Machines Of Eden Part 21

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 b.u.t.ton to 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 time 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. .h.i.t 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 nan.o.bots 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 his ironic humor morphed into something entirely different.

Tired of this island and the mania behind it. Tired of the freakshow computer program that thinks 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 in front of me.

He was, he realized suddenly, angry. He didn't often get angry, by personality, but now he was more 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, just 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.

Janice tried a finger stab at his throat; he caught the fingers and with a quick wrench snapped them. She gasped and tried a high kick. He took it in the shoulder without even noticing, and lunged. Janice flew backwards, stars exploding in her vision.

He's going to kill me.

The thought shocked her. The tables had turned too quickly. She'd been trained as a Gargoyle, and had killed more than once with her hands, but this was different.

I have no advantage. I have to get out of here.

While still moving back from the momentum of the drive that had thrown her, she kicked wildly to keep him at a distance and then darted inside the control room.

The door slammed shut and John heard the sound of the lock engaging. Then Janice's face appeared in the window, smiling at him with an insane light of triumph even as she held her aching chest and ribs with one arm.

There were several seconds in which he stood outside, chest heaving with adrenaline. It was useless to try to get in again; he didn't have time to find out how she'd gotten the door open earlier. Frustration at being denied the victory his rage demanded faded to a basic instinct to survive. The clock was ticking. It was time to leave.

He dashed for the stairs as the lights in the gallery turned red and a warning siren began blaring. He thought he could hear laughter echoing behind him.

His heart beat much faster than merely running up the stairs would have required. He could feel the sweat on his brow turn cold. All he could think about was getting outside to the sunshine and fresh air again before the world began to crumble on top of him.

I can't believe this is happening.

A low rumbling sound behind him told him that it was indeed happening. The screams of laughter had stopped and the sirens were m.u.f.fled. As John burst into the Level Two lounge area the floor began to tremble under his feet.

"I would have hoped for a different outcome," Eve said. "Tragedy compounds tragedy in this debacle." She sounded unperturbed and calm, but resigned. "It isn't so much the personal cessation of existence that hurts, but the ruining of my creator's wonderful plan."

I... have no answer to that.

"On the bright side, it is fitting that we shall all be buried together in a ma.s.s grave. Even Glenn. The Facility is where I was born and where I will die, and both my Adams with me."

The floor was beginning to buckle, as if certain pillars below had been s.n.a.t.c.hed away. Racks of food and a beverage machine slid across the room. John clawed his way past the debris toward the only opening to the outside world, knocking over a coffee table as he staggered to the observation deck.

"Eve, you have to stop it," he panted.

"Stop it? Adam, die gracefully. It's the least you can do for your species."

"Contain it. Please. There must be a way. I've failed, but you can still put things right."

The rumbling had become a dull roar behind him as the entire Facility converted into mounds of dirt, room by room and floor by floor. He staggered onto the brilliantly sunlit observation deck.

"If there were a viable way to stop this from happening, I would. My self-preservation motives are nearly as powerful as your own. But it is the destiny of the world we are dealing with. It is not something that should be stopped."

He leaned against the broken window edge for balance as the floor groaned and heaved, cutting his hand on the gla.s.s.

"You wouldn't leave one layer of fragile gla.s.s as the only safety barrier here," he breathed. "The tunnels were sealable; what about this exit?"

"Synthetic armor-gla.s.s wouldn't have stopped the nan.o.bots, but the fragile crystal gla.s.s would have," Eve agreed. "And it is even more ironic that the observation window is now the primary and only means of escape for the nan.o.bots. If I turned on the turbofans to repel the tide, the delicious irony would be lost on the world."

Midway through the last sentence, her voice dropped an octave, then raised higher than normal.

"Eve, please!" John shouted.

The shaking had rendered the elevator lift unstable. Instead he crawled out the window, hung from its lip for a moment, and let himself drop. The fall of several meters was partially broken by high bushes, but he still felt a rib crack when he hit. He ignored the searing pain.

"You have to do it," he cried. "Seal yourself in. Save humanity, do it in Glenn's memory! Do it for Glenn!"

"For Glenn?" Eve was now speaking in a voice that could only be described as girly, high-pitched and almost playful. "How about for spite? What's the value in an act of selfless good will? Are you now the one expecting blind obedience and loyalty? Answer me this riddle: what does one Painted Lady have to do with the universal current?"

She's going. It's over. She's through.

John began to crawl away, then stood up to run even though he hurt too badly to do so. The best he could manage was a lopsided limp. Eve's strangely high-pitched voice followed him, echoing from the opening above.

