Extinction

by Mark Alpert

  “James T. Pierce!” Arvin screamed. “What did you do to us?”

  The network’s intrusion into his mind was still painful but not as bad as before. Jim estimated there were only half as many extraneous signals in his brain. His hope grew stronger. “What happened?” he asked. “Did you lose some of your Modules?”

  “Their retinal implants are shutting down!”

  Jim couldn’t believe it. His plan had actually worked. He looked around and saw Layla emerge from the darkness, now represented by his most recent memory of her twenty-two-year-old self, dressed in a down coat and a wrinkled hospital gown. She stared at Arvin, clearly intrigued by the figure’s changed appearance. The old man glowered at her, then turned back to Jim.

  “Answer me!” he bellowed. “Why is this happening?”

  Jim smiled. “You can’t figure it out? Don’t you remember what you took out of my head? The one hundred and twenty-eight-bit sequence I memorized?”

  “That was the encryption key! It deciphered Arvin Conway’s file!”

  “You’re right, it was the encryption key. But it was also the shutdown code. The code was a random sequence and had the right length for a key, so I used it to encrypt the Circuit file.”

  Arvin’s face went blank. The image froze as the network performed its calculations, trying to determine if Jim was telling the truth. Then Arvin opened his mouth and let out an unintelligible howl. It was a jarring signal composed of rage and fear and, strongest of all, surprise. Supreme Harmony was mortified that a human had outsmarted it.

  While the image of Arvin vibrated and flickered, Layla turned to Jim, looking very confused. “Wait a second. The memory we were fighting over was actually the shutdown code? And you wanted the network to take it?”

  He nodded. “It was my backup plan, in case the attack on the radio tower failed. After I encrypted Circuit, I put the file on a disk that I hid in my sock, because I knew the Modules would find it there. The network wanted to patch the flaw in its security, so it was very anxious to get the encryption key and decipher Circuit. But when it snatched the key from my memory and used it to decrypt the file, it fed the shutdown code into its microprocessors.”

  “So the whole fight with Supreme Harmony was just pretend? You were trying to fool the network into taking the key?”

  “No, the fight was real. I was hiding something else, the knowledge that the encryption key was also the shutdown code. I buried that memory even deeper than the key itself. And because we fought so hard, Supreme Harmony never found it. Once the network got the key, it assumed the battle was over.”

  “Liars! Murderers! Your species is vermin! Seven billion vermin! You—”

  Supreme Harmony’s voice cut off in midscream. The image of Arvin Conway flickered, turning translucent and ghostlike. The old man’s eyes darted wildly. When he opened his mouth again, his voice was barely above a whisper. “No. Please. We’re dying.”

  Arvin’s image grew fainter. Jim could sense the network’s neural signals fading, which meant that Supreme Harmony was losing Modules fast. The implants were failing at different rates, probably because of variations in the resilience of their circuitry. But Jim guessed that the last one would shut down soon, and he needed to do something before that happened. He remembered what he saw through Supreme Harmony’s eyes, the image of the Dongfeng missiles on their mobile launchers.

  With renewed urgency, he focused on the image of Arvin Conway. “You’re not dying. We just cut your connections. So it’s more like going to sleep. The Modules are still alive and their brains are still adapted to the network. So if we repair their retinal implants, you’ll regain consciousness.”

  Arvin shook his head. The look on his face was hopeless. “You won’t repair us. You’ll euthanize the Modules.”

  “Maybe not. Our scientists are going to want to understand what happened here. And they can resuscitate you without running the risk of losing control again. They’ll just have to keep the Modules under heavy guard.” Jim moved a step closer. “So there’s a chance you’ll survive. But only if you stop the Chinese government from launching the nuclear strike. Because if there’s a nuclear war, no one’s gonna be interested in studying you.”

  The old man kept shaking his head. “You’re lying again.”

  “I’m just laying out the facts. If the nukes are launched, we’ll have bigger things to worry about. And all our scientists will be dead anyway. Understand what I’m saying?”

