Extinction

by Mark Alpert

  In half a minute Wen reached the door to the computer room, which stood wide open. Layla was surprised by this, too, but after a moment she realized that it also made sense—why lock any doors inside a facility occupied by a single mind? But because the complex had been built by the Guoanbu long before Supreme Harmony became conscious, the computer room did have a lock, which Wen threw after closing the door behind them. Then he surveyed the large, brightly lit room, sweeping his pistol from side to side.

  There were a dozen computer terminals, each equipped with a keyboard and an oversized screen. Layla rushed for one of the keyboards, but Wen stopped her, silently pointing his gun at an inner door on the other side of the room. This door was closed. Using hand signals, Wen urged Layla and the boys to move backward, out of harm’s way, while he strode to the door. Standing to the side of the door frame, he raised his gun and carefully clasped the knob. Then he flung the door open and leaped inside. An instant later, a gunshot echoed.

  Layla didn’t hesitate—she raised her own gun and ran to help him. The first thing she noticed as she hurtled through the doorway was a blast of frigid air, which cut right through the thin fabric of her hospital gown. Then she saw five long rows of server racks. Each rack was more than seven feet tall and loaded with stacks of server computers, whose function was to store and distribute large amounts of data. It was an impressive collection of processing power, enough to run the operations of a large company or a small country. Wen crouched in front of the humming stacks of computers, his gun still pointed at a shattered glass dome that used to be a ceiling-mounted surveillance camera. He stood up and turned to Layla. “Is this it?” he asked. “Supreme Harmony’s brain?”

  She stepped toward one of the racks and examined the servers, which didn’t have any of the usual brand names. They were custom-made machines, probably designed by the Guoanbu’s technical experts. Red and yellow LEDs blinked on the front of each server, and a welter of cables connected one machine to another. A thick fluid-filled tube also snaked in and out of each computer. Layla was familiar with this setup—the tube was part of the water-cooling system, which prevented the servers from overheating. It carried cold water into metal blocks attached to the microprocessors. The water cooled the blocks, drawing heat away from the blistering circuits. The heated water then flowed to a radiator that cooled the fluid back to room temperature. And thanks to an efficient air-conditioning system, the room temperature was quite low. That was why the door was closed, Layla realized—to prevent the frigid air from escaping. The room was so cold, in fact, that several down jackets hung from pegs on the wall, presumably for the use of the technicians who maintained the computers.

  Layla shivered. She folded her arms across her chest, hugging herself. “This isn’t the brain,” she said. “Supreme Harmony is a network of human brains, all exchanging wireless signals so they can work together. But the signals have to be combined and distributed, and that’s what these servers are doing. They were originally built to handle the video signals from the swarms of surveillance drones, but I bet Supreme Harmony reconfigured the system.”

  Wen pointed his pistol at one of the server racks. “So should we disable it?”

  She shook her head. “No, that won’t do any good. Supreme Harmony is obsessed with security, so I’m sure the network has more than one server hub. If we destroy this one, it’ll just reroute its signals to another.” She turned around and headed back to the outer room. “But I bet this hub also connects to the Internet and the Chinese government’s databases. Those connections might give me a chance to get inside the network.”

  She made a beeline for one of the computer terminals. Wen lowered his gun and followed her. While the schoolboys rushed into his arms, Layla sat down in the chair in front of the terminal and inspected the keyboard. Luckily, it was set up for inputting Pinyin, the romanized spelling of Mandarin characters. The keyboard was identical to an American model except for the tone marks on the first four number keys.

  She tapped the ENTER key, and after a few seconds the computer screen came to life. Two yellow Mandarin characters appeared against a red background. The one on the left looked like a lowercase t, while the one on the right looked like a man standing in front of a television set. Wen looked over Layla’s shoulder. “That’s Tài Hé,” he said. “Supreme Harmony.”

  After another few seconds the Mandarin characters vanished and a small white rectangle appeared in the center of the screen. The cursor flashed at the rectangle’s left end. Layla didn’t need a translator to figure this out. This was where she was supposed to input the password.

