Mark Alpert - Extinction

“What kind of boats are they? Destroyers?”

“Yes, but they’re not American. They’re the Lanzhou and the Haikou . From the Chinese navy.”

Shit, Layla thought. This was bizarre. She could understand the Chinese government dispatching a few agents to America to stop her from revealing their secrets. But sending warships? And cooperating with the U.S. Navy? They must have one hell of a motivation.

“I don’t get it,” she said. “What do they want?”

“Both the Chinese and the Americans seem determined to shut us down. But we still have a chance. Our captain came up with a plan to slip out of the trap. We’re going to cruise south for four hundred kilometers, then turn to the southeast. Then we’ll make a dash for the Panama Canal. If we’re lucky, we’ll reach the Pacific entrance to the canal by tomorrow afternoon, a few hours ahead of the American and Chinese ships.”

“But we’ll have to slow down at the canal’s locks. They’ll catch up to us.”

Schroeder shook his head. “The U.S. Navy would have no qualms about intercepting us on the high seas, but there are international treaties assuring free passage through the canal. They won’t attempt to board us there, and they won’t let the Chinese warships stop us either. Once we reach the Caribbean side of the canal, they’ll be able to chase us again, but we’ll have a better chance of shaking them off there.”

Layla looked askance. “I don’t know. It sounds desperate.”

“I’m willing to consider alternatives, fraulein. Do you have any?”

She turned away from him and stared at the ocean. Creating a map in her head, she pictured the U.S. ships to the north and the Chinese ships to the southwest. Meanwhile, Schroeder waited patiently beside her, sneaking looks at her ass. In the end, she concluded he was right. She couldn’t see any alternatives.

She was just about to admit defeat when Angelique suddenly reappeared on the top deck. Breathless, she ran to Schroeder. “Gabie, you have to see this.”

Layla was surprised. “You finished translating the files already?”

“No, no, I just skimmed them. But I think I found what the Chinese are so worried about.”

“Is it in the document about the cyborg insects?” Layla asked.

Angelique raised her hand to her chest and took a couple of deep breaths. “No, that file has nothing but engineering details. The only interesting thing about it is the file’s distribution list. A copy of the document was sent to a CIA agent with the code name ‘Hammer.’” She unfolded a piece of paper with some scribbled notes on it. “But the second document is different. It lists the names of twenty-nine Chinese dissidents who’ve been detained by the Guoanbu over the past year. They were pro-democracy activists, mostly from Xinjiang and the other western provinces.”

Layla felt a rush of adrenaline. This was the reason why she’d pursued the Guoanbu network in the first place, because of the rumors about the mistreatment of dissidents. “What happened to them? Were they executed?”

“No.” Angelique looked sick to her stomach. “They were lobotomized.”

Jim and Arvin stood in the auditorium at the Singularity headquarters, staring at each other. Arvin put on a smile. “Good to see you again, Jim. Sorry I’ve been out of touch, but as you can see, I’m quite busy.”

He tried to pull his arm out of Jim’s mechanical grip, but Jim didn’t release him. Instead, he moved closer and whispered in Arvin’s ear. “Let’s go someplace where we can talk.”

Arvin shook his head. “No, I’m afraid that’s impossible. But I can schedule an appointment for early next week. How’s that?”

Jim frowned. He didn’t want to hurt Arvin. Despite all their disagreements, he owed a debt to the man. By accepting Jim as a student fifteen years ago, Arvin had given him the opportunity to remake his life. And Jim was still grateful for that. But then he thought of his daughter, and his resolve strengthened. The danger to Layla outweighed everything. “Don’t fuck with me, Arvin. You know what I can do.”

The old man glanced at his bodyguards. “I can have you arrested, you know.”

“Sure, go ahead. But before your men pull me away, I’ll transmit a radio pulse that’s three times as powerful as the last one. At this range, it’ll fry your retinal implants to a crisp.”

Arvin let out a sigh. Nodding in surrender, he waved off his bodyguards. Then he walked with Jim out of the auditorium and down the corridor that led to his laboratory.

Jim knew the way. He had fond memories of the lab from the ten years he’d worked with Arvin. The room was huge, the size of a school gymnasium, and as they walked through the doorway, Jim noted with satisfaction that the place hadn’t changed a bit. The walls were still covered with old-fashioned blackboards, and the lab tables were still loaded with machine tools and prototypes. As Jim surveyed the place, he saw many of the inventions he helped to develop: prosthetic legs, mechanical arms, neural control units, eyeglass-cameras. But the room was devoid of people. Maybe Arvin had given all his lab assistants the day off. Or maybe he’d become even more isolated than Jim had imagined.

At the very center of the room was Arvin’s desk. It was an ugly piece of metal furniture that held his computer and several stacks of engineering journals. Taped to the front of the desk was a yellowed sheet of paper that Jim remembered well. Printed on the paper was a forty-bit sequence of zeroes and ones:

0100000101110010011101100110100101101110

It was Arvin’s name spelled in binary code, with each letter represented by an eight-bit sequence. This string of code had an almost mystical significance for Arvin. It symbolized his lifelong goal, the melding of human and machine intelligence. To make the point absolutely clear, Arvin had typed the word “Singularity” below the sequence of ones and zeroes.

The Singularity was Arvin’s favorite subject. He used to pontificate about it at the end of the workday, while he sipped his scotch and soda at his desk and Jim nursed his glass of Jack Daniel’s. According to Arvin, the Singularity would occur when scientists built a computer that could design a better version of itself. This would lead to an explosion in machine intelligence. Soon computers would outperform people at every task. They would cure cancer and compose operas and discover theories that would revolutionize physics and mathematics. And while machine intelligence leaped past the human variety, advanced prostheses would make people more like machines. Eventually, the two forms of intelligence would merge. Machines would become capable of translating the brain’s signals into digital code, allowing anyone to download the contents of his mind into a computer. “Just think of it!” Arvin would shout after his third scotch and soda. “We won’t be tied to these fragile bodies anymore! If we can store a person’s memories in a sufficiently powerful processor, we can program it to generate new thoughts based on those memories. For all intents and purposes, the intelligence inside the processor would be identical to the one inside the person’s brain. And this will become possible very soon, within the next few decades. There are people alive today who will never die!”

Jim always took these pronouncements with a big grain of salt. He knew that scientists had barely begun to explore the human brain, and he couldn’t imagine how a computer could come close to matching it in his lifetime. Nevertheless, Arvin’s speeches were inspiring. Jim threw himself into the work, and after a few years he and Arvin had their first great success, the development of the retinal implant. It was the first machine that could exchange large amounts of information with the brain, and Arvin confidently predicted there would be many more.