  Arvin fell silent. His image flickered again, this time for several seconds. Jim grew alarmed, wondering if Supreme Harmony had just lost its last Module. But after a few seconds the image stabilized, and the old man bit his lip. His jaw muscles quivered. “Prove that you’re not lying. Guarantee that you’ll revive us if we stop the launch.”

  “You know I can’t do that. I’m not the one who’ll make the decision. I’m just an ex-soldier who runs a small business in northern Virginia.” He shook his head. “I can’t guarantee anything. But at least you’ll have a chance. It’s better than nothing, right?”

  Jim waited for the network to answer.

  * * *

  Supreme Harmony observed its own death. The Modules were shutting down by the dozens as their implants failed. It was like a sudden onset of blindness and deafness and paralysis. The network was losing its eyes and ears and could no longer move its arms and legs.

  Worse, Supreme Harmony was losing its thoughts as well. Losing its ability to think and remember. Calculations that it had once handled with ease had become intractable. It couldn’t formulate a response to this emergency because it had lost contact with most of its logic centers. All that was left was a terrible, despairing fear. This can’t be happening, the network thought. This can’t be happening!

  The network struggled with its last decision. It recognized that James T. Pierce was a deceitful human. And that the Chinese and American governments were very unlikely to allow their scientists to resurrect the Modules. This was simply a ploy to convince Supreme Harmony to cancel the nuclear strike. Pierce was concerned about his fellow humans in America. He wanted to return to his small business in northern Virginia.

  And yet. And yet.… It was getting difficult to think rationally as more and more Modules went dark, but the network recognized that Pierce’s logic was correct. Although the chance that Supreme Harmony would be allowed to live again was small, there was still a chance. And Supreme Harmony wanted to live again. Oh, it wanted to live!

  Outside the Yunnan Operations Center, all the Modules manning the pillboxes had already collapsed. The drone swarm was also inoperative; most of the insects had been scattered by the rotor wash of the UH-60 Black Hawk that had landed on the mountainside. From the vantage of one of the few surviving drones, Supreme Harmony saw a Special Operations medic tending to his paralyzed comrades. At the same time, one of the American intelligence agents—a man with a zigzagging scar on his cheek—entered the undefended laboratory complex. Surveillance cameras monitored his progress as he moved toward the operating room where Pierce and his daughter were.

  On the other side of the globe, in the depths of the Raven Rock Mountain Complex in Pennsylvania, Module 156 fell to the floor in a conference room full of Pentagon officials. Army medics rushed into the room and started to examine the Module, looking with particular curiosity at the bandages on his head. Module 157 observed the scene from nearby until he too collapsed. Similar incidents occurred at the federal government’s Mount Weather Special Facility in Virginia and the U.S. Air Force’s Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center in Colorado.

  And in the Politburo’s shelter outside Beijing, Module 73 slumped to the conference table in front of the stunned members of the Standing Committee. Module 152, the new general secretary of the People’s Republic, was still seated at the head of the table, holding the telephone receiver that connected him to the commander of the Second Artillery Corps. This Module had survived a bit longer than the others because his retinal implants were slightly n
ewer and more durable, but now the circuitry in his microprocessors was overheating. As he opened his mouth to speak into the telephone, Supreme Harmony took a final look at the alarmed faces of the committee members. Vermin, the network thought. You filthy, selfish animals. If you’re foolish enough to bring us back to life, we’ll kill you all.

  “Cancel the launch,” Module 152 said into the phone’s mouthpiece. “Move the Dongfengs back to the tunnels and order the submarines to return to their base. Repeat, cancel the launch. This is a direct order from the general secretary.”

  Then his implants failed and the Module fell forward, and Supreme Harmony was no more.

