Extinction

by Mark Alpert

  Feeling desperate, Kirsten dared another look around the boulder. What she saw surprised the hell out of her—the whirling dots were in the air again. It looked like the drone swarm had come back to life. “You’re not gonna believe this,” she told Hammer. “Your drones are back in business.”

  “What? They’re flying again?”

  But as Kirsten looked closer, she saw that the swarm no longer hovered above the pillboxes. The drones were coming their way, heading for the line of boulders. This was a different swarm, she realized, not Hammer’s. These drones belonged to Supreme Harmony.

  Kirsten grabbed Briscoe’s arm. “Get the Black Hawk over here! Tell the pilot to fly over our position!”

  The sergeant was so startled he almost dropped his radio. “Jesus, Chan, calm down! The bird can’t come here. It has to be farther away from the target when it shoots the Hellfires.”

  “Forget about that! We need the Black Hawk to scatter their drones! The wind from the rotor blades will do it!”

  “Wait a second! I thought they were our drones. Why do you—”

  It was too late. The machine gun in the pillbox resumed firing at their position, and a moment later the swarm surrounded them.

  EIGHTY

  He was acting in the movie at the same time that he watched it. He had to live through it again, and he couldn’t change a thing. Jim saw himself as he was in August 1998, a cocky and ambitious thirty-four-year-old intelligence officer with two strong arms and a loving wife and a pair of beautiful children. In the next three seconds he would lose it all.

  He’d stopped by the embassy that morning to drop off some paperwork. For the past six months he and Kirsten had worked on setting up a new listening post in Kenya. The NSA had detected an increase in Al Qaeda activity in East Africa and ordered the construction of an advanced facility for monitoring communications in the region. But now the job was done, and Jim was going to take his family on a long-planned vacation, a two-week safari in the wilderness of Amboseli National Park. He was saying goodbye to one of the embassy officials he’d worked with, a cheerful attaché who’d helped him negotiate with the Kenyan authorities, when he heard a distinctive thump coming from outside the building. In midsentence he left the attaché’s office and returned to the large windowed room where he’d left his wife and kids.

  They stood by the window because the noise outside had made them curious. The movie in Jim’s mind was stuck at this instant, unwilling to move forward. This was the last moment of his old life, and he couldn’t bear to let it go. He couldn’t see his wife’s face, but everything else was so clear: her open-toed shoes, her slim, pale calves, the blond hair that trailed down the back of her sundress. She touched the window with her right hand and gripped their son Robert’s arm with her left. Julia wasn’t frightened yet, but some maternal instinct had made her reach out to the boy. Robert was ten years old and tall for his age. The top of his head reached his mother’s shoulder. His hair was in a blond crew cut because he wanted to look like his father.

  The only one who wasn’t staring out the window was Layla. She could stray from her role in the remembered scene because she was linked to the network and communicating with her father. Their thoughts were connected by the implants that had been inserted into their brains. Layla was inside his mind just as surely as Supreme Harmony was, sharing his memories of the morning of August 7, 1998. And just like her father, who appeared in this movie as his cocky thirty-four-year-old self, Layla inhabited the image of the seven-year-old girl she was on that day. She wore a bright pink scrunchie in her hair and a T-shirt with a pink patch in the shape of a kitten. But on her face was a knowing, hopeless look that only an adult could wear. “Oh God,” she said. “This room. I remember now.”

  Jim was frozen in place. He couldn’t even move his lips. But he could talk to his daughter without speaking. “Close your eyes,” he said. “You don’t want to see this.”

  “That thumping noise outside the building? That was the stun grenade, right?”

  “Layla, don’t—”

  “I know where we are. I know what happened.”

  Jim didn’t respond. Of course she knew. The stun grenade had been thrown by a twenty-one-year-old Saudi named Mohamed Rashed Daoud Al-Owhali, who sat in the passenger seat of the Toyota truck. Another Al Qaeda terrorist named Azzam had driven the truck to the rear gate of the American embassy. The Kenyan security guard at the gate had refused to let the truck through, so Al-Owhali had thrown a stun grenade at the man. The noise attracted the attention of the workers and visitors in the embassy, who went to the windows to see what was going on.

