Mark Alpert - Extinction

And if the carrot didn’t work, Arvin thought, he’d brandish the stick. He could shut down their whole operation if they didn’t give him what he needed.

The limo finally broke free of the traffic and reached the highway that branched off to the northwest. They left behind the polluted haze that hung over China’s capital and climbed into the Yanshan Hills, which were turning golden in the twilight. The limo exited the highway at Juyongguan Pass, and Arvin caught a glimpse of the Great Wall, which curled across the terrain like a gray ribbon. This section of the wall, he knew, was a modern reconstruction; the Chinese government had patched together the crumbling remnants of the ancient fortifications, restoring them to Ming Dynasty perfection for the benefit of the tourists who flocked to Juyongguan every day. But the tourist facilities had closed more than an hour ago, and all the taxis and charter buses had departed.

The stillness of the place was forbidding. There was no one else around for miles. The limo entered the parking lot, which was empty except for an unmarked panel truck. Bewildered, Arvin turned to Agent Liu. “We’re meeting here? At the wall?”

Liu chuckled. “Yes, and you have it all to yourself. It’s much nicer when there’s no crowd, eh?”

Arvin didn’t like this at all. Were the Guoanbu agents planning to kill him here? Shoot him in the head beside the Great Wall? He imagined his corpse slumped in the wall’s shadow, his hair matted with blood and speckled with flies. But Arvin suppressed his fear and followed Agent Liu out of the limo.

Two men in dark suits emerged from the shuttered visitors’ center. They cornered Agent Liu and spoke with him in Mandarin. Arvin assumed that the men also worked for the Guoanbu, although they didn’t look like typical, muscle-bound security agents. They were pale and gaunt, and there was something oddly familiar about them. Arvin couldn’t put his finger on it.

After a minute Liu turned back to him. “Okay, it’s all arranged. Go with these two gentlemen, please. They’ll take you to General Tian.”

Again, Arvin had no choice. The men in dark suits led him to the walkway that ran along the top of the Great Wall. Beyond the visitors’ center, the wall climbed a tall green hill overlooking Juyongguan Pass. Steps had been cut into the steepest sections of the walkway, and every thousand feet or so the wall connected to a stone watchtower that had served as an observation post during the Ming Dynasty. Arvin counted four watchtowers in all, including the one at the hill’s summit.

As he climbed the steps, with the Guoanbu men close beside him, he felt the deep pain in his abdomen again. He grimaced, but in a way the pain was welcome. It reminded him why he was here.

Supreme Harmony observed the Juyongguan section of the Great Wall. The network had taken control of the tourist facility’s surveillance cameras and deployed a swarm of drones to scan the area. Modules 16 and 18 escorted Arvin Conway up the walkway on top of the wall, ascending toward the highest watchtower. Some of the drones scanned in the infrared range, and their sensors showed that Conway’s body temperature was abnormally elevated. The exertion of the climb was straining his circulatory system. The man was obviously in poor health and therefore not a good choice for incorporation into the network. But Supreme Harmony knew other ways to extract the needed information from him.

After Conway reached the watchtower, the swarm focused its surveillance on the Guoanbu limousine, which remained in the deserted parking lot. Agent Liu Xiaofang stood next to the car, smoking a cigarette and speaking in Mandarin with the limousine’s driver and a third man whom the network identified as the night watchman for the Juyongguan visitors’ center. There was no one else nearby and the gate was locked. But Liu’s cell phone was on, and the agent would surely contact the Ministry of State Security if he noticed that something had gone awry. Supreme Harmony needed to make sure this didn’t happen.

The network directed part of the swarm to descend upon the three men in the parking lot. The drones landed on their necks and delivered the paralyzing compound. The surveillance video showed the men falling to the ground. Then Supreme Harmony radioed new orders to Modules 41 and 42, who were waiting inside the unmarked panel truck parked a few meters away. These two Modules, who were formerly Guoanbu agents assigned to the Beijing headquarters, opened the truck’s rear doors and loaded the three paralyzed men into the cargo hold. Luckily, all three were young and in relatively good health.

At this point Supreme Harmony had a total of seventy-two Modules in its network, about half of them added in the past thirty-six hours. Most were based at the Yunnan Operations Center, but the network was intent on extending its geographical reach. Modules 16 and 18 had moved the medical equipment and the supply of implants from the basement of the Ministry of State Security—which wasn’t a good place for storing the items, the chances of discovery were too high—to the cargo hold of the panel truck. Now Supreme Harmony had a mobile facility for surgical implantation, and the network had already used it to incorporate a dozen Beijing-based Guoanbu agents. The Modules had isolated and subdued the agents one by one without raising the suspicions of the ministry’s top officials. The network planned to incorporate those officials, too, before they noticed anything amiss.

Still, the risks were great. If the Chinese government realized what Supreme Harmony was doing, it could paralyze the network by shutting down the ministry’s communications hubs and server farms. To counter this threat, Supreme Harmony was dispersing its Modules and swarms, connecting them to dozens of computer centers across China. A decentralized network would be more robust—it could continue operating even if the government shut down large parts of it. Some of the new Modules from Beijing had been dispatched to central China, where they would soon incorporate the security officials in that region. Once the network had spread across the country, the only thing that could disable it would be malware embedded in its operating software. And Supreme Harmony was already taking steps to eliminate that possibility.

As the drone swarm flew over Juyongguan Pass, the surveillance video showed several kilometers of the Great Wall, which ran across hills covered with low trees and thick brush. Because Supreme Harmony was conscious, it possessed the attribute of curiosity, and out of curiosity it accessed several historical documents from the Internet. The Great Wall, the network learned, had been built and rebuilt, at great cost, to defend against barbarian tribes attacking from the north. In other words, it was a relic of mankind’s wastefulness, like the immense cloud of sulfur dioxide and soot that hung over the city of Beijing. Although Homo sapiens was a wonderfully designed species, capable of using the earth’s resources to achieve any number of worthy goals, its constant warfare and rampant overconsumption had threatened the survival of the planet’s ecosystem. The evolution of Supreme Harmony had clearly come at the right time. The network would take over the stewardship of the planet before Homo sapiens could destroy it.

The surveillance video from the drones was transmitted to the Modules, who efficiently performed the function for which the network was created, analyzing large amounts of visual information to detect suspicious activity. All was quiet until about five minutes after Conway entered the watchtower. Then the network detected something suspicious. A sweep of the mobile-communications frequencies identified a faint cell phone signal emanating from the watchtower at the summit. And there was a second signal, even fainter, coming from a position on the hillside two hundred meters to the west.