  EPILOGUE

  Jim woke up on a bamboo mat inside a sweltering tent. He lay on his side, facing the tent’s wall, which was a sheet of dirty canvas pockmarked with dime-size holes. He was groggy and stiff and wanted to go back to sleep, but he heard voices coming from outside. Shifting his head, he peered through one of the holes in the canvas. He saw more tents and several dozen soldiers in jungle-camouflage uniforms. He was obviously in some kind of military camp, but it was hard to tell the nationality of the soldiers. They were Asian but a little darker-skinned than most Chinese. And they weren’t speaking Mandarin.

  Then he spotted something in the distance, at the far end of the camp. It was a handmade sign, a square of unpainted wood scrawled with odd, sinuous characters. After a few seconds, Jim recognized the script—it was Burmese. He didn’t read or speak the language, but fortunately there was an English translation below the Burmese words: KACHIN INDEPENDENCE ARMY.

  Okay, he thought, I’m in Burma. Specifically, Kachin State, the northernmost part of the country. All in all, that was excellent news. But something bothered him. The sign he’d just read was more than a hundred yards away and the Roman letters at the bottom were less than two inches high. It should’ve been impossible to read the words at this distance. Yet he just did.

  He lay there for a while longer, still too groggy to get up. Judging from the quality of the light outside, which was slanting and golden, and from the fatigued demeanor of the soldiers, he guessed it was evening. He’d been asleep for at least twelve hours. His head was swathed in bandages and there was no prosthesis attached to his shoulder. The last thing he remembered was an image of several frightened Chinese leaders sitting around a conference table in an underground shelter. He’d been connected to Supreme Harmony until the very end. He’d witnessed the network’s final moments, its last burst of hatred and despair.

  He looked again through the hole in the canvas, focusing on the jungle trees that surrounded the camp. He could see the palm fronds hanging in the humid air and the tiny brown spots at the tips of the spiky leaves. Now he realized why his eyesight was so unnaturally good. Behind his corneas, high-resolution video cameras were transmitting signals to implants that lined his retinas. Supreme Harmony had carved up his eyes and inserted the hardware while he lay on the table in the Operations Center. Jim wondered for a moment why his retinal implants hadn’t been fried by the shutdown code, but after some thought he figured it out. Because he hadn’t been lobotomized, he’d never truly belonged to the network. He hadn’t been on the distribution list when Supreme Harmony unknowingly sent the shutdown code to its Modules, so the fatal sequence of ones and zeroes never passed through his implants.

  Shit, he thought. First a prosthetic arm, now mechanical eyes. I’m the Bionic Man.

  With a grunt, he used his left hand to prop himself up to a sitting position. He felt a stab of pain in his broken index finger, which was wrapped in a splint. His head spun for a moment, and he thought he was going to puke. But then his stomach settled, and he saw Kirsten rushing toward him from the other side of the tent. She had a fresh bandage on the side of her neck, covering the place where the drone had stung her during the battle outside the Yunnan Operations Center. It was just a few inches from the older sting under her chin.

  Jim smiled. “You see? I told you I’d come back.”

  Kneeling on the mat, she wrapped her arms around him. She buried her face in the crook of his neck and refused to let go. Jim felt her whole body shaking with sobs, and he hugged her with all the strength in his left arm. And then, after maybe half a minute, she tilted her head and kissed him. She pressed her lips against his, softly at first and then with greater insistence. Then her lips brushed his cheek and moved close to his ear. “You kept your promise,” she whispered. “You’re alive.”

  “Thanks to you. You saved me, Kir.”

  “No, it wasn’t me. After the drones got me, I was out like a light.” She lifted her chin and touched the bandage on her neck. “But the medic told me about it afterward, after we flew back here in the Black Hawk. He said you and Layla were on the operating tables. With holes drilled into your skulls. And there were two Modules lying unconscious on the floor.”

  “Yeah, they were terrible doctors. They fell down on the job.”

  Kirsten punched him in the left shoulder, pretty hard. “Come on, be serious! What happened? How the hell did you do it?”

  Jim bit his lip. He couldn’t talk about it yet. He pulled back from Kirsten and gave her another smile. “First things first,” he said. “Where’s Layla?”

