Machines of Eden (5 page)

The high rasp of Sergeant
Wiley echoed in his head:
Duck and dodge,
and you can beat the bots. Sprint in the open, and you’re dead.
It’s that simple.

And it was that simple.
They said the day would come when bots could do anything a human
could do and then some. Bots far outclassed humans in speed and
strength, no question. Flesh and neurons couldn’t beat steel and
motherboards. But humans still had a few edges; superior agility
and the ability to anticipate enabled a human to navigate an
obstacle course
faster than any bot ever
made.
B
efore any
were
developed
that could outdo humans
in agility
and intuition, manufacturing
had ground to
a halt
.
The war
took care of that.

John’s
lungs were on fire. Behind him came the whine of servos and
gears. The 9’s were much lighter than their predecessors, but still
weighed close to a hundred kilos, and he chose
the most dense and difficult terrain
to enhance his advantage. He was jumping like a gazelle over
a fallen tangle of branches when he realized the sounds of pursuit
had stopped, and he risked a glance over his shoulder. The bot was
caught in some creepers, thrashing and kicking to free itself. It
would only take seconds until it resumed the pursuit, but the
opportunity was exactly what he’d been waiting for.

The ASKALON units were not
armored, but you still had to know where to hit them if you wanted
a sure kill. He’d lost more than a few friends to partially
disabled bots. You had to be sure. This one ran on power cell
technology, but access to the cell was protected by its
carapace.

John
scrambled four-legged across a patch of open ground and got
behind a banyan tree. The machine freed itself from the last of the
creeper and went still, its sensor array moving back and forth.
With its optical lens broken, it was reliant on infrared, and
infrared had limitations.

He couldn’t be sure what
the exact capabilities of this bot were. He knew the specs of the
ASKALON series by heart, but modifications were so common it was
more realistic to assume it had been upgraded than not. He
carefully peered around the edge of the banyan trunk.

The bot was motionless
except for its head, which was in a slow, 360 degree scanning
pattern; it was likely to remain that way until it reacquired its
target or until its recall programming activated. That could take
anywhere from ten minutes to ten days. Sergeant Wiley rasped
in
John’s
mind:
the bots’ predictability is
their greatest weakness.

He searched the ground,
found a half-buried stone, and gently tugged it loose. The bot’s
head was cycling away from him when he sprinted from behind the
banyan, praying that this one wasn’t baiting him with a
sophisticated decoy routine. Three quick steps, noiseless in the
damp leaf mold of the jungle floor, and he brought the rock down
hard on the bot’s head with crushing force.

It jerked under the impact,
all sensory equipment destroyed, and he struck again, this time at
the base of the neck where its wiring was exposed. In a crackle of
sparks and ozone, the bot lurched forward and collapsed, facedown.
Instantly he was on it, hands ripping away the carapace to get at
the power cell and the brainbox. Only after they were torn free did
he relax.

Not bad for just bare
hands and a rock.

John didn’t consider
himself a violent person, but he enjoyed the rush from his quick
victory. He didn’t feel the slightest trace of regret at the
violent destruction of the bot. He had taken out far too many of
them in his time for it to bother him.

Some people liked bots too
much. They were so helpful, clean, and polite. Totally subservient.
Reliable. And although they had no personalities unless programmed
that way, people projected personalities onto them, said thank you
when a bot performed a service, viewed them as
if they were sentient
. It was
harmless most of the time, but he had heard stories. A woman ran
back into a burning house to save “Kenny” and they found her
charred body embracing the red-hot house bot. Stuff like
that.

And bot-love could get you
killed when the bots were your comrades in arms. When you’d been
fighting alongside a bot for weeks, calling it by a nickname, and
had your life saved by it, it was surprisingly difficult to let it
die, or refrain from running under fire to drag an injured one to
safety. You felt loyalty to it in spite of yourself. It was a
psychological phenomenon that took some mental discipline to
overcome.

Not a problem for me. This
bot had it coming.

Now that he was up
close,
John
could
see that the bot was even older and less maintained than he’d
supposed. He looked for other distinguishing features, but there
were none visible. He had no time for deeper examination. The bot
had been patrolling the fence, and he
ha
d tripped
a
sensor
it
was monitoring
when he climbed it. It was
an even bet that someone somewhere was monitoring the bot
in turn. There was no telling what kind of
response might be sent out.

Time to go.

John
grabbed the power cell, noticing that it was much newer and
cleaner than any of the bot’s other components,
and hurled it far into the trees. Then he
headed back toward the fence. Despite the risk of discovery,
there was something else he needed to know before he
moved on
.

From the cover of the
trees, he followed the rusty fence line until he found what he was
looking for – a laser projector situated a
meter off
the ground on one post,
pointing down the fence line toward a receiver fifty meters away.
There was a second laser line half a meter apart from the first, a
corollary beam for greater reliability. Insects and birds could
interrupt one and not set off any alarm, but if both were broken it
meant something large was in the area.

He studied the equipment
carefully.
It was a
surprisingly
good setup. Unlike the
bot he’d destroyed, the security laser box was clean and
well-maintained. So was the power cable that fed it, and the
four-meter-high solar panel pole.
The
panel itself was half-hidden in the tree canopy above.
He scanned the maintenance
track
, noticing wheel tracks where a mower
had come through not too long ago
.

