Machines of Eden (7 page)

He moved it.

They called the first major one the Green War. Then there was
another and another in quick succession, erupting across the globe
in chains like the endless strands of hydrogen fusing into helium
on the sun’s surface. So we called them The Green Wars, and lumped
them all in together, because if the weapons and geography changed,
the causes always stayed the same.

They hated us. Unrest became a nervously muttered byword of
sarcastic humor, it was such an understatement. In millions they
marched, sometimes beginning peacefully with protests and
petitions, but always turning in the end to Violence, the last tool
of the disenfranchised masses that was too often the first and
only.

We
weren’t listening, we didn’t
need
to listen. We were first-world, they were third. We carried
out a few mercy missions and food drops to assuage our collective
conscience, and then we dropped them cold and let them fight it out
amongst themselves.

“
It’s not our fight”, we said. “Let them resolve their own
conflicts”. As if we weren’t at the root of each and every.
Eventually, in country after country, starting in the Middle East
and Africa and all those far-away places and then cropping up in
places frighteningly close, desperation reared its head. After
desperation came the point of no longer caring, and beyond that was
madness. Rioting en masse, with entire regions burning away in
chaos and mindless plunder.

Responses could be swift and deadly, cutting the head from the
snake—but it always became a hydra. They could be aloof and
restrained, holding the borders from behind mirrored shades and
denying access. In the end it never mattered. Hundreds of thousands
would die, leaving the survivors even more wretched and desperate,
and new generations would rise up in hate. They never stopped
breeding, which societally we could not grasp in the first-world.
The nine-billion-plus of the earth kept coming.

In
the end, they would always keep on coming. Gradually, we found
ourselves participating in the long-feared Apocalypse.

The
world men once knew and trusted in no longer applied. New rules had
to be written, and textbooks, where they were still bothered with,
had to throw out much of the past. History didn’t provide answers
for what the world now faced. History didn’t know about warfare on
this scale, not after all its plagues and World Wars and genocides.
We went past mechanized and computerized warfare and paused for an
ugly decade on biological war, until the scientists foresaw where
that would end up and convinced the policy-makers to put a stop to
it. Then it was back to the way wars were always fought, except
this time with profoundly new tools of destruction on our
side.

The
early robots were a supplement to our human-controlled machines,
providing the manpower which we lacked and had no desire to field.
But after years of fighting and researching and manufacturing and
more fighting, the robots became the defining force in battle. In
some cases, they were even the reason for the battle. The nightmare
of Old Brasilia was perpetrated simply to verify some theories the
eggheads behind the curtain had come up with.

The
main problem with combat ‘droids was the inability to adapt. They
slaughtered people hundreds to one, but then other people would
seek out ways to get behind them. Blinding the sensors, trapping
them, tricking them, swarming them. A bot could only dispense so
many rounds a minute, and could only carry so many
total.

Children were used to get past them and disarm them, so they
started shooting children that got too close—what other choice was
there? Failure was unthinkable: a multi-million-dollar machine
destroyed by a naked eight-year-old? It was ugly, no one denied
that, but it had to be done. Didn’t it?

It
was all ugly and always had been. Everyone admitted that. And after
all, they had been warned. Our bots blared warnings in native
tongues six times a minute while they dealt death. For some reason,
it didn’t keep the children away.

The wars progressed, the situation devolved, and over
time
the masses
gained the ability to build their own tools of death. They saw what
worked and they adapted. There were devious minds among the
millions of howling mobocrats, and they took and dissected and
replicated. Soon it became not a hundred machines against ten
thousand Wigglies, but a thousand machines against five hundred
machines and five hundred thinking men and women. Later, after much
bloodshed and experimentation and sub-national coalescence, the
playing field leveled into a chessboard of autonomous machine
destruction.

Conscience eased on both sides after that, when conscience was
still considered at all. It became a battle of wits, but always
with the shadow of Desperation lurking on the edge of the
battlefield. Because when the bots had all been vanquished, there
were still the Wigglies to deal with. They’d hide behind their
machines just like us as long as they could, but when it came down
to it, the difference between us was that they turned into wild
animals while we retreated behind more mechanized cover.

After years of this, things had to change. People had to
change, and they did. People left the supreme arrogance of the
Grays, disgusted and sick, infused with their own desperation to
find and do what was right, not what was expedient. They were worse
than traitors, less understood than madmen, more hated than the
worst sociopaths.

I
was one of them.

The tunnel was too low to
allow
John
to
stand erect and his lower back began to ache from running bent
forward at the waist, but he didn't dare to stop with the sounds of
pursuit echoing up the shaft behind him. The floor and walls
of the tunnel were ribbed for architectural strength, and made the
way forward difficult. There was no way to tell if he was putting
distance between himself and the bots due to the distortions caused
by the tunnel.

As he half-ran,
half-hobbled, he considered the consequences if the tunnel ended in
a giant fan or furnace – or was simply grated off. There would be
nothing left to do except rest his feet until the bots arrived and
mowed him down.

He stumbled abruptly as
the tunnel rose at a forty-five degree slope and T-boned with
another tunnel. He looked down the corridor right and left, but
they were identical, dimly lit with small
plasma lights
set into the ceiling.
The intersecting tunnel was larger and he could stand upright. He
chose left at random and began to jog, conserving his strength for
a sprint if needed. The walls and ceiling were a half-dome that
barely cleared his head. The air was dry and stale.

