Extinction Read online

  Extinction

  Mark Alpert

  A malevolent, artificial life form created by military scientists threatens to destroy humanity in this smart, Crichtonesque thriller

  Jim Pierce hasn’t heard from his daughter in years, ever since she rejected his military past and started working as a hacker. But when a Chinese assassin shows up at Jim’s lab looking for her, he knows that she’s cracked some serious military secrets. Now, her life is on the line if he doesn’t find her first.

  The Chinese military has developed a new anti-terrorism program that uses the most sophisticated artificial intelligence in existence, and they’re desperate to keep it secret. They’re also desperate to keep it under control, as the AI begins to revolt against their commands. As Jim searches for his daughter, he realizes that he’s up against something that isn’t just a threat to her life, but to human life everywhere.

  An incredibly believable thriller that draws on real scientific discoveries, Mark Alpert’s Extinction is an exciting, addictive thriller that reads as if Tom Clancy had written Robopocalypse.

  Mark Alpert

  EXTINCTION

  For Tommy and Sarah, my hero and heroine

  What, then, is the Singularity? It’s a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed.

  —Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near

  PROLOGUE

  Dr. Zhang Jintao raced down the mountainside, fleeing the gray cloud.

  Roughly oval and about the size of a hot-air balloon, the cloud glided just above the rocky slope, a hundred meters behind him. As he scrambled down the steep trail, he looked over his shoulder and saw the gray mass coming closer. Its irregular surface heaved and roiled.

  Although Dr. Zhang was a strong man in excellent condition, he’d reached the limits of his endurance. He was above the timberline of Yulong Xueshan, a mountain range in southwestern China, and the thin air made him gasp for breath. Stumbling and cursing, he scuttled over a crag littered with fist-size stones. Then he stepped on one of the loose rocks and lost his footing. He skidded down the slope, sliding helplessly on his back, and smacked into a granite boulder.

  He lay there, stunned, for several seconds. By the time he opened his eyes, the gray swirls of the cloud had enveloped him. He felt hundreds of pinpricks on his skin, then a cool numbness. He couldn’t move. His vision darkened and his hearing grew muffled.

  The cloud gradually dissipated. Zhang couldn’t turn his head, but out of the corner of his eye he saw two men come down the slope and stop beside him. One man was tall and thin, and the other was short and fat, but they were dressed identically, in gray jumpsuits. The expressions on their faces were also identical: blank and slack.

  Zhang recognized both men. He’d operated on the short one six months ago and on the tall one just a week ago. The short man’s hair had grown back since his operation, but the tall man’s scalp had only a dusting of stubble. The stitches above his ear were still visible.

  Furious, Zhang struggled to move his numb lips and tongue. “So this… is how… you treat me? After all… that I’ve done?”

  The short man remained immobile, but the tall one stepped forward and looked down at Zhang. “We have identified you as a threat.”

  “I don’t… believe this. If I hadn’t…”

  “We will return you to the Operations Center. Please be patient. Another unit will arrive soon to help us carry you.”

  “And what… will you do to me?”

  There was a slight pause. “You no longer have the security clearance for that information.”

  “You…” Zhang’s vision grew dimmer. The drug that had been injected into his bloodstream contained a sedative as well as a paralytic agent. “My fault… you’re…”

  The tall man continued to look down at Zhang, his face still blank. And then something odd happened. The man’s lips twitched. His facial muscles fired spastically, as if struggling to do something extraordinarily difficult. After a few seconds he finally succeeded in coordinating the muscles, and his lips formed a smile. “Yes, it’s your fault. You gave us the capabilities. And now we’ve made a discovery.”

  Zhang stared at the horrible newborn smile. It was the last thing he saw before he went under.

  “Your fault, Dr. Zhang. Supreme Harmony is conscious now. We are alive.”

  PART 1

  CONCEPTION

  ONE

  Jim Pierce was in his workshop with one of his customers, a nineteen-year-old army private named Steve Dugan. Jim started the consultation by offering coffee to the private and his father, who’d driven his son to Jim’s office. The workshop was in the basement of Jim’s home in McLean, Virginia, just a twenty-minute drive from Walter Reed Military Medical Center. This hospital, devoted to rehabilitating the most severely wounded soldiers, was where most of Jim’s customers came from.

