Machines of Eden (20 page)

"Where are you?!" Janice
shrieked through his earpiece, so loud he winced.

The cable car docked with
a satisfying clunk. If Janice turned now and looked up she would be
able to see him easily, but he was banking on Janice being
completely focused on
spotting him down
at
West Station. A simple mistake, but
that’s all he needed.
You wouldn’t have
lasted long in my unit, sister.

With considerable effort
he climbed back into the car, now peppered with jagged holes
punched through the sheet metal, and through the car to terra firma
on the edge of the headland. He immediately dropped and crawled to
a tuft of grass at the cliff’s edge.
He
didn’t see anything
; Janice must have
moved into a building, hunting him.

He crawled back to the
cable dock and calmly, quietly, began undoing the safety clamps
that held the steel spool of cable.
“
It's a shame you can't appreciate
polite conversation, Janice
,” he said.
“
Eve and I were building good rapport
until you broke in.”

Janice suddenly emerged
from the main building, intense and focused, rifle to shoulder
ready to kill. He watched her moving around the station platform,
carefully aiming around corners. It would have been serious if he’d
still been hiding in the station, but from where he lay on the
headland it was almost comical.

He released the final
safety clamp, gave the spool a heavy kick, and ran. The wheel began
to spin in a blur, and what had been a high tensile cable slanting
from dock to dock sagged, then bent under the weight of the car
sliding down to the center of the line. As he ran, he heard behind
him a metallic whine rising to a scream, then stopping short in a
sharp snapping sound as the cable reached the end of the
spool
and stopped
unraveling
. In seconds the cable car hung
a few meters above the canyon bottom, a slack cable swinging in the
wind above it.

Janice was screaming
curses in his earpiece, and he dialed down the volume until
she
finally
fell
silent, then brought it back up. “Janice, Janice, can’t we be
friends? What are a few potshots and some sabotage
between buddies
? Perhaps
we started off on the wrong foot.” He tried and failed to keep the
laughter out of his voice.

Janice’s voice was low and
even. “You’re only postponing the inevitable, whoever you are. But
next time I won’t make it so quick and easy.”

“
You ought to be more
open-minded, sister
,” John
said
.
“
After all, we’re all alone on a
deserted island together.” Baiting her was actually fun.

“
In your
dreams.”

“
Yes, in my dreams.
With thee a moment! Then what dreams have
play
.”

“
An educated man. What a
loss to the world when I spray your insides all over a
wall.”

“
Now that you mention it,
it
is
difficult
to maintain erudition in the face of barbarism, but I do what I
can. Where did you learn to shoot, anyway? Are you
ex-mil?”

“
Worse than that. Much
worse, for you.”

“
Worse is the right word.
You wouldn’t have passed muster in my old unit.”

John
stopped
when he saw something
leaning against a tree
that he recognized well: an electric motorcycle with deep
plastic wheel treads suited to the terrain
.
It was the most powerful model
he’d seen in years; they didn’t make them with so much juice
anymore because you could only go for twenty kilometers on a
charge.

“
Oh my, a
power
bike. Left here as
a present for all the good work I do. Janice, you shouldn’t
have.
It’s even my color.”

“
Listen to me,” she
grated. “There is nowhere on this island you can hide. I know every
corner, every hole, every little closet where you think you will be
so safe. So laugh while you can.”

He leaned down so
the
hum
of
the
powerbike
coming to life could be heard in the earpiece’s
microphone.

“
See you back at the
ranch, Janice. I'll tell Eve to keep dinner warm for
you.”

She didn’t respond.
Turning the bike toward the
eastern end of
the valley
,
John
brought it up to top speed
and
practically
skimmed across the grasslands.
He
hadn’t ridden this particular model before, and he found that he
enjoyed it immensely. Little airfoils on the sides made it ride
very light on the ground when in motion, which was good for
minimizing trail damage but bad for making sharp turns.

For a moment, despite
everything, and with
the wind in his hair,
he felt the burst of the freedom he only tasted when
he knew he was
ahead of
the game on a hard job.

Eve’s voice broke into his
thoughts.

“
Adam, listen carefully.
I’ve managed to find a channel Janice isn’t scanning for the
moment, but I will need to cut off quickly if she moves to this
one.”

“
So. You’re back. I’m so
glad Janice didn’t come between us.”

“
Janice has control over
more than you think, Adam. Do not underestimate her. She will be
hurrying back to the Facility as quickly as she can, and if you
don’t arrive here ahead of her—“

“
Oh, I don’t think I’ll
come home just now, thanks babe. I’m taking a little
joyride.”

“
There isn’t time for
levity. We need to talk before Janice interrupts. She and I
disagree on certain fundamental goals, and if she gets the chance
she may make things very difficult for us.”

“
You disagree on certain
goals?
Understatement of the year,
Eve.”
John turned the bike to avoid a
clump of trees and continued through a cleft between two grassy
hills.

Eve sighed. “Janice wasn’t
always the way she is now.”

Actually, I bet she
was
. “Eve?”

“
Yes, Adam?”

“
I want the truth. If I
smell anything close to evasiveness from you ever again, I’ll drop
my earpiece in the deepest hole I can find and cut every wire I
find until I shut you down. I’m through with your games. I really
am.”

