Machines of Eden (24 page)

He walked over to the main
processor array and used the ring spanner from his pants pocket to
decouple each remaining stack. Easy for Janice or a service bot to
reconnect, but temporarily useless to Eve.

“
Good night, sweetie,” he
said, powering down the rest of the room’s electronics. Brushing
the dust from his hands, he picked up his portable. “Maybe I’ll
wake you up later. For now I need to be able to move freely around
here.”

“
I’m not going anywhere,”
Eve said. “Did you think losing one processor stack and some memory
would cripple me?”

John hesitated, thinking
fast.

“
I was kind of hoping it
would do
something
.”

Eve didn’t sound fazed at
all. Her mannerisms and voice functionality, at least, should have
been routed through the primary cortex. That stuff usually required
its own stack, especially for an A.I. this convincing.

“
How many cortexes are
there?” he asked, already cringing.

Janice, still breathing
heavily but unable to resist, answered with a snicker. “Eight main
ones, hero. But that’s only the beginning. I tried to make it clear
that you’re outclassed; you’re finally starting to clue
in.”

John swore under his
breath. “And I don’t think I made myself clear to
you
. I’m going to
dismantle every circuit board and fuse box in this stinking
tropical hellhole. Then I’m going to put you out of your man-hating
misery. And then I’m going to drink a coconut on the beach! I’m
tired of your attitude and I’m going to show you the error of your
sad, mousy little research-assistant ways. Wipe the drool off your
face and watch me work.”

It was pure pettiness, but
it felt way too good to refrain. He felt a grin stretch across his
face at the outrage in Janice’s voice when she replied.

“
You know nothing about
me! This isn’t about man-hating or any other petty human attitude.
This is about stopping the real and utterly depraved abuse you and
your kind have heaped upon my mother!” She screamed the last word
at him.

“
Not me, baby. I’m no
cigar-chomping Gray bureaucrat.”

“
Gray, Green, it’s gone
beyond that, you fool. The slate needs to be wiped clean. Everyone
is corrupt!”

“
You are just too far
gone, honey. Well, I tried the easy-tech way and that didn’t work.
So now I try it the old-fashioned way: get ready for some
heatstroke, Eve. When I finish, you’ll be sweatier than Janice is
right now.”

“
You’re going to overheat
me?” Eve asked.

“
This is what I do. Taking
apart malfunctioning machines that exceed their own specs, and
killing their organic handlers. It’s a hard job, but somebody’s got
to do it, and I have a stunning résumé.”

“
You try it,” Janice
replied, failing to conceal her panting breath. “Meanwhile, Eve, I
want radio silence until I break it. No sense in giving him any
hints about my movements. He’ll find out where I am when a bullet
severs his spinal cord.”

Doubt it,
sister
. John packed up shop, kicked over a
few canisters of lubricant near the door to make a mess, and
left.

Back on the stairs, he
pulled out Glenn’s datacard and brought up the secret diary entries
again.
I need to know a little more about
the way things work around here. The interpersonal conflicts of
these people are making my head hurt.

Two early entries outlined
Glenn’s plan to populate Eden with diverse plant life from the seed
banks Eve had collected, but the data indexing on the card showed a
discrepancy between the plan and the actual tallies in later
entries. The amount of seeds being gathered was a hundred times
more than could be used in the valley.

Other entries touched on
nanotechnology, getting into some in-depth analysis of its use in
terraforming planetary surfaces, including the ethics, methods, and
dangers.

Futuristic technology
that’s a little ahead of its time even today, but theoretically
feasible. What does this have to do with planting a garden? Is Eden
just a prototype for a much larger-scale beautification
project?

Another thing the entries
revealed was a shift in Glenn’s personality. In the early entries
he seemed to be a very intelligent but ideologically
run-of-the-mill academic, torn between the Gray and the Green as
many of his kind had been. But his level of fanaticism grew as he
spent more time alone on the island with Eve and his thoughts.
After the entry in which he brought Janice aboard, he started
really getting weird. He spoke about everything in terms of how it
fit into the Creation story, drawing parallels between every
person, tool, location, and idea on the island with Biblical
elements.

“
In a sense, I am the
Father,” Glenn wrote. “Eve and I are re-birthing the world
according to divine plan just as before.” Then there were
references to “Janice’s intriguing idea of terrestrial rebirth”,
but later Glenn seemed to back away from the idea and focus more on
what he called “harmonic balance”.

John put the card away.
That was all he had time to read at the moment, but it was enough.
Everything was starting to add up, and he was deeply unsettled by
the picture that was forming. With nanotechnology, Janice and Eve
might actually have the ability to somehow reform the world, or
large parts of it.

As he hurried down the
stairs, he tried to recall everything he’d ever heard about
nanotech capabilities. Before the wars the Fed supercomputers had
been churning away on programs related to Environmental
Macro-Architecture, but that had all been interrupted by warfare.
If an A.I. as powerful as Eve had quietly continued developing the
models and plans without distraction… terrible things might be
possible.

At the bottom John faced
the door to Level One. It was a military-grade ribbed blast door
with an electronic retinal-scan panel and more than one manual
lock. He set about breaking in, hoping that Janice wasn’t inside
the Facility yet. He had taken too much time to read, but the
insight into his enemies’ minds was invaluable.

He bypassed the electronic
panel easily enough without tripping any alarms, but the physical
lock mechanisms were harder than he expected. The door was sealed
electromagnetically from the inside and required a key card that he
couldn’t match with his pocket kit. So he resorted to the
burn-stick again, and killed it trying to drive through the
critical juncture of lock, seal, and sensor wiring.

