damn it!” he screamed. Pulling back his prosthetic arm, he turned to Kirsten, who crouched on the floor beside him, her arms wrapped around her knees. He expected her to make another suggestion, but she just stared at him with her camera-glasses. She looked terrified.

  No, he thought. No! There has to be a way out! He focused on Kirsten’s face, the frightened eyes behind the glasses he’d built for her, and out of the blue he recalled an image he’d seen on a Web site a few weeks ago. A home-improvement Web site, of all things. It was an article about how to insulate your attic. The image was a thermal display of a ceiling, with dark lines showing the gaps where cold air was coming through.

  He grabbed Kirsten’s arm. “Look at the boards! The whole ceiling! See if there are any thermal differences. Cold spots, warm spots, whatever.”

  After a moment she caught on. She lay on her back, looking straight up at the boards. As Jim watched her, the buzzing of the drones grew louder. They were at the bottom of the stairway, he guessed, and their implanted processors were charting a course up the first flight of steps. “Come on!” he yelled. “What do you—”

  Kirsten pointed at the ceiling. “There! Around the edges of that board!”

  Jim lay next to her and held up the screen of his sat phone. At first glance the board looked the same as the others, but when Jim took a closer look he saw that its edges weren’t flush with the adjacent boards.

  “Move over!” he shouted. As Kirsten backed away, he positioned his prosthetic fist under the board’s right edge. Muttering a quick prayer, he threw the punch.

  The noise was different this time. The whole ceiling creaked. When Jim looked again at the board, he saw that its right edge had crept upward a quarter-inch. This board was the hatch, he realized. It was jammed into place, but it could be dislodged.

  Kirsten yelled, “Jim!” At first he thought she was shouting for joy, but the tone of her voice was more horrified than triumphant. She was pointing at the top of the stairway, where several dozen drones flew in circles, their cameras scanning the crawl space.

  Jim slammed his fist against the board’s right edge again, pushing it up another quarter-inch. He threw a third punch and the board tilted upward, almost free. But at the same moment, the drones detected Jim’s heat signature and rushed toward his head. Opening his prosthetic hand, he swatted the two closest insects, knocking them to the other side of the crawl space. Then, still lying on his back, he raised his knees to his chest and kicked both feet up against the loosened board. It went shooting into the air like a cork.

  “Go, go!” Jim shouted, but Kirsten needed no encouragement. She leaped for the opening and pulled herself up. Jim followed right behind, catching a whiff of cool, pine-scented air as he scrambled out of the crawl space. They emerged on the ground-floor of an open-air pagoda that seemed to be situated in the middle of a pine forest. The nearby tree trunks glowed in the moonlight, and Jim’s heart swelled with relief. He swiftly reached for the wooden board that had served as the hatch for the crawl space and shoved it back into place, sealing the tunnel again.

  “Jesus!” he gasped. “That was too fucking close!”

  Smiling, he turned to Kirsten. She lay on the floor of the pagoda, her chest rising and falling.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  She didn’t answer. Her camera-glasses had slipped off her face, and her arms and legs shook violently, banging against the pagoda’s floor. A cyborg fly that had followed them out of the tunnel crawled along the side of her neck.

  FIFTY-ONE

  Supreme Harmony observed the thick gray mist that hung over the Yangtze River. It was 9:00 A.M., three hours after dawn, but the mist was still as thick as it had been at daybreak. Module 96 walked alone to the riverfront, taking his first steps since he was incorporated into the network. He wore a police officer’s uniform, with captain’s bars on the shoulders. This Module had formerly belonged to Captain Xi Keqiang, a strong, healthy thirty-nine-year-old, and his nervous system had adapted speedily to the new implants in his eyes and brain. He took quick, confident strides on the asphalt path that led to the southern bank of the Yangtze. As the Module trained his ocular cameras on the horizon, Supreme Harmony observed a long, striated structure that ran between the thick gray mist and the wide gray river. This was the structure that Captain Xi was assigned to protect, the paramount symbol of China’s technological might: the two-kilometer-long Three Gorges Dam.

  Module 96 approached the security checkpoint at the southern end of the da
m. Ten policemen carrying assault rifles guarded the gate running across the dam’s concrete abutment. Standing among these officers was Module 92, who’d been incorporated into Supreme Harmony just a few hours before Captain Xi. Infiltrating the dam’s security forces had been easier than expected. Twenty-four hours ago the network had dispatched Modules 36 and 37 from Beijing to Hubei Province. Because they were Guoanbu agents claiming to have intelligence about security threats to the dam, it was easy for them to arrange private meetings with Xi and his deputies. And because Xi and his top officers had been highly disciplined men who wore their hair in buzz cuts like PLA soldiers, it was no surprise when they showed up for duty the next morning with shaved heads. Their officer’s caps hid their fresh stitches.

