Mark Alpert - Extinction

Layla leaned still closer, pressing against his chest. She slid her hand up to his head and ran her fingers through his hair. She kissed his jawline and the side of his neck, opening her mouth to lick the sweat off his skin. It was, she thought, a good performance. She doubted that anyone in the world could tell she was faking it.

Then she heard a low mechanical noise. She strained her half-closed eyes to the left and saw the surveillance camera swivel away from them. The camera in the opposite corner of the ceiling turned away, too. Both pointed their lenses at the pair of schoolboys from Lijiang, who’d stopped eating their noodles to gape at the make-out session on the other side of the room.

Layla felt a surge of triumph. Supreme Harmony was averting its eyes. “We did it,” she whispered in Wen’s ear. “Look at the cameras.”

His body tensed and he stopped caressing her. “You’re right,” he whispered. “Why did they—?”

“The network has a problem with sex.” She continued groping Wen’s torso and nuzzling his ear. “I noticed it when I undressed in front of the Modules. They can’t stand to look at sexual images.”

“Why not?”

“I have no idea. Maybe because the images destabilize the network. These zombies have a group intelligence. They all share the same thoughts, but sex is more of a one-on-one activity. So maybe the thought of it upsets them.”

“And this intelligence, it’s acting on its own? It’s no longer controlled by the Guoanbu?”

Layla nodded, rubbing her cheek against Wen’s. “Yeah, it’s like an army of Frankensteins. And it has a serious grudge against the human race.” She squeezed his arm. “Come on, keep your hands moving. So you heard what happened to Dragon Fire?”

“Yes, I heard. I was also an agent in the Guoanbu, but in a different part of the country. When my brother left China, I was suspended from my duties.” His slid his hands up and down her back, but with no passion whatsoever. “The Counterintelligence Bureau interrogated me to find out where Wen Sheng had gone. I knew nothing and I told them so. But they found my brother anyway and murdered him.”

Layla thought of her brief encounter with Wen Sheng in Central Park. She remembered her last sight of him, sprawled motionless on the pathway. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “He saved my life.”

“Were you his contact in the United States? The interrogators said he was collaborating with the CIA.”

“That’s a lie. I’m a hacker with InfoLeaks. Your brother wanted to show the world what the Guoanbu was doing to the dissidents.” She squeezed his arm again, this time in an attempt to comfort him. Then a panicky thought occurred to her. “Wait a second. If you were a Guoanbu agent, how come Supreme Harmony doesn’t recognize you?”

“I learned a few tricks while I worked for the ministry.” He raised his hand and touched the thick frames of his spectacles. “I don’t need these glasses to see. But they hide so much of my face, they fool the facial-recognition programs.”

Well, that explains why he’s wearing the ugly things, Layla thought. “So did you come here to get revenge for your brother’s murder?”

He shook his head. “No, not revenge. My brother was loyal to China. He wouldn’t have turned against the Guoanbu unless he saw something terrible, so terrible he couldn’t remain silent. When he died, that obligation passed to me.” He started caressing her more vigorously. His voice was still a whisper, but there was some heat behind it. “I came to Yunnan and began my own investigation of the Operations Center. I heard they were looking for schoolchildren in Lijiang, so I took a temporary job in the school district’s office.” He jerked his head in the direction of the boys. “Now I see the terrible thing that my brother saw.”

Layla glanced at the children again. They crouched on the floor, their shaved heads close together, staring intently at their entwined protectors. Each boy had raised his right hand to his mouth to cover his grin.

“So what are we going to do about it?” Layla whispered, locking eyes with Wen through his fake glasses.

He took a deep breath. “I’m trained in the martial arts. I can disarm one of the soldiers the next time they come into the room. If I’m lucky, I can kill two or three of them. But this complex is heavily guarded. When we entered the Operations Center I observed seventeen men with shaved heads, and there may be more. Our chances of escaping with the children aren’t good.”

Layla frowned. She’d also seen the platoon of lobotomized soldiers when she entered the complex. It was hard to imagine how she and Wen could defeat all of them. The soldiers were well armed, and Supreme Harmony was probably linked to every surveillance camera in the Operations Center.

But then she remembered something else she saw when the Modules had escorted her down the complex’s long corridor: the room crowded with computer terminals and screens.

She cupped her hands around Wen’s cheeks and pulled him closer. “There’s a room less than fifty meters from here, a computer room. You just need to get us in there. Then we’ll barricade the door, and I’ll take care of the rest.”

Wen looked puzzled. “I don’t understand,” he whispered. “What will you—”

“I’m going to hack into Supreme Harmony.”

Unfortunately, the tunnel to Beijing’s Fangshan District wasn’t as wonderfully straight and wide as the Changping tunnel. The Communist cadres who’d built this particular spoke of the Underground City had apparently worked in fits and starts, digging the tunnel in sections that didn’t quite align. Every mile or so the corridor narrowed to a bottleneck less than three feet across, and Kirsten had to slow the scooter to a crawl so they could squeeze through the gap and proceed to the next section. Worse, the tunnel’s walls were pockmarked and crumbling, and in some places the concrete had given way altogether, spilling huge mounds of dirt across the slab floor. In those spots Jim and Kirsten had to get off the scooter and haul it over the earthen mounds. Then they took their seats again, Jim behind Kirsten, and rode cautiously forward.

With all the stopping and starting, their average speed dropped below ten miles per hour. Jim hated the slow pace, but there was one good thing about it: He didn’t have to shout above the roar of the scooter’s engine. This made it easier to tell Kirsten what had happened at the Great Wall and what he’d learned about Supreme Harmony. She bombarded him with questions for almost an hour, clearly reluctant to believe that the surveillance network had developed a mind of its own. Jim could see why she was skeptical. He wouldn’t have believed it either if he hadn’t seen the network in action, the Modules and drones working in perfect synchrony.

Kirsten finally fell silent, taking some time to think. Meanwhile, Jim reached into his pocket and pulled out the Dream-catcher, the small metal disk that Arvin had ripped out of his scalp. Jim rubbed the disk on his pants to remove the last bits of gore from its surface. Then he connected it to the USB port of Arvin’s flash drive.

The disk must’ve been programmed to automatically download its contents, because when Jim linked the drive to his satellite phone and looked at the screen, he noticed a new entry on top of the list of files: 07222013. It was today’s date, he realized, July 22, 2013. Opening the file, Jim saw that it held Arvin’s final memories, all the images the old man had perceived in the last twelve hours of his life: a view of Tiananmen Square, a close-up of Chairman Mao’s corpse, a panoramic vista of the Juyongguan section of the Great Wall. Jim scrolled down until he reached the very last of Arvin’s memories. He saw an image of the dark, dank room inside the watchtower. Then Jim saw a close-up of his own face, which was so flushed and frantic he barely recognized it. Then he clicked on a link to another set of memories and saw a woman’s face, haughty and beautiful. Her skin was pale, her lips were bright red, and her eyes were black. Her hair was also black, with scattered silver highlights. But when Jim looked closer he saw that it wasn’t really hair at all—the woman’s head was covered with writhing black snakes. What he’d thought were highlights were actually the snakes’ eyes and fangs. It’s Medusa, he realized with a start. The monster whose face turns men to stone.