Mark Alpert - Extinction

When they got within a hundred yards of the radio tower, he led her to an outcrop jutting above the ice sheet. They ducked behind the rock, and Wu Dan and Li Tung slid off their backs. Then her father raised his rifle and said, “Wait here.” Before Layla could protest, he ran to the control station. When he reached the trailer, he kicked the door open and rushed inside. Layla’s heart was in her mouth as she waited to hear a gunshot. But after a few seconds he reappeared in the doorway and gave the all clear sign. She took the boys’ hands and dashed to the trailer.

Her father was already seated in front of the terminal when she got there. While the boys rushed to the electric space heater to warm their hands, Layla looked over her father’s shoulder, watching him input the password. He typed the romanized spelling of Héxié Shèhui on the keyboard, then the six digits. Then he pressed the ENTER key.

For three full seconds the screen was frozen. Layla’s stomach clenched—had Supreme Harmony changed the password? But then a high-pitched chime came out of the terminal’s desktop speakers and the log-on screen faded away. A moment later it was replaced by a graphical user interface that looked a bit like a spiderweb. Bright yellow lines, some thick and some thin, crisscrossed the screen in an elaborate pattern. At the junctions of the thick lines were blue squares and red circles, and at the endpoints of the thin lines were clusters of white diamonds. The squares and circles and diamonds had labels in Mandarin that Layla couldn’t read, but she didn’t need her father to translate them. The interface was perfectly clear: It was a graphical representation of the Supreme Harmony network. The squares and circles were the server farms and communication hubs. The diamonds were the Modules.

Unable to resist, Layla reached past her father, grasped the mouse and clicked on one of the red circles. A list of program files appeared on the screen. She crossed her fingers as she opened the first file. She’d be out of luck if the network’s communications software was written in a Chinese programming language. She wouldn’t be able to read the programs, much less hack into the system. But when the software code came on the screen, she saw line after beautiful line of Proto, a programming language she knew fairly well. It was often used to write the software for networks of robots, making it a good fit for Supreme Harmony.

Keeping her right hand on the mouse, Layla gave her father a gentle push with her left. “I’ll take it from here.”

He looked her in the eye. “The shutdown code is binary, a hundred and twenty-eight bits. We need to get it past the network’s firewall and broadcast it to all the Modules simultaneously. You think you can set that up?”

She pushed him a little harder. “I can’t do it if you’re hogging the terminal. Get up!”

He stood up and stepped aside. Layla sat down in front of the screen and got to work.

Jim watched his daughter attack Supreme Harmony. Her eyes locked on the screen and her fingers jabbed the keyboard. As she focused on the software, her mouth opened a bit and the tip of her tongue slid forward until it rested on her lower lip. Jim remembered seeing this same expression on Layla’s face when she was just a three-year-old attacking a page in her coloring book with a thick red crayon gripped in her tiny fist. Her tongue came out whenever she was concentrating.

He glanced at the lines of code scrolling down the screen, the nested instructions packed with operators and variables. Jim was familiar with this programming language. Arvin Conway had used it for some of his robotics projects. But Jim couldn’t manipulate it the way Layla could. His specialty was hardware, not software. He was good at building machines but clumsy at writing the programs for communicating with them. Strangely enough, his daughter had the opposite set of skills. Or maybe it wasn’t so strange—maybe Layla had deliberately chosen to excel at something he wasn’t very good at. Either way, Jim was glad she knew her stuff. Supreme Harmony’s programming looked pretty damn complicated.

After a while he turned away from the terminal and glanced at the bank of video monitors. To his dismay, he noticed that all the screens had gone black. Supreme Harmony had evidently turned off the video feeds from its surveillance cameras. The network knew that he and Layla were in the control station, and it didn’t want them to see the Modules coming.

Jim rushed to the trailer’s door and opened it. Raising his AK, he stepped outside and surveyed the area around the radio tower. It was 7:00 P.M. and daylight was fading fast. The glacier on Yulong Xueshan reflected the violet sky. He looked in all directions and saw nothing but ice and rock. But the Modules could be waiting just out of sight. When darkness fell, they’d be able to approach the trailer unseen.

Feeling antsy, he returned to his daughter. Layla was still staring openmouthed at the terminal, in the exact same pose as before. Jim came up behind her and rested his left hand on her shoulder. “How are you doing? Are you getting close?”

She kept her eyes on the screen. “Don’t bother me now, Daddy.”

“The thing is, it’s gonna get dark soon. And if we don’t—”

“Goddamn it, I’m working as fast as I can!”

Jim knew that tone of voice all too well. During Layla’s last two years of high school, at least half their conversations had been screaming matches. He didn’t want to start another argument with her, so he backed off and went to the other end of the trailer.

Wu Dan and Li Tung still sat by the space heater. They looked at Jim nervously, their eyes focused on his right hand. He looked at it too and saw the damaged knuckles where the polyimide skin had been scraped off. That’s what’s making the boys nervous, he realized. They could see the steel joints.

Smiling, he held up the prosthesis. “Don’t be scared,” he said in Mandarin. “It’s just a mechanical hand, see? Made of steel and plastic.” He wiggled the fingers.

The boys still looked nervous. Jim tried to think of a way to reassure them. After a few seconds he spotted a Phillips-head screwdriver on a shelf behind one of the server racks. He picked it up with his right hand. “Hey, want to see something cool?”

Neither boy responded, but Jim sensed their interest. He wrapped his mechanical fingers around the metal part of the screwdriver, positioning the thumb near the tip. “Okay, watch this.” He sent a signal to the motor controlling the thumb, slowly increasing the force applied to the metal. After a few seconds the tip of the screwdriver started to bend.

Li Tung’s face lit up. “Whoa!” he shouted. “How did you do that?”

“I built a superstrong motor for each finger. And motors for the wrist and elbow joints, too.” He released his grip on the screwdriver so the boys could inspect it. “Not bad, huh?”

Wu Dan touched the screwdriver’s bent tip. He was obviously more skeptical than his younger schoolmate and probably suspected it was made of rubber. When he saw that it wasn’t, he let out a whistle. “How strong are you?” he asked soberly. “Are you as strong as Jackie Chan?”

“Yeah, are you?” Li Tung chimed in. “Could you beat up Jackie Chan?”

“Well, I don’t know.” Jim scratched his chin. “He’s awfully quick. Maybe I could—”

He was interrupted by another high-pitched chime coming from the desktop speakers attached to the computer terminal. “Dad!” Layla called. “Stop playing around and get over here.”

Jim felt a rush of adrenaline. He left the boys and rushed to Layla, but when he looked at the computer, he saw nothing on the screen. “What happened?”