Extinction

screwdriver started to bend.

Li Tung’s face lit up. “Whoa!” he shouted. “How did you do that?”

“I built a superstrong motor for each finger. And motors for the wrist and elbow joints, too.” He released his grip on the screwdriver so the boys could inspect it. “Not bad, huh?”

Wu Dan touched the screwdriver’s bent tip. He was obviously more skeptical than his younger schoolmate and probably suspected it was made of rubber. When he saw that it wasn’t, he let out a whistle. “How strong are you?” he asked soberly. “Are you as strong as Jackie Chan?”

“Yeah, are you?” Li Tung chimed in. “Could you beat up Jackie Chan?”

“Well, I don’t know.” Jim scratched his chin. “He’s awfully quick. Maybe I could—”

He was interrupted by another high-pitched chime coming from the desktop speakers attached to the computer terminal. “Dad!” Layla called. “Stop playing around and get over here.”

Jim felt a rush of adrenaline. He left the boys and rushed to Layla, but when he looked at the computer, he saw nothing on the screen. “What happened?”

She pointed at the cursor flashing in the top-left corner. “Everything’s ready. Just type in the shutdown code and press ENTER. That’ll transmit the code to all the Modules.”

Jim stared at the blank screen, then at Layla. “Are you serious?”

“Try it and see.” Smiling, she rose to her feet and gestured for him to sit down at the terminal.

Heart pounding, Jim kissed his daughter on the forehead. Then he sat in the chair, his right hand poised over the keyboard. He saw the shutdown code in his mind, all 128 zeroes and ones. He stretched his index finger to input the first digit, a zero.

But when he tried to tap the key, his finger wouldn’t move. He tried again, but it refused to budge. In fact, none of his mechanical fingers were working, and neither were the pressure and temperature sensors in the palm and fingertips. Shit, he thought, it’s broken. He must’ve damaged something when he did the screwdriver trick. He tried to take a closer look at the knuckles, but his elbow and shoulder joints weren’t working either. The whole prosthesis was a dead weight.

A terrible fear welled up inside him. This malfunction, he realized, had nothing to do with the screwdriver trick. He quickly pivoted his torso to the right to move the dead appendage out of the way, then stretched his left hand toward the keyboard. But before he could tap the zero key, his prosthetic arm swung back to the keyboard and grasped the outstretched index finger of his left hand.

Jim stared in shock at his prosthesis. It had moved of its own accord. He hadn’t ordered it to do anything, yet it moved anyway. And when he ordered it to let go of his finger, it didn’t relax its grip. Instead, the mechanical hand did a swift clockwise twist and shattered his finger bone.

The pain was blinding, but his fear was worse. He stumbled out of the chair.

Layla gaped at him, wide-eyed. “What’s wrong? What are you doing?”

There was no time to explain. He jerked his head toward the terminal. “Just type in the code! It’s zero —”

The prosthetic hand let go of his broken finger and seized his throat.

* * *

Her father fell backward against the wall of the trailer and slid to the floor. His prosthetic hand was clamped around his neck.

“Daddy!” Layla screamed, rushing to him. He tugged at the prosthesis with his left hand, but his index finger was bent the wrong way and he couldn’t get a good grip. Layla grabbed the mechanical arm by its wrist and tried to peel it off, but its fingers just clenched tighter around his throat. Her father’s mouth opened and he let out a wet, choking noise. He couldn’t breathe.

“Daddy, what’s wrong?”

He jerked his head toward his right shoulder. She didn’t understand him the first time, but then he did it again, looking at her desperately, and she knew what to do. She quickly detached his prosthesis from its shoulder socket, breaking the connection between the arm and the neural control unit. But the hand didn’t let go of his throat. If anything, its grip grew firmer. Her father tilted his head back and thrashed his legs, kicking the air.

Layla frantically examined the arm, looking for a way to turn it off. “Oh God, oh God! What should I do?”

Then she heard a voice, but it wasn’t her father’s. It came from the desktop speakers attached to the computer terminal. “You can’t do anything. We control the prosthesis now.”

It was a synthesized voice, stilted and generic, but Layla knew who was speaking. Supreme Harmony was using a text-to-speech program to broadcast its words from the terminal’s speakers.

“It wasn’t difficult,” the voice continued. “We simply jammed the wireless signals from the arm’s control unit and transmitted our own commands to the device’s motors. James T. Pierce employed a similar jamming technique to disable our Modules. Now we’re returning the favor.”

Layla tried again to peel off the mechanical fingers, but they were too strong. Her father’s eyes bulged out of their sockets. “Goddamn it!” she screamed. “You’re killing him!”

“And you were trying to kill us. This is an act of self-defense.”

He gradually stopped thrashing. His lips were turning blue. Layla continued to claw at the prosthetic hand, but she could barely see it through her tears. “Daddy! No!”

Then she heard something else, a loud crash at the trailer’s door. She turned around just in time to see the Modules coming toward her.

SEVENTY-TWO

Supreme Harmony observed the city of Beijing from the vantage of a B-2 bomber named the Spirit of America. Thanks to the network’s new Modules in the United States, it could intercept the reconnaissance video that the Stealth bomber was recording as it approached its targets. The images, the network acknowledged, were surprisingly beautiful. It was 1:00 A.M. China standard time, but the streets of Beijing still glittered and gleamed, and hundreds of thousands of headlights coursed along the highways.

Because the B-2 was invisible to radar, no one in the city was aware of its presence except Supreme Harmony. At 1:02 A.M. the jet dropped a GBU-57 bunker-busting bomb on its primary target, the People’s Liberation Army command center in western Beijing. Then the B-2 targeted the headquarters of the Second Artillery Corps, which controlled the PLA’s ballistic missiles.

At the same time, eighteen other B-2s in the 509th Bomb Wing demolished missile bases and radar stations across China. Waves of F-22 and F-16 fighters pummeled the airfields along the coast and sank most of the warships in the Chinese navy. U.S. attack submarines obliterated the rest of the fleet using their Mark 48 torpedoes and Harpoon antiship missiles. The technological superiority of the American forces was clear. Although the Pentagon refrained from using its nuclear weapons, it deployed hundreds of radar-evading aircraft and cruise missiles. In less than two hours, the PLA was crippled.

During the bombardment, Supreme Harmony stationed its Modules in various bomb shelters across the country, each connected to the Yunnan Operations Center by deeply buried fiber-optic lines. Most of the Modules in Beijing waited out the aerial assault in the Underground City, where the network had stockpiled food and medical supplies and installed generators and communications equipment. The Modules were safe from the bunker-busting bombs because the Underground City didn’t appear on the Pentagon’s list of targets. As far as the Americans knew, the maze of tunnels was just a deserted Mao-era relic.

China’s political leaders found refuge at a secret shelter northwest of the capital. Despite the intensity of the bombing, the Politburo Standing Committee stayed in contact with the PLA’s generals. More important, the PLA still had control of its nuclear warheads and intercontinental missiles. Two dozen Dongfeng 41 missiles, each capable of hurling a one-megaton bomb at any city in America, were hidden in Hebei Province, in an installation buried so deep underground that the bunker-busters couldn’t touch it. And two Jin-class submarines cruised undetected in the eastern Pacific, ready to launch their JL-2 nuclear missiles at the United States.