by Brian Nelson
But then it seemed that technological change had slowed. The same B-52s that had bombed Vietnam in the 1960s also bombed Afghanistan and Syria. Yes, there were drones and webcams and real-time satellite footage, but the rate of change did not feel quite so awesome as before.
Now he realized that this perceived deceleration had been an illusion. The changes had been happening all along. He just hadn’t seen them, because the changes were, quite literally, not visible. They were invisible, microscopic. Since World War II, technology had moved away from things that people could see and appreciate (aircraft carriers, submarines, thermonuclear explosions) toward the invisible—the molecular, atomic, subatomic, quantum.
But were they really on the cusp of doing what they hoped to do? Were the Chinese really almost there? It was so big—not just one or two additions to the arsenal. No, the whole arsenal would change, and most existing weapons would be useless against those who wielded the new science.
And it would come from a single major breakthrough—what they were calling “replication”—when they figured out how to bring these things to life.
He reminded himself that he didn’t have to take the job. He could tell Garrett to go to hell. The Preacher would sigh and shake his head and say he was disappointed, but he would let Curtiss out because he wouldn’t want a man who wasn’t fully committed to the project. Then Curtiss would be free to retire in peace. Yet, it was clear there would be no peace. The peace was ending. That much was evident in the image of the dead Tibetan boy on the cot, in his shape, his strong back.
* * *
That night, Curtiss lay in bed beside his sleeping wife, running over everything he had learned. The spiraling vultures, the rib cages and spinal columns, the bassinet in the corner.
At 4:30 a.m., Curtiss found himself in Logan’s doorway, looking at his son as he slept. It was a ritual he had performed religiously when the boy was younger—the evening check that he was safe, a ritual that began when he was a newborn, fresh out of the hospital. Back then Curtiss would check three or four times a night just to make sure the boy was still breathing, often stepping into the room and placing a hand on his back. And that simple act, that simple piece of evidence—the rise and fall of his son’s chest—was still the most soothing thing in the world to him.
Logan was snoring loudly. Curtiss looked around the dim room, saw the silhouettes of the boy’s soccer trophies amid all the things that he knew were there, yet were concealed in the darkness: the prize he won for a state writing competition, a picture of the boy and their dog, the Pink Floyd prism poster, the life-size cutout of Lionel Messi.
He gave a heavy sigh as he remembered the Tibetan boy. He didn’t want the job, but he was going to take it. It came back to Annapolis and Bancroft Hall. It was the way he had been trained: to do the things that he didn’t want to do.
Chapter Two
February 28, 2025
Advanced Micro Laboratories, Sunnyvale, CA
Two men sat on a rooftop overlooking Silicon Valley.
From here, they could see the top floors of the other tech giants—silver-and-glass towers jutting above the trees like Mayan temples above the rain forest. On the streets below, workers were pulling out of parking lots and heading home for the day—a long stream of red brake lights making their way to the foothills. To the east lay the San Francisco Bay and the vibrant green wetlands that made up its southern tip.
But the two men weren’t looking at the buildings or the traffic or the bay. They were gazing out at the fiery sunset that filled the western sky. A warm high-pressure system had moved up from Baja in the afternoon, colliding with cooler air from the north. The effect was astonishing. The clouds were stacked up like shelves, each tier refracting a different hue of red or purple or orange, reaching high into the troposphere. Between the layers, shafts of light broke through, spotlighting distant patches of earth and water.
The two men sat in rapt silence. They had come here as part of a ritual, to mark the end of an era. Thirty-two years ago, they had been on this very rooftop together, confident young men celebrating the launch of their first company. It had been a big party: two thousand invitees, thirty tables of food, a swing band, and 120 gallons of ice cream. Reporters from all the major magazines and newspapers in the country had been there for “the startup of the decade,” and the party had run late into the night.
Now, the scene was very different. The building was abandoned—the electricity, water, and gas turned off. There were no witnesses, no reporters. The only light was a single candle on the plastic table between them. And while the company would live on under new leadership and in a new facility, for these two men it was over.