Sitting back, he glared at
the door. He had hacked hundreds of these, but not without a
heavy-duty infiltration load-out. Going off of the facility
diagrams he’d seen, he strongly suspected that everything he needed
to know lay right behind this door—cortexes, perhaps, and secret
labs, the real control center of the Facility. He was millimeters
away from severing the tie holding it shut. The hole he had burned
into the lock panel had to be most of the way through, unless these
walls were a foot thick. Even then, the door shouldn’t be. Doors
were always the weak point.

He felt around in the
various pockets of his cargo pants, and pulled out the ring spanner
with the screwdriver head he had grabbed up first entering the
Facility. Jamming it pointy end first into the burn-hole in the
door, he leaned back on the floor and kicked at it with his boot.
It jammed in deeper.

He kicked and kicked again;
the tool drove deeper. He kicked again. There was a soft clunk and
a hollow popping sound. He stood up and pushed against the door. It
wobbled slightly, so he bent down and scrabbled at its base to get
a hold. Lifting against its ribbed surface, he raised it enough to
get a few fingers underneath, and then heaved it upward. Thirty
centimeters up it ran into another lock of some kind and stopped,
but it was enough space for him to roll under. He yanked the
spanner out of its hole and crawled through the gap. Then he left
the spanner wedged underneath the door to keep it open.

He stood up and looked
around. Immediately a loud beeping sounded throughout the hallway,
repeating four beeps in a row separated by pauses. A red light
flashed on a ceiling mounted intercom.

What’s it going to take to
shut that off this time?

He crept down the hallway,
looking for access panels. This level was constructed differently
from the others, with older and uglier design. The lighting wasn’t
as good, mostly blue strips along the floorboards with an
occasional LED overhead, and the halls were very narrow. He came to
the end of the entrance hallway, which turned to the left beyond,
and faced a small armor-glass window into an interior chamber.
Inside, the glow of monitors told him he would have access to all
the information he sought, the deepest secrets of this
place.

But how to get in? This
level reeked of even higher security than those above, the kind of
paranoid security measures that would shoot first and identify
later. The shotgun emplacement had been a wake-up call. Down here
he could expect much worse.

He leaned right and saw
that the corridor jogged left but then continued straight on again.
From the looks of it, security measure number one was embedded in
the wall that he would be facing when he turned left into the short
jog of hallway. He couldn’t see what it was, but there was some
kind of hatchway there that would undoubtedly open and rain death
upon him if he stepped out into the path of the sensors in the
hallway.

That’ll be the simplest
obstacle, meant to take out stupid targets or transmit data about
the smarter ones for the trickier traps farther in to use against
me: height, reaction time, man or bot, heat signature.

I don’t mean to give it
that data.

He stretched his legs out
well, hoping he was still in good enough shape for what he was
about to attempt. Putting his hands out, he pushed against the wall
on the left and walked his feet up the wall at his right. This got
him into position to climb the tight corridor toward the corner.
The tension of pushing against both walls to hold himself up made
him grunt and grit his teeth.

Near the top, he strained
one hand around the edge and felt blindly around on the wall. It
was a little farther along than was comfortable, but his hand met
with the sensor device that he suspected would be placed there.
Gripping its farthest edge with his fingers, he pulled hard. He
could feel the plastic case give, but it remained screwed into the
wall.

He wasn’t going to be able
to hold his position much longer, with the weight of his body
stretched from one wall to the other, so he got a firmer grip on
the case. Then he swung out into the second hallway, letting his
body fall and smash against the corner as he cleared it. All his
weight was on the device above him, and as he swung around it
ripped free of the wall. He plummeted to the floor, shattering the
sensor box on the hard surface and narrowly avoiding doing the same
with his knee. Wires trailing up to the ceiling shredded under the
force and jerked free to fall limply beside him.

He was elated at the
success of the stunt, but couldn’t even pause to catch his breath.
Instantly he was up and somersaulting forward to get under the
likeliest range of a gun emplacement. Sure enough, the hatch he’d
spotted slid down and revealed a minigun with autosensors,
cylinders already whirring into life. Fortunately he had left it no
way to aim, and he was already out of its way.

The next section of hallway
to his right, however, presented its own challenges, and John had
very little time to react. A horizontal black strip ran along each
side of the hallway at about waist height, continuing a half meter
into the hallway he had just dived from, with a similar black strip
running along the floor and ceiling. Sensing instinctively that it
would not be good to get caught between the strips, he continued
his somersault until he was facedown against the floor, doing a
pushup. Then he tilted to his side to get out of the path of the
stripe on the floor, making it a one-armed pushup.

And this is why the Sarge
always warned us not to let ourselves get soft just because we
weren't privates anymore.

Triggered by his passage
into this section of hallway, a visible green laser beam passed up
the hallway toward him and into the hallway behind, forming a thin
cross of green light from wall to wall and from floor to ceiling.
He could hear the dust stirred by his acrobatics sizzling and
snapping in the laser’s trajectory. As quickly as it had come, it
winked out.

Trying to stay in the
narrow space between the wall and the strips, John crawled quickly
forward to the next hallway, which jogged right. The corridor
seemed to go all the way around the room at its center, with the
only door at the very end of the spiral.

This hall was much longer.
He moved down it as quickly as he dared, eyes wide open and
adrenaline pumping. There was tiny hatch at the base of the wall
opposite him, but it was only a few centimeters square. Above it
was a small black lens pointing down the hallway at him.

He kept his eyes on the
little hatchway by the floor, and ran along the wall to minimize
his exposure to the lens. If it was a heat ray or laser, he had
nowhere to hide and could only try to get past it before it
activated. But it looked more like a camera lens.