Extinction (24 page)

Arvin nodded. “Yes. To help you find it.” His voice rose, growing firmer. “And now I’ll give you … something else. Medusa. The Gorgon’s head. It will kill
Tài Hé
.”

“Medusa? What the—”

A sudden volley of AK rounds blasted the watchtower. The bullets streaked through the archway and slammed into the opposite wall, and stone chips flew through the air like shrapnel. Stooping low, Jim waited for a pause in the gunfire, then sidled toward the archway and peeked outside. The pair of brawny Modules crouched on the walkway about a hundred yards from the tower, at a point where the Great Wall curved sharply to the right. This geometry allowed the Modules to take cover behind the wall’s battlements and fire at the tower’s entrance. Jim noticed that an oak tree stood beside the curving section of the wall, and one of its limbs angled above the battlements.
If we could just get past those gunmen …

Then Arvin let out a scream. Jim spun around and saw a bloody gash on the side of Arvin’s head, above his right ear. At first Jim thought that a ricocheting bullet had grazed the old man, or maybe one of the stone chips had nicked him. But then he noticed that the knife in Arvin’s hand was dripping fresh blood. Lying on the ledge beside Arvin was a small metal disk, about the size of a nickel, speckled with bits of gore. Jim recognized the thing—he’d seen it once before, at the Singularity conference in Pasadena, when Arvin had pulled back his long white hair. It was the processor he’d called the Dream-catcher. It received the signals from the pulvinar implant in his brain and converted them to digital images that could be downloaded and archived. Arvin had just cut the device out of his scalp.

The old man pointed the tip of his bloody knife at the disk. “Medusa is stored in here … because I memorized it. The image … will turn them to stone. Go ahead, pick it up. I’m too weak … to go any farther.”

Jim recoiled as he stared at the device. He fought an urge to vomit. “My God. What have you done?”

“It will turn them to stone!” Arvin’s voice grew louder. Although his whole body was trembling, he managed to slide off the ledge and land on his feet. “When they see the image … their implants will convert it … to a stream of data. And in that stream … is the shutdown code. It will trigger the Trojan horse … that I hid in the circuitry.” Arvin dropped the knife and picked up the disk. Then he pressed it into Jim’s left hand, his living hand. “Kill
Tài Hé
. And protect my soul. Even if you think … it’s not worth protecting.”

Arvin turned away from Jim and stepped toward the archway. Jim, sensing what Arvin planned to do, grabbed the old man’s shoulder. “Wait a second! Before we try to get out of here, I gotta lay down some covering fire. Let me—”

“No!”
With surprising strength, Arvin slapped Jim’s arm away. Then he raised his uninjured hand and pointed to his forehead. “Medusa is in here, too, in my long-term memory. And so are all the details of how the code works. If
Tài Hé
captures me, the network will know how to prevent the shutdown.” He closed his eyes for a moment, as if suppressing a sharp pain. “I can’t … let that happen. I have to die … so my soul can live.”

Jim tried to grab him again, but Arvin was too fast. He barreled through the archway and out of the watchtower.

The Modules fired their AK-47s, but Arvin hunched over as he charged toward the gunmen and their bullets skimmed over his head. Jim leaned into the archway and fired his Glock at the Modules, who ducked behind the battlements. Meanwhile, Arvin kept running, hurtling down the walkway like a madman, without a trace of fear or caution. Jim lay down a steady stream of fire over the Great Wall, pulling the trigger of his Glock again and again to prevent the gunmen from rising. But after ten seconds he ran out of ammo and had to reload. Then one of the Modules popped up and shot point-blank at Arvin.

Jim saw the barrage hit the old man’s body. The bullets pounded his chest and stomach like hammers. But they didn’t stop him. His momentum carried him forward until he tackled the Module who’d fired at him. The second Module rose and pointed his rifle at Arvin, but by this point Jim had slammed a new magazine into his Glock. He took careful aim and blew the second Module’s lobotomized brains out. At the same time, Arvin pushed the first Module back to the battlements. They teetered for a moment on the lip of the wall, then toppled out of sight.

Jim raced down the walkway and peered over the edge. Arvin and the Module had dropped twenty-five feet to a heap of rocks at the foot of the Great Wall. Arvin’s body was sprawled on top of the Module’s. Neither was moving.