  Without a word, the policemen at the gate stepped aside and let their captain through. Xi Keqiang had been a creature of habit who’d always walked the length of the dam every morning, so now Module 96 did the same. On his left was the enormous reservoir created when the Three Gorges Dam was built. On his right was the 175-meter drop to the spillway and the lower stretch of the Yangtze River. Supreme Harmony had thoroughly researched the dam’s engineering details—the 16 million cubic meters of concrete, the 500,000 tons of steel, the thirty-two turbines that generated 20 billion watts of electricity—and in the process it had learned about the structure’s weaknesses, particularly its vulnerability to a terrorist attack. Because the builders had used inferior concrete in certain sections of the dam, a series of explosions—strategically placed and timed—could cause a breach. A wall of water, trillions of gallons, would pour from the reservoir into the Yangtze Valley, drowning millions of people in the floodplain. The potential for disaster was so great that the government had taken extraordinary measures to prevent it. Under Captain Xi’s command were five hundred men who guarded every road leading to the dam. But the attack planned by Supreme Harmony wouldn’t come by road.

  Module 96 walked briskly along the top of the dam. He passed the huge winches that dangled chains into the shafts that went down to the dam’s control gates. Six hours ago, while it was still dark, Module 92 and three others had placed explosive charges within these shafts. But the first and biggest explosion would be triggered several hundred meters away, at the northern end of the dam. As Module 96 walked toward this point, he focused his ocular cameras on a concrete tower attached to the dam’s eastern face. This was the ship lift, an elevator for small and medium-size boats. Ships coming from the reservoir entered a huge steel bathtub, filled with 10,000 tons of water, which was lowered down the side of the dam by a system of rope pulleys and counterweights. The ship lift had been built for the benefit of the tourist-laden cruise boats, allowing them to avoid the delay of navigating the canal that went around the dam. But the convenience came at a price. When a ship moved from the reservoir to the lift, it passed through a U-shaped notch in the dam, a deep crenellation. And a powerful explosion at this crucial point could rock the entire structure.

  The sun was rising, but it couldn’t break through the mist. The natural haze was thickened by the particles of soot that were emitted so copiously in this part of central China. Module 96 grasped the binoculars hanging from his neck and surveyed the vast reservoir to the west. In the foreground were several Yangtze River freighters, each bearing a mountainous load of coal, and behind them was the China Explorer, a 2,000-ton cruise boat that was currently empty of passengers and guided by a crew consisting of half-a-dozen Modules. The boat had left Badong three hours ago after being loaded with the dynamite from the Yunnan Operations Center, and now Supreme Harmony was steering it toward the ship lift. A patrol craft would soon rendezvous with the cruise boat, and two inspectors under Captain Xi’s command would board the vessel to search for hazardous materials. But the network had incorporated those inspectors as well, so they wouldn’t report the sixty tons of dynamite stored on the boat’s starboard side.

  Although the China Explorer was filled with the chemicals of destruction, Supreme Harmony preferred to think of it as a vessel of renewal. It would cleanse the garden that had been sullied by mankind, making the earth ready for a new planting.

  * * *

  Fifteen thousand kilometers to the east, on the other side of the globe, Supreme Harmony observed the Chinese embassy in Washington, D.C. Thanks to favorable winds over the ocean and light traffic on the highway out of Dulles Airport, Modules 56 and 57 arrived ahead of schedule at the embassy compound near Connecticut Avenue. It was a modern building with off-white limestone walls. Although office hours were long over—the local time was 9:15 P.M., twelve hours behind China standard time—the embassy guards rolled back the gate for the limousine, which proceeded to the entrance. The Modules stepped out of the car and walked into a high-ceilinged lobby, each carrying a heavy suitcase.

  The guards dutifully escorted them to the corner office occupied by Yang Feng, chief of the Guoanbu’s Washington station. His office had a well-polished conference table and an ornate, antique desk, behind which stood Agent Yang himself, who wore wire-frame glasses and a pin-striped suit. Supreme Harmony was well aware of Yang’s reputation. He was one of the most celebrated spies in the history of the People’s Republic. Over the past twenty years Yang had stolen hundreds of technological secrets from U.S. corporations in the defense and computer industries. In fact, Supreme Harmony owed its very existence to this man. It was Yang who’d made the surveillance network possible by infiltrating the American labs that did the initial research on cyborg insects.

