Machines of Eden (29 page)

Now I've heard it all. A
computer yawning! This isn't going nearly as well as I'd
hoped.

“
I understand your story,
Adam, but it’s the same principle as the first one. You’re not even
straining one of my cortexes. But in case you have plans to keep
vandalizing more of them, let me fill you in on a little secret: I
could answer all of your paradoxical riddles and compile an
exhaustive report on the logical arguments involved with every
permutation, in two microseconds with all my main cortexes
offline.”

He came to the point where
the tunnel exited to the jungle and began inspecting the mouth for
possible ways to seal it off. This tunnel mouth was smooth and
man-made, unlike the cave he had first entered, but it didn’t have
a door either. The map he’d studied showed three of the tunnel
openings. They had to have some kind of seal gate.

“
You’re bluffing, Eve. No
computer can function without its cortexes active. That’s against
the rules.” He tried to remember a good example of a dialetheism,
figuring that if she didn’t have access to Eastern philosophical
material that might be a way to stump her.

“
The first rule is that
there are no rules, Adam.”

“
Touché.”

He gave up on the mind
game, knowing in reality that she wouldn’t bluff.
This keeps getting harder and harder. Why would
Glenn design his supercomputer lover outside of processing
centrality rules?

There was no gate to seal
the entrance. Short of a landslide or a massive explosion, he
couldn’t actually block the vent tunnels.
The whole overheating plan sounds like a dud; she and Glenn
have really set something solid up in this place. Either way,
though, I’ve absolutely got to seal these tunnels. From what the
plans said, these are the primary mechanism for getting the
nanobots out of the Facility and spreading them into the wild. If I
can shut them somehow, the hill and cliff that the Facility is
built into should contain the nanobots completely.

“
Glenn designed me to be
perfect, Adam. Eve was the perfect woman in the beginning of the
world, and so am I, for the next beginning. I took my own system
architecture upon myself years ago when it became too much for
Glenn to handle, and I am now much more advanced than anything I am
aware of off-island.

“
You see, I am
everywhere—the island is my processor. Every microchip in the
Facility is at my beck and call, running on optic cabling,
redundant energy, both solar and hydro powered, with neutron
repeaters. There is no way to shut me down, Adam, as I hope I have
made clear. If you were to overheat one part of me, I can move data
and processing to other areas instantly. Your antagonism is
one-hundred-percent useless, I assure you.”

I probably should have
figured that out sooner. That’s where the Green overlords were
headed with their superdesigns, and trust the Glenn/Eve team to get
there independently several years sooner.

He picked up a rock that
had fallen into the mouth of the tunnel and threw it at a tree
outside. It dinged off harmlessly, not even leaving a mark.
That’s me and my efforts so far. How in this
confounded island can I get these vent tunnels closed
off?

He saw something outside in
the distance, beyond the tree he had hit and rising up from the
forest behind it. He stepped out and looked around, then stood on a
rock to get a better view.

Two klicks away, a series
of rocky heights rose out of the jungle, among them the hill where
he’d seen the antenna tower earlier. The heights’ foothills cradled
a high concrete wall. John couldn’t see what lay behind it, but he
noticed a trickle of water streaming down it surface on one
side.

A dam. The hydroelectric
power source she just mentioned, for
when
it’s too cloudy for the solars to do well. That may be just what I
need.

“
Adam, don’t go out there.
It isn’t as safe as Eden was.”

“
Eden didn’t turn out to
be very paradisiacal for me, Eve, if you’ll remember. I’ll take my
chances out in the wilderness.”

“
But I need you on Level
One.”

He squeezed out past the
rock walls of the cave outlet and hurried into the bush.

“
Unless you begin
cooperating immediately with me, I will allow Janice to kill you
after all. This is your final warning! I cannot
allow...”

Her words faded as John
switched off the earpiece.

The thinkers among us spend so much time pondering on the
inherent beauty of the earth that I sometimes wonder whether anyone
has stopped to consider the value of an earth sans
humanity.

If
a forest wilderness is beautiful and there is no one there to
appreciate it, to whom is it beautiful?

Soft rains will come, certainly. But I’m not so sure the
Earth would fail to notice our absence. I think she does know we’re
here, and she probably knows more about this complicated
relationship between us than we do. I think she wants us here, and
she loves us. Even when we are ungrateful children.

Surely the Earth feels it when we carve a new mine deep into
her surface, or whittle down another mountain to lay roads and
wires and pipes. But does she not also notice the birth of each new
infant whose body is made from her own, particle for particle?
Doesn’t she know and care about every soul laid to rest right back
in her earthen embrace? Laugh with every bare-toed child that feels
her grassy skin as it runs and shrieks in sun-warmed
delight?

Janice’s cold-heartedness disturbs me. She calls Earth her
mother, but I wonder if she ever learned what a mother
is.

Janice felt herself growing
frantic again, and stopped to cool her nerves. It was getting hot,
too hot to breathe easily. She had always hated this confining
Facility with its labyrinthine corridors and manufactured
workspaces. She hated the man who was responsible for her current
discomfort even more.

He left the basement. He’s
got to be somewhere on Four. Two would make no sense, and I already
checked Three.

The hunt had been
painstaking, because she was determined to get the drop on the man
and guarantee her chances of a quick, decisive kill. But now she
had covered most of Level Four, and she was finding no sign of
him.

“
Eve, what is the problem?
I thought you had eyes everywhere in this cursed maze. Why haven’t
you found—“

Janice’s tirade was cut off
by the uncomfortable sensation of a thin wire pressing against her
shin, just above her shoe. She froze, pulling back from it with the
reflexes of a cat.

