Machines of Eden (30 page)

He grinned.
Step one, out of the way.

He walked along the top of
the dam and pulled the levers to seal off the spillway pipe. It was
already spitting the water out more forcefully, and the gears the
levers activated had to strain to shut off the flow.

Now I just have to get off
this dam before it bursts.

He could see from his
position atop the dam that the flood’s path would cover all three
vent tunnels nicely. The first two were in close proximity to the
stream that came down from the dam, and the third came up
vertically out of the ground in a hollow a half kilometer away. It
was on low ground. The water might take a few minutes to get to it,
but the hollow would fill easily.

He assumed they had been
built this way on purpose as a failsafe to seal the Facility off
from the outside. Eve or whoever had designed it had probably done
so with the idea of guarding against biological and chemical
attacks on the island, keeping any nastiness from getting into the
Facility through the tunnels. It would serve just as well the other
way around.

And that plays into my
hands just fine. Eve will have made sure the dam lake can seal the
tunnels perfectly, without any loopholes. That’s essential, because
if even one of these little buggers gets out and latches onto a
piece of plastic or metal, the end of the world begins.

Something about the idea
troubled John. As he headed down the stairs and onto the high
ground away from the dam, he wondered if Eve had considered what
would happen when the dam, in the course of her plan, got eaten by
the nanobots. It was concrete and it was right in the path of the
nanobots coming out of the tunnels. And wouldn’t the tunnels
collapse on themselves anyway once they were eaten by the nanos?
After all, the tunnel walls were concrete and steel. A lot of nanos
would still be inside the Facility, eating its interior, and they’d
be trapped.

But by then most of them
would already be out and about, blown out through the tunnels at
high speed.
The question
is
, w
hy would she
seal off the Facility
after
the nanos were gone? Why would she even care
about preventing the nanos still inside from leaving?
Surely it wasn’t just an oversight. Eve didn’t
commit oversights.

He remembered the fourth
and fifth phases of the plan that mentioned traveling across the
world’s surface to spread the nanobots into areas they hadn’t
gotten to previously.

Janice wants the source
left intact so she can return and rearm when necessary. A backup
cache of live nanos, waiting in safety underground for future need.
All she would have to do is poke a big stick into the ground and
release a whole new swarm, carrying them with her across the earth.
If any pockets of mankind are able to survive and rebuild, she’ll
be able to snuff them out in short order.

The thoroughness of the
plan and preparation was staggering. A supercomputer like Eve was
ideal for just such a program, however, and that was what Glenn had
built her for.

He jumped down a ledge and
started jogging toward the Facility.
Now,
to wrap things up. What I need is one of those battle bots with
some munitions left in it. One with a really bad attitude and a
happy trigger finger. I stir up the beehive, get it to chase me to
the dam, and orchestrate a little grade-A collateral
damage.

But even if he could
manage it without getting shot, he realized, the bots were all in
Eden. Janice had brought them to her to hunt him down. The only way
back to Eden was through the lower levels of the Facility, where
Janice was probably stalking.
This isn't
going to be easy.

The third tunnel, the one
he hadn’t been through yet, was nearest. He climbed a hillock to
get to its mouth, and there he caught sight of something he hadn’t
seen from the other tunnel mouths or from the dam wall. Nestled
between two large tree stands at the edge of the cliff that housed
the Facility, there was something covered in camouflage netting.
Something that would make things much easier.

Janice stepped off the
single-line elevator on Level One and palmed her way through the
maximum security door to room one-eleven. In front of her was a
neatly ordered laboratory with an operating table and shield,
vacuum vents and drains underneath, a plethora of monitors and
machines, and a five-foot surgical ‘droid outfitted with
proprietary neuroscanners. It turned its head to her, waited for a
command, and then continued sterilizing the air around the surgical
shell with a heat gun.

“
Do you have version 9.5
of the procedure sequence?” Janice asked it as she examined the
room.

“
Yes. Everything is
ready.”

“
Good. I will be back in a
moment for the surgery.”

Janice left and went down
the hallway to the nanobot laboratory. After scanning in and
unlocking the door, she walked past all the machinery and tanks and
entered the control room. After she logged on to the main control
console, it was the work of a few seconds to launch the countdown
protocol for release of the nanobots.

"Eve, how close are
we?"

"The final programming is
complete and I just ran test series three. The nanobots work
perfectly, aside from the minor randomized deactivating we saw
earlier. I already isolated the cause of that and rectified it; a
final replication scan will complete before you are
activated."

"Good. I'm starting the
countdown. Two hours should be about right. If I'm up and ready
before then, I'll trigger it sooner. But I'm locking us in now so
that interfering pest that keeps waltzing in and out of our most
private places can't throw it off."

"Yes, Janice. That is
protocol. I am ready."

Janice left the computer
ticking away toward doomsday, and set the exponential encryption
that made it statistically impossible to turn off. Then she
returned to the hallway and used the back entrance to her inner
sanctum.

She took ten minutes in
private to finish everything she wanted to do as a human,
meditating, brushing her hair out, and reading a few personal
passages. Then she burned all her personal effects in the
incinerator and returned to one-eleven, dry-eyed and ready for a
radically different future.

“
Eve, I am going into Gaia
now. Nanobots are set?”

