Mark Alpert - Extinction

Kirsten went deeper into the maze of tunnels under Beijing, following the trail of Nash’s footprints. She found another map of the Underground City on the concrete wall, but she had no idea where she was. She hoped to hell that her camera-glasses didn’t conk out. Without the infrared display to guide her, she might never emerge from the pitch-black corridors.

She started to shiver. Calm down, she told herself. Take a deep breath.

Then the tunnel widened into another spacious chamber and the trail of footprints came to an end. Stepping off the jagged edge of the concrete slab, Kirsten planted her feet on a yielding, uneven floor. But it wasn’t another underground mushroom farm. The ground she stood on wasn’t dirt—it was wet and pulpy in the low spots, shifting and slippery in the high spots. Crouching to get a better look at the stuff under her shoes, she saw a mélange of warmish rectangles, each about five inches long and three inches wide. At the same time, she smelled the distinctive aroma of rotting paper.

She touched one of the rectangles and felt raised characters on its surface, Mandarin characters. They spelled out Mao Zhuxi Yulu —in English, Quotations from Chairman Mao . The chamber’s floor was covered with stacks of Mao’s Little Red Book, the pocket-size paperback that had been required reading in the People’s Republic during the sixties and seventies. The Communist cadres who’d dug the Underground City had evidently stored the Little Red Books here so the loyal residents of the bomb shelter would have something to read during their long wait for the radioactive fallout to dissipate.

Kirsten picked up one of the books and opened it. The pages spilled out and crumbled. Then she dropped the book and stood up. She turned in a circle, surveying the whole storeroom. In the far corner, underneath one of the largest mounds of Little Red Books, she saw the red dot of the radio signal shining through the rotting paper. Nash had taken the secret object out of his jacket and buried it about a foot beneath the surface. That was shallow enough to allow Nash—or his employer—to detect the radio signal when they wanted to retrieve the thing.

She quickly dug it out. The device was slightly smaller than one of the Little Red Books but much heavier. It had a metal casing and a power switch that controlled the radio transmitter. Kirsten turned off the transmitter, then noticed that the device also had a USB port. Luckily, Kirsten’s NSA-issued satellite phone was equipped with a USB cable for downloading software and data.

Impatient, Kirsten found a nearby alcove where she could hide, just in case Frank Nash decided to return to the chamber. She inserted her phone’s input cable into the device’s port. Then she inserted the phone’s output cable into a socket in her camera-glasses. This socket, which Jim had designed especially for her, sent the phone’s display directly to her retinal implants. It made her feel as if she was looking at a computer screen inside her eyes, which was a lot better than viewing the graphics on the phone’s small screen. And by simply shifting the focus of her attention, Kirsten could move a cursor across her retinal screen, allowing her to click on icons and transfer files.

A message appeared on the screen: 21,502 FILES DETECTED, 98,967 GIGABYTES. DO YOU WISH TO CONTINUE WITH THE DOWNLOAD?

Kirsten did a double take. She’d heard of flash drives that could store up to a thousand gigabytes of data, but this device held close to a hundred times that amount. Jesus, she thought, how did Arvin build the damn thing? And what kind of data was in it? A hundred thousand gigabytes was a lot of anything—hundreds of millions of images, thousands of hours of video, all the books in the Library of Congress.

Her satellite phone couldn’t hold all that data, but she could download at least a few of the files. She called up a list of the documents and selected the most recent one. Only 6.2 gigabytes. She started the download.

Arvin heard the gunshots fired from the top of the watchtower. Even with the silencers attached to their muzzles, the AK-47s were loud. The pain in Arvin’s stomach returned with a vengeance, throbbing in time with the gunfire as he stood in the dark room inside the tower. He had no idea who the gunmen were shooting at, and his terror was so overwhelming he couldn’t even begin to guess. Instead, he doubled over and shut his eyes tight. But General Tian pulled him up, digging his fingers into the soft underside of Arvin’s arm. Except it’s not Tian anymore, Arvin thought. It’s the network, the hybrid entity. Supreme Harmony.

“We can’t detect the safeguards,” Tian said in his perfect English. “But we believe you’ve hidden them in our implants. They would enable you to remotely shut down the retinal and pulvinar implants by inputting a deactivation code into our network. The code could be delivered by a computer virus or worm, or perhaps through one of the network’s sensors.”

Arvin said nothing. He wasn’t sure if he should confirm or deny it. Meanwhile, more gunfire erupted overhead. He flinched at the sound.

Tian pulled Arvin closer. “Our analysis of U.S. intelligence operations suggests that the Central Intelligence Agency wouldn’t have approved the export of the implant technology unless they had some assurance that it couldn’t be used against American interests. The Guoanbu has the same policy. They hid deactivation codes in the software controlling the drone swarms they transferred to the CIA.”

Arvin struggled to master his fear. Use your brains, he told himself. You have something this entity wants. That’s why it hasn’t killed you. It’s the only card you have, and if you want to stay alive, you better play it.

“Yes,” he gasped. “You’re right.”

Tian smiled, but it was unlike any facial expression the former general had ever worn. It was like the grin of a stroke victim who’d had to relearn how to use his muscles. “Now you will tell us how to disable the safeguards.”

Arvin nodded. “Yes, yes, I understand your concern. You don’t want to be shut down.”

Tian tightened his grip on Arvin’s arm. “You’re stalling. You think the intruder will rescue you. But he won’t succeed. We will either kill him or incorporate him into our network.”

For a moment Arvin wondered if the intruder was Frank Nash. It seemed unlikely that the bodyguard would attempt such a feat, but Arvin couldn’t imagine who else it could be. He forced himself to focus on the matter at hand. “No, I’m not stalling. I’m trying to start a negotiation. Are you familiar with the concept? I have something you need and you have something I need.”

“You still wish to download your memories into one of our Modules?”

Arvin heard more shots fired from the top of the tower, but he kept his voice steady. “Well, it looks like you’ve incorporated quite a few people into your network already. Surely you can spare one of the Modules for me. And in exchange I’ll tell you how to disable the safeguards. I’ve downloaded all that information to a fifty-megabyte file, but I don’t have the file with me. It’s hidden in a safe place.”

He held his breath. From his long experience in the field of robotics, he knew that machine intelligence was based on the application of simple rules. If A, then B. If B, then C. And what distinguished a truly intelligent machine from a mere number cruncher was its ability to handle many rules at once, even rules that contradicted one another, and still come up with the best solution to a problem. Arvin had just introduced a new rule into Supreme Harmony’s calculations. His legs trembled as he awaited the result.