Mark Alpert - Extinction

Jim bit his lip. He couldn’t talk about it yet. He pulled back from Kirsten and gave her another smile. “First things first,” he said. “Where’s Layla?”

“She woke up a few hours ago. Luckily, the holes in your skulls are tiny and they heal fast. The medic said Layla could walk around a little, so she decided to explore the camp. She’s outside now, saying goodbye to the boys.”

It took Jim a couple of seconds to figure out who Kirsten was referring to. “You mean Wu Dan and Li Tung?”

“Yeah, we found them in another room in the Operations Center. There’s a man here at the camp, a smuggler from Pianma, who’s going to drive them back to their homes in Lijiang. It’s easier to cross the border now that the People’s Republic agreed to the cease-fire.”

“A cease-fire? When did this happen?”

She nodded. “You slept right through it. The Chinese government accepted the American terms. Apparently, there was a shake-up in the Politburo Standing Committee. The new leaders ordered the PLA to end hostilities everywhere.”

Praise the Lord, Jim thought. The frightened men in the Politburo’s shelter had done the right thing. “That’s good news. I hope this means we can go home soon.”

“We’re leaving after nightfall. The Special Ops crew is going to fly us to an air base in India, and the CIA is arranging a flight from there to the States.”

Jim recalled something else he’d seen through Supreme Harmony’s eyes, the image of a man entering the Operations Center. A bald man with a scarred cheek. “It’s Hammer, right? He led the Special Ops team? And brought his own drones from Afghanistan?”

Kirsten looked at him intently with her camera-glasses. “How do you know all this? You’ve been asleep ever since we found you. What’s going on, Pierce?”

He took a deep breath. “I was connected to Supreme Harmony. I could see what the network saw because it was inside my mind. It was picking through my memories.” Simply thinking about it was enough to make his head spin again. He tried to steady himself by raising his hand to his bandaged scalp. “Layla was connected, too. It was going to lobotomize us.”

“So how did you stop it? Hammer said the Modules started collapsing.”

Jim shook his head. Maybe in a day or two he’d be ready to talk about it. But not now. “Let’s talk about it later, okay? I’m still a little shaky.”

In response, she hugged him again and didn’t say a word. She’s a good woman, Jim thought. A smart, kind, beautiful woman. He was lucky as hell.

Half a minute later, Layla came into the tent. Her head was bandaged just like Jim’s, and she wore a Kachin Independence Army uniform that was way too big for her. When she saw her father, she did the same thing Kirsten had done—she rushed across the tent and threw herself at him. Layla wrapped her arms around his shoulders and hugged him fiercely. Jim patted her back with his left hand. “Hey, kiddo,” he said. “Good to see you, too.”

Kirsten gazed at them for a few seconds, smiling. Then she winked at Jim and silently left the tent, leaving him alone with his daughter.

After a while, Layla let go of him and sat cross-legged on the mat. “What took you so long? I’ve been awake for hours.”

“That’s because you’re twenty-two. Twenty-two-year-olds are invincible. What were you doing while I was asleep?”

“Well, for a while I was trying to get Wu Dan and Li Tung to teach me some more Mandarin, but then they ran off to play with the soldiers. Then Kirsten let me borrow this.” She reached into the pocket of her oversized pants and pulled out an electronic device. It was Arvin Conway’s flash drive. “It’s pretty fascinating. Especially the search engine that retrieves the visual memories. I’m still trying to figure out how he programmed it.”

Jim chuckled. He wondered how Arvin would react if he knew Layla was picking apart his soul. “Just don’t delete anything, okay? I promised the old man I’d keep it in one piece.”

“No problem. I’ll be careful.” She put the flash drive back in her pocket. Then she leaned a bit closer and grinned slyly. “So have you noticed anything different since you woke up? Any unusual changes in your vision?”

Jim looked into his daughter’s eyes. After a few seconds of close examination, he noticed a silvery glint in her pupils. She had the ocular cameras and the retinal implants, too. The sight made his heart sink. “Oh Jesus. I’m sorry about this, baby.”

“Sorry? Why are you sorry? It’s amazing. I can read a newspaper from across the room. How cool is that?”

“Well, sure, but—”

“And that’s not all. I was watching the Kachin soldiers do target practice with their assault rifles? And I could actually see the bullets come out of the muzzles. Honest to freakin’ God.”

This got Jim’s attention. He remembered what Arvin Conway had said about the improvements he’d made to the implants. “So the motion detection is pretty good?”

“Are you kidding? It’s unreal. But the best part is watching the birds. Come on, you have to see this.”

Rising from the bamboo mat, she grasped Jim’s left arm and pulled him to his feet. His head swam for a moment. “Whoa, hold on! Where are we going?”

“To the edge of the jungle. Now that it’s getting dark, the birds should be feeding. Most of them are shrikes, I think. Insect-eaters. Wait till you see this.”

She dragged him out of the tent, and they walked across the camp toward the edge of the jungle. Jim was surprised that Layla was in such a lighthearted mood. Considering the horrors they’d experienced just twelve hours ago, he expected her to be traumatized, or at least a bit distressed. But, instead, she was babbling about the range and habitat of Burmese shrikes and how they had this interesting habit of impaling their dead prey on thorns to make it easier to rip them apart. Jim wondered if maybe Layla was piling on all this ornithological talk just to bury the memory of their ordeal in the Operations Center, but as he studied his daughter he got the feeling that her happiness was genuine. She seemed jubilant and relieved, as if a great weight had been lifted from her.

Then they reached the trees and saw the birds flying. They had black heads and plump white bodies and striated wings that were the color of old rust. Jim suspected that even with ordinary eyesight it would be a lovely thing to see these creatures jump from the branches of the palm trees and dive through the clouds of mosquitoes that filled the jungle before sunset. But when Jim viewed it with his new eyes he was absolutely awestruck. He could see every beat of the shrike’s whipping brown wings.

Layla stood beside him, still babbling, but she wasn’t talking about birds anymore. She said that when they got back to the States she was going to reenroll at MIT, but instead of pursuing computer science, she was going to study evolutionary biology. And she was going to take courses in Mandarin, too, because she wanted to keep in touch with Wu Dan and Li Tung. And she also wanted to pay a visit to someone she’d met at the University of Texas, a graduate student in aerospace engineering who was smart and funny and phenomenally hot.

And as Jim listened to his daughter go on about her plans and dreams and desires, he felt his heart melting. He was so in love with this girl. He couldn’t understand how he’d lived for so long without her.

The development of brain-machine interfaces, which link the human mind to microchips, sensors, and motors, is one of the most momentous trends in twenty-first-century science. Here are some of the real technologies I highlighted in Extinction .