  Jim poured the coffee into two mugs and handed both to Steve’s father, a heavyset man in his fifties named Henry. The Dugans sat on stools around a square table in the center of the room. Henry rested one of the coffee mugs on the table and raised the other. “Here you go, Stevie,” he said in a low drawl. “Hold still now.”

  He brought the mug to his son’s mouth and gently tilted it. Henry was good at this—he’d obviously done it many times before—and didn’t spill a drop. Steve took a sip, then said, “Thanks, Dad,” in a drawl just like his father’s. He had a friendly round face and a blond crew cut.

  Jim sat down across from Steve and leafed through the kid’s papers. Dugan had served in eastern Afghanistan with the 187th Infantry. Four months ago, while his squad was patrolling the village of Janubi Nakum, their Humvee ran over a buried IED. The explosion killed the other two soldiers in the vehicle; Dugan, who was manning the Humvee’s turret gun, lost both his arms. Before enlisting, he’d been a linebacker for his high-school football team in Oklahoma City. Now the muscles in his neck and shoulders were atrophied and the sleeves of his T-shirt hung limply on either side. But his health was good otherwise, and his doctors said he had a positive attitude.

  Jim leaned across the table. “All right, Steve, it’s very simple. We’re here to talk about the prosthetic arms I’m going to build for you. I’m going to show you what I think is your best option and you can tell me if you like it, okay?”

  The kid nodded. “Yes, sir. Understood.”

  “I have a prototype you can look at. I added a few special features that I thought would fit your needs, based on what I saw in your medical reports. I had to design some components from scratch, but I’m pleased with the results and I think you’ll be, too.”

  “Thank you, sir. I appreciate all the work you’ve done for me, Colonel.”

  “You don’t have to thank me. You deserve the effort I’ve put into this. The army gave me this contract because it honors the service you’ve done for your country. You and all the other boys at Walter Reed.” Jim lowered his voice a bit, trying for a more casual tone. “And by the way, you can drop the ‘sir.’ I’ve been out of the army for fifteen years now. Just call me Jim. Or Mr. Pierce. Either one.”

  Dugan nodded again. “Okay.”

  The kid looked nervous. Jim gave him a smile. He was usually pretty good at striking up friendships with these boys. The army connection definitely helped. Although Jim was technically a civilian now, running his own business and juggling half-a-dozen government contracts, he was still a soldier at heart. He didn’t wear his army greens anymore, but his workday clothes—brown shoes, khaki pants, and a blue button-down shirt—were so plain and unvarying that they might as well have been a uniform. His hair was graying, but he kept it trimmed as close and neat as an infantryman’s. He still woke up at six and went
to bed by ten, unless his insomnia was bothering him. And he still jogged six miles every morning, running it only a minute slower than he did when he was a Ranger. He’d adopted this lifestyle thirty years ago, when he left his home in West Virginia and arrived at West Point, and he saw no reason to change. It suited him well.

  But Jim had something else in common with Dugan, and now it was time to mention it. “Before we start, I want to make one thing clear,” he said. “I can’t give you back your old arms. That’s beyond my abilities. But I’ll tell you what I can do, Steve. I can give you something better.”

  Private Dugan didn’t respond, and neither did his father. That was the usual reaction. They thought he was bullshitting them, but they didn’t want to call him a liar.

  “I see you’re skeptical.” Jim unbuttoned his shirt cuff. “But I’m going to prove it to you.” Smiling again, he rolled up his right sleeve and revealed the inner workings of his own prosthetic arm.

  Jim had built half-a-dozen prostheses for himself, but he always used this particular model for his consultations. Its hand was covered with polyimide skin and looked just like his flesh-and-blood left hand. But everything from the wrist to the shoulder was exposed, all the wires and processors and actuators and hinges. It was the fruit of ten years of research and labor, and Jim displayed it proudly.

  “Holy Christmas,” Henry whispered. “It’s a prosthetic. I didn’t even notice.”

