black. Layla remembered the speedboats in Gatun Lake and the gunshots that had echoed across the water.
As the plane ascended, Layla twisted around in her seat, as much as her bindings would allow, and looked out the window. She glimpsed a dense cluster of lights on the ground and a great black expanse beside it. It’s a coastal city, she thought, probably Panama City. We’ve just taken off from Panama International Airport and now we’re heading west over the Pacific Ocean.
She felt a wave of nausea. Her head throbbed where the rifle butt had hit her. She almost puked, but she managed to keep it down.
One of the agents in black looked at her from across the aisle. He had muscular forearms tattooed with snakes and Mandarin characters. He grinned. “Feeling sick?” he asked in a thick accent.
Layla didn’t answer. She stared straight ahead.
“How old are you?” the agent asked. His grin became a leer. “You look like a schoolgirl.”
She scowled. “And you look like a pimp.”
The agent chuckled. Then he reached into the pocket of his black pants and pulled something out. It was her flash drive, the one holding the files from Dragon Fire. “This doesn’t belong to you,” the agent said. “You tried to steal it from us.”
“I didn’t steal it.”
“Yes, you did. You and Wen Sheng. We had to punish him.”
“Kill him, you mean. Why didn’t you kill me, too?”
The agent shrugged. “I don’t know. I just follow orders.”
“Bullshit.”
“I’m telling the truth. I don’t know the reason. But you’ll find out soon enough.”
“When we get to Beijing?”
He shook his head. “We’re not going to Beijing. We’re going to Lijiang.”
“Lijiang?”
“It’s a city. In Yunnan Province.”
TWENTY-FOUR
Arvin Conway was eating lunch at Quanjude, his favorite Peking duck restaurant in Beijing, but the meal was a disappointment. The last time he’d been in China, when he’d helped Dr. Zhang Jintao set up the Supreme Harmony network, he and Zhang had enjoyed Quanjude enormously. They’d gorged on the sweet, crispy slices of duck and downed a considerable amount of Tsingtao beer. But in the months since then, Arvin’s cancer had spread from his pancreas to the rest of his body, and the drugs he’d taken to slow the disease had deadened his taste buds and killed his appetite. So he sat quietly at the table while his bodyguard—a big, burly ex-cop named Frank Nash—exchanged small talk with an equally big man named Liu Xiaofang. Liu was Arvin’s minder, the Guoanbu agent assigned to keep an eye on him.
Arvin had arrived in Beijing the day before. He’d left the United States in a hurry, knowing that Jim Pierce would soon learn the truth about his dealings with the Chinese government. He’d tried to contact Dr. Zhang as soon as he landed, but Agent Liu informed him that the doctor was preoccupied with his duties at the Yunnan Operations Center. However, Liu promised to set up a meeting with General Tian, the commander of the Supreme Harmony project, who luckily happened to be in Beijing that week. The meeting was scheduled for 4:00 P.M., and Arvin was counting the minutes.
At two thirty they left the restaurant and headed for the Ministry of State Security, which was near Tiananmen Square, less than a mile away. They walked past the neon signs and luxury stores of Wangfujing Street, then strolled down an alley crowded with stalls selling shish-kebabs. Agent Liu acted as their tour guide, making trite comments about everything. Although they walked slowly, within half an hour they reached the huge portrait of Chairman Mao facing Tiananmen Square. Arvin wanted to go into the ministry building and wait in the lobby until General Tian was ready, but Liu insisted that they use the spare time to visit the Mausoleum of Mao Zedong.
Thousands of Chinese stood in a long line that snaked across the square, all waiting for their turn to view Mao’s embalmed body, which had rested for thirty-five years inside his transparent coffin. But because Liu was a Guoanbu agent, he could cut ahead of the masses. He and Arvin and Frank Nash went to the front of the line and entered the mausoleum. Mao lay stiffly under the glass, still dressed in his trademark gray jacket, with a red blanket pulled up to his chest. His face was orange and waxy. Most tourists caught only a glimpse of the corpse— the mausoleum’s guards kept the line moving—but Liu’s guests were allowed to stare at the coffin for as long as they wanted to. For Arvin, this turned out to be a mixed blessing. With his implant-enhanced eyesight, he could see all the minute stains and fissures in Mao’s desiccated hide. As he stared at the dead body he felt a deep pain in his abdomen. This corpse had once been the most powerful man in the world, commanding a billion people with absolute authority, but Death had defeated him just the same. And now Death was coming for Arvin as well. He could feel it reaching into his body with its cold fingers…
Arvin shook his head, dispelling the image. He had a plan, he reminded himself. He’d laid the groundwork twenty years ago when he founded Singularity, Inc. In the first few years he’d focused on basic research, learning how the human brain coded its signals. Then in 1999 Jim Pierce joined his research team, and together they made remarkable strides. Their progress was so rapid that for a while Arvin could see success on the horizon, less than a decade away. They’d cracked the neural code and built machines that could communicate directly with the nervous system. The next step was building the mechanical equivalent of a human brain, a powerful computer that could store and process the memories downloaded from the mind. For a while, immortality seemed to be within reach. The Singularity was near.
Then Arvin suffered three crushing blows. First, his attempt to build a mechanical brain failed miserably. Then Jim Pierce left Singularity, Inc., to start his own company. And then Arvin received his cancer diagnosis.
But in the following year, a miracle happened. While Arvin was visiting China to pursue an alternative cancer therapy, he met his old friend Zhang Jintao, a brilliant bioengineer. Zhang had been authorized by the Guoanbu to seek Arvin’s help. The ministry’s technology division had developed a microdrone surveillance system using swarms of cyborg insects. It was an amazing technical accomplishment, but the system had proved fairly useless in its initial field tests in Tibet and Xinjiang. The problem was that the drones produced an unwieldy glut of video, almost all of which showed ordinary scenes of village life. Even with the help of sophisticated software and hundreds of trained agents staring at the video monitors, it was nearly impossible to ferret out the telltale signs of insurrection among the thousands of hours of footage collected by the swarms. So Zhang asked Arvin, in strictest confidence, if he could develop an artificial intelligence program that would pinpoint the images showing suspicious activities and automatically direct the drones to the areas where the activities were taking place.
That’s when Arvin had his brainstorm. Computer programs, he realized, weren’t good at detecting suspicious activity. They could barely recognize objects and patterns, much less divine the intent behind them. But the human brain was a wonderful threat-detection machine. Millions of years of evolution had produced an organ that was finely tuned for detecting predators and other dangers. The key, Arvin saw, was to deliver the surveillance video to the brain in a way that was more direct and efficient than displaying it on a monitor in front of a bored Guoanbu analyst. And Arvin had the tools for doing this: the retinal and pulvinar implants. The video could be transmitted wirelessly to a person with retinal implants, which would relay the feed to the person’s brain. After his visual cortex analyzed the footage and pinpointed the images showing suspicious activities, his pulvinar implant could transmit those images to other people whose implants were linked to the network, and to the computers controlling the surveillance swarms. The system would be even more efficient if the participants in the network were dissidents themselves, because they would instantly recognize their fellow subversives.
It was an elegant solution to the problem, but for Arvin it was something more. He saw an opportunity to use the enormous resources of the Chinese government to create a system that was part-human, part-machine. It was an alternative route to the Singularity, one that didn’t require building a mechanical version of the brain because human brains would be incorporated into the system.
