Machines Of Eden Part 3

5.

Two bots emerged from the jungle road and began to cross the river. They were like nothing John had ever seen before, heavily modified quadrupeds and in much better shape than the ASKALON-9. One was clearly built on an old Koyuki base, but instead of the tires that the pre-war j.a.panese manufacturer had favored, it had small rubberized feet that moved in a rapid four-cycle march. It carried two heavy pincher arms of an unfamiliar design.

The other was a bizarre blend of a Misca sentry bot and a Cobalt Arachnyd X4; a small cylindrical torso from which sprouted eight jointed legs ending in four-p.r.o.nged claws. It strongly resembled a spider and moved in much the same way, but was not quite as tall as a man. Both bots were armored and neither had any external apparatus, making them much more difficult to disable. Only a direct hit to a sensor socket would blind these ones.

The bots walked briskly across the road and entered the trees on the far side. John saw movement in the jungle, a flash of sun on a reflective surface that quickly disappeared, and he waited a moment longer.

As long as I stay out of sight, those bots are my best shot at finding a person or a computer that can tell me where on earth I am.

He sprinted across the road feeling horribly exposed, and breathed a sigh of relief when he made the trees. He could hear the bots marching up ahead. He had no idea how sensitive their auditory feeds were, so he'd have to hang back and walk slowly. He slowed his breathing and strolled forward, listening intently.

A few minutes pa.s.sed. The road was slowly rising in elevation, and he hoped that meant it led to the top where the antenna stood. It was likely the two bots were going there for routine maintenance. Maybe there was a vehicle shed, or at least a terminal with a human interface that he could access without undue difficulty. Maybe John threw himself to the ground just as a flechette canister whirred by overhead. Three square meters of jungle thrashed as hundreds of razored metal sc.r.a.ps shredded it into a haze of chlorophyll. He rolled hard off the road to his right, downhill into the trees. A rapid clanking above warned him of the bot's approach.

Stupid, stupid, stupid!

They'd planned a perfect ambush, one bot continuing ahead and making noise while the other secreted itself at the edge of the road and waited for him. If he hadn't heard the slight clunk as the flechette canister loaded into the launcher, he'd have been instantly shredded. Luckily, the sound was unmistakable once you'd heard it a few dozen times. Once you'd seen what it could do...

He kept rolling until he was behind a thick banyan and he gripped its roots, mind racing. The bot, probably the Arachnyd, would be scanning the jungle for movement and infrared signatures simultaneously. When it saw nothing it would descend, looking for him, another flechette canister ready. He had maybe twenty seconds before it flushed him out.

Up, screamed Sergeant Wiley. Up!

Up.

John stood and jumped for the nearest branch. Banyans trailed so many creepers, vines, and branches that getting up was easy. He pulled himself higher, keeping the trunk between himself and the road. The bark was slimy and smelled foul as he slithered upward, breath rasping in his throat. Settling into a fork in the main trunk, a curtain of vines hid the road from sight, but he could hear the Arachnyd finish its scan and descend the slope toward the banyan. He waited, listening to the sounds.

The Arachnyd moved slowly for several meters, then stopped. He almost poked his head through the vine curtain to see, but controlled the urge and waited. After a moment, the bot continued much more quickly, circling wide to gain the best trajectory. When it reached the point where it should have been able to see him, it stopped again.

He drew in a deep breath. Any second now.

The Arachnyd would be calculating all possible angles of escape, and the tree offered the best chance of concealment. Therefore it's going to shred the tree.

On cue, the machine approached, flechette port aimed at the lowest probable hiding place, a curtain of vines that draped down over a fork in the main trunk. It prepared to fire.

John dropped down from directly above the Arachnyd, tearing a sharp branch with him as he went. An attack from an elevation above a bot's approach vector had been a favorite of his during the war, and the banyan had a branch perfect for the job. He landed directly on top of its torso, his weight slamming the spidery body onto the ground.