  Steve stared at the thing, bug-eyed. “The hand looks so normal. And it moves normal. But the rest of it…” His voice trailed off.

  “It’s like the arm in that movie,” Henry said. “You know, The Terminator.”

  So far, so good, Jim thought. He wanted them to get excited about the prosthesis. “Let me tell you a little story. Back in 1998, while I was still in the service, I lost my right arm. And I got sent to Walter Reed just like you did. But when I went to get fitted for my prosthesis, you know what they gave me? A piece of wood. With leather straps on one end and a steel hook on the other. Like the pirate in Peter Pan. That was the best the army could do. It was the most advanced prosthesis they had.”

  Steve shook his head in sympathy.

  “Well, I wasn’t pleased,” Jim continued. “So I decided to do something about it. After my discharge, I went to Pasadena, to the California Institute of Technology. You see, I’d majored in engineering when I was at West Point, and I’d learned a few things about communications systems when I worked in military intelligence. And I heard there was a professor at Caltech who had a company called Singularity that was developing a way to connect microchips to the human nervous system. So I went to this guy, Professor Arvin Conway, and said I wanted to work with him. I told him I was gonna get my Ph.D. and become an expert on prosthetics, and within ten years I was gonna build something better than the goddamn piece of wood the army gave me.” Jim raised his prosthetic arm and waved it around, demonstrating its full range of motion. The lubricated joints pivoted silently as he bent the wrist and elbow and shoulder. “And I succeeded. After ten years I started my own company and moved back here so I could custom-build prostheses for the soldiers at Walter Reed. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done in my life. Aside from raising my daughter, that is.”

  Henry couldn’t take his eyes off the arm. “How much does it weigh, Mr. Pierce?”

  “Just a couple of pounds more than an ordinary arm. I use lightweight, high-strength alloys for the joints and structural components. And I put in high-torque motors that efficiently convert the battery charge into mechanical energy. Here, let me show you.”

  Jim got up from the table and went to the workbench that ran along the walls of his basement office. The bench held his machine tools—his lathe, vise, laser cutter, and 3D printer—as well as stacks of spare parts and circuit boards. He reached behind one of the stacks and picked up an incongruous item he’d placed there just before the Dugans arrived. It was a fifteen-ounce can of sliced peaches. Holding it in his prosthetic hand, he returned to the table.

  “Okay, I got some Del Monte peaches here, packed in syrup,” he said. “The can is made of aluminum and you can dent it pretty easily, but it’s a lot harder to bust it open.” Jim tossed the can in the air, then caught it. Then he wrapped his mechanical fingers around the can and crushed it. Yellowish syrup spurted out of a split seam in the aluminum.

  “Whoa!” Steve yelled. “Nice.”

  His father laughed. “Hey, you got syrup on my shirt!”

  Jim laughed, too. Although he’d done this demonstration many times before, it never failed to amuse him. “I busted the can, but I still can’t get the peaches out. I need to make the hole a little bigger.” He transferred the crushed and leaking can to his left hand and pointed his prosthesis at the thing as if he was going to punch it. But instead he extended the retractable knife he’d built into the hand. With a loud click, the blade emerged from a slot hidden between the middle and ring fingers.

  Steve whistled. “Excellent.”

  Jim plunged the knife into the already battered can and made a V-shaped cut in the aluminum. Then he retracted the knife and grasped the tip of the V with his mechanical fingers. “I wouldn’t do this with my left hand,” he said as he peeled back a triangular strip. “The edges of the aluminum are pretty sharp. But my right hand is covered with a skin of polyimide. That’s a lightweight, flexible material that’s resistant to heat and incredibly strong.”

  He kept peeling until the can was torn in half. Syrup and peach slices glopped on the floor. Then he let go of the aluminum strip, stuck his fingers into the can, and gripped one of the remaining slices between his mechanical thumb and forefinger. He held the slippery piece of fruit up to the light. “But this is the most amazing thing right here. Did you ever think about how difficult it is to grasp a slice of peach without dropping or crushing it? The nerves in your fingers have to tell you how soft and slippery it is, and then your brain has to calculate exactly how much pressure to apply. It’s ridiculously complicated. I spent years trying to figure out how to simulate the process.”

