Machines of Eden (11 page)

“
Not anymore. We are
almost fully automated now. I keep everything running
smoothly.”

He used the restroom, which
he’d been needing for the past hour, passed on the sandwiches, and
took a bottle of water from the bar. Dehydration was just as
dangerous as potassium cyanide.

“
I’m ready to see your
project, honey,” he called out, approaching the wide doorway at the
far end of the lounge and cafeteria. “Promise not to kill me right
away?”

“
I promise. Next time I
try to kill you, I’ll let you know beforehand.” A pause. “That was
a joke.”

John
didn’t laugh, and neither did
Eve
.

“
Step up to the
observation deck window. I think you’ll be surprised at what you
see. It’s quite beautiful, and I’m very proud of it.”

John
walked through, feeling surprisingly calm.
Eve wasn’t actively pursuing his demise at the
moment, so he would play along
.

I’m curious.

Artificial Intelligence was
first used in entertainment. Commerce and communication followed,
but it was a long time before we trusted combat decisions to
artificials. Maybe not long enough, though.

You send a robot out on a
mission, say to search and destroy an arms dump or a training camp.
If you’re going to hold its hand every step of the way and tell it
when to fire and when to wait, that’s manpower being used up. Sure,
the guys back at base with their fingers on the controls aren’t
getting shot at, but it’s three or four fewer men to send
elsewhere. And then there’s that delay, a combination of human
weakness and signal transmission speed. Sometimes it gets your bot
blown up before it has a chance to react and defend itself. Even
bots should have the right to defend themselves at some level,
shouldn’t they?

Their programmers sure
thought so. Bot-loving freaks.

So just as surely as the
policy-makers distanced themselves from personal accountability for
the horrors of war, the heat-of-the-moment decisions gravitated
into the hands of the bots themselves. You go with what works.
Letting your shiny new killing machine get fried because its hands
were figuratively tied doesn’t work. Telling it to think for itself
and act at the speed of light works. I’ve seen a state-of-the-art
bot pivot, aim, fire, and confirm an instant headshot kill in no
more than the time it took for the snap of a twig to register in my
brain as a potential threat. I prefer those ones to be on my
side.

It’s remarkably easy to
turn control over to a good AI that you trust and have seen do its
work. You can trust it. It doesn’t get PTSD, shellshock doesn’t
bother it, and it doesn’t feel a thing when a comrade-in-arms gets
wasted right next to it. Friendly fire is next to impossible, at
least with small arms. It can carry an awful lot of ammunition, and
its weapons are very difficult for an enemy to repurpose. It
doesn’t need sleep, and robot armies don’t march on their stomachs
. Technically, they can’t even commit war crimes (and if they do,
then the rules were a bit outdated anyway).

So many of the little
problems that fester during a war, gone. No longer an issue. It’s
very easy.

The Harvard and MIT and
West Point men were geniuses at plotting ever more complex digital
chess moves. Tactics libraries with a hundred million different
attacks and defenses could be loaded up at the factory and then
live-updated remotely while data on the enemy’s movements streamed
into battlefield headquarters.

It takes a resourceful
Wiggly indeed to outwit one of these machines. And with four,
eight, twelve-bot squads covering each other, platoons of them
acting in perfect concert, the effect was deadly. Gone were the
days of the Fog of War, the difficulties of coordinating precise
actions between bodies of men over distances with poor
communications equipment. Modern war was fought in milliseconds and
meters, not minutes and miles.

Battlefields were divided
up into grids with millions of rows and columns, with obstacles
categorized and marked. Each machine knew where every one of its
friendlies were to within a square foot, and if an enemy was
spotted by one it was known by all.

Bots could move safely
through minefields and traps with a purely mental knowledge of
where not to step. Pursuers would walk into the danger zone with no
possible way to sense they were about to die. Artillery strikes,
air strikes, and gun emplacements could all be directed right past
and in between retreating or advancing ranks of bots without the
risk of a single friendly casualty. Hiding behind cover was no
longer as safe a refuge for soldiers as it had once
been.

The truly high-level AI’s
could manage entire battles of thousands of combatants while
running communications for friendly forces, disrupting those of
enemy forces, calculating risk factors, and delivering verbal and
visual reports to their human counterparts. They could be counted
on, and they made very few mistakes. They cost billions of dollars,
but they could win wars almost single-handedly.

We nick-named them Patton
and Alexander and Napoleon. The programmers gave them personalities
and accents to make voice communication more natural. Troops
established genuine rapport with their Commander machines, trusting
them with their lives and demanding to work under their favorite
ones.

Thus the state of war in
the Age of Conflict came about. Some of us can barely remember or
imagine any other life.

An immense bank of windows
formed the entire wall ahead of him, flooding the long room with
sunlight. The glass seemed to intensify the light, streaming it in
through floor-to-ceiling panels and letting him drink in the blue
of sky through them. The windows drew him irresistibly with the
promise of fresh air and freedom. He shuddered involuntarily,
mentally ridding himself of the hours he’d just spent crawling
through tunnels and breathing recycled air.