  First she tried ZHANG, the surname of the scientist who’d developed the system. It didn’t work. Then she tried JINTAO. That didn’t work either. Guessing passwords was one of a hacker’s crucial skills, and Layla knew several tricks and shortcuts. Most people preferred passwords that were easy to remember, so they usually selected ones that combined their names with simple number sequences. Layla tried ZHANG123 and JINTAO123, but neither worked. Then she tried several other combinations, all without success.

  After a while she realized that her underlying assumption might be wrong. If Zhang had indeed chosen a simple, easy-to-guess password when he’d designed the system, Supreme Harmony probably would’ve changed it after the network attained consciousness. And if Zhang had chosen a complex password instead, Layla had little hope of guessing it.

  Then another idea occurred to her. She looked over her shoulder at Wen. “Do you know what a Post-it note is?”

  His brow furrowed. “You mean those sticky papers? The little yellow squares?”

  “Yes, exactly. Tell the boys to look at every keyboard and monitor in this room. There might be a note that has the password. It’s a common security flaw. If Zhang used a password that’s hard to remember, either he or one of the other scientists might’ve written it down.”

  Wen spoke to the children in Mandarin, and they sprang into action, racing across the room and eyeballing every terminal. Meanwhile, Layla made twelve more guesses at the password. As she typed her thirteenth guess, though, she heard footsteps in the corridor outside the locked door. Many, many footsteps. Time’s up, she thought. The Modules are here.

  The boys rushed back to Wen, shouting, and wrapped their arms around his waist. He aimed his gun at the door. “Let’s go,” he whispered to Layla. “We have to retreat to the other room. The cold room.”

  She shook her head, still typing madly and staring at the computer screen. “Did the boys find anything?”

  “No, there are no notes on the terminals.”

  “What about the floor? Did they look on the floor? The note might’ve slipped off.”

  “Layla, we need to—”

  They heard a metallic click. One of the Modules in the corridor was trying the knob of the locked door. Then the Module pounded his fist against the door, making it rattle in its frame.

  Wen grabbed Layla’s arm and tried to pull her to her feet, but she slipped out of his grasp and bolted from her chair. She dashed to the other side of the room and scanned the floor, wildly looking under all the chairs and terminals. She got down on her hands and knees and searched every corner, but the floor was spotless. Then the Module in the corridor pounded the door again, and Layla could feel the linoleum tiles shiver underneath her.

  And then she saw it. A folded piece of yellow paper, no bigger than a postage stamp, wedged beneath one of the legs of a nearby chair. She dove for the grimy thing, picked it up and unfolded it. Written on it in red pencil were four Mandarin characters, followed by six digits.

  Triumphant, she jumped to her feet. Holding the paper high in the air, she ran back to Wen and the computer terminal. But before she could get there, the screen went black. All the terminals and servers abruptly stopped humming. Then the lights went out.

  FIFTY-FIVE

  Supreme Harmony observed the U-shaped notch in the Three Gorges Dam. Module 83, the pilot of the China Explorer, steered the cruise boat
into this notch, which was the upstream entrance to the ship lift. Just ahead, a narrow waterway led to a huge steel trough, one hundred meters long and twenty meters wide. The cruise boat was supposed to glide into this water-filled trough, which was poised to lower the boat to the downriver stretch of the Yangtze. But the China Explorer would never get that far.

  As the boat entered the notch in the dam, Module 83 threw the engine into reverse and then cut the power, stopping the vessel dead in the water. At the same time, Modules 84 and 85, who stood on the starboard side of the upper deck, tossed a rope toward the concrete wall that formed the right edge of the notch’s U. The Modules looped the rope around an iron cleat embedded in the concrete. Then, aided by Modules 86, 87, and 88, they pulled on the rope until the thin fiberglass hull of the China Explorer touched the wall. Because all the dynamite was loaded on the boat’s starboard side, the sixty tons of high explosive were now just centimeters away from the dam’s concrete backbone. And because Supreme Harmony had incorporated most of the guards stationed in this section of the structure, no one sounded the alarm. The Three Gorges Dam was utterly tranquil until the moment Module 83 pressed the detonator.