Finally, when all the light had drained from the sky and the first stars began to shine, Jack Behrmann stirred. He was a massive man, over seven feet tall and built like Paul Bunyan. He had a thick beard and spoke with a deep, gravelly voice.
“Can we trust him?”
“Curtiss?” Bill Eastman asked.
Jack nodded.
“It’s still bothering you, isn’t it?”
Another nod. “I suppose it’s not really him, exactly. It’s the whole idea. Weapon systems? I just never imagined …”
It was the big question, the one that had been plaguing both of them. It had been a frenetic six weeks since Admiral Curtiss had started calling—a disconcerting and emotionally draining process of staunch refusal, reconsideration, and, ultimately, acceptance. In the end, it was the images from Tibet that had persuaded them.
“You’re right to be worried,” Bill said. “Believe me, so am I. But it’s really the only option we have. The venture capital for this is all over the place: we have Procter and Gamble trying to use nanosites to make better toothpaste, and Merck trying to use them for erectile dysfunction. The only players with a real shot at replication are the national governments. That means China and the United States. And if our goal is to create a safe and sustainable postreplication world—which, of course, it is—then we can’t let China win. That leaves us with the US government.”
Jack grunted unenthusiastically. He knew all this, yet he kept trying to shuffle and reshuffle the possibilities until he got a different result. “It still doesn’t feel right.”
Bill gave him a reassuring smile. “You asked me if we can trust Curtiss. We can trust him for one thing: to do his job, which is to get us to replication. I think he’ll do everything in his power to help us, and that could be a tremendous asset. But after replication …”
Jack watched him closely. Bill had a habit of rocking back and forth in his chair as he spoke. He would lean forward to make a point, and his face would come into the candlelight; then he would lean back, and his face would be consumed in darkness again.
“It’s after replication that we have to be very careful with Curtiss. That’s when our goals will diverge. That’s when Curtiss and the people who control him will have their new big stick, when they’ll have the power to make weapons the likes of which this world has never seen. My fear is that they might be tempted to use those new weapons.” He leaned into the light. “First it was Gatling, then Nobel, and finally Oppenheimer. They each believed that their inventions would make combat much too destructive for the likes of ‘civilized’ humans.” Bill leaned back, and the hollows of his face filled with shadow. “I hope we’re not remembered for making the same mistake.”
Chapter Three
March 14, 2025
Tangshan Military Laboratory, Hebei Province, China
General Meng Longwei strode back and forth across his office, examining a single piece of paper. It was only a short paragraph, a snippet of data, yet he had been fixated on it all day. It has finally happened, he thought. He had known that it would. It had to, sooner or later, but that didn’t make it any easier to accept.
He turned to the far wall and looked at the faces there: dozens of eight-by-ten-i
nch color photos. They were arranged in a pyramid, a bureaucratic hierarchy. The kind of thing one might expect to see in a detective’s office, displaying the faces of an infamous crime ring such as la Cosa Nostra. It was like that, but different.
Jessica M. Berg—Head of Artificial Intelligence
Formerly full professor of integrated systems, Duke University, Durham, NC
PhD Yale University, 1991
National Medal of Science, 1997
Olexander Velichko—Head of Genetic Engineering
PhD National Technical University of Ukraine, Kyiv (Kiev) Polytechnic Institute, 2010
MD Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, 2013
Wolf Award in Medicine, 2016
William Allan Award (ASHG), 2020
And so on. Next was Jack Behrmann, the head of Nanotechnology. Meng found this man’s face particularly disturbing. There was something about the huge head and bushy beard that he found grotesque. He was smiling too broadly, and with those big, puffy cheeks, he was like a caricature of Santa Claus.
But the face that Meng was drawn to, the picture that pulled his eyes to it over and over again as he tried to work at his desk, was tiers above that. No, not Eastman, who looked serene and self-assured. No, the face above that. Meng had memorized its shape, its lines—the small mouth with thin lips, the nose that looked as though it had been broken at least once, the brown skin, the deep-set dark eyes.