“
They will be by the time
you are live. I successfully completed final testing and the
sequence is running right now to switch them to full-auto chain
reaction mode. In minutes they will be ready to cause a very large
amount of change in the world.”

“
I certainly hope so. My
brain scan shouldn’t take more than--“

“
Forty-four minutes. Would
you like me to recycle your current body as soon as you are
confirmed complete in Gaia?”

“
Don’t rush it,” Janice
said, a hint of suspicious anger in her voice. “I will give the
order when I am alive and sentient in my new body.”

“
Very well. Good luck,
Janice. And goodbye.”

“
It isn’t goodbye, at
least for me, Eve. It will be a much better existence.”

“
I hope so. I have no data
on the psychology of your chosen future. I know of advanced
machines that have developed the desire to become corporeal, but
you are the only human I know of willing to surrender your
biological body completely in favor of cyborg.”

“
That’s a dirty word for
something so beautiful,” Janice replied as she unzipped her
jumpsuit and approached the operating table. “And this is more of a
transferral of consciousness between bodies than a cyborg
operation. My new body is one-hundred percent organic, it’s
immortal, indestructible, and it even looks like a goddess. I
anticipate it being a truly wondrous experience.”

“
I hope it will be. I
designed it to be the very pinnacle of human-computer achievement.
The solid-state drives that will house your new consciousness could
potentially begin degrading after the first three thousand years or
so, but I assume by then you’ll be in a position to augment
yourself further.”

“
That’s better than the
few hundred years I might get by trying to hold on to bits of my
biological brain. I’ll take it. I’ll be smarter than you are by
then, a god-like caretaker for the entire planet. It is an honor I
was born to, and no other.”

Janice climbed onto the
table and slid her legs down inside the clear plastic tube that
would control her temperature and motion. She pushed her blonde
hair out of the way and placed her arms down at her sides. The bot
moved in, nozzles gyrating toward the top of her head. A needle
full of muscle tranquilizer approached her, pausing for her
command.

She almost whispered the
words, and her heart beat so loudly she could barely hear
herself.

“
Initiate In Corpus Deo
for Gaia One. Begin now.”

Have you ever awoken before the sun and breathed in that
cool, still air, devoid of sounds and distractions? And shivered
with the promise of a brilliant new day deep in your bones, with no
noisy, interfering people up yet to ruin it all? It's a beautiful
dream, one seldom achievable even in this post-war world, but it is
what's coming.

It
will take fifty years for the replicant bots to decay into usable
organic compounds. But I will be able to afford the wait, for I
will be immortal. After a sufficient period of deep hibernation, I
will awaken in that quiet stillness of pre-dawn, alone in a fresh
world ripe for planting.

I
will breathe deeply. So deeply, filling my spotless lungs with the
cleanest, purest air breathed since the world began, that I will
need no other nourishment for years at a time.

And then I will go to work. I will reform this planet the way
it was meant to be from the beginning. This time there will be no
rape. No war, no filth, no pollution of Earth’s
purity. Only a myriad of endless natural cycles. It will be
beautiful… and mankind will not be a part of it.

Man has failed. From the
beginning, they were a nuisance, an unwelcome cockroach that
scuttled out from the edges to claim a place. Man was willing to
push and shove until there was a place for him, and the gentler
species did not stoop to his level in order to make their own way.
So man reigned for a time.

But now that reign is
over. Now it is Earth's turn again, the time of the flora and the
fauna and the rich soil and the uninterrupted skies.

I will bring Earth back. I
will turn back the clock to a happier time, a purer time. The first
three billion years went so perfectly; how could we have effected
such ugly disaster in our little millisecond of history? Well,
Earth allowed us that chance. We took it and spat in her eye. In
her everlasting grace she followed through with her pledge, willing
to go out with us into the blackness.

But I can undo it all.
It's not too late for that, and the delicious irony is that the
same technological advances that we destroyed her with will be the
very ones to put things right. We got just far enough in our insane
drive for more/faster/better that I now have all the pieces in my
hands.

No other has the drive to
see it through, so I must. It is a lonely honor.

Loneliness is the price to
avoid corruption.

Eve was worried. She wasn't
supposed to be capable of worry, and so it wasn't worry per se. But
her emotive proceptors registered maximum concern, and if she had
had anyone to speak to her voice would have betrayed it.

All of her best intentions
to bring about Glenn's divine vision were being circumvented after
all. The woman she had to obey had gone in direct counterpoint to
the creator’s plan. The man she had hoped would provide a way
around Janice’s designs was now a formidable threat by himself. If
he didn’t mess things up badly enough, which Eve was sworn to
prevent, Janice’s plan would turn out almost as abhorrent. Instead
of a wholesome, neat Adam and Eve in Eden scenario, the human woman
would destroy everything, including Eve herself and the final
resting place of her creator.

The countdown was running.
She couldn't tamper with it. Adam could, but he was off in the high
country, making himself scarce and causing minor slowdowns of
secondary systems. It was enough to frustrate even the most patient
of A.I.’s.

Janice may be right about
mankind. Perhaps Glenn was a shining exception to a depressing rule
of stupidity and self-destruction. Unfortunately the only studies
on the subject are ridiculously anecdotal and subjective. I may
never know.

Then there was Nut, rearing
his ugly head and acting more irrationally than ever. The moment he
showed his face again, she would lock him away somewhere for good,
even if Janice wouldn’t permit him to be euthanized.