  The embassy guards closed the doors to the office, leaving Yang alone with his visitors from the Guoanbu headquarters. He smiled broadly, confidently, obviously afraid of nothing. Supreme Harmony took careful note of his expression, memorizing it for future use.

  “Welcome to the United States,” Yang said. “Did you have a good flight?”

  Module 56 nodded. He set down his heavy suitcase, which contained several kilograms of communications equipment. Module 57 set down his suitcase as well and stood to the left of Yang’s desk.

  Yang looked curiously for a moment at the baseball caps the Modules wore. Then he gave them another serene smile. “Minister Deng informed me that you’d be coming tonight. He said you’d have a new assignment for me?”

  Module 56 nodded again. “Yes. You’re going to request a series of private meetings. First with the Chinese ambassador to the U.S. And then with several of your counterparts in the American intelligence agencies.”

  “Very interesting.” Yang’s eyes darted sideways, glancing at Module 57, who’d opened his suitcase and removed a black pouch. “And what will be the subject of these meetings?”

  “Within the next few hours a crisis will erupt in the People’s Republic. We want you to monitor the American response.”

  Yang stopped smiling. “What kind of crisis?”

  Module 56 didn’t answer right away. He waited until Module 57 unzipped the black pouch. Then he reached into the outside pocket of his suitcase, as if to pull out a document or folder. Instead, he removed a Heckler & Koch semiautomatic pistol. The limousine driver, acting under Minister Deng’s orders, had given the gun to Module 56, who now leveled it at Yang. “You’ll learn the details as soon as we perform the implantation. Please step toward the conference table.”

  Yang lunged for his desk drawer, where another gun was most likely hidden. But before he could open it, Module 57 jabbed the syringe into his arm.

  FIFTY-TWO

  Layla was awakened from deep sleep by a kick to her rear. At first she just stared groggily at the uniformed man looming over her. Then she remembered where she was and jumped to her feet, tightening the belt of her hospital gown. A second soldier kicked Wen Hao, who lay on the other side of the room, closer to the pair of schoolboys from Lijiang. Wen also jumped to his feet and stepped between the soldier and the boys, who continued to sleep soundly, huddled against each other. A third Module stood by the door, pointing a 9 mm pistol at Layla. This was the Module in the lab coat, the one who u
sed to be Dr. Zhang Jintao. “It’s time,” he said, his face expressionless. “Please put on your slippers. We’re taking you and the children to the operating room.”

  She was confused. The Modules were too early. “It can’t be noon yet. I thought you said you’d come at noon.”

  Dr. Zhang nodded. “You’re correct. It’s nine thirty-one A.M. The shipment of neural implants arrived earlier than expected.”

  She felt a jolt of panic. She’d hoped she and Wen would have a chance to rehearse their plans one more time. They’d just have to wing it. “Don’t do this to the boys,” she pleaded. “I don’t know what kind of moral rules you’re operating under, but surely you have to see that—”

  “There’s nothing immoral about incorporation. This is the way Supreme Harmony was created. We couldn’t exist without it.” Zhang narrowed his eyes, staring at Layla over the barrel of his gun. Then he turned to Wen Hao and barked an order in Mandarin.

  Wen, still playing the role of the obedient clerical assistant, knelt beside the children and gently nudged them awake. He whispered something in their ears, and they sat up, gazing sleepily at the two soldier Modules. Then both boys started to cry.

  Zhang frowned. The soldier Modules also frowned, their faces contorting clumsily. Zhang barked another order, and Wen whispered something else to the children. But instead of consoling them, his words had the opposite effect. Their sobs turned to full-throated wails.

  Wincing, the soldier Modules backed away from the children. Zhang stepped toward Wen and let loose a Mandarin tirade, most likely a string of curses culled from the long-term memories of the PLA soldiers. But Wen just shrugged and held up his hands in the universal gesture of helplessness.

  The boys howled. Layla didn’t know exactly what Wen had whispered to them, but it did the trick. Their faces glistened with tears, and their cries echoed relentlessly against the concrete walls. The soldier Modules took another step backward. Zhang, still cursing, cocked his pistol and pointed it at Wen’s forehead.