The Last Sword Maker

by Brian Nelson

  But he knew he must at least try—if not for himself, for them.

  It would be up to his right hand. Even though the fingers were gone, there was enough of a stump on his index finger that he might be able to pinch the pill. With his thumb, he slowly began to work the pill out of the seam. He had to ease it out slowly, carefully, lest it fall to the floor.

  “It’s time to begin again, old friend,” Meng said, coming forward and giving him three quick little slaps to the face. “I know you’re awake. Don’t forget, I’ve done this before, as many Tibetans can tell you.”

  Bo Li’s head rolled heavily, and he looked up at Meng with glassy eyes.

  “Tell me when it started,” the general said.

  Bo Li considered lying, saying it was recent, because that would make it sound as if the treason were not so great. But he dare not risk being caught in a lie now. “About two years,” he said weakly. “They recruited me when I went to visit Heng in New York.”

  Meng seemed satisfied with the answer.

  Bo Li had now worked the pill out a bit, and he tried to grip it. But the hand was clumsy from the trauma of the amputated fingers—club-like, swollen, and stiff. He couldn’t grip it. He would have to push it out a little bit more, ever so gently.

  “And who gave you the miniature iSheets?”

  “I don’t know. They arrived by post.”

  Meng picked up the cricket bat and tested its weight. He didn’t like any I don’t know answers. “How often did they come?”

  “Only once. I remember the return address was from an optometrist on Hexi Road.”

  Meng nodded. It made sense. In fact, the whole thing was ingenious. Truly ingenious. He appreciated that, yet he found himself shaking his head with disgust all the same.

  Bo Li tried again to pinch the pill. It was a supreme effort. Gripping it meant he was pushing it into the stump of his finger; pinching it against exposed bone. The pain ran over him like a sheet of cold rain, and it was all he could do to disguise the agony. But he had it. It was out.

  He willed his left hand to open. He couldn’t feel the hand itself, but he could touch it with his right and feel that it was open. He dropped the pill in and willed it shut, again, checking it with the other hand. Now the pill was safely in his left fist.

  “Now tell me about the drops,” Meng said.

  “I will tell you if you will let my hands free.”

  “No.”

  “Just for a few minutes. Please. I’ll tell you what you want to know.”

  “Tell me first.”

  Bo Li nodded slowly. “All right.” And he told him about the drops.

  Meng’s jaw shivered spasmodically as the rage came over him again. He was angry at Bo Li, but also at his own men, who had watched it happen and had seen nothing.

  “Please, my hands,” Bo Li said. “You have me. I’m cooperating.”

  Meng ignored him, pacing around the room. To Bo Li, the general seemed cool and calm again. But he knew that the other Meng was just under the surface. If he said the wrong thing, that other Meng would be back. “Why?” he said. “Why did you do it? Your family sacrificed so much for China. They dedicated their whole lives to ridding us of the imperialists. And you disgraced them and everything they worked for. Why?”

  “Please, my hands.”

  Meng came closer. He placed his hands on the arms of the chair and pushed his face close to Bo Li’s. Their eyes met. “Tell me, old friend. Why?”

  “I’ll try to explain, but first, please, my hands.”

  Meng pushed himself up and stood, inspecting the man. Finally, he waved a tired hand at the guards, and one came forward to remove the cuffs.

  “Thank you,” Bo Li said. “Thank you.”

  Bo Li brought his hands around and saw his wounds for the first time. The four bloody stumps were purple and black, caked with dried blood, and a shoot of bone protruded from two of them.

  The sight filled him with a rush of several emotions: First was sadness, a sense of needless loss. Then there was hatred toward Meng for doing it to him. Finally, there was a sense of strength, a sudden conviction. He had been right to do all the things he had done. It was right to commit treason against a government that would do this to its own people. And he was only one of many, of hundreds of thousands—no, one of millions—who had died defying this government. And they all had been right to do it.

