Harmony felt sorry for her. Maybe it sensed on some level the indecency of what it was doing to her. And if that was true, if the network actually had a sense of morality, then maybe she could appeal to it.
After a few minutes she turned off the water and dried herself with a towel hanging on a nearby hook. Both Modules, she noticed, were averting their eyes now. She saw a pair of slippers and a pile of fresh clothing folded on a bench next to the shower. On top of the pile was a pair of clean underpants, which she gratefully slipped into. Then she picked up what looked like a blue cotton robe. When she shook it out, she saw it was a hospital robe, the kind that patients wear for an operation.
All at once, her courage deserted her. Her eyes stung and her throat tightened. With trembling hands, she put on the robe, tying the strings at the back. Then she stepped into the slippers and approached the Modules. “Please don’t do this,” she said. “I’ll cooperate with you. I’ll tell you everything you want to know about securing your network.”
The Module standing at the door observed that she was ready. He opened the door while the other Module grasped Layla’s arm. “Now we will proceed to Room C-12,” he said.
“C-12? What’s that?”
“The preoperative room. We must shave your head.”
FORTY
Jim and Arvin ran a thousand feet along the top of the Great Wall, dashing down the steep walkway toward the bottom of Juyongguan Pass. Then the AK-47s erupted behind them and the rounds ricocheted off the walkway. Jim glanced over his shoulder and saw the two Modules on top of the highest watchtower, pointing their assault rifles downhill. Supreme Harmony must’ve revived them by implementing a countermeasure to his radio jamming.
“Come on!” he yelled at Arvin, but the old man couldn’t run any faster. His face was pale and his mutilated hand bled fiercely. Jim hooked his prosthetic arm around Arvin’s waist and hustled him forward. They finally reached the second-highest watchtower and took cover behind it. But as they leaned against the tower’s stone wall, panting, Jim saw two brawny figures about a quarter mile farther down the walkway. They wore dark suits and carried AK-47s just like the Modules at the summit, but they were bigger and in better shape. They raced up the walkway, leaping over the stone steps in perfect synchrony. At the same time, Jim heard the buzzing of the cyborg flies. The swarm was close.
“Get in the tower!” he shouted, pushing Arvin through an archway carved into the tower’s wall. They stumbled into a dark, dank room almost identical to the one inside the tower at the summit. This room, though, had only one entrance and no windows. While Arvin collapsed on the stone floor, Jim uncapped his canister of parathion and sprayed the area, filling the tower with a fog of insecticide. Ten seconds later, the drones at the leading edge of the swarm poured through the archway. Jim stepped back but kept spraying. Hundreds of flies hit the floor immediately, while the rest spiraled in drunken circles before dying. The rotten-egg smell of parathion permeated the room, making Jim dizzy. He couldn’t keep this up. The insecticide was poisoning him, too. He stopped spraying and pulled up his shirt to cover his mouth and nose. “Arvin!” he yelled. “Cover your mouth!”
Arvin lay in a heap, blood pumping from his left hand. He could barely raise his head. But his right hand still held the knife he’d used to stab the general. He gripped it so tightly that Jim could see the veins bulging between his knuckles. “Pulvinar,” he gasped. “The throne… of the soul.”
“I said cover your mouth! This stuff is toxic!”
“Cushion… that’s what it means… a cushioned throne.”
“Jesus!” Jim crouched behind Arvin and lifted him off the floor. On the other side of the room was a stone ledge, about three feet high. Jim hauled Arvin to the ledge and propped him against the wall, which elevated him above the thickest concentrations of insecticide. “Can you hear me, Arvin? Try to stay with me, okay?”
Arvin shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. My soul…”
The old man’s voice trailed off. He needed medical attention, fast. Jim pulled out his satellite phone and tried to call the American embassy, but he couldn’t get a connection. Radio noise blocked his signal.
Arvin allowed Jim to field-dress his left hand. His body was limp. “My soul… can leave its throne. I have… another.”
Jim focused on the bandage, wrapping it over the stumps of Arvin’s severed fingers. “Stop worrying about your soul,” he said. “The bleeding isn’t so bad. You’re gonna be fine.”
“I knew… I might die here. So I made a copy… of my soul.”
Jim looked up from the field-dressing and stared at him. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“A hundred thousand gigabytes. All downloaded… from my pulvinar implant. Nash can tell you where… the flash drive is hidden.”
Jim remembered what he’d overheard Arvin say about downloading his memories. He also remembered the radio-emitting device carried by Frank Nash, Arvin’s bodyguard. “This flash drive, does it have a radio tracker?”
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
“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.
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
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—”
Jim tried to grab him again, but Arvin was too fast. He barreled through the archway and out of the