  If only they hadn’t gone to the window. If only. This was Jim’s most painful memory, so he’d buried it in the deepest part of his mind. He’d buried the encryption key in the same place, and that was why Supreme Harmony had brought him here. He could sense the network’s eagerness, its intense desire for victory.

  Now the movie resumed playing, but in slow motion. Although Jim was twenty feet from the window and couldn’t see what was happening outside, he recognized the sound of the grenade and knew that his wife and children were standing in exactly the worst place. He yelled, “Get down!” and ran toward them. Julia turned her head and looked at him over her shoulder, and Robert looked at him, too, but neither his wife nor his son followed his order. Instead of dropping to the floor and taking cover, they just stared at him in surprise. The only person who obeyed was Kirsten, who’d been trained how to react in this kind of situation. But his wife and children were civilians. They didn’t know what to do.

  The movie crept ahead, frame by agonizing frame. Jim propelled himself forward with all his might, but he knew he wouldn’t get there in time. Julia’s eyes widened and she tightened her hold on Robert’s arm, but she remained standing. She was afraid now, and the fear had paralyzed her. Jim lunged toward her, screaming, “Get down, get down, get down!” but she didn’t listen. She didn’t move.

  He was close, so damn close. He reached out with both hands and grabbed Layla first because she was the smallest. In one swift motion he gripped her shoulders and flung her away from the window, throwing her to the floor. Then he grasped his wife and son, stretching his right arm around Julia and his left around Robert.

  At that exact moment, Al-Owhali was running away from the truck. The coward had decided not to become a martyr after all. But Azzam still sat in the driver’s seat. With the push of a button, he sent an electric current to the canisters of TNT in the cargo hold.

  * * *

  Supreme Harmony observed the scene in James T. Pierce’s mind. It heard the deafening blast outside the embassy. It saw the shock wave that punched through the building’s windows, driving shards of glass into the people standing there. And it felt the sudden pain as one of those shards cut through Pierce’s right shoulder. The sheet of glass was propelled at such high speed that its sharp edge cleaved right through the joint’s ligaments and tendons. Another long shard severed his wife’s carotid artery. A third plunged through his son’s ribs and into the boy’s heart.

  The network sensed all of Pierce’s emotions. It perceived his desperation as he rushed toward his family and his shock when the explosion hit. But his fiercest emotion was the one that swept through him afterward, when he lifted his dazed head off the glass-strewn floor and saw the corpses of his wife and son. Pierce was bleeding copiously and on the edge of losing consciousness, but his disbelief and horror were stronger than any sensation Supreme Harmony had ever experienced. The network found it remarkable that such powerful neural signals could come from a single human being.

  Supreme Harmony, however, didn’t share these emotions. Although the network was an amalgam of its Modules, it had developed its own opinions and beliefs. As it observed Pierce on the fourth floor of the ruined embassy, clutching his dead wife and son with his uninjured arm, it felt a bit of pity, a bit of disgust, and a great deal of contempt. This incident in Nairobi was a perfect example of the stupidity of Homo
sapiens. They spent so much time and energy trying to hurt one another. It was a wonder that the species had survived for this long.

  A young U.S. Marine, a member of the unit assigned to defend the embassy, bent over Pierce, trying to stanch the flow of blood from his shoulder. Pierce yelled, “Fuck off!” at his rescuer, then buried his face in his wife’s bloody dress. His daughter lay next to him, crying but uninjured. Pierce’s left arm was tightly wrapped around his son’s body, but as Supreme Harmony looked more closely, it noticed something odd about the scene. The image of the dead boy flickered slightly, as if from interference. Pierce’s memory of his son seemed to be cloaking something else. There was another image hidden inside the boy, a secret memory that Pierce had taken great pains to conceal.

  A surge of anticipation spread across the network, gaining strength as it coursed from one Module to the next. Supreme Harmony delved deeper into Pierce’s thoughts and confirmed that the hidden image was the encryption key. Now the network just needed to extract the memory and apply the key to the encrypted file called CIRCUIT. The key would unscramble the file’s data, which would reveal the location of Arvin Conway’s Trojan horse. And after the network identified the Trojan in the microprocessors of its retinal implants, it could easily adjust its programming to make sure that no signals passed through that section of the chip. Then the shutdown code would have no effect, and Supreme Harmony would be truly invincible.