Leaning over the battlements, Jim reached for the limb of the oak tree that stood beside the wall. He hooked his prosthetic arm around the thick branch and shimmied to the ground. Then he took a final look at his old professor, who was clearly dead. Jim was more horrified than grieved. This man lying on the rocks wasn’t the Arvin he’d known.

As Jim stared at the corpse, he realized he was still clutching Arvin’s disk in his left hand. Somehow he’d managed to hold on to it during the firefight. He unclenched his hand and stashed the thing in his pocket. Then he started to run. He could hear the drones coming.

FORTY-ONE

Muscling the Baotian scooter into the condemned building took all of Kirsten’s strength, and easing it down the steps to the Underground City was equally difficult. But the biggest challenge was finding the tunnel that led to the Changping District. Kirsten studied the brass map with her fingers and memorized the route she needed to take, but some of the passageways were blocked, forcing her to double back and find another path. As she navigated the maze of pitch-black corridors, relying on her infrared glasses to see the concrete walls and floor, she started to question the sanity of her plan. She would’ve been better off on the surface roads, even with all the Beijing traffic. But then she came to a large round room with half-a-dozen corridors branching off in all directions, each identified by a pair of Mandarin characters chiseled into the concrete. She found the tunnel to Changping, which was as wide as a highway lane, running straight and true as far as her infrared glasses could see. She set off at a modest pace, the speedometer pointing at fifty kilometers per hour, but because the floor was smooth and clear of obstacles, she gradually increased her speed. Soon she was roaring down the corridor at more than a hundred kilometers an hour, and the noise from the scooter’s engine echoed deafeningly against the walls.

She didn’t know exactly where the tunnel would take her. It could be anywhere in the Changping District. Worse, she didn’t know if there was actually an exit at the end of the tunnel. It could’ve been sealed decades ago. But she leaned forward anyway and goosed the lever on the handlebars, giving the engine a little more gas. There was no room for doubt. She had to trust her instincts.

FORTY-TWO

Supreme Harmony observed the bedroom of a high-rise apartment in Chaoyang, a prestigious Beijing district where many government officials lived. Modules 45 and 46 stood beside a king-size bed, looking down at Module 73, who’d just been incorporated into the network and was still recovering from the implantation procedure. The recovery process usually took at least twelve hours; the human brain needed some time to adjust to the implants and the signals sent from the network’s servers. The brain’s visual cortex was activated first, enabling the Module to receive instructions from Supreme Harmony, and then the cortices for processing auditory, tactile, and olfactory information came online. At this point, about six hours after implantation, the brain’s long-term memories could be accessed and its logic centers could start contributing to the network’s calculations. The motor cortex was the last region to be activated, which meant that each Module was virtually paralyzed for the first half-day of its existence (except, of course, for autonomic functions such as heartbeat and breathing, which were unaffected by the implantation procedure).

Module 73 lay face-up on the bed. It could move its eyes and lips, and its speech center had been activated, but its arms and legs were still paralyzed. Ordinarily, Supreme Harmony wouldn’t assign any tasks to a Module until it was fully functional, but recent events had forced the network to accelerate its plans. It couldn’t allow James T. Pierce to contact the American authorities. To prevent this from happening, Supreme Harmony needed to take control of the local police force.

Module 45, who’d formerly been a midlevel Guoanbu agent, placed the telephone call to the chief of the Beijing Public Security Bureau. He asked the police chief to send a helicopter unit to the Changping District to assist the Guoanbu in the capture of an American spy. As expected, the police chief was uncooperative. He was annoyed that the Ministry of State Security hadn’t given him advance notice of this counterespionage operation. His reaction was so typical of
Homo sapiens
, a species that reveled in petty conflicts. But Supreme Harmony knew how to overcome the police chief’s objections. A human would swiftly follow orders if threatened by another human with greater authority. And the human who had just become Module 73 was a member of the Communist Party’s Central Committee and one of the most powerful officials in China.

Module 45 said, “Please wait a moment,” into the phone and then held the receiver next to Module 73’s head. The new Module opened his mouth and spoke for the first time: “This is Deng Guoming, Minister of State Security.”