Instantly he was off, thrusting at its sensory sockets with his tree branch. A leg flailed at him, and he leaned out of its reach. The socket caved in and sparked, and the legs ceased flailing. He couldn't destroy the bot entirely without a better weapon or tools to pry off its armored carapace, but it would be unable to hunt him now unless repaired.

The problem now was the other bot. He heard it coming in response to the distress signal the Arachnyd had sent the instant he attacked. Now the Koyuki unit was descending the slope toward them, its pincer arms swatting branches aside as it came. He ran for the river, knowing that the Arachnyd had already transmitted all information of his attack to the Koyuki, along with modified attack suggestions based on his movements.

The bots always learn from their mistakes, screamed the Sergeant. Adapt and keep moving!

He launched himself out into the river as far as he could, and went deep. Even underwater he could hear the hiss of the flechettes as they peppered the surface. He surfaced midstream and risked a glance back just in time to see the Koyuki launch a small projectile with a puff of smoke.

Grenade.

He dived.

The concussion drove the air from his lungs and hammered an intense pain through his ears. He surfaced again, barely in time, and gulped air. The current picked up and took him around a bend beyond effective grenade range. He watched the Koyuki disappear and continued downstream for five more minutes, swimming to speed himself away. Then he clawed his way past a boulder and grabbed a handful of riverbank foliage. He hauled himself up onto the bank and crawled quickly into the brush.

They would be coming soon. The Koyuki was capable of performing rapid field maintenance on other bots, sort of a battlefield medic for machines, and although he didn't know if this unit had been programmed that way, he had to a.s.sume both bots would be on his trail within minutes. He had to find a weapon. They'd be ready for sticks and stones next time.

John exited the river on the same side he'd entered it, but almost half a kilometer ahead of the ambush site. If he kept up a good pace, he'd stay ahead of the bots. He ran through the jungle at a right angle to the river until he hit the road, then continued uphill on the far side. He'd just run straight up until he reached the antenna on top. The Arachnyd might follow, but the grade was too steep for the Koyuki, and it would be forced to follow the road.

The ground shook as a grenade detonated a few meters to his right. A sudden sharp pain in his shoulder made him gasp. Another explosion fountained dirt and broken trees to his left.

How'd they find me so fast?

He ran back downhill toward the road but another grenade cratered the ground just ahead. He was knocked to the ground, ears ringing. He could barely think. Where are they shooting from? Which one is shooting? Others. It had to be others. The first two couldn't have arrived so soon. They must have called ahead.

He lunged to his feet and stumbled south along the slope, keeping to cover whenever possible. Behind him came more explosions; they were still trying to triangulate him. John hoped they wouldn't see his movement until he could get around the far side of the hill. He crossed a small clearing in seconds and slid to a stop on the far side. He lay still, panting and listening, river water still dripping from his hair down his face.

He stood to get moving again, and a strange sound came from off to his left. Two darts. .h.i.t the tree in front of him, sticking in the bark and sizzling with a burst of steam. Their design was unfamiliar to him, and he shook his head in disbelief.

What is this place?

He dodged behind the tree the darts were protruding from and jumped from there into a shallow gully. Higher ground was out of the question with hostiles this close; he would be exposed. He ran along the gully, staying low, and dived toward a rocky outcropping ahead. There were no more shots. He stayed behind the dark gray crumbling stone for a minute, catching his breath. His shoulder burned like fire.

He froze as he heard the whine of servos nearby. They were advancing, trying to flush John out. If he moved, he'd probably be hit, but if he stayed where he was, death was certain. He leaped from behind the rock, somersaulting downhill, and heard the whirr of flechettes and the boom of some projectile weapon. Only his wild movement had saved him from a hit. He rolled to his feet and ran, batting branches away from his path and leaping over obstacles on the ground. He could hear the thing scrambling after him and reloading cartridges into its internal chambers.