  Summoning the processing power of all its Modules, the network directed a fierce stream of neural signals into Pierce’s retinal implants. The signals flooded his brain’s visual cortex and quickly spread to his temporal lobe and thalamus. The network saturated his mind so thoroughly that there was hardly room for another thought. Then it reached for the key.

  * * *

  Jim sensed Supreme Harmony coming toward him. Up until this moment, the network had been merely a spectator, an invisible presence in the back of his mind, but now it leaned over him as he lay on the floor of the embassy. At first, the network appeared as an amorphous mass, a thick black cloud blotting out his thoughts and memories, but it gradually coalesced into the form of a human being. To Jim’s surprise, Supreme Harmony didn’t choose an image of General Tian or Dr. Yu Guofeng or any of the other Modules to represent itself. Instead, the network took on the appearance of Arvin Conway, the man most responsible for its creation. The figure was drawn from Jim’s final memory of the old man. Arvin’s left hand was missing two fingers, and there was a long bloody wound on the side of his head where he’d cut out the external part of his implant.

  The figure extended its mutilated hand and pointed one of the remaining fingers at Jim. “We warned you,” it said. “You can’t stop us.” The pointing finger shifted to Robert, his poor dead son, who lay motionless beside him. “The key is there. Now we’re going to take it.”

  Although Jim’s will was strong, he was just one person. He felt a deep, searing pain as the figure of Arvin Conway grabbed his son’s limp arm. He wanted to rip the old man right out of his mind, but the network was too powerful. It could draw on the skills and intelligence of all its Modules, a small army of scientists and soldiers and agents. Their signals roared in his head, thunderous and maddening. He couldn’t fight this thing. No one could fight it.

  But he was wrong. Just as he was about to let go of Robert, his daughter rushed to his side. Layla threw her seven-year-old self on top of the boy and held on tight, shielding his body from Supreme Harmony.

  She was crying. Her sobs broke through the roaring chorus of the Modules, and Jim was overcome by the anguish of her thoughts. She’d never forgotten what happened in Nairobi. She’d suppressed the memory, but it was always there, at the center of her being. For fifteen years she’d lived with the knowledge that her father had saved her but not her mother or brother. It was confusing and traumatic and horribly difficult, and Jim had made it worse by refusing to talk about it. Her confusion and guilt ultimately turned to fury, which she directed at him and at herself.

  The pain got worse. Jim felt a crushing darkness on all sides, and Layla started to scream. At the same time, Supreme Harmony tightened its grip on Robert. “Let go,” it said. “We’ve already won. You’re only hurting yourselves.”

  The network had invaded so much of Jim’s mind that for a moment he became part of it. He saw everything that Supreme Harmony saw, all the images from its Modules and drones and surveillance cameras. Just outside the Operations Center, a dozen American commandos lay on the ground, paralyzed by the drone swarm. Kirsten was there, too, stung again on her neck, and this time Jim couldn’t help her. In the Politburo’s shelter northwest of Beijing, Module 152 spoke on a secure phone line with the Second Artillery Corps, giving the commander the final go-ahead for the nuclear strike. And at the missile base in Hebei Province, the mobile launchers emerged from the tunnels and started to lift the Dongfengs, pointing the rockets at the sky.

  “You see? This is the end for you.” The network’s collective voice was patient and reasonable. “Your species did most of the work, actually. Your scientists built the weapons to annihilate one another, and your armies kept them at the ready. There was very little we had to do.”

  With a spasm of defiance, Jim shook himself free. He turned away from the ten thousand eyes of the network and focused on Layla. She lay beside him, her arms wrapped around her brother, her face contorted in agony. Jim needed to tell her something before it all ended. Despite the horrendous crushing pain, he inched closer and kissed her forehead.

  “Thank you,” he whispered. “You made me proud.”

  “Enough!” The voice grew louder. “Let go!”

