Machines of Eden (35 page)

He could feel sweat
running down his back. He was dizzy.
Not
enough water. Not enough food. No sleep.
He could feel his body slowly shutting itself down, drying
up, mummifying in the heat.

The elevator looked dented
and the light in it was broken, so he took the stairs down a level,
then cautiously picked his way through the low corridors toward
where he remembered the labs were, according to the map he'd
studied.

Eve's voice murmured again
over the speaker system. "There is still time. If you can help me,
I can help you achieve things beyond your most ambitious
dreaming."

John
sighed loudly. "I know you'd like a body, Eve. But it's not
going to happen, not while I'm around. Leave me alone and run a
diagnostics scan, just for kicks." He started down the hallway to
the labs, following a dimly glowing sign overhead.

"Adam, the bodies are
retrievable. With them, we could--"

"I. Don't.
Want
. To. You hear
me?"

The door to the labs
automatically slid up into the ceiling, and he stepped through.
Beyond were a series of parallel galleries, interconnected and with
walkways overhead and below in some parts. The main feature of the
gallery before him was a huge dome with pipes running into it. He
stared at it.
The oven that cooks the
little devils.

The galleries were labeled,
and he could see immediately that the third one down was the most
active. Lights illuminated the dome in it, and two small service
bots were buzzing back and forth by it.

"I insist that you
reconsider. I am willing to offer--" Eve's voice, which had been
soothing and seductive, now became a scream of alarm. "Adam, don't
go in there! Janice is--"

It was enough for him to
freeze where he was and duck slightly.
A
shot rang out and tiny, hot shards of flooring sprayed against his
cheek. The sound echoed around the gallery as he whirled out of the
way and took refuge against a protruding part of the wall. He
breathed deeply, adrenaline threatening him with tunnel
vision.

Getting tired of
that.

Eve had warned him
in time
, but now she
tried another tack without missing a beat. Her voice rang out, calm
and reassuring.

"Janice, you're a
remarkabl
y resilient
woman. I have a proposition that you will be wise to
consider. Outside in the jungle lie the bodies that we both were
meant to inhabit. If you will submit to my guidance in the
operation, I can--"

"Quiet, machine." Janice's
voice shook. "If you maintain silence for the next few minutes, I
might
still allow you to watch the
fruition of the Plan without
wi
ping
you
clean
first
. Your
choice.” The last two words came in a rasping whisper.

John
listened to her feet. She made no attempt to be quiet. He
heard her heavy breathing.

On the upper catwalk,
scoping out this gallery. Got to move past her.
It reminded him of the confrontation at West Station. This
time he was disappointed to find that he had nothing nearby to use
as a shield.
But that jug of
sterilizer
fluid
might help.

"Adam, I need you. I need
you so badly..." Eve was back to him now. "What is it you want most
of all in the world? I can give it to you, in time. Only work with
me."

He grabbed the jug from
the
rack
where it
hung, the only nearby item of any useful size, and stepped out to
quickly swing it up into the air at a curving angle that would
carry it toward where he hoped Janice was staked out.

Another shot broke the
silence of the room, and he took the chance. Sprinting out from the
wall, he got behind the dome itself, keeping the bulky hoses and
tubes between him and the figure on the railing above. Janice
melted away into the shadows, moving to another vantage point, and
he made another move, springing toward the next dome in the third
gallery over, he crouched behind it.

She won't dare take
another shot while I'm by the domes. If she punctures the dome
we're both history.

"Janice?" Eve called out.
"I can give you this man. I can tell you how to get at him. Just
promise me you'll cooperate. It's what Glenn would have
wanted."

There was no sign of the
sniper creeping around above him in the darkened galleries, so he
glanced around to locate the control station for the active dome.
One of the maintenance bots rolled close, and he kicked it
away.

There – that little side
room under the stairs looks like it might house the
controls.
John
dashed under the metal stairway that led up to the catwalks
above,
threw himself inside the control
room,
and slammed the door shut behind
him.

A
wide
window gave him a view of the
dome outside, and he rapped on it with a knuckle after making sure
the door was locked.
Armor-glass.
Perfect.

Emptying his mind of other
distractions, he stood in front of the desk console and took a
moment to orient himself. The screens were easy to
follow
, but what they showed was
depressing
. The countdown sequence had
reached phase four of five – the nanos were live and activated,
fully programmed, and currently undergoing a final test of
replication integrity. He wiped sweat from his eyes.

In forty minutes, the
doors open and the fans turn on.

He took another moment to
scan the readouts on some of the displays regarding the specifics
of the bots' programming. It seemed that Eve had decided on a total
of one hundred and nine different artificial, man-made materials
for the bots to attack. Everything from steel and similar alloys to
plastics and other synthetic building materials would be potential
targets of the nanomachines.

The
little bugs
would fly around as
airborne particles of dust until they came into contact with a set
of molecules that they recognized as being one of the targeted
materials. Then they would systematically break the atomic
connections of the material, reassemble the particles into more
nanomachines with a few left-over
organic
molecules, and move
on.