He sped around a huge boulder being slowly strangled with creepers and an opening yawned in front of him, a cave in the hillside. He entered on the run, too desperate for cover to worry about hazards in the darkness. A blinding blow to his forehead told him the cave ceiling was lowering, and he fell to his hands and knees, gritting his teeth at the pain and feeling blood trickle down his nose. He doubted they had a bot that could fit in here, but if they had a flamethrower they could burn him to a greasy cinder from the entrance. He squirmed forward, kicking for better traction as the cave narrowed even further, trying not to imagine being wedged in.

Then the sides widened again. He'd pa.s.sed some sort of choke point. The floor was smooth and hard, and he scrambled, daring to rise a little and finding the ceiling higher than his head. He stood gingerly, head throbbing. Hardly any light penetrated this far, but enough had filtered back that he could make out smooth walls, smooth ceiling.

Smooth.

This isn't a cave.

There was light coming from up ahead now, a dim white light. John edged around an outcropping. The light increased. Now the floor was concave and ribbed and the walls were reinforced with arching girders overhead. The cave had become a tunnel, curving ahead of him with a small maintenance light mounted at its entrance. He felt a warm breeze on his face, heavy with the scent of metal and warm electronics. Some kind of huge ventilation shaft. Hope it's not a silo launch vent. Wouldn't that be ironic.

The sounds of bot legs sc.r.a.ping against the rock walls behind him interrupted his thoughts. They can't fit in here!

These aren't normal bots, the Sergeant snarled in his mind. Move it!

He moved it.

5.5.

They called the first major one the Green War. Then there was another and another in quick succession, erupting across the globe in chains like the endless strands of hydrogen fusing into helium on the sun's surface. So we called them The Green Wars, and lumped them all in together, because if the weapons and geography changed, the causes always stayed the same.

They hated us. Unrest became a nervously muttered byword of sarcastic humor, it was such an understatement. In millions they marched, sometimes beginning peacefully with protests and pet.i.tions, but always turning in the end to Violence, the last tool of the disenfranchised ma.s.ses that was too often the first and only.

We weren't listening, we didn't need to listen. We were first-world, they were third. We carried out a few mercy missions and food drops to a.s.suage our collective conscience, and then we dropped them cold and let them fight it out amongst themselves.

"It's not our fight", we said. "Let them resolve their own conflicts". As if we weren't at the root of each and every. Eventually, in country after country, starting in the Middle East and Africa and all those far-away places and then cropping up in places frighteningly close, desperation reared its head. After desperation came the point of no longer caring, and beyond that was madness. Rioting en ma.s.se, with entire regions burning away in chaos and mindless plunder.

Responses could be swift and deadly, cutting the head from the snake-but it always became a hydra. They could be aloof and restrained, holding the borders from behind mirrored shades and denying access. In the end it never mattered. Hundreds of thousands would die, leaving the survivors even more wretched and desperate, and new generations would rise up in hate. They never stopped breeding, which societally we could not grasp in the first-world. The nine-billion-plus of the earth kept coming.

In the end, they would always keep on coming. Gradually, we found ourselves partic.i.p.ating in the long-feared Apocalypse.

The world men once knew and trusted in no longer applied. New rules had to be written, and textbooks, where they were still bothered with, had to throw out much of the past. History didn't provide answers for what the world now faced. History didn't know about warfare on this scale, not after all its plagues and World Wars and genocides. We went past mechanized and computerized warfare and paused for an ugly decade on biological war, until the scientists foresaw where that would end up and convinced the policy-makers to put a stop to it. Then it was back to the way wars were always fought, except this time with profoundly new tools of destruction on our side.

The early robots were a supplement to our human-controlled machines, providing the manpower which we lacked and had no desire to field. But after years of fighting and researching and manufacturing and more fighting, the robots became the defining force in battle. In some cases, they were even the reason for the battle. The nightmare of Old Brasilia was perpetrated simply to verify some theories the eggheads behind the curtain had come up with.