His mind raced. The war
had left a lot of the more remote island groups in chaos, and
Restoration hadn’t completely pacified Australia yet. It would be
decades before they reached the South Pacific
, if that was where he’d ended up
.
The war had been officially over for
a
while and i
t was hard to conceive of a
place that hadn’t heard the news. But if this was an island it was
theoretically possible that this place had never been
demilitarized.

Another possibility was
that they had heard and refused to demilitarize. Some of the more
fanatical Grays had ignored the armistice and fought on. But he’d
heard they were mostly isolated in the temperate zones. He’d never
heard of Gray holdouts in the tropics. On the other hand, this
could be a refugee camp. He’d heard that the islands were full of
them, scattered to winds during the war by choice or by necessity
and now grown accustomed to autonomy. Some had carved out nice
little kingdoms for themselves and resented outsiders.

John
shook his head. Without hard data on his position it was
useless to speculate. It could have been just one more
malfunctioning bot in the wrong place at the wrong time, a defunct
machine running on outdated programming. The disposal teams
collected thousands of them each year.

Or
…

But he pushed the last
thought from his mind. There were other possible explanations, much
more upsetting. He didn’t want to consider those.

The ASKALON-9 that attacked
him hadn’t displayed any upgrades, from what he had been able to
observe. No armor. No sophisticated subroutines. No weapons
systems. Minimal AI. No maintenance, but that told him little. The
ASKALONs were pre-war models – spare parts were rare. The unit’s
sheer age might have caused its failure. He shook his head again,
and headed for the hill.

After t
wenty minutes
John noticed the sound
of water at the edge of his hearing, but the noise of the incessant
insects and his own heavy breathing made it difficult to judge the
size or precise location of the waterway.
Passing through some thick trees, he emerged into the open
along the bank
of a
river
, blinking in the sudden
sunlight.

The river was
perhaps
ten
meters wide. Although it moved slowly at his current
position,
upstream
it
exited
a
gorge between the hills
from which
he could hear the roar of whitewater. The
milky brown water gave him
no way to tell how deep the
river
was. He threw a stick into
midstream and watched it float, noting the
point at which the
current
sped up around a bend
.

He could probably swim it,
but he didn’t like the idea for several reasons. The
murky
water
made
it impossible to
tell if there were submerged rocks or snags. He’d heard awful
stories of aquatic snakes, as well. But his greatest concern was
the lack of cover. Once he entered the water, he would be helpless
if another bot appeared. Just standing on the banks made him
uneasy, and he backed into the jungle again to think.

Finally he decided to
follow the riverbank from just inside the jungle, close enough to
the river to notice a bridge or shallows if there were any. It was
the safest bet, and the ASKALON-9 had made
it clear that the safest option was the only option
here
.

He started walking, thirsty
from the sound of water gurgling at the banks. The humidity was
oppressive, and he knew he was losing too much water from sweat. He
needed to find some clean water, and soon. There seemed to be a
faint path among the trees and creepers and he followed it,
grateful to make better time. He kept an eye on the river, but
checked his route every few seconds for laser sensors.

As he stepped over a
fallen log a dark shape in the trees caught his peripheral vision,
and he froze. It was a good-sized log, hanging from thick cables
tied around trees branches above. He slowly scanned the area,
noticing a tripwire on the ground in front of him that had already
been loosed, its pin lying on the trail ahead. The wire tripped the
log, which had swung down, continued across, and become tangled in
some creepers at the far end of its swing.
But why have a random log here?

Then
John
saw the pit. He wouldn’t have
noticed it if it hadn’t been for a dark patch on the ground,
something not quite right, a corner of the pit
where the palm fronds littering the path had fallen
in.
When he realized what he was looking
at, his eyes traced its dimensions. Three meters by three, placed
directly across the path. Mentally he cursed himself for his
stupidity.
Paths were made for a reason.
Just like fences.

He crouched at the edge
and lifted off one of the palm fronds
still
covering the pit. Down the
hole in the darkness, he could see vertical sides carved from the
dark soil, with some small vines already growing across the shaft.
It was deep. He ripped off more fronds, letting in the dim green
light. There was something at the bottom. He leaned down for a
closer look, wrinkling his nose at the smell.

Bones
.

They were browned from the
rot clinging to them. He saw a ribcage and mandible, then a
partially buried skull. The clothing had long since rotted away.
The bottom of the pit was lined with upright stakes driven into the
earth and shaped to sharp points. The angle of the skeleton’s
ri
b
cage, pierced
by two stakes, made him wince.
A bad way
to die. I’m going to have to be very careful on this
island.

He stood. The path was no
longer an option, but he still needed to follow the river. His
thirst made him instinctively reluctant to leave the water. He’d
just have to chance discovery by walking along the banks. The air
would be better, and perhaps a breeze would rid him of the
insects.

Five minutes later he found
the crossing.

A road spanned the river at
a narrow point, raised slightly above the water level on pontoons.
The water slid underneath in a sheet as smooth as glass before
tumbling down in a small waterfall that stretched from bank to
bank, perhaps half a meter high.