The time to complete a
reassembled working nanomachine copy varied depending on which
materials were available, but it could be anywhere from five
to
three
hundred
seconds. At that rate, if the machines encountered continuous
sources of material to convert
...
he did the math quickly on the system calculator.
It wouldn't take more than a week or two to entirely resurface the
world’s landmass of
everything
manmade, if the bots were given free
reign.

Best case scenario, within
two years of current weather patterns, the bots would have spread
everywhere, and every single piece of machinery, circuitry, or
building in the world would be
active
dust. Then, fifty years
later, the nanobots' internal clock would run down and they would
all biodegrade into
inert soil,
reenter
ing
the cycle of life through plant roots.

The sheer size of Janice’s
plan was staggering. It was surreal, a madman’s plot that couldn’t
possibly work.

Except it
can
.

John
knew, deep down, that it could. The technology
was solid, and had existed decades
ago
. It just needed the final touch of a
lunatic
to actually make it
happen
.

He fought against a
feeling of overwhelming helplessness.
So
many backups and redundancies. There
’s
no guarantee that even if
I
manage to shut it all
down, Janice won’t simply laugh and push a different button
t
o
start another
nightmare.
He slammed a fist down on the
console.
There must be a way. I just have
to try different things until one works.
It’s t
ime to shut this thing
down.

He began looking around
the control values for things he could modify, probing for a
weakness in the code he could exploit.
If
I can either inject an interference array into the countdown
protocol or overwhelm it with a trillion update requests, I might
be able to –

The door flew
open.

A woman's arm reached
around the doorframe, a black handgun held firmly and pointing
toward
John
blindly. He had just enough time to send the room's only
little stool rolling toward the doorway and to drop to the floor.
Then shots came thick and fast, deafening him in the tiny room. The
bullets hit the ceiling, the wall, and the control panel, shredding
fiberboard and plastic where they hit.

He crab-scuttled to the
doorway in seconds and jumped to his feet. Kicking out with one
foot and trapping the gun-arm against the doorjam, he spun through
the open doorway and raised his other leg up high for a
stomp.

Janice was crouched just
outside, her head underneath the level of the window.
John
lashed out at
Janice's shoulder, aiming to incapacitate her, but she twisted free
of his pinning leg just in time.
Swinging
into a sitting position, she aimed the gun up at him from between
her legs.

Before she could
fire,
John
was on
top of her, knocking the gun aside and pounding at her head and
chest with both hands. She was not a large woman, but she was
surprisingly agile and flexible, writhing and rolling, making it
almost impossible to get in a solid hit.
John
made the mistake of leaving one
supporting leg in place too long near her, and with a vicious
ground-fighting move she wrapped her body around it, kicked off the
wall, and threw him off balance.

His leg felt almost
broken, but he blinked away the pain and dived back at her. Even as
they grappled, he felt an insane grin begin to spread across his
face. It was too ridiculous, too bizarre. Here, deep underground in
a beyond state-of-the-art facility, with a tank of nanobots on a
doomsday countdown, two
humans
were
fist-fighting
. He almost laughed out
loud.
This is what we’ve come to. After
all our
robots, A.I.’s, dream machines and
techno-
wonders, humans still revert to
trying to bash each other’s brains out with bare hands.
Like monkeys.

Somehow
Janice
connected a foot
to his head. He shrugged off the blow as best he could and got a
hand on her scalp, yanking her around by the hair.
He had never been much for brawling, but he could
throw his weight around as well as any man.
The gun in her hand fired once more and then clicked
empty.

As she dropped the weapon
and scrambled to her feet,
John
got to his as well. He could taste blood in his
mouth.
Something changed in his head, and
h
is ironic humor morphed into something
entirely different.

Tired of this island and
the
mania behind it. T
ired of the freakshow computer program that
th
inks I’m
some
kind of character in a biblical morality play, tired of the sorry
loser who thought it all up and died for it
,
and really, really tired of this
deluded
murderess i
n front of
me
.

He was, he realized
suddenly, angry.
He didn’t often get
angry, by personality, but now he was m
ore
angry than he’d ever been in his life. Rage flooded
him
, driving reason out of his
mind,
and he welcomed its hot
power.

It’s too much. I’m through
with it! I’m going to kill her.

All the war, all the
killing and fighting, all the friends
I’ve
watched die screaming, riddled
through with some bot’s ordnance. Tired of all the waste and
burning and death, the lies, the manipulations, the
politics.

All the suppressed hate
and pain and frustration of the years and months and days erupted
in a volcanic surge that he didn’t even try to
control
, j
ust let
it come and enjoyed it.

He
faced her with a wolfish grin
. “I’m
going to take your other ear now.”

Janice sensed something
had changed. She took a step backward, and then
her opponent
was on her, impossibly
fast, mouth open in a silent snarl.