Extinction

clearly hear the buzzing of the drones. The swarm was closer now. It would reach the stairway very soon.

Desperate, Jim punched the same spot again and again. His prosthesis pumped up and down like a piston. After a dozen punches, though, all he’d done was make a few inch-wide indentations in the wood. And when he looked at his mechanical hand, he saw that he’d scraped the polyimide skin off its knuckles, exposing the hinge joints underneath. He’d lost the temperature sensors in the middle two fingers, and the pressure sensors indicated that the hand was at the breaking point. If he kept pounding the boards like this, the steel fingers would warp and he wouldn’t be able to open his hand anymore.

“Damn it!” he screamed. Pulling back his prosthetic arm, he turned to Kirsten, who crouched on the floor beside him, her arms wrapped around her knees. He expected her to make another suggestion, but she just stared at him with her camera-glasses. She looked terrified.

No, he thought. No! There has to be a way out! He focused on Kirsten’s face, the frightened eyes behind the glasses he’d built for her, and out of the blue he recalled an image he’d seen on a Web site a few weeks ago. A home-improvement Web site, of all things. It was an article about how to insulate your attic. The image was a thermal display of a ceiling, with dark lines showing the gaps where cold air was coming through.

He grabbed Kirsten’s arm. “Look at the boards! The whole ceiling! See if there are any thermal differences. Cold spots, warm spots, whatever.”

After a moment she caught on. She lay on her back, looking straight up at the boards. As Jim watched her, the buzzing of the drones grew louder. They were at the bottom of the stairway, he guessed, and their implanted processors were charting a course up the first flight of steps. “Come on!” he yelled. “What do you—”

Kirsten pointed at the ceiling. “There! Around the edges of that board!”

Jim lay next to her and held up the screen of his sat phone. At first glance the board looked the same as the others, but when Jim took a closer look he saw that its edges weren’t flush with the adjacent boards.

“Move over!” he shouted. As Kirsten backed away, he positioned his prosthetic fist under the board’s right edge. Muttering a quick prayer, he threw the punch.

The noise was different this time. The whole ceiling creaked. When Jim looked again at the board, he saw that its right edge had crept upward a quarter-inch. This board was the hatch, he realized. It was jammed into place, but it could be dislodged.

Kirsten yelled, “Jim!” At first he thought she was shouting for joy, but the tone of her voice was more horrified than triumphant. She was pointing at the top of the stairway, where several dozen drones flew in circles, their cameras scanning the crawl space.

Jim slammed his fist against the board’s right edge again, pushing it up another quarter-inch. He threw a third punch and the board tilted upward, almost free. But at the same moment, the drones detected Jim’s heat signature and rushed toward his head. Opening his prosthetic hand, he swatted the two closest insects, knocking them to the other side of the crawl space. Then, still lying on his back, he raised his knees to his chest and kicked both feet up against the loosened board. It went shooting into the air like a cork.

“Go, go!” Jim shouted, but Kirsten needed no encouragement. She leaped for the opening and pulled herself up. Jim followed right behind, catching a whiff of cool, pine-scented air as he scrambled out of the crawl space. They emerged on the ground-floor of an open-air pagoda that seemed to be situated in the middle of a pine forest. The nearby tree trunks glowed in the moonlight, and Jim’s heart swelled with relief. He swiftly reached for the wooden board that had served as the hatch for the crawl space and shoved it back into place, sealing the tunnel again.

“Jesus!” he gasped. “That was too fucking close!”

Smiling, he turned to Kirsten. She lay on the floor of the pagoda, her chest rising and falling.

“You okay?” he asked.

She didn’t answer. Her camera-glasses had slipped off her face, and her arms and legs shook violently, banging against the pagoda’s floor. A cyborg fly that had followed them out of the tunnel crawled along the side of her neck.

