Extinction (48 page)

Okay,
he thought,
I’m in Burma
. Specifically, Kachin State, the northernmost part of the country. All in all, that was excellent news. But something bothered him. The sign he’d just read was more than a hundred yards away and the Roman letters at the bottom were less than two inches high. It should’ve been impossible to read the words at this distance. Yet he just did.

He lay there for a while longer, still too groggy to get up. Judging from the quality of the light outside, which was slanting and golden, and from the fatigued demeanor of the soldiers, he guessed it was evening. He’d been asleep for at least twelve hours. His head was swathed in bandages and there was no prosthesis attached to his shoulder. The last thing he remembered was an image of several frightened Chinese leaders sitting around a conference table in an underground shelter. He’d been connected to Supreme Harmony until the very end. He’d witnessed the network’s final moments, its last burst of hatred and despair.

He looked again through the hole in the canvas, focusing on the jungle trees that surrounded the camp. He could see the palm fronds hanging in the humid air and the tiny brown spots at the tips of the spiky leaves. Now he realized why his eyesight was so unnaturally good. Behind his corneas, high-resolution video cameras were transmitting signals to implants that lined his retinas. Supreme Harmony had carved up his eyes and inserted the hardware while he lay on the table in the Operations Center. Jim wondered for a moment why his retinal implants hadn’t been fried by the shutdown code, but after some thought he figured it out. Because he hadn’t been lobotomized, he’d never truly belonged to the network. He hadn’t been on the distribution list when Supreme Harmony unknowingly sent the shutdown code to its Modules, so the fatal sequence of ones and zeroes never passed through his implants.

Shit,
he thought.
First a prosthetic arm, now mechanical eyes. I’m the Bionic Man.

With a grunt, he used his left hand to prop himself up to a sitting position. He felt a stab of pain in his broken index finger, which was wrapped in a splint. His head spun for a moment, and he thought he was going to puke. But then his stomach settled, and he saw Kirsten rushing toward him from the other side of the tent. She had a fresh bandage on the side of her neck, covering the place where the drone had stung her during the battle outside the Yunnan Operations Center. It was just a few inches from the older sting under her chin.

Jim smiled. “You see? I told you I’d come back.”

Kneeling on the mat, she wrapped her arms around him. She buried her face in the crook of his neck and refused to let go. Jim felt her whole body shaking with sobs, and he hugged her with all the strength in his left arm. And then, after maybe half a minute, she tilted her head and kissed him. She pressed her lips against his, softly at first and then with greater insistence. Then her lips brushed his cheek and moved close to his ear. “You kept your promise,” she whispered. “You’re alive.”

“Thanks to you. You saved me, Kir.”

“No, it wasn’t me. After the drones got me, I was out like a light.” She lifted her chin and touched the bandage on her neck. “But the medic told me about it afterward, after we flew back here in the Black Hawk. He said you and Layla were on the operating tables. With holes drilled into your skulls. And there were two Modules lying unconscious on the floor.”

“Yeah, they were terrible doctors. They fell down on the job.”

Kirsten punched him in the left shoulder, pretty hard. “Come on, be serious! What happened? How the hell did you do it?”

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.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: THE SCIENCE BEHIND
EXTINCTION

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
.

Powerful Prostheses.
In 2011 researchers at the University of Pittsburgh conducted one of the first human trials of a prosthetic arm guided by the user’s thoughts. The scientists implanted an array of electrodes on the surface of the brain of Tim Hemmes, a thirty-year-old paralyzed in a motorcycle accident seven years before. By sensing the brain cell firing patterns that correspond to specific arm motions, the device enabled Hemmes to mentally send commands to a nine-pound prosthesis and move its hand and fingers. The research is partly funded by DARPA, the Pentagon’s R&D agency, which has invested $100 million to develop better artificial limbs.

Artificial Eyes.
Researchers have given eyesight to the blind by linking a video camera to an implant attached to the retina. The camera wirelessly transmits its video to the implant, which reproduces the images on a grid of electrodes. The electrodes stimulate the adjacent nerve cells in the damaged retina, and the pattern of nerve signals conveys a rough picture to the brain. Second Sight Medical Products has already introduced the first commercial retinal implants in Europe, and the device may soon become available in the United States as well.

Cyborg Swarms.
Spurred by funding from DARPA, scientists have developed the first “bugs with bugs”—insects with implanted electronics designed to turn them into remote-controlled surveillance drones. By transmitting radio signals to electrodes attached to the brains and flight muscles of beetles, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, steered the insects left and right as they flew across the lab (see “Cyborg Beetles” in
Scientific American
, December 2010). At Cornell University, scientists inserted tiny half-gram circuit boards into the pupae of moths; when the adult insects emerged from their chrysalises, the electronics were embedded in their bodies next to their flight muscles.

The Singularity.
A growing number of so-called Singularitarians, inspired by the writings of futurist Ray Kurzweil and others, believe that people will achieve immortality in this century by downloading the contents of their minds into advanced computers. Although many scientists scoff at this prediction, researchers demonstrated in 2011 that they could extract memory traces from the brains of rats. Implanted electrodes recorded signals in the hippocampus, a brain region involved in forming memories, while the rats performed a simple task. When the researchers replayed the signals later in the rats’ brains, it helped the animals remember the task.

What Is Consciousness?
Speculation about the nature of consciousness has long been the province of philosophers, but in recent years neuroscientists have tried to answer the question using brain-imaging experiments and other studies. One hypothesis is that the synchronization of signals from various regions of the brain generates the experience of consciousness. The region called the thalamus may play a vital role because it relays so many of the brain’s signals. Two excellent books on the subject are
I of the Vortex
by Rodolfo R. Llinás and
The Quest for Consciousness
by Christof Koch.