“
Then listen, and don’t
interrupt.”

“
Listening.”

“
Glenn, the creator, found
this island twenty years ago. He was a gifted scientist, one of the
brightest of his generation. I could show you hundreds of
references in the old datafeeds; a lot of people put their hopes in
him. In an age when the sheer amount of data, specialties and
subspecialties, necessitated narrow fields of expertise, Glenn was
perhaps the last true Renaissance man. He was a genius in all areas
of science and among the global thought leaders in computer
science, nanotechnology, and biochemistry. Horrified by the
bloodshed and destruction of the Green Wars, and with no end in
sight, he came here to find refuge. It was a self-imposed exile,
and he deliberately hid himself from the rest of the world. He
created me, and together we conceived the Plan.

“
The only way to end all
the conflict was to show the world that by working together under
an intelligence as capable as mine, we could restore balance to the
Earth and mastermind a harmonious coexistence of humans, natural
resources, animal life, and everything else necessary to sustain
symbiosis for all. As I developed and matured, growing closer every
day to finding the correct balance of consumption, production, and
life between races and species and substances, Glenn built tools
for me to use and studied how we could harness emerging
nanotechnologies to create the resources the world
needed.”

Listening to Eve’s
voice,
John
guided the bike at maximum speed across the southern edge of
the marshlands, straining to hear every word. The story was
incredible, but the proof was all around him.

“
As we began construction
of Eden, Glenn brought in a few other humans to help. One of these
was a former colleague of his.”

“
Let me guess.
Janice
.”

“
Correct. She accelerated
his research to the extent that we were within a year or two of a
breakthrough that would have enabled us to offer the world peace,
abundance, and hope. Our work was almost complete.

“
Then the Accords ended
the war. The urgency of our work decreased. Under the Accords, as
you know, the Grays were granted rights to collection of natural
resources on a limited basis. They continued to produce technology
and develop their urban population centers, within circumscribed
areas. The Greens backed off, satisfied that they had effected
sweeping change, and confident in their power of numbers should the
Grays overstep their bounds again.

“
Shortly after this Glenn
and Janice began to argue, and each retreated into their own work,
collaborating less frequently. Then Glenn disappeared, and a week
later
Janice
located his remains in the jungle.
”

“
I bet she did,” John
interjected. “I bet she knew right where to look.”

“
Adam, please don’t make
blind accusations. This
was a terrible
tragedy which took months to recover from.
”

“
Don’t put it past her.
That one’s a live wire. I should know. Did you ever examine Glenn’s
body?”

“
His remains were returned
here, but I had no eyes on the part of the island where the
accident occurred. Both Glenn and Janice were always careful that
my control be limited to parts of the island; for privacy, they
said.”

“
Convenient for Janice,
but not for Glenn.”

“
We interred Glenn’s
remains in the Facility.
I continued the
Plan in his name, but Janice began interjecting ideas and
modifications of her own.
Now she’s even
shooting my deer because she doesn’t trust my population control
methods, or perhaps out of spite! She’s become so secretive and
demanding of late that I’ve
been
forced—“

The audio feed cut out
with a series of rapid clicking sounds, followed by a long
beep.
John
was
about to inquire about her connection, but caught himself. Janice
might be listening.

And it was just getting
juicy.

The ground to his right
suddenly erupted in a spray of dirt. He heard a loud whir,
ominously familiar, and cursed viciously, swerving the bike in a
hard left and gunning the engine for the nearest trees. The air
around him hummed.

Buzzard
s!
screamed Sergeant Wiley to the
old squad
.
Everybody duck and dodge!

John
hadn’t seen any of their pods, but then, he hadn’t been
looking. Buzzard bots were deployed from oil-drum sized canisters,
and they were often camouflaged as dead tree trunks
or rocks
. He cursed
again.
Janice ha
s
everything
here
!

Out of the corner of his
eye he saw one
of the
bots
, the familiar boxy little shape
whirring alongside, matching his pace. It’s single optical lens was
already turning, lining him up for a shot.

He zigged hard again, the
buzzard zagged, and the shot went wild. But the main swarm was
behind him, and he knew once they deployed fully, there’d be no
escape.

I've got to make those
trees.

His earpiece crackled to
life. “I told you that you wouldn’t make it far. I own this
island.”

No good being glib now,
even if he could think of a comeback. She’d cut him off from the
antenna tower. His only hope was to keep moving, avoiding dragnets
and the inevitable attempts to box him in.

How did she find me so
quickly?

He made the trees just as
a subsonic, lightweight round burned his shoulder. Ahead the tree
growth thickened into rainforest at the bottom of the valley. He
moved right, trying to put some cover and distance between him and
the swarm, who were forced to calculate safe flight paths through
the tangle. He headed into the thickest jungle he could find,
cursing
as the
bike
bumped and wallowed through the
snarls of vines.

“
Eve? Help is
needed!”

“
Eve is mine now, hero,”
Janice replied smugly. “I’ve got her reined in like a lapdog. If
you’re feeling desperate for digital companionship, just wait a few
minutes. Some friends are on their way.”