The main problem with combat 'droids was the inability to adapt. They slaughtered people hundreds to one, but then other people would seek out ways to get behind them. Blinding the sensors, trapping them, tricking them, swarming them. A bot could only dispense so many rounds a minute, and could only carry so many total.

Children were used to get past them and disarm them, so they started shooting children that got too close-what other choice was there? Failure was unthinkable: a multi-million-dollar machine destroyed by a naked eight-year-old? It was ugly, no one denied that, but it had to be done. Didn't it?

It was all ugly and always had been. Everyone admitted that. And after all, they had been warned. Our bots blared warnings in native tongues six times a minute while they dealt death. For some reason, it didn't keep the children away.

The wars progressed, the situation devolved, and over time the ma.s.ses gained the ability to build their own tools of death. They saw what worked and they adapted. There were devious minds among the millions of howling mobocrats, and they took and dissected and replicated. Soon it became not a hundred machines against ten thousand Wigglies, but a thousand machines against five hundred machines and five hundred thinking men and women. Later, after much bloodshed and experimentation and sub-national coalescence, the playing field leveled into a chessboard of autonomous machine destruction.

Conscience eased on both sides after that, when conscience was still considered at all. It became a battle of wits, but always with the shadow of Desperation lurking on the edge of the battlefield. Because when the bots had all been vanquished, there were still the Wigglies to deal with. They'd hide behind their machines just like us as long as they could, but when it came down to it, the difference between us was that they turned into wild animals while we retreated behind more mechanized cover.

After years of this, things had to change. People had to change, and they did. People left the supreme arrogance of the Grays, disgusted and sick, infused with their own desperation to find and do what was right, not what was expedient. They were worse than traitors, less understood than madmen, more hated than the worst sociopaths.

I was one of them.

6.

The tunnel was too low to allow John to stand erect and his lower back began to ache from running bent forward at the waist, but he didn't dare to stop with the sounds of pursuit echoing up the shaft behind him. The floor and walls of the tunnel were ribbed for architectural strength, and made the way forward difficult. There was no way to tell if he was putting distance between himself and the bots due to the distortions caused by the tunnel.

As he half-ran, half-hobbled, he considered the consequences if the tunnel ended in a giant fan or furnace or was simply grated off. There would be nothing left to do except rest his feet until the bots arrived and mowed him down.

He stumbled abruptly as the tunnel rose at a forty-five degree slope and T-boned with another tunnel. He looked down the corridor right and left, but they were identical, dimly lit with small plasma lights set into the ceiling. The intersecting tunnel was larger and he could stand upright. He chose left at random and began to jog, conserving his strength for a sprint if needed. The walls and ceiling were a half-dome that barely cleared his head. The air was dry and stale.

For several minutes he followed the tunnel, sensing that it curved to the right in a long, gradual loop. He wondered if the right hand tunnel would meet up with the one he was in, forming a huge circular track. If so, all the bots had to do was send one after him, and another down the right hand tunnel. Sooner or later he'd be caught between them.

Then he came to another T-intersection and stopped. The tunnel continued to his right into the distance, but to his left it immediately began to slope steeply upward and he could see a grid of light at the top. He stared at it, uneasy. It looked like an exit, but the hill he was traveling through was much too large for this to be the far side.

John hadn't heard any sounds of pursuit in the last five minutes, but bots were capable of surprising stealth when needed. One could appear behind him any minute. He took a running start and got about halfway up the slope before sliding back down. It was more of a shaft to be climbed than a ramp, but much narrower and with a lower ceiling than the large one below. By going backward and pressing his hands overhead against the ceiling, he got enough traction to inch up the slope to the grate.

It was about half a meter square, a stainless steel grid bolted into the walls of the tunnel, forming a grillwork of perhaps six-centimeter squares. He hooked his fingers through them to keep from sliding back and peered through the grate, attention riveted by what he saw.