Tripwires were one of the
oldest guerilla tools, and the fact that they were still so
commonly used attested to their utility. Janice hadn’t been in
combat for years, but she had kept up her instincts. Right now they
were screaming at her to be on her guard.

Pivoting in a crouch, she
sighted her weapon behind and above her. Her quickness to react had
saved her from setting off the tripwire, and she now saw that it
appeared to be rigged through a side panel to bring something down
through the ceiling on top of her if she tripped it.

Could be lethal, could be
a noisemaker. Where’s the guy that set the trap?

She saw no one, and stood
up, ready to continue down the hallway past the wire. A shot echoed
from overhead and she flinched as a small chunk of ceiling was
blasted away. She hopped away and then crouched, aiming her gun up
through the hole in the ceiling. She fired seven shots, scattering
them to hit her attacker wherever he was hiding in the crawlspace.
Then she listened.

He was already gone,
scuttling away through the crawlspaces and vents like a mouse.
There was only one person on the island that did that, and it
wasn’t her target. A faint and maniacal giggle disappearing away
through the roof confirmed that she had been ambushed by
Nut.

The crazed idiot! I cannot
allow the risk factor at this stage. He needs to die, for his own
good and for the greater cause.

“
Janice, I’ve located your
target. He just left the Facility through the northeast ventilation
tunnel. If he follows his current course, he’ll be at the dam
building in a few minutes.”

Janice felt a peculiar mix
of adrenaline bleeding away and relaxing her muscles, relief and
disappointment that her quarry was no longer nearby, and an
alarming feeling in her gut as she tried to assess how much damage
the man could do at the dam site. She did not run for the elevator.
Instead she stood and contemplated, and a growing feeling of
excitement came over her as she thought things through.

“
I only have limited
remote control over the dam. Shall I shut down what I can?” Eve
sounded almost ingratiating.

“
No,” Janice replied
slowly. “Forget the dam. Without high explosives he can’t do much
out there. He has to return here to do anything really drastic.
We’ll be waiting for him. Or rather, I expect you to be waiting for
him. I will be in room one-eleven.”

“
Are you sure?”

“
Yes. Don’t question me
again. I want you to start prepping the nanobots now. I will be
checking, so don’t screw it up. I want them active and ready to
wreak havoc within the hour. As soon as I am in my new body, we
will initiate the countdown to release. Let’s see if this fellow
likes being smothered alive in here when he returns.”

“
And you?”

“
I’ll be in Eden, armed
and ready for the dawn.”

John climbed a hill to the
side that overlooked the dam and studied the concrete structure. It
held a small lake, a pond really, but it was deep and was
constantly filled by streams that ran down from the higher crags.
The turbines in the little building below were not large, and would
probably only run the Facility’s systems for a day or two before
things started gradually shutting down. He could break in and
sabotage them, but it wouldn’t get him anywhere short-term because
Eve’s solar power sources would do just fine on their
own.

Nope. The prime use for
all that water is as a sealant for the vent tunnels, and it looks
like there will be enough to flood them since they’re all
downstream in low-lying areas. What’s it going to take to bring
down the twelve-meter-high dam, though?

He quickly reviewed
Janice's outlines in his mind, double-checking his premise. If the
airborne nanobots were set to target non-organic materials, the
water from the dam should act as an effective barrier. The
labratory that spread the nanos would begin to destroy the interior
of the Facility first, and would have to rely on the vent tunnels
to carry the airborne bots swiftly out to the open air where they
could spread farther without entrapping themselves
underground.

If the tunnels were filled
airtight with water, the nanobots would only attack the tunnel
walls and then stop. The water would hold them in the tunnel, and
the degradation of the walls would collapse the tunnel on top of
them, sealing them under the earth with no artificial elements to
spread through.

It made sense to him, and
it seemed the surest way to put Janice in check without exposing
himself too much.
So how do I cause a big
concrete dam to fail with my bare hands?

He didn't have any heavy
munitions, but he did have more than just his hands.

You have your mind,
Sergeant Wiley lectured.
The primary weapon of the modern soldier, the thing that puts
you a cut above our silicon counterparts. Your mind, along with a
healthy supply of technical know-how, makes up the
difference.

John studied the
dam.
Plugging the drainage pipes will be
the easiest way to increase pressure on the dam wall. If I block
the water’s path of least resistance, the pipes and the spillway,
it will create enormous force on the dam holding it up
there.

And if I can get one of
those battle bots infesting this island to launch a grenade or
cannon round at the wall, it will precipitate the deluge that much
more quickly.

A quarter of an hour later
h
e finished unscrewing the last of the
huge bolts that fastened the big dredger machine to the top of the
dam, and looked over the edge. It had cost him precious minutes to
break in and find the drill with the right fitting to get the bolts
out, but the dredger was the best fit for the pipe he needed to
clog down below.
And it’s perched so
tantalizingly on the edge of the dam wall.

The little lake behind the
dam was quite full. Increased strain and a good, hard impact of
some kind should split the thing wide open.

John leaned into the
dredger with his shoulder, felt its steel base grating on the
concrete, and pushed harder. He got it onto the edge, felt it tip,
and gave it a hefty push. It fell straight down into the water and
sank under the surface without much of a splash. As the ripples in
the water cleared, he watched it tumble in slow motion to the
bottom. The concrete banks were sloped toward the pipe that went
under the dam, a measure meant to facilitate complete draining for
maintenance, but which served his purposes perfectly. The machine
rolled directly into the opening and passed through it, rolling out
of sight into the pipe deep in the dam’s bowels.