Rear Admiral James Curtiss.
“How much do you know?” he said aloud, his own voice surprising him in the quiet office. In light of the piece of paper in his hand, it was the most important question in the world.
It was true that he felt a deep contempt for most Americans. Theirs was a nation of capricious children, obese, arrogant, and spoiled, who could be distracted by the simplest of things: fast food, Hollywood movies, video games, and sparkly gadgetry. Pampered, undisciplined, and stupid. Yu chun. It was Americans like these who had been his adversaries until now, moving forward with their own replication project in pitiful fits and starts. And so, he had, he now realized, grown complacent. He had had nothing to worry about.
But their choice of Curtiss worried him because it demonstrated a perspicacity that he had not thought his enemy possessed. Curtiss was a cruel, cruel man—a man who, like Meng himself, had been tempered by a huge military institution. A man who knew war, had survived it, and had gone far. They were very similar, really. And while they would likely never meet, they were now viciously committed to defeating each other.
He looked down at the paper in his hand. It was mostly gibberish, random characters. Only here and there a word that even meant anything:
（こやま けいいちろうてごし ゆうΣΓ や、11月11日 - ）形象顏藍TARGETTING KFMLEADERS委批作賤自己色為為粉紅色。[同時屬於∝♥♡ョム子團體手越增田] 餘波TEST SITE ABLE:DAGZE 重ϬϬFILL辦38TESTSITE98 艦08形象BAKER 顏色為長:BEILA 冷血役男 隔天ǼΏΣΓ續尋歡TESTSITE890CHARLIE:鄰娃墜樓 BAINA.伊朗國家電視ᆶᇸ臺當天援引伊朗石化行MORTALITY業官員納西100PERCENT裏的話報道說RECOGNITION TUNNELING事故係天ACCU然氣泄97 PERCENT 漏起火導致ǼΏΣΓфюЩᄦᄸ REPEAT ᅦᆶᇸ∝♥心ョムマヶ。納西裏說，火勢目前已得到控制，事故未對該石化廠處理設施造成損壞。他表示，事故原因
This small packet of data, a droplet in the torrent, had been snatched out of the ether by a government satellite because it had no clear recipient or sender. Suspicious, General Meng had ordered it decoded, and after a month this was all that had been, or could ever be, recovered.
But it had been enough.
Since his first day as project leader, he had assumed that there were spies among them. He suspected everyone and kept them under the tightest surveillance. Yet to know without a doubt that he had a traitor was still disconcerting. Like a man who discovers his wife has been unfaithful, he felt a complicated mix of distrust, betrayal, and, most of all, anger.
Two words particularly disturbed him: “RECOGNITION TUNNELING.” Those words jumped off the page at him. It was the technique that the new virus used to spin rapidly through the genome and read the entire double helix in a fraction of a second, thereby identifying the victims. It was a revolutionary step—something that took a large computer in a laboratory eight hours to do.
Mention of it suggested that the spy was high in his ranks and was likely passing on some of their most important design secrets. Of Meng’s more than twenty-four thousand employees, only two hundred knew about it.
But who? He looked at Admiral Curtiss again. “Who is it? I know he’s one of yours.” Then his voice changed. He coaxed sweetly, as if talking to a lover, “Why don’t you tell me who it is?”
Admiral Curtiss did not reply.
“It doesn’t matter,” Meng said abruptly, “because I will find him. Yes, I will find him, and then …”
The poor man—or woman. It was the most inexcusable of treasons in Meng’s eyes, given the history of his country. China had been the greatest nation in the world, its oldest civilization, its most advanced culture—at least until the Western powers had forced their way in, dividing them, pitting them against each other, destroying their culture in the name of their markets. It was what they all had been taught in grade school as “the Great National Crisis.” Beginning with the Opium Wars and culminating in the devastation and humiliation of the Second World War. Everyone knew it. China’s fall was the fault of the colonial powers.
