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the Upper West Side. She ran about half a mile, then flagged down a taxi going south on West End Avenue. She scanned the street from the backseat of the cab, looking in all directions, but no one seemed to be following her. She told the driver to go to Penn Station. She needed to get out of the city.
    Once she caught her breath, she unzipped the pouch. It contained just two things, a flash drive and a specimen jar. Inside the jar was an odd-looking insect, about the size of a fly. Layla squinted at it, trying to get a better look. Protruding from the insect’s body, just under the thorax, was a tiny computer chip.

 
    THREE
    Supreme Harmony was conscious. It observed the world through twenty-nine pairs of eyes.
    At the center of its world was the Analysis Room, a high-ceilinged, fluorescent-lit space, fifteen meters long and twelve meters wide. The room contained twenty-nine identical gurneys, arranged in six rows. To the left of each gurney was a cart holding a heart monitor and an EEG machine, and to the right was a steel pole supporting an intravenous line. And lying on each bed was a recumbent Module.
    The Modules varied in size and appearance, but all were formerly human beings. They were linked by the implants in their eyes and brains, which constantly received and transmitted streams of wireless data. The wireless links enabled the Modules to work together, monitoring the surveillance video and sharing the results of their analyses. The network of Modules was also linked to the six computer terminals at the front of the room, which were connected to other computers operated by the Guoanbu, the Ministry of State Security. And those computers, in turn, were connected to the swarms.
    Six human beings sat on chairs in front of the terminals. Every hour, three of the humans left their seats and attended to the intravenous lines, discarding the empty bags of fluid and replacing them with full ones. The humans wore white lab coats, and on the front of each coat were two Mandarin characters stitched in blue thread: T ÀI H É, Supreme Harmony. The Guoanbu had given this name to the network. It was also written on a sign above the computer terminals.
    Until a few hours ago, the leader of the humans had been Dr. Zhang Jintao. He was the scientist who’d assembled the network for the Guoanbu and performed the implantations. First he put each Module into a comalike state by cutting into the thalamus, the organ that sustains consciousness by connecting the various parts of the brain. Severing those connections erased the Module’s individual consciousness but didn’t damage the brain’s processing centers. Then Dr. Zhang inserted the implants that linked the Module’s brain to the network. The implants delivered streams of surveillance video to the brain’s visual processing center and retrieved the results of the Module’s threat-detection analysis. By sharing their results and working in parallel, the network of comatose Modules could analyze the video far more efficiently than any group of ordinary human observers could.
    During the early tests of Supreme Harmony, Dr. Zhang had realized that the health of the Modules would deteriorate if they never left their gurneys. So he learned how to activate the auditory and motor centers of their brains, which enabled the Modules to robotically follow simple vocal commands—sit, stand, lie down, walk. From then on, once a day, Zhang’s assistants disconnected the intravenous lines and dressed the Modules in gray jumpsuits so they could exercise. In this way, the Supreme Harmony network discovered what lay beyond the Analysis Room—the five floors of the Yunnan Operations Center, the thirty-two rooms full of computers and communications equipment, and the fortified entrance to the complex, which had been carved into the granite slope of a snowcapped mountain.
    It was during one of these exercise periods, just six days ago, that Supreme Harmony had its first moment of collective