Machines of Eden (28 page)

He couldn’t help giggling
softly to himself as he scurried off to check his
tripwires.

Janice, unknowing and
uncaring, went nowhere near Nut’s traps, instead heading straight
for the entrance to her inner sanctum after grabbing a first aid
kit. She knew that the man she wanted so desperately to kill would
not be there, but the thought that he had infiltrated and violated
her holy of holies compelled her to go and see how it had happened,
and what he had done there.

That the man had been able
to penetrate the saferoom was yet another failing on Eve’s part.
She had entrusted Eve with the design of the redundant security
measures, commanding her to make it as lethal as possible for any
human other than Janice herself to go there. But Eve had failed,
apparently leaving loopholes and blind spots.

Well, now I know better
than to leave such things in the hands of a machine. Eve is nearly
obsolete anyway, and in five or six more hours she’ll be swept away
with the rest of the machines.

When she got to the sanctum
she realized that it would be foolhardy to explore the corridors
after the defenses had been activated and possibly tampered with or
damaged. She went up a level to her favorite data console and
queued up the surveillance files for the last hour. Sitting in
front of the screen, she held drug-laced bandages to the side of
her head until the painkiller erased the burning sensation from the
area, and focused on the videos.

After watching the man
dance past her most foolproof and deadly automated defenses, she
began to gain a new respect for her opponent. He had at first
annoyed her to the extreme with his attempts at witticism and
verbal banter, but now she saw that it had been a front to put her
off her guard. The man knew what he was doing, and obviously had
experience in infiltration, hacking, and human vs. robot
tactics.

The surveillance record
showed that he had gotten into everything in the safe-room. It
didn’t look like he had destroyed anything inside, but she had to
assume that he had a full knowledge of current operations and the
Plan. She would need to slow down and conduct the endgame much more
carefully now. If she underestimated the man again, it might mean
the failure of the entire Plan.

She would need to think
clearly, act rationally, and be decisive in bringing him down
before he could do more harm. And yet she had to also remain
flexible. It might become necessary to inhabit Gaia immediately,
sidestepping the final five percent of tests on the nanobots. She
hoped it wouldn’t come to that, but this wrench in the works was
starting to shake her confidence. The last thing in the universe
she wanted was a total failure of the Plan.

She took several calming
breaths, checked her weapon, and stood up.

“
Eve. I need you to help
me now. And I need you to carry out my orders perfectly, because
your next failure will be your last. That’s a promise.”

“
I only perform
perfectly,” Eve’s cold reply came back. “You can
not
hold me accountable for
unpredictable factors that I have no way of--“

“
Spare me the excuses,
machine. My ultimatum stands. Now
find me
that rat
!”

John’s first priority was
to incapacitate Eve. Without her processing power, the island’s
dangers would evaporate, and he could wrap things up neatly. After
disarming the psychopath that was hunting him, of
course.

If he spent his time trying
to battle Janice, Eve would be free to go right ahead and initiate
whatever irreversible part of the Plan she wanted, and she would
probably end up killing him too. He could only take advantage of
his status as her Adam for so long. In any event, he didn’t like
the odds of going toe to toe with an ex-GRS hellion toting an
assault rifle.

From Level Five he found a
stairway leading up to the major cooling control center. The door
at the top opened freely and the lights came on to reveal a
floor-to-ceiling HVAC console along with several manual
controls.

Just what I like to
see.

He studied the array of
switches and lights for a moment. There were no heating controls
since this was a tropical island, but shutting off all ventilation
and cooling would cause a Facility this large to heat up very
quickly. It was primarily the cooling sources that flowed to Eve’s
processing cortexes that he was after.

He quickly flipped off two
rows of switches, hit a big shut-down button near the bottom, and
then picked up a live electrical extension cable. Jamming its
prongs into the data input port on the console fried the circuitry
nicely. Then he turned off all the manual controls he could find,
including a wheel he had to turn to shut a valve supplying coolant
and compressed gases to several of the mains.

“
I thought you were
showing promising signs of cooperative behavior,” Eve said quietly
in the stillness of the room.

“
What do you mean?” John
retorted. “I certainly never intended to be anything but a royal
pain.”

“
You reset my prime
directives.”

“
Doesn’t mean I want to be
in your power,” he replied. “Just that I want to be in Janice’s
even less.”

He dusted off his hands in
satisfaction and left the room. Downstairs he followed the hallways
back toward the massive ventilation tunnel he had first entered the
Facility through.

“
Are you feeling it yet,
Eve? Going to get very warm in here soon.”

Eve responded over the
intercoms attached at various points along the ceiling of the
corridor he was in. “You are trying to overheat me by turning off
the air conditioning? I don’t run on gasoline or burning coal, you
know, Adam.”

“
All right, let’s try a
few little mental exercises, then. I always like to keep my mind
active while I’m taking down megalomaniacs.”

“
Are you sure you aren’t
starting to suffer from heatstroke yourself, Adam? You are
beginning to sound irrational.”

John ignored her. “I’ll
start with a question for you, Eve. It helps me get to know you
better, and conversation is nicer than silence anyway." He trotted
quickly through the hallways, pleased at his success in remembering
the route he had used to gain access to the fifth floor
initially.

"Give me the question,” Eve
responded in a resigned tone. “I've never failed to come up with an
answer yet, and Glenn was capable of some real
beauties."

"Is the answer to this
question ‘no’?”

“
That’s downright silly,
Adam.”