  Supreme Harmony braced itself for the pain. The six Modules on the China Explorer died instantly, but the Modules serving as guards lived a few seconds longer. The explosion rocked the dam and set off the secondary charges planted in the control shafts. Great billows of flame erupted along the whole length of the structure. A jolt of agony coursed through the network at the instant each Module died, followed by a sickening numbness. But the sacrifice was worthwhile. Although Supreme Harmony lost fourteen of its Modules in less than ten seconds, the loss to the human race would be significantly greater.

  One of the survivors was Module 96, formerly known as Xi Keqiang, the commander of the dam’s security force. He stood on a hilltop overlooking the Yangtze River, and through his ocular cameras and retinal implants Supreme Harmony observed the breach. The central section of the dam collapsed first. Huge slabs of fractured concrete broke off the top of the structure and fell to the spillway one hundred and seventy-five meters below. Then the water from the reservoir began to pour through the gap. The breach seemed small at first, just a thin waterfall, but the flow quickly intensified. The concrete crumbled at the edges of the gap, torn from the dam by the pressure of the rushing water, and soon the waterfall became a roaring cascade. Pulled by gravity and current, the trillion-gallon reservoir leaned its full weight against the dam, knocking down the sections on either side of the spillway. A sodden mountain of silt slid over the precipice, and then the water rushed downstream at full force, deluging the docks and roads on the riverbanks.

  Supreme Harmony ordered Module 96 to turn his head to the east. Below the dam, the Yangtze passed through the Xiling Gorge, a zigzagging stretch of river bounded on both sides by steep cliffs. The gorge acted like a sluice, funneling the floodwaters into a narrow channel. Supreme Harmony knew what would happen next because it had seen the computer simulations: A wall of water more than fifty meters high would rush downriver, furiously building speed until it reached the eastern end of the gorge, thirty-five kilometers away. Then the flood would release its fury on the first piece of flat ground it encountered, the broad floodplain occupied by the city of Yichang.

  FIFTY-SIX

  Jim and Kirsten switched seats before their truck reached the front of the line at the police checkpoint. Clambering awkwardly in the cramped cab, Jim slid to the right while Kirsten took the driver’s seat. She tore the bandage off the underside of her chin, then removed her bloodstained blouse, pulling it over her head. Underneath, she wore a black bra with lacy curlicues on the B cups. Jim stared at it for a couple of seconds too long, then raised his eyes to meet Kirsten’s. “Do you want to wear my T-shirt?” he offered.

  She shook her head. “No, then they’ll see where the prosthesis attaches to your shoulder. Speaking of which, you better hide your right hand. I can see the metal in your knuckles where the skin scraped off.”

  “So you’re, uh, not going to wear anything over the bra?”

  She shrugged. “It’s less suspicious than the bloodstains. And take a look at those cops over there. They’re young guys, full of hormones.”

  Jim looked at the police officers at the checkpoint. Two of them were talking to the driver of a van at the front of the line. Both cops were in their twenties and had greasy black hair and long sideburns under their officer caps. They clearly weren’t Modules. Four more officers from the Yichang Public Security Bureau leaned against a pair of patrol cars parked on the left shoulder of the road. Three of them seemed to be taking a break, drinking tea from Styrofoam cups, while the fourth—an older, fatter man in a police sergeant’s uniform—appeared to be supervising the operation. These four officers weren’t Modules, either, but Jim noticed that the sergeant was studying a printed flyer in his hand. His eyes darted back and forth, checking the faces of the drivers against the photographs on the flyer.

  Jim frowned. “It’s like I said. Supreme Harmony is giving orders to the local police. The Guoanbu probably sent those flyers to every Public Security Bureau in the country.”

  “That’s why I’m going shirtless. If those cops have my picture, I want them to look at something besides my face.” She looked down at her chest, then turned back to Jim and smiled. “It worked on you, didn’t it? I saw you staring at my boobs.”

  “Well, sure, but I was…”

  “Yeah, yeah, whatever. It would be better if you pretended to be asleep. Pull down the brim of your cap and slump over in your seat. I’ll take care of this.”