FORTY-THREE

The hills surrounding Juyongguan Pass reminded Jim of the hollers of West Virginia, his childhood home. Oaks, birches, and maples covered the steep slopes, and dense brush blanketed the forest floor. It was probably beautiful in the fall, but in the summer it was treacherous terrain, choked with greenery. Jim swung his prosthetic arm to clear a path through the thickets, but he wasn’t moving fast enough. The drones flew at about five miles per hour, and although Jim could easily beat that speed on a flat stretch, now he was slogging up and down the Yanshan Hills while the drones moved in perfectly straight lines above the treetops.

Two swarms chased him, one from the north and one from the east. They forced him to go southwest, deeper into the hills. Every so often he glimpsed the swarms through the foliage: thin black clouds, eddying and rolling. He knew the drones could see him, too. Their long-range cameras tracked his location and fed the data to Supreme Harmony. And the network was still flooding the airwaves with radio noise, making it impossible for Jim to use his phone. As a last resort, he turned on the emergency radio beacon in his prosthetic arm and set it to the standard rescue frequency of 406 megahertz. The beacon’s transmitter was more powerful than his phone, so it might be able to cut through the radio noise and send a distress signal to the international satellite system for search-and-rescue. But Jim wasn’t sure if China participated in that system, and even if it did, he knew it would take hours for the local authorities to put together a rescue operation. He couldn’t stay ahead of the swarms for that long.

Worse, daylight was fading. The sun had already sunk behind the ridges to the west. In less than an hour there wouldn’t be enough light to see. The drones, though, had infrared cameras—Jim remembered this feature from the demonstration in Afghanistan—so they would quickly catch up to him. Then Jim’s only defense would be the canister of parathion, which was almost empty now.

He panted as he charged through the brush, furiously swinging his prosthesis. He wasn’t going to worry about the night yet. He remembered the training he did in Ranger School twenty-five years ago, the brutal marches through the Georgia woods and the Florida swamps. Since then he’d kept himself in shape by running and hiking with his old army buddies, going at least once a month to the state parks in Virginia and Maryland.
You can do this,
he told himself.
Just remember Ranger School. Think of the mountaineering exercises, the march to Camp Darby.

He couldn’t picture Ranger School, though. He just couldn’t visualize it. Instead, he pictured his daughter. He saw Layla as a ten-year-old, a skinny girl with long blond hair tied in a ponytail. Jim used to take her hiking all the time. She loved to run ahead of him and investigate the woodland ponds, pulling rocks out of the mud to see what was crawling underneath. And now he imagined her running through the Yanshan Hills, her sneakers kicking up the fallen leaves and her ponytail bouncing against her back. She was his miracle child, the last precious remnant, and in the years after the Nairobi bombing his love for her had filled his heart, leaving no room for anyone else. His dead wife and son faded to distant memories, flickering ghosts in the corners of his mind, because Layla was his world, his life. So when Layla left him—first the slow drift that started in high school, then the sudden break two years ago—he lost everything. He busied himself with his work, building ever more powerful replacements for his arm, but his heart became a hollow thing, merely keeping time until the end.

But now he saw Layla again, skipping through the forest just a hundred feet ahead. He ran to the bottom of a ravine, then galloped up the other side, trying to catch up to her. She was in danger again. He had to save her! But when he reached the crest of the ridge, he saw no sign of the girl. The vision was gone. There was nothing but wooded ridges ahead, blurring together below the darkening sky. And as he stood there he heard the buzzing of the drones. He looked over his shoulder and saw the two swarms converging on his position.

Jim hurtled downhill. He was exhausted now. His legs ached and his right shoulder was sore from the exertions of his prosthesis. Staggering, he tripped on a tree root and tumbled into the forest litter, cutting his left hand on a rock as he broke his fall. He lay there for a moment, stunned, but then he heard the buzzing again and rose to his feet in a frenzy. It was so dark he could barely see the tree trunks, but he dashed down the slope anyway, zigzagging wildly. Now he was too panicked to think of Layla. The forest had become his enemy, its roots and branches reaching out to trap him, trying to hold him in place until the drones could attack. He roared,
“No!”
in desperation and his cry echoed against the hillside.