There was a small
holographic map-table in the room’s center, and a few datacom
consoles on the wall. As he approached the windows, the sky seemed
to spread out before him, almost blindingly blue. He touched one of
the panes and realized it was pure quartz-glass.

Interesting...

For a facility this well
designed, a natural quartz-glass was an odd choice with the variety
of modern synthetics like armor-glass. This brittle silica glass,
without any steel stabilizers, was an anachronism.
John
didn’t like it. It
was just one more bizarre reality in an already surreal
world.

Then his eyes grew
accustomed to the light, and he shifted his attention from the
glass itself to what lay beyond it.

“
What do you think,
Adam?”

An immense valley opened
out before him, the ground falling away in layers of green toward
the horizon. To either side vertical mountain cliffs rose out of
the verdant jungle, forming sheer rock walls a
hundred
meters
. They wrapped from the face he was looking out of all the
way around to the west, hugging the valley and leaving only one
side open.
At the opposite end
of the valley from where he stood,
there was a low point between the cliffs that
looked like the valley's only exit
, and he
could see the blue of open ocean beyond
.

He had come all the way
through the
buried
facility and emerged
at the bottom
of the interior canyon formed by the volcanic ring. The valley was
deeper than an ordinary crater, and longer where it ran out to the
sea. Vegetation of all kinds filled the valley, from towering trees
to open grassy areas
.
Several streams wound through the myriad of green and ran
into three different ponds and wetlands he could see from the
Observation Deck.

It was as if God had
decided to seal off this little emerald jewel from any outside
penetration; nothing could descend the sheer cliffs that encircled
the valley
, and nothing could get
out.
He wondered at the geothermic forces
that must have gone into its creation.
It
can’t be terraformed. That would take trillions of dollars and
fifteen years for
several united
government
s
to complete. A private organization couldn’t
possibly do it.

He could see the movement
of large wildlife without the aid of the scopes hanging by the
windows; some sort of large ungulate herd grazing in a meadow. A
rainbow macaw burst past the window in a sudden spray of color, and
below a flock of large white egrets exploded into flight, rippling
the surface of one of the ponds.

A tall bamboo forest
didn’t surprise him too much, since he had seen bamboo growing in
many regions of the world.
He did a
genuine double take, however, when
he saw
the distinctive black and white fur of a large
panda waddl
ing between two
clumps
half a kilometer away.

Those are supposed to be
extinct.

“
All right, Eve, I’m
impressed
,” John said.
“
Beats any park or preserve I’ve ever
seen.”

“
I hoped you would be,”
Eve purred. “It is my magnum opus.”

“
Is it a zoo? Or a gene
stockpile?”

“
Not a zoo, Adam. Eden.
This is Eden.”

Ah.
That adds up.

“
I can understand your
confusion, Adam. You will come to know in due time. For now, just
realize that everything you see is completely, utterly unspoiled.
Natural. Un-tampered.
Clean
.”

John
frowned. “What’s natural about pandas and gazelles grazing
together? What makes this different from any other crackpot
biorefuge? Lots of pre-war rich people started their own little
preserves to save the planet, and guess what? They all
failed.
You can’t twist nature.
And—
hey,
is that an
snowy
owl
I’m seeing?
I thought they were arctic.
” A soft-looking white owl was perched on a tree limb just
below the window. It caught his eye when it flapped its wings and
resettled on its perch.
“
There’s nothing natural about any
of this, no matter how pure and clean it might be.”

Silence.
Maybe I’ve angered her
.

“
It
is
a snowy owl, Adam. Your
ornithological knowledge is impressive. I can see I’ve chosen
well.”

In spite of himself, he
was pleased at the compliment, even if it was coming from a
computer that
probably
held more data
about birds than he’d
ever learn.
Bird-watching
was an intensely private hobby of
his
, one that he’d never been able to
share with fellow soldiers. He prided himself on his knowledge of
the natural world, even the parts of it that were long
gone.

The part about being
chosen didn’t slip by him unnoticed, however.
She’s sounding more and more like a megalomaniac.
What’s her goal here?

“
Not arctic,” Eve
went on
, “but undeniably
out of place in this climate. That particular specimen
has been overfed because it was anthropomorphized
with a
pet name
—
Simmons
.
Now it will not leave the
Facility’s entrance
and
mingle with others in the habitat. It is proving to be a very
stubborn creature... in many ways like you, Adam.”

A brief laugh to make sure
he understood that it was a joke.

Eve continued.
“To answer your question about the purpose of the
Project, please proceed down the elevator hatch, and I will explain
in full as you tour Eden. Below, you will find an earpiece that
will make communication easier outside the Facility.”

John
stood on the elevator pad and pressed the down button. It
took him through the floor and into a lower chamber
that contained a
rack
of
localized comms equipment near a large door.
H
e took a slim wireless earpiece,
positioned it comfortably, and turned it on.

“
Can you hear me,
Eve?”

“
Loud and clear, thank
you, Adam,” she replied softly in his ear. “Now, let’s begin. And
let me just say how pleased I am to be able to show this to someone
like you, who I hope will be able to appreciate it fully. Go ahead
and step outside. There are a number of pathways you can take as we
talk.”