FIFTY-ONE

Supreme Harmony observed the thick gray mist that hung over the Yangtze River. It was 9:00 A.M., three hours after dawn, but the mist was still as thick as it had been at daybreak. Module 96 walked alone to the riverfront, taking his first steps since he was incorporated into the network. He wore a police officer’s uniform, with captain’s bars on the shoulders. This Module had formerly belonged to Captain Xi Keqiang, a strong, healthy thirty-nine-year-old, and his nervous system had adapted speedily to the new implants in his eyes and brain. He took quick, confident strides on the asphalt path that led to the southern bank of the Yangtze. As the Module trained his ocular cameras on the horizon, Supreme Harmony observed a long, striated structure that ran between the thick gray mist and the wide gray river. This was the structure that Captain Xi was assigned to protect, the paramount symbol of China’s technological might: the two-kilometer-long Three Gorges Dam.

Module 96 approached the security checkpoint at the southern end of the dam. Ten policemen carrying assault rifles guarded the gate running across the dam’s concrete abutment. Standing among these officers was Module 92, who’d been incorporated into Supreme Harmony just a few hours before Captain Xi. Infiltrating the dam’s security forces had been easier than expected. Twenty-four hours ago the network had dispatched Modules 36 and 37 from Beijing to Hubei Province. Because they were Guoanbu agents claiming to have intelligence about security threats to the dam, it was easy for them to arrange private meetings with Xi and his deputies. And because Xi and his top officers had been highly disciplined men who wore their hair in buzz cuts like PLA soldiers, it was no surprise when they showed up for duty the next morning with shaved heads. Their officer’s caps hid their fresh stitches.

Without a word, the policemen at the gate stepped aside and let their captain through. Xi Keqiang had been a creature of habit who’d always walked the length of the dam every morning, so now Module 96 did the same. On his left was the enormous reservoir created when the Three Gorges Dam was built. On his right was the 175- meter drop to the spillway and the lower stretch of the Yangtze River. Supreme Harmony had thoroughly researched the dam’s engineering details—the 16 million cubic meters of concrete, the 500,000 tons of steel, the thirty-two turbines that generated 20 billion watts of electricity—and in the process it had learned about the structure’s weaknesses, particularly its vulnerability to a terrorist attack. Because the builders had used inferior concrete in certain sections of the dam, a series of explosions—strategically placed and timed—could cause a breach. A wall of water, trillions of gallons, would pour from the reservoir into the Yangtze Valley, drowning millions of people in the floodplain. The potential for disaster was so great that the government had taken extraordinary measures to prevent it. Under Captain Xi’s command were five hundred men who guarded every road leading to the dam. But the attack planned by Supreme Harmony wouldn’t come by road.

Module 96 walked briskly along the top of the dam. He passed the huge winches that dangled chains into the shafts that went down to the dam’s control gates. Six hours ago, while it was still dark, Module 92 and three others had placed explosive charges within these shafts. But the first and biggest explosion would be triggered several hundred meters away, at the northern end of the dam. As Module 96 walked toward this point, he focused his ocular cameras on a concrete tower attached to the dam’s eastern face. This was the ship lift, an elevator for small and medium-size boats. Ships coming from the reservoir entered a huge steel bathtub, filled with 10,000 tons of water, which was lowered down the side of the dam by a system of rope pulleys and counterweights. The ship lift had been built for the benefit of the tourist-laden cruise boats, allowing them to avoid the delay of navigating the canal that went around the dam. But the convenience came at a price. When a ship moved from the reservoir to the lift, it passed through a U-shaped notch in the dam, a deep crenellation. And a powerful explosion at this crucial point could rock the entire structure.

The sun was rising, but it couldn’t break through the mist. The natural haze was thickened by the particles of soot that were emitted so copiously in this part of central China. Module 96 grasped the binoculars hanging from his neck and surveyed the vast reservoir to the west. In the foreground were several Yangtze River freighters, each bearing a mountainous load of coal, and behind them was the China Explorer, a 2,000-ton cruise boat that was currently empty of passengers and guided by a crew consisting of half-a-dozen