  There was solace in knowing that his was an ordinary death. One single life to be thrown on the heap, the great graveyard of history. From Mao’s killing of a quarter of his own army, to the reform camps, to the Hundred Flowers purge, to the occupation of Lhasa, to the Cultural Revolution, all the way to Tiananmen Square. His was an ordinary death. One single number, a lone digit—1—of millions.

  He began coughing—a violent cough, but a fake cough. He brought his left fist to his face and sucked in the pill.

  Then he slouched back in his chair as if he had just finished a long race. He was free. All he had to do was bite, and it would all be over.

  “You want to know why I did it?”

  Meng looked at him eagerly. “Yes.”

  Bo Li just nodded, almost smiled. For a brief moment, he considered trying to explain it to Meng. But the man didn’t deserve his final words. Instead, he turned his words inward. To his wife and son. “My dearest Yàn and my boy Heng. I love you, and I want you to know that I cherished every moment that I had you. And I’m so sorry I can’t be with you anymore.”

  “Come on,” Meng said, “out with it.”

  Bo Li would soon be free. He had not told his secret. Meng had never asked the right question. He bit into the pill.

  * * *

  At three thirty in the morning, Admiral Curtiss was working in his study. He was just about to turn out the light when he decided to check his mail. It was a bad habit, he knew, because it would just be full of more demands for his time. Luckily, there was nothing new. He was about to shut down the computer when a new message popped up.

  “New Mail - Subject: No subject—From: Meng Longwei. Received 0337 9 November 2025”

  General Meng.

  Curtiss stared at it and rubbed his jaw. Now, what could this be? Was it some kind of trick? The Chinese were constantly barraging the lab with cyberattacks. Many of them were emails that appeared to be from legitimate places—banks, alumni associations, even friends and family—trying to entice employees into clicking on them and releasing their bots into the network. Curtiss told himself not to open it. Just send it to one of the techies for quarantine.

  But he didn’t. Instead, he found himself running his mouse over it.

  “Subject: No subject—From: Meng Longwei. Received 0337 9 November 2025”

  It seemed to be calling to him. Pulsating. Go on, open me! Perhaps it was the late hour or his fatigue, but he couldn’t let it go. He needed to know.

  But he couldn’t risk the network. That was out of the question. He looked around. In the corner was a new iSheet he had bought for Logan. He grabbed it, spent fifteen minutes configuring it, and then set up a new email account. Then he forwarded Meng’s message to it. Finally, he disconnected it from the network.

  The mouse floated above the name: Meng Longwei. Go on, he told himself, get it over with. He tapped the screen.

  A huge image began to load. It opened painfully slowly, filling in from top to bottom. He could see only a small piece of it, it was so large. He couldn’t make it out. Were those teeth? Bloody teeth? A torn lip? What in the hell was it?

  Then the image finished loading and adjusted, instantly shrinking down.

  Curtiss’s veins flooded instantly with a violent cocktail of adrenaline and hate. The hardness. He snarled aloud at Meng, as if he were actually in the room.

  Meng, dressed in fractal woodland camo, was grinning like a boy on his birthday. He was standing in what
could only be a torture chamber: a metal chair bolted to the floor, a pool of black blood around it, an IV stand, a filleting knife, and a cricket bat. Facedown on the floor was a corpse, naked except for a bloodstained shirt, the bare legs tapering up to pasty buttocks. But the body was not complete.

  In Meng’s outstretched hand, just in front of his grinning face, was the head of Bo Li.

  “I got him!” it said at the bottom of the photo.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Replication

  December 24, 2025

  Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC

  Phase 1 Deadline: T-plus fourteen days

  Mankind is in the first steps of creating a life-form whose evolution will be measured in minutes, not millennia.

  —Bill Eastman

  The breakthrough came on Christmas Eve.

  On the night of the twenty-third, a heavy snowstorm came up the Eastern Seaboard. By morning, the capital was under fourteen inches of snow.

  Eric got to work early, trudging through the snow, already giddy with excitement. The first thing he did was take a look at her. Their newest prototype: Minerva-Charlie. If you looked close enough, long enough, you could almost imagine you could see her with the naked eye. You couldn’t, of course—at her thickest, she was only a hundred atoms wide.

