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
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
