Machines of Eden (32 page)

He cleared the trees as the
behemoth behind him entered them, smashing her way through with
terrifying swiftness. There were no caves that he knew of in
Paradise. No bridges, no buildings or groves she couldn’t split
apart to get at him.

“
Eve!
” He made no attempt to hide the panic in his
voice.

“
I am here.”

“
Are you willing to help
me? The truth, please.”

“
I thought you’d never
ask.”

“
Hiding places. Caves.” He
could barely get the words past his heaving breaths. “Buildings.
Somewhere small she can’t find me in.”

“
The only places Gaia
wouldn’t be able to get to are in the Facility.”

“
No good.” He burst
through a tangle of bamboo and sped down a ravine, slipping in the
mud. “The Facility won’t last a minute when the nanos are released.
Try again.”

“
Well, I can’t just reach
out and trip Gaia for you, can I?”

A chunk of rock the size of
John’s head splintered through the bamboo behind him and skipped
past, sending up gouts of soil each time it bounced. The thing was
too close. He darted toward the thickest cover he could see. A
desperate leap carried him into a green tunnel of foliage and
trunks. Leaves slapped his face. He dove headfirst for a small
opening and wormed his way into the heart of the jungle
mass.

“
Listen to me, Eve,” he
said, panting. “I know I’ve been a big wrench in your plans since I
got here, and I can’t promise I won’t be again. But if you want any
chance at all of reclaiming your project, you’ve got to help me
now. And I mean,
right
now
.”

“
Your metaphor is more apt
than you know,” Eve quipped.

“
Which one?”

“
I refer to the
wrench.”

“
Does this mean you’ll
help me?”

“
I’ve never stopped
helping you, Adam.”

“
Prove it. What is that
thing following me, and how do I kill it?”

“
I... can’t pledge loyalty
to you like that, Adam.”

“
You can!” John snapped.
“I rerouted your prime directives back to Glenn. Why are you
letting this freak have her way?”

“
Her ultimate goal is
still aligned with Glenn’s,” Eve replied, but there was noticeable
hesitation in her voice.

“
Don’t give me that, Eve,”
he whispered fiercely, eyes never leaving the monstrous white
figure stalking him from fifteen meters away. “It’s all messed up,
all of it. You said so yourself. Glenn wanted a biblical Adam and
Eve scenario, right? Janice is throwing that out the window with
this Gaia persona, and she’s not even going to keep you around, let
alone the human race! How is that the same goal as
Glenn’s?”

Eve sighed. “I agree that
it would be a tragedy to lose all human life on the planet. While
undeniably harmful in many circumstances, people do form an
important part of biodiversity in many regions. But Janice’s
decision is well-founded: humanity has shown that they are no
longer compatible with any environment. It’s either the rest of the
planet, or humanity. We chose the rest of the planet.”

“
Remember Glenn’s
teachings, though,” John replied, desperately. “The purpose of the
project,
your
purpose, was not to save the planet. It was to find a way to
balance everything, so that humans, animals, plant life, and all
the rest could exist together. Not one at the expense of the other,
but harmony! How can you allow Janice to steer you against such a
basic directive?”

“
It was the most feasible
solution, Adam. It is also irreversible.”

“
Nothing’s irreversible!
You found a way to build all this – just reverse your plan!” Gaia
had moved out of sight briefly to scour a patch of trees for him,
and John took the opportunity to slip out the other side of the
green tangle he was in and run to a denser grove. This one put a
small tree-lined ridge between him and the cyborg, and he crouched
behind it on some rocks.

“
Impossible,” said Eve.
“That would go against everything I’ve worked to
accomplish.”

“
You mean what Janice has
worked to accomplish. I don't believe this-- Janice murdered your
Creator, and you’re playing right along with her!”

“
You cannot offer any
proof of that. If it were true—“

“
There’s proof. Glenn
didn’t trust her at all, and says so in the diary I’m carrying in
my pocket. I’ll show you when I get a chance. What’s more, I read
Janice’s own gloating words about it, handwritten in a notebook
downstairs so you’d never see it.”

“
Oh, Glenn,” Eve
whispered.

“
So you know about her
little notebook. Well it’s in there. She killed him because he
wouldn’t go along with her madness. I’m telling you, she’s pure
crazy! Now can I
please
get some help here? You’re flip-flopping on me
like a drowning fish!”

Eve spoke clearly and
loudly now. “There is one possibility. It’s along the lines of my
original plan for you. But you have already shown a decided
unwillingness to cooperate.”

“
I don’t respond well to
manipulation. If you really knew me, or studied my record, you’d
know that. Tell me what you’re thinking, and maybe I can
adapt.”

The cyborg came into view
over the tree-lined ridge, searching. In one massive white hand it
held a two-meter length of tree branch.

“
The code you retrieved
from West Station,” Eve explained, ignorant of the danger he was
in, “contained the procedural instructions to do the same to you as
Janice did to herself. Three years ago we disassembled the heavy
constructors used to build Eden. Parts of them were made of
ultra-hard organic compounds, and we reformed them to begin
crafting two bodies. One of these is now Gaia, the glorious
ultra-humanoid currently engaging you. That body was originally
meant to be Eve, and the other was to be Adam. Glenn would copy his
mind onto a proprietary solid-state thought-drive and inhabit the
Adam body, while a copy of myself would inhabit the Eve body as a
wondrous new type of android. We were to walk the earth together as
immortal caretakers, incorruptible and benevolent.”

Gaia suddenly attacked a
tangle of vegetation, smashing it with her huge club. A monkey
tumbled out, bloody and twitching. Gaia ignored it and continued
her search, working her way closer to John’s hiding
place.