  So that they could see her, Ryan had hooked a scanning electron microscope up to a giant iSheet in the main auditorium. Amplified in this way, Minerva-C looked like a bleached-white fighter plane sitting on the tarmac. She had six large primary legs, then thousands of smaller secondary legs and arms, and looked like a cross between a virus and a wingless mosquito. Every now and then she would vibrate, and the legs and arms would go into a blur. This was each limb rising, extending, and gripping. If the motion were slowed down to one ten-thousandth its natural speed, it would look like a hand running down the keys of a piano. This was an internal systems check—a little like a fly preening itself. Eric swelled with pride to see that. The design of those legs was unmistakable. He had modeled them from the legs of the horseshoe crab.

  In the bottom of the screen, a timer counted down to this evening’s eight o’clock deadline: t-minus 12:44:19.

  * * *

  1258 hours: Nanotech Division final test cycle:

  Minerva-Charlie: T-minus 07:02:56

  “And people think cockroaches are tough!” Eric said.

  “That, my friend, is the benefit of designing with diamondoid,” Jack Behrmann said, lowering the temperature in the holding container. “Its functional temperature range is between 10 and 4,273.15 degrees Kelvin. That little gal could be in a blast furnace and still wear a parka. And on the cold end, as long as it’s warm enough for just a little bit of molecular activity, she’ll keep truckin’.” Jack leaned back in an enormous stretch, his wingspan taking up half the room. He yawned and put his hands behind his head. “That’s it! That’s the last test for us. Now it’s up to AI and Genetics. All we can do now is wait.”

  But that was really worse, Eric thought. He was nervous enough already. Now he had seven hours to do nothing but worry about all the thousands of things he might have overlooked.

  * * *

  1515 hours: Artificial Intelligence final test cycle:

  Minerva-Charlie: T-minus 04:45:00

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck, and FUCK!” Ryan Lee stood up and pressed his hands against his thighs, closed his eyes, and breathed deeply. The breathing wasn’t to calm himself, but to gather strength, like a martial arts expert preparing for the attack. On the sixty-five-inch iSheet, split between five windows were snapshots of six hundred thousand lines of code he had written over the past two years. Very calmly, he gripped the keyboard at the narrow end with both hands and began swinging. Sparks leaped from the screen, and keys rained down like pennies—Z, Q, R, Alt, Caps Lock.

  It had been three days since he last slept.

  * * *

  1515 hours: Artificial Intelligence final test cycle:

  Minerva-Charlie: T-minus 03:45:00

  Eric walked into the Moffett Hangar and saw the six hundred thousand lines of computer code spread out on the floor. It covered at least two acres. Forty-five programmers were on their hands and knees with handheld magnifying lights, looking for the error.

  Ryan was doing his best to coordinate the search, directing the conscripts—including his own boss, Dr. Berg—to the most suspect areas. Eric felt instant sympathy for him. His face was somehow both pale and flushed, his eyes swollen and puffy. Eric put a hand on his shoulder. “Is this what they call the luck of the Irish?” he said, referring to Ryan’s adopted pedigree. Though born in Korea, he had been adopted by Irish American parents, last name Lee, as in Robert E. Lee. “Really, I’m Irish,” he liked to say.

  Ryan snorted a laugh. “I’d feel lucky if all I had to do was find a needle in a haystack. This could take a month.” Ryan ran a hand through his black hair. “And we thought Bill was pissed when we had to push the deadline back two weeks. Wait till he hears about this.”

  “Relax, we’ll find it. You ran every possible debugging program, and nothing?”

  Ryan nodded. “It’s got to be a logic bug like an infinite loop or two parallel-executing threads.”

  “Where do I start?”

  Eric grabbed a magnifying light and was soon down on his hands and knees. They worked silently, like peasant farmers tending to row after row of computer code.

  An hour passed, then another. Just as Eric began to feel that it was truly hopeless, Dr. Berg sat up. “I got it!” she said. A normally austere woman with deep crow’s-feet at the corners of her eyes, she looked as ecstatic as a little girl getting a standing ovation at the school play.

