Mark Alpert - Extinction

“What we’re doing is no different from what the human race has always done,” Zhang replied. “Every year your species slaughters billions of farm animals. You’ve shown little compunction about exploiting other species to support your growth.”

“That’s ridiculous!” Layla shouted as the soldier released the last strap. “You can’t compare—”

She interrupted herself by lunging for the soldier’s pistol. She opened her right hand, ready to grasp the gun’s handle and start shooting. But Zhang darted forward, grabbed her hand and yanked it backward at the wrist. Excruciating pain shot up her arm. Layla yelled, “ Fuck !” and fell to her knees.

“You must accept your situation,” Zhang said as he wrenched her hand back, bending it almost to the breaking point. “Your species is no longer the dominant one on this planet. Supreme Harmony is the next step in the course of evolution.” The muscles in Zhang’s face jerked and twitched. Laboriously, his contorted frown turned into a contorted smile. “It’s our turn now.”

Layla doubled over, her face pressed against the linoleum floor. She could think of nothing but the unbearable pain in her arm. When Zhang finally released her, she was as weak as a baby. She cradled her right hand in her left, trying to rub it back to life. Her tears made tiny puddles on the linoleum.

In the background, she heard the children crying again. She lifted her head from the floor and saw the bespectacled man hugging them, one in each arm. Their faces were buried in the man’s shabby gray jacket, and Layla could see only the backs of their newly shaved heads. Both children were ready for the implantation procedure, just as she was. The soldier Modules pushed the man forward, guiding him and the schoolboys out of Room C-12.

Two soldiers grabbed Layla’s arms and lifted her to her feet. They followed the children out of the room and down the corridor. Layla walked in a daze between the Modules. In a few seconds they came to a pair of double doors, each with a rectangular pane of glass at eye level. Layla couldn’t see much through the glass, just a brightly lit space, but her heart pounded against her breastbone. It was an operating room.

Zhang stepped toward one of the doors and pushed it open. Then the Module froze. His face went blank and he stood stock-still in the doorway, as if he’d just remembered something vitally important. Layla glanced at the soldier Modules gripping her arms and saw that their faces had gone blank, too. A moment later, all the Modules in the corridor turned on their heels and headed back the way they’d come.

Layla turned to Zhang as the soldiers marched her down the hall. Her heart was still pounding. “What’s going on?”

The Module didn’t look at her. “We will perform the implantations tomorrow.”

A wave of relief rushed through her. Tomorrow! Trembling, she took a couple of deep breaths. Then she turned back to Zhang. “So what changed your mind? Having second thoughts?”

Zhang shook his head. “We’ve revised our priorities. We must immediately send thirty-two sets of implants to Hubei Province to facilitate a new undertaking in that area. Our current supply of implants is limited, and the new efforts in Hubei take precedence over our activities here.”

Layla smiled. “So there’s no implants left for us? What a shame.”

“The factory in Kunming that manufactures the devices is scheduled to deliver another shipment to the Operations Center tomorrow. Two hundred and fifty sets should arrive by noon.”

She kept smiling. That’s all right, she thought. She had sixteen hours. Anything could happen before then.

They went about twenty feet past Room C-12 and stopped at a heavy steel door. The Modules opened it, revealing a large room with blank concrete walls. It was empty except for a metal sink, a toilet, and two surveillance cameras hanging from opposite corners of the ceiling. The soldiers pushed the bespectacled man and the two schoolboys into the room, and then, to Layla’s surprise, they threw her inside, too. Still weak and trembling, she stumbled to the floor. Then the soldiers closed the door and locked it.

The man gently disentangled himself from the children and crouched beside Layla. He asked her a question in Mandarin, probably the Chinese equivalent of “Are you all right?” Then he leaned closer and wrapped his arms around her shoulders. His embrace was so intimate that Layla would’ve shoved him away if she’d had any strength. Instead, she hung limply in his arms.

He lowered his head, bringing his lips to her ear. “My name is Wen Hao,” he whispered in heavily accented English. “Dragon Fire was my brother.”

They were able to escape from Supreme Harmony, Jim realized later, because the maps of the Underground City had never been digitized. After Mao’s tunnels were abandoned, they sank below the notice of the Chinese government, which preferred to forget the less edifying legacies of the Mao era. The cinder block hut that had once been the end point of the Changping tunnel was taken over by a local farmer, who turned it into a barn for his goats. After Kirsten rescued Jim, she drove her scooter down the forest trail back to the barn, and because of the darkness and the thick canopy of foliage, the helicopter pilots lost sight of them. Neither the Beijing police nor the drones saw them enter the barn and drag the scooter toward the trapdoor that lay beneath a carpet of rotting hay. And because the Chinese government’s computers held no records of the Changping tunnel, Supreme Harmony was unaware of the hidden escape route. So while the helicopters and cyborg insects continued to scan the forested slopes of the Yanshan Hills, Jim and Kirsten sped south along the underground corridor, riding the scooter back to central Beijing.

About two minutes into the journey, after they’d had a chance to catch their breath, Kirsten pulled her satellite phone out of her pocket and handed it to Jim. He was confused at first. They couldn’t make a call, because there was no reception underground. And even if they could, it would’ve been a bad idea. The Guoanbu’s antennas would surely intercept the satellite signals and alert the Supreme Harmony network. Jim was uncertain how much control Supreme Harmony had gained over the Chinese government, but he knew that the Beijing police force was taking orders from the network and would pounce on him and Kirsten if they revealed their whereabouts. But before Jim could say anything, Kirsten handed him something else, a bulky device about the size of a paperback.

“This is what Arvin handed to his bodyguard,” she yelled over the engine noise. “It’s a flash drive, custom-designed, with multiterabyte storage capacity. Go ahead and plug the phone’s cable into the drive’s USB port.”

“What’s on it?” Jim shouted. While keeping his balance on the back of the scooter’s seat, he connected the sat phone to the flash drive.

“You have to see it to believe it. Get ready for ‘This Is Your Life, Arvin Conway.’”

Jim accessed one of the files, and the images flashed on the phone’s screen. He recognized right away that he was looking at an archive of Arvin’s visual memories. He called it his soul, Jim remembered. And in the final minute of his life he’d begged Jim to protect it.

For the next thirty minutes, as Kirsten cruised down the pitch-black tunnel with the help of her infrared glasses, Jim studied the stream of images. After figuring out how to navigate among the files, he focused on Arvin’s memories of the Supreme Harmony project. The flash drive held thousands of images related to the project, far too many for Jim to analyze in half an hour. But he soon found what he was looking for. He zeroed in on an image of a room full of gurneys, each supporting a recumbent man with newly fitted neural implants. The room was part of a sprawling underground laboratory guarded by a garrison of PLA soldiers. Jim located an image showing the entrance to the complex, carved into the side of a mountain. This image was linked to a video of a fast-moving river at the bottom of a ravine, which was linked, in turn, to a panoramic vista of snow-covered peaks jutting above the horizon. Finally, Jim came upon a link showing four Mandarin characters: Yu Long Xue Shan, Jade Dragon Snow Mountain.