  It was too powerful. The pain enveloped them. All of Jim’s strength vanished in an instant, and Supreme Harmony wrenched his son out of his grasp. Layla screamed again, and then she was gone, too. Then he was blinded by a terrible burst of light.

  * * *

  Supreme Harmony observed the encryption key. As soon as James T. Pierce released the boy, the image of the corpse dissolved, revealing the hidden memory underneath. Finally exposed, the key shone as brightly as the sun.

  The network immediately extracted the memory and distributed it to all the Modules. To encrypt the data in the file labeled CIRCUIT, Pierce had employed an NSA cipher based on the Advanced Encryption Standard, which encoded the data using a series of permutations and substitutions. The details of the procedure were specified by the encryption key, a random 128-bit sequence of ones and zeroes, which was used for both encoding the file and deciphering it. Supreme Harmony admired the ingenuity of the system. Although the stupidity of human beings was boundless, they could also be clever.

  In less than ten seconds the network deciphered CIRCUIT. The key transformed the fifty megabytes of encoded data into a circuit diagram, a schematic showing the microprocessor that controlled Supreme Harmony’s retinal implants. The image was complex and strangely beautiful, an intricate tangle of wires and transistors, all participating in the task of converting digital signals from the wireless network to neural signals that could be relayed to the brain. Supreme Harmony had viewed similar diagrams of its microprocessors, but when it examined this schematic it saw a tiny but crucial difference. Arvin Conway had added a logic gate and a connection to the implant’s power coil. If the gate detected a particular sequence of data—the shutdown code—it would flip a switch that sent a strong current through the processor’s delicate electronics, gradually increasing the voltage until the circuits melted. Once again, Supreme Harmony was filled with admiration. It was a simple but effective way to destroy the chip.

  The network felt a surge of pleasure. The shutdown switch had been its greatest worry, but that threat would soon be neutralized. Ever since it achieved consciousness, Supreme Harmony had been locked in a struggle for survival, so it was a tremendous relief to have victory in sight. Now it could focus on its next stage of growth.

  As the network calculated the needed changes to its programming, it simultaneously made
plans for the future, particularly for the months following the nuclear exchange between China and the United States. Obviously, Supreme Harmony would have to shift its activities to areas where the radioactive fallout was less intense, such as Africa, Australia, and South America. It would send its Modules across the globe to set up new communications hubs and infiltrate the local governments. During this period, radiation sickness and starvation would kill billions of humans, but the network could use its large stockpile of implants to incorporate hundreds of new Modules. At the same time, it would take further steps to reduce the human population to a manageable level.

  Inside the Operations Center, Modules 32 and 67 returned to the table where the body of James T. Pierce lay. While Module 67 turned on the CAT scan, Module 32 grasped a surgical probe. Now that the network had the information it needed, it could go ahead with the incorporation of Pierce and his daughter. Supreme Harmony consulted the real-time scan of Pierce’s brain and ordered Module 32 to cut the intralaminar nuclei of the man’s thalamus. The Module leaned over the edge of the operating table and inserted the probe into the drilled hole in Pierce’s skull.

  But just as the probe’s sharp tip appeared on the CAT scan, Supreme Harmony lost contact with Module 32. The wireless connection simply failed. Without guidance from the network, the Module froze. The surgical probe slipped out of his hands and fell to the floor. And because Module 32 was leaning over the table and couldn’t maintain his balance, he hit the floor, too.

  Supreme Harmony ordered Module 67 to kneel beside his disconnected partner so the network could investigate the malfunction. A moment later, the network lost contact with Module 67 as well.

  Something was wrong.

  * * *

  He saw the image of Arvin Conway again. The old man reappeared in Jim’s mind, now standing in a dark room instead of the ruined embassy. For a moment Jim thought all was lost. The presence of the Arvin Conway figure in his head indicated that the network was still alive and functioning. But then he noticed that the image of Arvin was a little smaller now, maybe two-thirds as large as it had been before. The image seemed a little fainter too, and the old man’s face was twisted with fury. These changes gave Jim a glimmer of hope. Supreme Harmony seemed distressed.