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.”
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.
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.
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 newer 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.
“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.
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