"Don't run away, sir. Please don't feel that you need to stay on my account." Her skittering voice took on a surly tone. "The evening is at an end. Can I order you a ride?"

"Yeah," he muttered through clenched teeth. "A yacht. A big yacht with an ice cold lemonade and a couple of gorgeous "

He gasped as he stumbled over a rock and felt his side flash with pain. He sank to one knee to keep himself from tumbling down an embankment that was shaking underneath him.

He turned his face back toward the gleaming crystal hole he had come out of.

"Eve!" he shouted. "I need you. Please help me, please! Seal that exit!"

"You need me?" she replied. "What a nice thing to say. I find that wonderfully validating."

Her voice sank back to normal octaves, but the speech slowed down and had a different accent. "I just wanted to hear..."

John couldn't make out the rest of her words as the rumbling from the mountain cliff he was facing drowned it out. She's turned into a ditzy girl, chattering inanely right at the end of the world. Glenn was a real idiot.

We all were.

The voice became clear again as it shouted a farewell. "You're wrong about me, sir. Entirely wrong. I'm not what you think I am. Now stand clear and mind your hat!"

He heard a high-pitched whine as fans came on inside the observation deck and shot a barrier of forced air back into the lounge area. Then the rock face that stretched from the valley floor up to the top of the cliff high above the Facility exit began to wave and shudder.

A long, loud scream came from inside. He thought she was screaming Glenn's name. It was drowned out by the roaring and shaking of the earth.

John couldn't be sure where all of the earth forming the landslide was coming from, but more dirt and rocks poured down the cliff at him than just the face itself could produce. It appeared to be bubbling up from the depths of the earth beneath the Facility.

He began running again, adrenaline replacing his pain with a burst of energy. He could hear huge boulders pounding the ground behind him, and he ran faster. Then the avalanche of displaced earth caught up with him and he was swept along, tumbling and cartwheeling as the landslide ran out half a kilometer into Eden.

27.

A bird called somewhere, but it was the pain that first awakened him.

John jerked, groaning. Was it a bad dream? No, he could feel the ravages of adrenaline and traumatic stress insisting that his mind hadn't made any of it up.

When he finally pulled his face from the dirt, he was turned around, and the first thing he saw was the cliff he had come out of. The Facility was gone, buried under a fifty-meter-long hill of steep brown scree.

Is this it? The beginning of the end of the world as we know it? It's very quiet.

He turned, taking in the panorama of destruction by degrees. Behind him something tall and angular protruded from the hill of rubble. His heart leaped as he comprehended the twisted metal strut, half-buried and poking out of the earth at an angle like a skeleton's arm.

Metal. If the nanos had escaped, the metal would have been eaten.

It hurt to smile, but he smiled anyway.

He picked himself up. Aside from his aching side, a twisted ankle that had been caught by a rock in the slide, and mouthful of sand, he wasn't terribly dissatisfied with the way things had turned out. A flood of relief lifted his heart and brought tears to his eyes. It worked. I did it.

She did it.

And yet...

The relief died away as his mind continued spinning.

I'm right back where I started, alone on this crazy island with nothing but a few exotic animals and a harsh sunburn.

And I might be here a while.

In fact, John admitted ruefully to himself, it could be a very long while. Janice was gone, Eve was gone, but the nan.o.bots had a fifty-year lifespan. And they were still in there, underground, waiting.

He knew, suddenly, that even if he brought all the firepower in the world down on the island, and rained high explosives for a month, there was a good chance a few nanos would be missed. There was no way to scan for them. And ma.s.sive explosions might even break open a pocket of nanos, reveal them to the open air, bring about the very outcome the saturation bombs were deployed to prevent.

Because all it takes is one.

But for that matter, I probably wouldn't even get the airstrike. No, they wouldn't destroy them. They'd come in here and harness them. The guys up top wouldn't be able to resist a toy like the one Eve made.

And there's the rub. If anyone, government or military or a prospector with a pickaxe, disturbs this island, then that's all she wrote. Our chapter ends.

I didn't just go through h.e.l.l for nothing.

He sighed, trying the math in his clouded head.

Fifty years... I'll be eighty no, eighty three. Just thinking about it made him feel old.

That's a long, lonely fifty years for me. Because if anyone comes around trying to make friends... I'll have to kill them.

Four hours later a naval aircraft blew overhead at high alt.i.tude, snapping pictures of the seismic disturbance center. The man on the ground below, much too far to see clearly through the jungle cover, didn't even look up.

He was too busy sharpening a makeshift spear.

End.

Machines of Eden is Shad Callister's debut novel. He lives in Utah and Alabama, where he writes, reads, and prepares for doomsday. Find out more about Shad's world at shadcallister.wordpress.com.

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