Extinction

life.

The whole experience was so fascinating that Kirsten could’ve continued trolling through the files for hours, but she had a job to do. She navigated through the memories until she found an image of the Guoanbu agent whom she’d seen with Arvin at Tiananmen Square. This memory was linked to images of a laboratory complex hidden in the mountains and a pair of Mandarin characters: Tai He, Supreme Harmony. Kirsten’s horror grew as she jumped from memory to memory. She saw a man in a prisoner’s jumpsuit lying on an operating table. She saw a bone drill cutting into his shaved skull and shiny implants being inserted into his scalp and eyes. The final image was the most horrible of all: a control room filled with two dozen supine men, each twitching and jerking spasmodically as his retinal implants delivered a stream of surveillance video to his brain. Kirsten reached for the USB cable and ripped it out of her camera-glasses. The terrible image of the control room vanished and was replaced by the infrared display of the underground chamber where she sat.

Rising to her feet, she put her phone and Arvin’s device in her pockets. She needed to find Jim. She had to contact him right away. Kirsten now had all the evidence they needed. All they had to do was return to the American embassy with Arvin’s flash drive, which was full of damning details about the Supreme Harmony project and its use of lobotomized prisoners. The diplomatic process would do the rest. The United States would confront China with the evidence and threaten to reveal it at a special session of the United Nations unless the Guoanbu abandoned the inhuman enterprise and returned Jim’s daughter. In all likelihood, the Chinese government would comply with the demands. So there was no need for Jim to shadow Arvin anymore.

Kirsten dashed out of the chamber of Little Red Books and retraced her steps through the tunnels of the Underground City. Her satellite phone couldn’t get reception underground, so she ran through the concrete corridors to get back to street level. She was going to tell Jim to return to the embassy immediately. Judging from what she’d seen of Arvin’s memories, their mission was far riskier than she’d imagined.

Following the three sets of footprints in the dust—two made by Frank Nash and one by herself—Kirsten made her way back to the mushroom plot and finally to the condemned building. She called Jim as soon as she climbed out the building’s ground-floor window, but there was no answer. She tried again, and then again. Still no answer.

Something’s wrong, she thought. Her stomach churned as she stood in the trash-strewn courtyard. She felt a desperate urge to go to Jim’s aid, to rush to the Changping District where the Guoanbu agents had arranged their meeting with Arvin. But she knew she’d never get there in time. It was 7 P.M., and by now the evening traffic had locked down Beijing’s highways and ring roads. Changping was only thirty miles away, but driving there would take at least ninety minutes. The only way to beat the traffic would be to fly over it, and she didn’t have a helicopter.

Then Kirsten had another idea. She ran out of the courtyard, banging through the unlocked gate. Looking right and left down the long, straight hutong, she saw an old woman lugging a shopping bag, a grizzled man pushing a wheelbarrow, and a pimply teenager riding a loud, gas-powered scooter. She reached into her pants pocket and pulled out a wad of 100-yuan notes, part of the ample stash of Chinese and American currency that she and Jim had brought into the country. Then she stepped into the middle of the alley and flagged down the scooter driver by waving the cash and yelling the Mandarin equivalent of “Hey! Want to make some money?”

The teenager stopped, looking puzzled. Kirsten examined his scooter, which was a Baotian model, very popular in Beijing. It was a little battered and rusty, but it had a big 125-cc engine and the gas tank was full. “I want to buy your scooter,” Kirsten said, counting the 100-yuan notes in her hand. “I’ll give you 3,000 for it.”

“What?” The teenager scowled, but his eyes focused on the money. The price, Kirsten knew, was a good one—3,000 yuan was equal to about $500, and the battered scooter wasn’t worth nearly that much.

Kirsten finished counting the thirty notes, then waved them in the teenager’s face. “Do you want the money or not?” she shouted. With her other hand she grabbed the scooter’s handlebars, already claiming possession. “Come on, I don’t have all day!”

The teen hesitated. Then he snatched the money and dismounted from the scooter. As the boy walked away, Kirsten pushed the bike toward the unlocked gate. Although riding the scooter on Beijing’s highways would be faster than driving a car, the traffic would still slow her to a crawl. Instead, she hauled the bike across the courtyard to the condemned building. She remembered the brass plaque she’d seen in the Underground City, the map showing the maze of tunnels under the city and the long spokes stretching to the outlying districts. One of those spokes, she recalled, led to Changping.

THIRTY-NINE

The drive from the airport in Lijiang to the Yunnan Operations Center took about two hours. During the second hour the Chinese army truck slowed down and Layla’s ears popped from the change in altitude. She couldn’t see anything from the cargo hold, but she guessed they were in the mountains. When they finally stopped moving, the lobotomized PLA soldiers grasped her arms and took her out of the truck, escorting her across a huge garage crowded with military vehicles. A dozen soldiers wearing berets on their shaved heads were loading crates into a semitrailer truck. Layla noticed that the soldiers handled the crates gingerly, stacking them with great care in the trailer. Then the Modules led her through a doorway and down a long corridor.

They passed a room with rows of lockers against the walls. Then they passed a computer room filled with terminals and screens. There were surveillance cameras everywhere, fixed to the ceiling above every doorway. Finally they came to a large bathroom. It had five toilets, four sinks, and one shower stall. The Modules let go of Layla’s arms once they entered the room. One of them closed the door and stood in front of it, blocking the exit. The other pointed at the shower stall. “Please remove your clothes and clean yourself,” he said.

There was no doubt that Layla needed a shower. She still wore the clothes that had soaked in the waters of Gatun Lake. She reeked. But she scowled at the Module anyway. She needed to learn more about this thing, this Supreme Harmony. She needed to test it, challenge it, observe its reactions. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “You don’t like the way I smell?”

As she said this she moved closer to the Module and lifted her arms. To her surprise, the Module wrinkled his nose and stepped backward. “Please remove your clothes and clean yourself,” he repeated.

Layla glanced at the Module guarding the door and noticed that he wrinkled his nose, too, even though he stood at least twelve feet away from her. Interesting, she thought. The Modules shared everything they saw, heard, and smelled. And the network seemed to have inherited the visceral reactions of the people who’d been forced into it.

She decided to take her experiment a step further. Looking the Module in the eye, she took off her shirt and threw it to the floor. Then she unhooked her bra. “A little privacy would be nice,” she said. “But I guess that would be too much to ask, huh?”

“Please remove your—”

“Yeah, I heard you the first time.” She took off her bra and dropped it next to her shirt. Then she unzipped her pants and peeled them off. The Module kept staring at her, but he showed no signs of interest. His eyes didn’t shift downward to look at her body, not even when she lowered her panties and kicked them aside. That’s odd, Layla thought. This Module was a young guy in his late teens, the prime years of sexual frenzy. Most of the other Modules she’d seen were also young men. If the network had inherited their visceral reactions, why wasn’t it responding to the sight of her naked body? She knew she wasn’t the most beautiful woman in the world, but she also knew that men were men. They responded very predictably to certain stimuli.

She squared her shoulders and put her hands on her hips. “Okay, I removed my clothes. Satisfied?”

The Module stepped toward her. Layla felt a jolt of fear—had she pushed things too far? But the Module didn’t touch her. Instead, he knelt on the tile floor and gathered up her discarded clothes. Then he stood up and pointed at the shower stall again, but this time he averted his eyes from her body. “Please clean yourself,” he said.

Very interesting, she thought. As she entered the shower stall and turned on the water, she pondered the meaning of that gesture, the averted eyes. Maybe the network was suppressing the sexual responses of its Modules. Or maybe—and this was the more intriguing possibility—maybe Supreme