For several minutes he
followed the tunnel, sensing that it curved to the right in a long,
gradual loop. He wondered if the right hand tunnel would meet up
with the one he was in, forming a huge circular track. If so, all
the bots had to do was send one after him, and another down the
right hand tunnel. Sooner or later he’d be caught between
them.

Then he came to another
T-intersection and stopped. The tunnel continued to his right into
the distance, but to his left it immediately began to slope steeply
upward and he could see a grid of light at the top. He stared at
it, uneasy. It looked like an exit, but the hill he was traveling
through was much too large for this to be the far side.

John
hadn’t heard any sounds of pursuit in the last five minutes,
but bots were capable of surprising stealth when needed. One could
appear behind him any minute. He took a running start and got about
halfway up the slope before sliding back down. It was more of a
shaft to be climbed than a ramp, but much narrower and with a lower
ceiling than the large one below. By going backward and pressing
his hands overhead against the ceiling, he got enough traction to
inch up the slope to the grate.

It was about half a meter
square, a stainless steel grid bolted into the walls of the tunnel,
forming a grillwork of perhaps six-centimeter squares. He hooked
his fingers through them to keep from sliding back and peered
through the grate, attention riveted by what he saw.

The room on the other side
of the grate was well-lit and spacious, but deserted. Industrial
grade metal cabinets, tables, and rolling chairs were pushed
against the walls, piled with machinery and equipment, only some of
it familiar. It looked like a workshop or production
lab.

He felt a gust of hope. If
he could get inside, he would be in his element. No more jungle. He
didn’t like the jungle – too many variables, too much he didn’t
know. But inside, with walls and lights and tools...

He examined the grate,
darting a look behind him every few seconds for bots. He could
detect no security apparatus visible to the eye. Slipping a hand
inside his trousers, he brought out his emergency toolkit. He kept
it in a small case strapped to his left thigh, almost in his groin
– undetectable to all but a thorough frisk. He selected a
screwdriver and set to work.

Three minutes later the
grate was off and
John
was inside. He blinked, letting his eyes adjust to the
brighter light, and examined his surroundings. It was indeed, as he
had suspected, a small manufacturing lab. The only entrance, other
than the grate, was a door set in the far wall. There were no
windows. Energy coils and fuel cells were scattered across a dusty
countertop to his right, a big soldering table stood at his left,
and small rails on the floor led from the room’s only door to the
grate he had entered through. A large metal ventilation hood
surrounded the grate on the inside.

The equipment was
expensive, but dated – ten years old or more. It puzzled him. A
thick layer of dust covered all surfaces and there was no sign of
any activity. If anyone was controlling the bots, they weren’t
doing it from this room.

I’d bet a
jar
of
real
pre-war
strawberr
ies
that
this place is much, much bigger than this room. I smell massive
technology.

A familiar shape off to the
side shifted his attention from the door. Behind a large autoclave,
lying prone on a table, was the armless torso and head of a bot, an
old pre-war android with bare wiring protruding from its eye
sockets. Dust covered this one as well. He stared at it, questions
crowding in, until he shook his head.

First things
first.

The Sergeant was muttering
in his brain, but he already knew what the Sergeant wanted, so he
ignored him. On a nearby bench lay a lightweight ratcheting ring
spanner with a flat screwdriver on the other end.
John
felt silly holding
it as a weapon, but it was better than his bare hand for now, and
could come in handy against hardware beyond the scope of his
emergency pack.

Now he approached the door.
To his surprise, it slid upward with a pneumatic hiss, revealing a
long hallway to his left, a short one ahead ending in a door, and
to his right a small alcove with an array of monitors and digital
readout screens. No one was visible, and he dodged quickly across
the hallway to the other door. An observation window was set into
the door, and staying clear of the motion sensor that would actuate
this door, he peered through.

The room beyond was much
larger, and clearly an android production facility. The lights were
on and he could see several body parts and trays of old bot pieces,
but again the place looked like it hadn’t seen heavy use in some
time. He waved his hand across the motion sensor, curious to
examine the bot remnants in closer detail, but the door remained
shut.

“
Welcome to Alpha
Facility.”

It was a woman’s voice,
echoing from somewhere down the long hallway.
John
spun, eyes darting, and then
peeked cautiously around the corner into the hallway.

Nothing
.

“
Please come to Level
Two.”

The voice was perfect.
Cultured and sexy; the rich tone of a professional speech artist.
Re
gular
women
seldom spoke like that; at least none
John
had
had the pleasure of meeting. Despite
the uncertainty of the moment, he found himself wondering what she
looked like, and grinned at his own intrepidity.

“
Just follow the hallway
to your left.”

This time he traced the
voice to a small intercom mounted in the ceiling, snugly nested in
a hidden alcove alongside what looked like a camera. There were no
cams at his end of the hallway, so it must have picked him up from
that distance. Either someone with very good eyes was monitoring
that exact screen at the time he darted across the hall, or they
had some technology that he had underestimated. Stealth was out of
the question.

“
There's no need for
apprehension. I am pleased that you are here. Any concerns you may
entertain will be addressed when you reach Level
Two
, where we can get better acquainted
with each other
.”