  Ryan ran to the spot, his sneakers splashing through the paper. After a minute, he confirmed the discovery. “I knew it! A deadlock. Dr. Berg, you are a GODDESS!”

  “Yes,” she said, appearing to give it some serious thought. “I am.”

  Ryan looked across the field of data at Eric, who was sitting up on his knees. It had taken them only two hours. “Luck of the Irish,” Ryan said.

  * * *

  2028 hours: Genetics Division final test cycle:

  Minerva-Charlie: T-plus 00:28:09

  Up in his office, Bill Eastman was sitting with his head in his hands. He gave a heavy sigh. “Okay, what are our chances?”

  “Tough to say, Bill,” Jack said. “It’s not like anyone’s ever done this before.”

  Bill motioned with his hand. Keep going.

  “If Olex’s team doesn’t have any trouble, and the AI code has really been fixed, I’d say our chances are at least eighty, eighty-five percent.” Jack paused, and sat down on the opposite side of the desk. “Now,” he added, inhaling deeply, “will she replicate more than once? Increasingly unlikely. But, Bill, the science of it is sound. God knows it works every day in nature. I see no reason why it shouldn’t work here, too.”

  Bill rubbed his forehead. “It has to work,” he replied. “God damn it, it has to. If we fail, if we have to postpone, I’ll never get this team back up to speed.” They were hanging by a thread.

  Jack sighed. His friend was under tremendous strain. China was getting ever closer to the same goal. And who knew what China would do if they replicated first? To be safe, to give America time to create countermeasures, they had to get this right, and it had to be now.

  Jack searched for something encouraging to say, but all he could come up with were platitudes, so he kept quiet. They had known each other too long for that.

  * * *

  2200 hours: Replication test: Minerva-Charlie:

  T-plus 02:00:56

  Twenty-two hundred nanotechnologists, systems engineers, and geneticists were crowded into the main auditorium when the clock struck ten. This was it: the final test. Success tonight would change everything. If it worked, they could finally take off in
all the exciting new directions that the age of nanotechnology promised. And if they failed, then what? Eric didn’t want to think about it.

  The place was strangely quiet, and it was a little unnerving to have so many people in one room and have it be so still. He wanted to say something, to make a joke to Ryan or Jane, but the silence had somehow become hallowed. The room was dark, the only light emanating from the huge iSheet, which painted everyone’s faces in an eerie pale glow. On the screen was their creation, not yet alive.

  Minutes ticked by. They were waiting for Bill Eastman, who sat in the back of the room, reviewing the test results. The glare from his iSheet caught on his glasses, making them disks of light. Every few minutes, Eric would look over his shoulder to see if Bill was ready.

  Ryan sat beside Eric, fidgeting nervously, his fingers crossed under the table. Jane bit at her nails. Olex sat nearby, playing it cool, absently galloping his fingertips on the table. Vadup, vadup, vadup.

  Finally, Bill was ready.

  “Okay, ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “here we go.” He jabbed the Enter key. First, they heard a noise, very faint, like the hum of wet power cables. On the chalky black-and-white video screen, Minerva-C trembled, paused, trembled again, then shook into a blur. When she came back into focus, there were two.

  Simple. Natural. Fast.

  The room exploded with noise. They had done it. “Son of a bitch,” Jane breathed. “It worked!” They all were on their feet. People hooted and cried out, gave each other high fives, and hugged. Jane grabbed Eric and kissed him full on the mouth. An instant later, she was lost in the pandemonium. The place went wild.

  Then came another roar. Eric turned to the screen. Now there were four. A second later, the four trembled, then blurred, and there were eight. The room roared again. Again the tremble and blur. Sixteen. Thirty-two. Sixty-four. One hundred twenty-eight. Two hundred fifty-six. At each replication, everyone cheered, raising fists into the air. Ryan had to readjust the microscope. Now it looked like a satellite view of an airfield covered with neat rows of airplanes. Some of them began to move about like curious insects.