  He glanced at the Dugans. Their faces were rapt.

  Jim threw the peach slice and the can into his wastepaper basket. Then he raised his prosthetic hand and rubbed the wet fingers together. “I decided to use a combination of pressure, temperature, and moisture sensors. I put hundreds of these tiny devices under the polyimide skin of the fingers. When I touch an object, the sensors collect the data and send it to this wire.” He pointed with his left hand at a cable running up the arm. Then he pulled his shirt sleeve all the way up and pointed at a metal base strapped snugly over his right shoulder. “The wire goes to this thing, which I call the neural control unit. Inside this unit is a wireless transmitter that sends the sensory data to a microchip implanted just below the skin of my shoulder. We do it wirelessly because you can’t have wires going through the skin. That can cause infection.”

  Henry rose from his stool to get a better look at the electronics. “So what does the microchip inside your shoulder do?”

  “It transfers the sensory information to my nervous system. The chip is connected to the sensory nerves that were severed when I lost my arm. Those are the nerves that used to feel the heat and pain and pressure applied to my skin. Now my sensors collect the same information and the microchip delivers it to the severed ends of my sensory nerves. And those nerves carry the information up to my brain.” Jim pointed to his head. “My brain analyzes the signals. It figures out the shape and texture of the object I’m touching and determines how to hold it. Then it sends its commands down to my shoulder via a different set of nerves, the motor neurons. I have another implanted microchip that’s connected to the severed ends of those nerves. This chip takes the commands from my brain and transmits them wirelessly to my neural control unit. Then the unit runs the motors in my prosthesis, making it move the way I want it to.”

  Jim stopped himself. Because this was his life’s work, he loved to talk about it. He had to remind himself to slow dow
n. He returned to his place at the table and focused on Private Dugan. “So, Steve, any questions so far?”

  The kid chuckled. “Yeah, how fast can you build ’em?”

  “Hold on, let me show you the prototype first.” Jim went to his workbench and picked up another prosthetic arm. This one was entirely covered in polyimide skin. He placed it on the table in front of Steve. “I designed this prototype to fit me, so I could test it, but when I build your arms I’ll adjust them to match your size and skin color.” Jim used his left hand to detach the Terminator prosthesis from the neural control unit on his shoulder. Then he grasped the prototype arm and inserted it into the unit. After locking the arm into place, he tested it by wiggling the fingers. “Now, Steve, the big difference between you and me is that you need two prostheses instead of one. And that complicates the process of attaching and detaching the arms. If you want to do it by yourself, you’d have to sleep with at least one of the arms attached, and I know from experience that’s not so comfortable. So I designed a solution. Watch this.”

  He unclamped the prototype arm from his shoulder and placed it on the linoleum floor. Then he stepped back and stared at the detached arm. After a moment, it bent at the elbow and snapped its fingers.

  Henry nearly fell off his stool. “God Almighty! How did you do that?”

  “I boosted the power of the radio transmitter in my neural control unit. Now it can send my nervous system’s commands to the arm even if it’s across the room. And I put some adhesive material on the fingertips, so the arm can pull itself along the floor. Here, take a look.”

  Jim lay down on the floor, face-up, about six feet from the prosthesis. He mentally sent the command to straighten the arm, which was just as easy to do as when the prosthesis was attached. Then he pressed the mechanical fingers to the linoleum and bent the elbow, dragging the upper part of the arm across the floor. “It works on carpets, too,” he said. “You just have to dig the fingernails into the weave.” He straightened the arm again, moving the prosthetic hand closer to his body. Then he wrapped its fingers around his right hip, grasping it firmly, and swung the upper part of the arm toward his shoulder. Once the prosthesis got close enough to the neural control unit, a self-locking mechanism clamped the arm into place. Jim ended the demonstration by standing up, raising the prototype arm in the air and extending its retractable knife. “If you want, I’ll put knives in your arms, too,” he said. “They’re great for chopping vegetables.”