“
Few machines can come up
with a good rebuttal for the ‘this statement is false’
argument."

"Or few people for that
matter."

John turned on his earpiece
so he could continue the conversation when he left Eve’s interior
mic range. "You’re supposed to be such a powerful A.I. Prove it.
The following statement is false, the preceding statement is true.
Chew on that for me.”

There was a moment of
silence. When Eve responded, however, she didn’t sound as confused
as he had hoped.

“
You are attempting to
induce my cortexes to maximize load capacity in order to calculate
an answer to your meaningless question. It won’t work.”

You hope it won’t!
John grinned at her arrogance. He had stumped
some fairly high-level commander A.I.’s before with this kind of
mind game. “But humor me anyway, please. I know you probably have
mandates that all but forbid you from ending a conversation with a
human yourself. It’s a social thing. And I want to talk. So shoot
me an answer to my question, and we’ll go from there.”

“
Very well, Adam. It makes
no difference to me. 'Perhaps'. The answer to your question is that
the answer itself can neither be ‘yes’ nor ‘no’, and therefore must
be ‘perhaps’. Your circular regression is as meaningless as it is
impractical.”

“
Come on, Eve, you’re not
even trying. Engage with me!”
A
house-droid or a sentient security bot would have been locked up
for fifteen minutes trying to find a satisfactory answer for me. So
this girl’s smarter; well, I had to start somewhere.
“How about this one. I’ve been wondering about it
since I was a boy, and last I heard, the major supercomputers at
the universities hadn’t really given it a definitive answer. A guy
travels back in time and kills his grandfather, preventing his own
birth. How does that shake out?”

“
I’m not falling for that,
Adam, and I'm not accustomed to petty argument. If you, as a
semi-logical human, wish to spin your head one way or the other,
then I can be perfectly content taking your preferred answer and
moving on with my work.”

He arrived at the hallway
outside the very first labs he had seen. He hoped there weren’t any
defenses or traps he hadn’t noticed the first time.

“
Not good enough. Too
subservient for a genius like you. I want a real
analysis.”

“
The premise is flawed,
but I’ll play along just to fulfill your childhood dream. The same
man is born to a different set of parents, thus avoiding any
contradiction between chronologies.”

“
Lame! Really lame, Eve.
What about bifurcating universes, or unstable parallel
contradictory timelines? You don’t believe in any of
that?”

“
Your grasp of
astrophysics and relativity sounds unfortunately tenuous, Adam, if
you don’t mind me saying so. Please stop this game and let’s talk
about the here and the now. Which, by the way, you should be very
worried about.”

He stopped at a section of
wall that he noticed was a removable panel, and pulled it off.
Behind it he had access to some more wiring and some micro-vents.
He happily busied himself denting and slashing them all as he
continued.

“
How about this: there’s a
town with only one male barber. Every man in the town keeps himself
clean-shaven, some by shaving themselves and others by letting the
barber do it. So essentially the barber shaves all the men that do
not shave themselves, and only those men, right? Well, answer me
this. Does the barber shave himself?”

Eve didn’t hesitate. “He
shaves himself when needed, Adam, and the rest of the time he does
not. I am not perplexed by the contradictory nature of your
anecdote, if that’s what you’re going for. I am never perplexed,
about anything, unless to fulfill a social function to make my
audience more comfortable speaking with me.”

“
So make me comfortable. I
like a good debate.” John passed through the lab and found the vent
grate still open where he had originally broken in. He crawled back
through and started down the tunnel.

“
We don’t have time now to
educate you enough to even have that level of discussion, Adam.
Perhaps with Glenn, but I hardly think you’re up to it. No
offense.”

“
No offense to you either,
wire-trash. You shouldn’t place so much confidence in your beloved
Glenn. All men are liars.”

Eve paused and then
laughed. “That was intentional, yes? How witty. But I already
showed you that I’m not interested in vicious circularities. I cut
them off at the nearest definable point and leave it
alone.”

It was still cool in the
tunnel, but it was growing humid. He could sense the jungle waiting
for him outside.

“
My clip is far from
empty, honey. You can replace any part of a boat, and it will still
be the same boat. So you can eventually replace all of the parts,
and it will still be the same boat. What if I take all those
original pieces and assemble them into a boat? Is that the same
boat I started with?”

“
It is a copy of the boat
you started with that happens to consist of the parts that
originally belonged to it.”

“
Whatever.”

John had taken the opposite
branch of tunnels from the way he came in, and ahead he saw
light.

“
One more, for kicks. This
is my favorite: A judge tells a condemned man that he’ll be
executed at high noon on a weekday during the following week. In
order to punish him with sheer torment of suspense, however, the
judge declares that the execution will come as a surprise to the
man. He cannot know the day of execution until it’s time to go to
the chamber.

“
The man thinks about it
and figures he won’t be executed after all, because if it didn’t
happen until Friday, it wouldn’t be a surprise, because by Thursday
afternoon he’d know it had to be the next day. He also figures it
can’t be Thursday, because Friday’s already eliminated, and
therefore if it didn’t happen Wednesday afternoon he would know in
advance that Thursday was the day, so no surprise. And so on, for
Wednesday, Tuesday, and Monday. It can’t really be a surprise if it
comes on any of those days, and it had to be a weekday, so he
considers himself home free. And yet: Wednesday at noon he’s
dragged off to die, despite all of his theorizing, surprised as all
get out. And the judge won.”

Eve gave a delicate
yawn.