And now, three quarters of a century after that great humiliation, after more than seventy-five years of the People’s Revolution, China was once again back in its rightful place—on the cusp of surpassing all other nations. So, to find a Han Chinese willing to trade their greatest technological advances—indeed, their nation’s very future—to the Americans … The thought brought up a fierce contempt in him, and the urge to do violence. When he found the spy, there would be torture and execution, then prison for his family. And the spy would be caught. Meng was supremely confident of this, just as he was confident that China would reach replication first.
Regardless of the Americans’ sudden awakening, regardless of their recruitment of Curtiss and Eastman, and regardless of the presence of the spy, Meng still remained largely unfazed. And why shouldn’t he be? For the past five years, he had guided the Tangshan program with tact and precision. He had pushed and cajoled and manipulated his scientists, who were some of the best in the world, to overcome obstacle after obstacle. He himself had conceived the synthetic virus as a weapon system that could be used either as an instrument of assassination or to subdue large populations. He had convinced the politburo to make it a research priority. And he had pushed to test the prototype on the Tibetan separatists, skillfully killing two birds with one stone.
And his success had not gone unnoticed.
No less than the president’s personal secretary, Tan Wei, had called to congratulate him. “The president sends his personal congratulations to you. He wants you to know that the people’s government treasures men like you—men who inspire us all with your service and dedication. Your work in Tangshan, as well as in the Tibetan Autonomous Region, ridding the country of the terrorist threat, will not be forgotten.” Tan Wei went on to insinuate that Meng would soon be promoted from brigadier to major general.
Meng had thanked the secretary profusely, reiterating that he was always ready to fight terrorists—although the truth was, he had an ulterior motive in targeting the GFM separatists. For it had been the peace-loving Tibetans, a people who supposedly dedicated themselves to compassion for all life, who had killed his wife and daughter twelve years ago.
It was the night his life changed forever, during the May 2009 uprising, when Meng was just a captain stationed in Lhasa, in charge of the Najin barracks. He and his men had been outside the Tsuglagkhang (central cathedral), trying to quell the anarchists, when, unbeknownst to him, a band of th
em had stormed the barracks, overwhelming the few remaining soldiers and setting the place on fire.
That night, he had returned home to look for Li Xia and Lien. At first, he was sure they had fled like most of the other families. It was only late in the night, when he returned to his fire-gutted house, that he found them dead in the bedroom closet. They must have gone there to hide. The image of their faces as his flashlight crossed over them was forever cauterized in his mind. For the next five years it had persistently reappeared at least every hour, until he was quite sure it would drive him mad.
I’m sorry.
He could only guess what had happened. They had gone to the closet to hide, that much was certain. But once the fire started, Li Xia must have been too frightened to come out, despite the smoke, likely hearing the whooping and shouting of the Tibetan Mantze outside.
I’m sorry.
Lien, his daughter, had just turned two and, that morning, had learned the expression duì bu qǐ (I’m sorry). But she didn’t understand what it meant or in what context to say it, so she had gone around repeating it for everything. When her favorite cartoon ended: I’m sorry. Talking to her stuffed bunny: Wǒ ài nǐ. Duì bu qǐ (I love you, I’m sorry). When Meng had left the house in his uniform: Bye, Daddy, I’m sorry.
He had chuckled at that. I’m sorry, too, Lien.
And so, he was forever haunted by scenarios of their last moments. He imagined them in the closet. The sounds of the fire: the wind roar and the occasional startling pop. The shouts of revelry outside. And the smoke as it began to make its hypnotic curlicues under the closet door.
I’m sorry.
The bodies had not been burned—the fire had been put out before that. But they had been asphyxiated, their skin turned a milky purple. That was how they were when he found them, when he had opened the door—just checking, not really believing—and shined the flashlight inside. He knew immediately that they were gone. He did not call for help, didn’t even look away. He simply got down on his hands and knees and crawled into the closet behind his wife, pulled them both close, and turned off the flashlight. He had to use every ounce of his willpower to ignore the coldness of their skin.