In half a minute Wen reached the door to the computer room, which stood wide open. Layla was surprised by this, too, but after a moment she realized that it also made sense—why lock any doors inside a facility occupied by a single mind? But because the complex had been built by the Guoanbu long before Supreme Harmony became conscious, the computer room did have a lock, which Wen threw after closing the door behind them. Then he surveyed the large, brightly lit room, sweeping his pistol from side to side.
There were a dozen computer terminals, each equipped with a keyboard and an oversized screen. Layla rushed for one of the keyboards, but Wen stopped her, silently pointing his gun at an inner door on the other side of the room. This door was closed. Using hand signals, Wen urged Layla and the boys to move backward, out of harm’s way, while he strode to the door. Standing to the side of the door frame, he raised his gun and carefully clasped the knob. Then he flung the door open and leaped inside. An instant later, a gunshot echoed.
Layla didn’t hesitate—she raised her own gun and ran to help him. The first thing she noticed as she hurtled through the doorway was a blast of frigid air, which cut right through the thin fabric of her hospital gown. Then she saw five long rows of server racks. Each rack was more than seven feet tall and loaded with stacks of server computers, whose function was to store and distribute large amounts of data. It was an impressive collection of processing power, enough to run the operations of a large company or a small country. Wen crouched in front of the humming stacks of computers, his gun still pointed at a shattered glass dome that used to be a ceiling-mounted surveillance camera. He stood up and turned to Layla. “Is this it?” he asked. “Supreme Harmony’s brain?”
She stepped toward one of the racks and examined the servers, which didn’t have any of the usual brand names. They were custom-made machines, probably designed by the Guoanbu’s technical experts. Red and yellow LEDs blinked on the front of each server, and a welter of cables connected one machine to another. A thick fluid- filled tube also snaked in and out of each computer. Layla was familiar with this setup—the tube was part of the water-cooling system, which prevented the servers from overheating. It carried cold water into metal blocks attached to the microprocessors. The water cooled the blocks, drawing heat away from the blistering circuits. The heated water then flowed to a radiator that cooled the fluid back to room temperature. And thanks to an efficient air-conditioning system, the room temperature was quite low. That was why the door was closed, Layla realized —to prevent the frigid air from escaping. The room was so cold, in fact, that several down jackets hung from pegs on the wall, presumably for the use of the technicians who maintained the computers.
Layla shivered. She folded her arms across her chest, hugging herself. “This isn’t the brain,” she said. “Supreme Harmony is a network of human brains, all exchanging wireless signals so they can work together. But the signals have to be combined and distributed, and that’s what these servers are doing. They were originally built to handle the video signals from the swarms of surveillance drones, but I bet Supreme Harmony reconfigured the system.”
Wen pointed his pistol at one of the server racks. “So should we disable it?”
She shook her head. “No, that won’t do any good. Supreme Harmony is obsessed with security, so I’m sure the network has more than one server hub. If we destroy this one, it’ll just reroute its signals to another.” She turned around and headed back to the outer room. “But I bet this hub also connects to the Internet and the Chinese government’s databases. Those connections might give me a chance to get inside the network.”
She made a beeline for one of the computer terminals. Wen lowered his gun and followed her. While the schoolboys rushed into his arms, Layla sat down in the chair in front of the terminal and inspected the keyboard. Luckily, it was set up for inputting Pinyin, the romanized spelling of Mandarin characters. The keyboard was identical to an American model except for the tone marks on the first four number keys.
She tapped the ENTER key, and after a few seconds the computer screen came to life. Two yellow Mandarin characters appeared against a red background. The one on the left looked like a lowercase
After another few seconds the Mandarin characters vanished and a small white rectangle appeared in the center of the screen. The cursor flashed at the rectangle’s left end. Layla didn’t need a translator to figure this out. This was where she was supposed to input the password.
First she tried ZHANG, the surname of the scientist who’d developed the system. It didn’t work. Then she tried JINTAO. That didn’t work either. Guessing passwords was one of a hacker’s crucial skills, and Layla knew several tricks and shortcuts. Most people preferred passwords that were easy to remember, so they usually selected ones that combined their names with simple number sequences. Layla tried ZHANG123 and JINTAO123, but neither worked. Then she tried several other combinations, all without success.
After a while she realized that her underlying assumption might be wrong. If Zhang had indeed chosen a simple, easy-to-guess password when he’d designed the system, Supreme Harmony probably would’ve changed it after the network attained consciousness. And if Zhang had chosen a complex password instead, Layla had little hope of guessing it.
Then another idea occurred to her. She looked over her shoulder at Wen. “Do you know what a Post-it note is?”
His brow furrowed. “You mean those sticky papers? The little yellow squares?”
“Yes, exactly. Tell the boys to look at every keyboard and monitor in this room. There might be a note that has the password. It’s a common security flaw. If Zhang used a password that’s hard to remember, either he or one of the other scientists might’ve written it down.”
Wen spoke to the children in Mandarin, and they sprang into action, racing across the room and eyeballing every terminal. Meanwhile, Layla made twelve more guesses at the password. As she typed her thirteenth guess, though, she heard footsteps in the corridor outside the locked door. Many, many footsteps.
The boys rushed back to Wen, shouting, and wrapped their arms around his waist. He aimed his gun at the door. “Let’s go,” he whispered to Layla. “We have to retreat to the other room. The cold room.”
She shook her head, still typing madly and staring at the computer screen. “Did the boys find anything?”
“No, there are no notes on the terminals.”
“What about the floor? Did they look on the floor? The note might’ve slipped off.”
“Layla, we need to—”
They heard a metallic click. One of the Modules in the corridor was trying the knob of the locked door. Then the Module pounded his fist against the door, making it rattle in its frame.
Wen grabbed Layla’s arm and tried to pull her to her feet, but she slipped out of his grasp and bolted from her chair. She dashed to the other side of the room and scanned the floor, wildly looking under all the chairs and terminals. She got down on her hands and knees and searched every corner, but the floor was spotless. Then the Module in the corridor pounded the door again, and Layla could feel the linoleum tiles shiver underneath her.
And then she saw it. A folded piece of yellow paper, no bigger than a postage stamp, wedged beneath one of the legs of a nearby chair. She dove for the grimy thing, picked it up and unfolded it. Written on it in red pencil were four Mandarin characters, followed by six digits.
Triumphant, she jumped to her feet. Holding the paper high in the air, she ran back to Wen and the computer terminal. But before she could get there, the screen went black. All the terminals and servers abruptly stopped humming. Then the lights went out.
FIFTY-FIVE
Supreme Harmony observed the U-shaped notch in the Three Gorges Dam. Module 83, the pilot of the
As the boat entered the notch in the dam, Module 83 threw the engine into reverse and then cut the power,