The room on the other side of the grate was well-lit and s.p.a.cious, but deserted. Industrial grade metal cabinets, tables, and rolling chairs were pushed against the walls, piled with machinery and equipment, only some of it familiar. It looked like a workshop or production lab.

He felt a gust of hope. If he could get inside, he would be in his element. No more jungle. He didn't like the jungle too many variables, too much he didn't know. But inside, with walls and lights and tools...

He examined the grate, darting a look behind him every few seconds for bots. He could detect no security apparatus visible to the eye. Slipping a hand inside his trousers, he brought out his emergency toolkit. He kept it in a small case strapped to his left thigh, almost in his groin undetectable to all but a thorough frisk. He selected a screwdriver and set to work.

Three minutes later the grate was off and John was inside. He blinked, letting his eyes adjust to the brighter light, and examined his surroundings. It was indeed, as he had suspected, a small manufacturing lab. The only entrance, other than the grate, was a door set in the far wall. There were no windows. Energy coils and fuel cells were scattered across a dusty countertop to his right, a big soldering table stood at his left, and small rails on the floor led from the room's only door to the grate he had entered through. A large metal ventilation hood surrounded the grate on the inside.

The equipment was expensive, but dated ten years old or more. It puzzled him. A thick layer of dust covered all surfaces and there was no sign of any activity. If anyone was controlling the bots, they weren't doing it from this room.

I'd bet a jar of real pre-war strawberries that this place is much, much bigger than this room. I smell ma.s.sive technology.

A familiar shape off to the side s.h.i.+fted his attention from the door. Behind a large autoclave, lying p.r.o.ne on a table, was the armless torso and head of a bot, an old pre-war android with bare wiring protruding from its eye sockets. Dust covered this one as well. He stared at it, questions crowding in, until he shook his head.

First things first.

The Sergeant was muttering in his brain, but he already knew what the Sergeant wanted, so he ignored him. On a nearby bench lay a lightweight ratcheting ring spanner with a flat screwdriver on the other end. John felt silly holding it as a weapon, but it was better than his bare hand for now, and could come in handy against hardware beyond the scope of his emergency pack.

Now he approached the door. To his surprise, it slid upward with a pneumatic hiss, revealing a long hallway to his left, a short one ahead ending in a door, and to his right a small alcove with an array of monitors and digital readout screens. No one was visible, and he dodged quickly across the hallway to the other door. An observation window was set into the door, and staying clear of the motion sensor that would actuate this door, he peered through.

The room beyond was much larger, and clearly an android production facility. The lights were on and he could see several body parts and trays of old bot pieces, but again the place looked like it hadn't seen heavy use in some time. He waved his hand across the motion sensor, curious to examine the bot remnants in closer detail, but the door remained shut.

"Welcome to Alpha Facility."

It was a woman's voice, echoing from somewhere down the long hallway. John spun, eyes darting, and then peeked cautiously around the corner into the hallway.

Nothing.

"Please come to Level Two."

The voice was perfect. Cultured and s.e.xy; the rich tone of a professional speech artist. Regular women seldom spoke like that; at least none John had had the pleasure of meeting. Despite the uncertainty of the moment, he found himself wondering what she looked like, and grinned at his own intrepidity.

"Just follow the hallway to your left."

This time he traced the voice to a small intercom mounted in the ceiling, snugly nested in a hidden alcove alongside what looked like a camera. There were no cams at his end of the hallway, so it must have picked him up from that distance. Either someone with very good eyes was monitoring that exact screen at the time he darted across the hall, or they had some technology that he had underestimated. Stealth was out of the question.

"There's no need for apprehension. I am pleased that you are here. Any concerns you may entertain will be addressed when you reach Level Two, where we can get better acquainted with each other."

No need for apprehension? A few steps brought him directly underneath the intercom.

"Who are you?" John asked.