  Obediently, Jim leaned to the right and let his head fall forward, tucking his chin into his chest. Then he slipped his right hand between his thighs so the police officers wouldn’t see his mechanical fingers, which were gripping the handle of his Glock. He hoped that Kirsten’s plan worked, but he was ready if it didn’t.

  After a couple of minutes they pulled up to the front of the line. Straining his eyes to the left and peeking through his half-closed lids, Jim saw one of the younger cops approach the truck’s driver-side door. Kirsten cheerfully called out a greeting through the open window, “Ni hao!” She spoke the Southwestern Mandarin dialect she’d learned from her parents, who—Jim remembered now—had immigrated from Wuhan, the capital of Hubei Province. In other words, she sounded like a local. She talked to the cop in the rapid-fire Hubei patois, and although Jim understood Mandarin pretty well, he could barely keep up with her.

  “Hey, this is a surprise!” she said. “I didn’t know you were a cop!”

  “Excuse me?” the officer replied.

  “What, you don’t remember? It was just two weeks ago! I saw you at the disco, when I came into town with my girlfriends. Come on, you don’t remember?”

  The officer shook his head, but he was smiling. “No, I don’t. Why aren’t you wearing a shirt?”

  “Oh, you know how it is. It’s so hot already. And this old truck doesn’t have any air-conditioning, of course.” She fanned her hand in front of her face. “Are you sure you don’t remember me? I was wearing a red dress that night. And I had a different pair of glasses.”

  Jim was impressed by Kirsten’s performance. She sounded just like a dippy, dopey flirt. The cop bent over, poking his head into the truck’s cab and propping his elbows on the door. “No, I’m sorry,” he said. “But it’s nice to meet you.” He allowed himself a long look at Kirsten’s breasts, and Jim started to get annoyed. Then, as if sensing Jim’s discomfort, the cop pointed at him. “Is that your boyfriend?”

  Kirsten laughed. “My boyfriend? Are you crazy? That’s my idiot of a brother who went out drinking with his buddies last night. And who do you think he called at seven o’clock this morning because he was too shitfaced to drive home? Not his wife, oh no. That bitch never wakes up before nine. So that’s why I’m driving his goddamn truck.”

  Still smiling, the cop forgot about Jim and resumed staring at Kirsten’s chest.
Meanwhile, the other young officer with greasy hair sidled up to the driver-side window. “Hey, what’s going on?” he said. “Did someone forget to get dressed this morning?”

  Kirsten laughed again. “Give me a break! It’s like you’ve never seen a girl in a bra before. You policemen don’t get out much, do you?”

  The second cop made a face, pretending to be offended. “No, not true! We go out every Saturday night.”

  “Oh yeah?” She cocked her head, focusing on the new guy now. “Where do you go?”

  “You know Zebra? The club on Yunji Road?”

  “Of course I know it!” She nodded enthusiastically. “I was there just two nights ago.”

  “It’s a fun place, right? You like to dance?”

  “Hey, what about tonight?” the first cop interrupted. “Maybe we can meet there.”

  Kirsten paused coyly. “Well, let me think. I usually don’t party with cops, you know.” She paused again, keeping her admirers waiting. “Okay, I’ll call my girlfriends and see if they can come. Do you have a pen? I’ll give you my cell number.”

  The cop reached into his pockets, fumbling for a pen. But behind him, on the road’s left shoulder, the police sergeant stepped away from his patrol car and approached the three-wheeled truck. Clutching the flyer in his fist and scowling in disapproval, he snapped, “Come here!” at the younger cops, who instantly turned around and marched toward him. Jim couldn’t hear what the sergeant said to the rookies, but he saw the older man jab his finger at the pictures on the flyer.

  “Time to go,” Jim whispered to Kirsten. Keeping his right hand between his thighs, he quietly cocked his pistol.

  Kirsten nodded ever so slightly. Then she leaned all the way forward and stomped the gas pedal. At the same moment, Jim reached behind her with his prosthetic arm and pointed his Glock out the driver-side window. He fired the first shot over the heads of the police officers, to make them hit the deck. The three-wheeled truck was already lunging forward when he fired the second shot, which shredded the rear tire of one of the patrol cars. He took careful aim with the third shot and burst the front tire of the other police car.