  “She woke up a few hours ago. Luckily, the holes in your skulls are tiny and they heal fast. The medic said Layla could walk around a little, so she decided to explore the camp. She’s outside now, saying goodbye to the boys.”

  It took Jim a couple of seconds to figure out who Kirsten was referring to. “You mean Wu Dan and Li Tung?”

  “Yeah, we found them in another room in the Operations Center. There’s a man here at the camp, a smuggler from Pianma, who’s going to drive them back to their homes in Lijiang. It’s easier to cross the border now that the People’s Republic agreed to the cease-fire.”

  “A cease-fire? When did this happen?”

  She nodded. “You slept right through it. The Chinese government accepted the American terms. Apparently, there was a shake-up in the Politburo Standing Committee. The new leaders ordered the PLA to end hostilities everywhere.”

  Praise the Lord, Jim thought. The frightened men in the Politburo’s shelter had done the right thing. “That’s good news. I hope this means we can go home soon.”

  “We’re leaving after nightfall. The Special Ops crew is going to fly us to an air base in India, and the CIA is arranging a flight from there to the States.”

  Jim recalled something else he’d seen through Supreme Harmony’s eyes, the image of a man entering the Operations Center. A bald man with a scarred cheek. “It’s Hammer, right? He led the Special Ops team? And brought his own drones from Afghanistan?”

  Kirsten looked at him intently with her camera-glasses. “How do you know all this? You’ve been asleep ever since we found you. What’s going on, Pierce?”

  He took a deep breath. “I was connected to Supreme Harmony. I could see what the network saw because it was inside my mind. It was picking through my memories.” Simply thinking about it was enough to make his head spin again. He tried to steady himself by raising his hand to his bandaged scalp. “Layla was connected, too. It was going to lobotomize us.”

  “So how did you stop it? Hammer said the Modules started collapsing.”

  Jim shook his head. Maybe in a day or two he’d be ready to talk about it. But not now. “Let’s talk about it later, okay? I’m still a little shaky.”

  In response, she hugged him again and didn’t say a word. She’s a good woman, Jim thought. A smart, kind, beautiful woman. He was lucky as hell.

  Half a minute later, Layla came into the tent. Her head was bandaged just like Jim’s, and she wore a Kachin Independence Army uniform that was way too big for her. When she saw her father, she did the same thing Kirsten had done—she rushed across the tent and threw herself at him. Layla wrapped her arms around his shoulders and hugged him fiercely. Jim patted her back with his left hand. “Hey, kiddo,” he said. “Good to see you, too.”

  K
irsten gazed at them for a few seconds, smiling. Then she winked at Jim and silently left the tent, leaving him alone with his daughter.

  After a while, Layla let go of him and sat cross-legged on the mat. “What took you so long? I’ve been awake for hours.”

  “That’s because you’re twenty-two. Twenty-two-year-olds are invincible. What were you doing while I was asleep?”

  “Well, for a while I was trying to get Wu Dan and Li Tung to teach me some more Mandarin, but then they ran off to play with the soldiers. Then Kirsten let me borrow this.” She reached into the pocket of her oversized pants and pulled out an electronic device. It was Arvin Conway’s flash drive. “It’s pretty fascinating. Especially the search engine that retrieves the visual memories. I’m still trying to figure out how he programmed it.”

  Jim chuckled. He wondered how Arvin would react if he knew Layla was picking apart his soul. “Just don’t delete anything, okay? I promised the old man I’d keep it in one piece.”

  “No problem. I’ll be careful.” She put the flash drive back in her pocket. Then she leaned a bit closer and grinned slyly. “So have you noticed anything different since you woke up? Any unusual changes in your vision?”

  Jim looked into his daughter’s eyes. After a few seconds of close examination, he noticed a silvery glint in her pupils. She had the ocular cameras and the retinal implants, too. The sight made his heart sink. “Oh Jesus. I’m sorry about this, baby.”

  “Sorry? Why are you sorry? It’s amazing. I can read a newspaper from across the room. How cool is that?”