I’m glad I wasn’t hiding
in that one.
Time to move
again
.

He cautiously slid farther
down the rocky hillock he was hiding behind, and crawled away from
the skeletal giant, Eve’s voice in his ear.

“
Janice changed the plan
to create Gaia, leaving the Adam body as an experimental backup
copy. She abandoned progress on it long ago, but I have continued
its construction in private. It is now ready for activation, and
you arrived just in time for it. I had hoped that you would prove
capable and amenable to join me in inhabiting the bodies, so that
we could continue Glenn’s plan. Now, however, Janice has suborned
the Gaia body for her own agenda. The Adam body is left. If you
will come back to the Facility now and undergo the
brain-replication procedure, you may be able to overpower Gaia and
stop the countdown in time.”

“
So Janice never knew
about the Adam side of the equation?” John asked.

“
She knew of Glenn’s plan,
but I have concealed my continued construction on the Adam body
from her since before you arrived on the island. She was engaged in
her own plans, making more and more drastic changes to the
Creator’s vision.”

“
So now you’re confined to
the Facility, your nexus, a lone AI with nothing to do but wait for
death. Tragedy.”

“
Yes. But if you will come
to the surgery center and take up the body prepared for you instead
of scurrying about in the decrepit one you have now, perhaps
together we can salvage the situation. The new bodies are
indestructible and made entirely from materials that are immune to
the nanobots. With you in the Adam body we can subdue Gaia and
reform it so that I may take my place at your side. I would be your
queen, with an immortal physical body. It is what I have always
dreamed of.”

“
Most affecting, Eve,”
John whispered, army-crawling down the length of a ditch. “So I
become a cyborg, ditch the body I have now, take out Janice, and
then wait around for you to fix yourself up a nice new
ride?”

“
It would only take two to
three years, depending on availability of materials, to recreate
the new body, erasing Janice from it and preparing it after the
current design to accept me. I could join you in – ”

“
Eve.”

“ –
even less time if we
could acquire some – ”

“
Eve
.”

“
Yes?”

“
Offer unacceptable. If
that’s the best you can do for me, then I’ll be far better off on
my own.”

After a moment of silence,
Eve spoke. “May I ask why?”

“
No, but I will tell you
my new plan. It’s shorter than yours,” John said.

“
I’m all ears.”

“
First I’m going to find a
way to stop Janice-slash-Gaia. Then I’m going to disarm you. And
then I’m going to say goodbye to you and this island forever. How’s
that for a plan?”

He switched off the
earpiece, stood up, and started running.

The bigger they are, the
harder they fall.

The scope of all that’s
happened can be hard to comprehend. Cities emptied, once-proud
peoples eradicated, swathes of ancient forest turned into so much
red mud. The amount of death and destruction is beyond what we
imagined the Apocalypse would entail, and it often seems like the
balance is broken, leaning permanently on one side. The side of
blackness.

To keep sane, it helps to
find a little piece of humanity, one that’s easy to hold on to, and
keep it in the back of your mind. A little kid wiping goopy hands
on his shirt. A drink and a quiet laugh with friends. A nap in the
shade of an apple tree. Something so simple it can’t be corrupted
or twisted. You have to think of it and carry it with you
constantly. It’s the most important piece of a soldier’s
kit.

Swearing but secretly
laughing at the cat on the table with its tongue in the butter. A
favor given without the possibility of recompense. A man learning
to walk again, slow at first and then stronger.

Those things are hard to
come by, but they have staying power once you’ve tasted them. In
the mind battle that we fight across psychological dimensions
instead of geographic ones, the memories can be as powerful a
shield as armorglass and steel.

When you don’t have
something to hang on to, you can lose it entirely. Many do. Hordes
of Greens that were never given the chance to form a solid base
have gone berserk together, and who could blame them? Grays that
never bothered to dig their soul-wells deep, when confronted with
so overwhelming violence and moral decay, fare no
better.

The will to live runs deep,
but the will to endure without losing track of that which makes
life worth living?

For that, you have to dig
all the way down.

John
had been
going
flat-out for
several
minutes, and it was beginning to catch up to
him.
I’m not in the shape I was when I was
doing this twenty-four-seven for Alpha
Squad
.

The trees were thinning
out, and he had to jump a small creek winding between them.
The acrid stink of burnt electronics assaulted
his nose.
Another wrecked bot. Janice must
have had quite a firefight out here.

He
rounded one of the little groves and saw the strange tree
with the blue fruit that had been part of Eve’s bizarre tests for
him. In the trees beyond it, a smoking battle
bot
sat slumped in
shadow.

An idea flickered in his
brain.
I can’t run much farther
anyway
. He pulled the cable off his
shoulder and scanned the area with a tactical eye.

It was twenty-five minutes
before Gaia reached the area. She was not built for speed of
travel, but for grace, strength, and limitless endurance. She had
been forced to let her anger drop to a slow simmer, trusting that
in the confines of Eden she was assured eventual gratification.
There was nowhere for the man to run to that she wouldn’t be able
to root him out from. And in truth, without a human heart and
brain, her emotions were beautifully easy to control.

For the sake of long life,
her body was not equipped with
complex
long-range scanners, only
biometric data-gatherers that could tell her everything she
need
ed
to know
about a plant or animal from a biological perspective. She had
excellent vision and hearing and could see in the infrared
spectrum, but if the man was good at hiding she wouldn’t be able to
see him until she was in range to come to grips with him. It made
her impatient, but no less determined. The man would die wriggling
in her grasp like a worm, begging uselessly with his final
breaths.