Machines of Eden

by Shad Callister

  Battlefield jamming, deploying mobile EMP projectors, and counter-hacking guided missiles, the combat hack played a decisive role. Tech specialists were used to overcome enemy AI and bots, to find the way through preprogrammed static defenses and minefields, and to generally outfox the enemy’s technology on every level.

  He realized, with a slow sinking feeling, that he was right back on the battlefield.

  In fact, I never left it.

  10.5

  Four hundred screaming men and women beat at the gates outside, hurling their bodies against the steel paneling and making it shudder each time. Inside the compound, tucked in the heart of the city, all was quiet and still. Its occupants had been evacuated by airborne transport hours before.

  Brightly lit corridors and power-washed pavestones in the courtyards gave an aura of order. The echoes coming from outside were the only betrayal of the chaos and terror that still hung invisibly in the air.

  Suddenly a door broke open with a crunch, and four armed men fanned out into the hallway of the main compound building. They were dirty, mud-splattered and hungry-looking, but with a hardened determination in their eyes that set them apart from the horde outside. They wore camo and utility belts. One brandished a club with nails driven through its head, but the others had more impressive weaponry. The one in front even had a grenade on his belt to compliment the machine pistol in his hand.

  “There’s four floors. Spread out and find the arms cache!”

  The intruders moved cautiously at first, looking around corners and leaning over railings to scan their surroundings for threats. Nothing moved in the building except the searchers themselves, so they set a faster pace. Poking their heads into each room and blasting away locks with the shotgun one carried, they cleared the first two floors quickly.

  “Nothing here. Let’s move up to the next floor.”

  “No. They wouldn’t store ammo on the upper floors. There’s gotta be a basement.”

  “Why would they even store them here at all? This doesn’t seem like a police warehouse.”

  “I don’t know, but the squealer said there was a dump in the main building. That courier bot we took down said the same thing. Let’s hurry.”

  The men dashed around, checking back hallways and maintenance closets for stairs going down, but found nothing. Two of them ranged upward to the top two floors while one took the emergency-powered elevator up to the roof.

  The access door to the roof was unlocked. The man with the grenade cracked it open, peered out, and then stepped outside. The cityscape spread to either side into the horizon, but directly ahead was something that held his attention. Spray-painted on the waist-high wall of aged concrete that barred him from the edge were the words “Die” and an obscenity he wasn’t familiar with but understood the intent of clearly.

  He smiled. They didn’t like being driven out of their own headquarters. Tough. It isn’t gonna be the last time. We’re getting stronger.

  He turned and headed back downstairs, never noticing the small device attached to the outside of the access door. It had folded with a little clicking sound as the door opened against it, and a tiny red light turned on.

  Downstairs, the club man was getting frustrated.

  “There’s nothing here,” he grumbled. “Filing cabinets and mop buckets!” He kicked a garbage can over.

  He heard something moving outside the hallway, and moved to the adjacent exit to take a look. He didn’t see anything at first, relieving his fears of a monster attack bot on the loose. Then the quiet spinning of wheels against flooring made him look down, and he saw a stream of perhaps thirty fist-sized devices rolling out of a hatch on one wall.

  They were boxy and tall for their width, making them appear unsteady. They moved out into the room as a body, then split up and began turning in all directions, feeling their way along walls and up stairs. Their little wheeled treads could easily grip all surfaces, and soon there were little mouse-bots all over the room and climbing to the second floor.

  One of them rolled toward the man, and he ducked back into his hallway. He waited for the mouse-bot to approach, then swung his club down at it. It stopped with surprising agility, backing up slightly so that his club hit the floor harmlessly next to it, and then it zipped around to the other side of the man. He could see little lenses all over its squared body and wondered what its function was. He raised his club again.

  Suddenly sixteen other mouse-bots were in the hallway, pouring in along the walls and ceiling and floor from the big room they had deployed into. They were all around him, and he frantically arced the club at a cluster of them on the wall, sensing that they were indeed a threat to him. He succeeded in knocking one off the wall, but that was as far as he got.

  Two of the nearest mouse-bots darted forward and jabbed long needles that appeared from their cases into his foot. Passing cleanly through his boot and instantaneously sucking a droplet of blood each, the bots backed away. It took four milliseconds to analyze the blood samples, confirm the man’s identity as a hostile, and relay the information among themselves across the data cloud they formed.

  Then it was all over. One of the bots near him on the wall sent its needle twenty centimeters out and hit him in the neck. Six on the ground got his feet and legs. One on the ceiling slid its needle straight down into his scalp.

  The man went rigid, his club grasped with an unfeeling, paralyzed hand, and then let a small gasp of breath escape his collapsing lungs. His frozen heart ceased sending blood to his brain, which was being quickly eaten away by the venom from the head shot, and then his knees twitched in reaction to the pain. Last of all, his eyes glazed over from their terror and pain-filled state, and his body crashed to the ground.

  The man from the roof exited the elevator at the same time the shotgun man came down the stairs, ready to admit defeat. They saw the club man go down and immediately began firing at the little bots surrounding him. But other bots were already aware of them, moving into position, sending data about the combatants to the rest of the swarm, telling them that these men, too, could be killed, because they were firing weapons and shared other characteristics with the man they had blood samples from.

  By the time one of the little bots had rolled into the part of the building where the last man was helping himself to packets of coffee creamer he had found, they were no longer in exploratory mode. He never had time to glance behind him on the floor, and the last thing he felt was a little pinprick on his heel.

  The horde outside finally broke the gates in by sheer weight of human bodies, and trampled unheeding over those trapped under the fallen gates. They broke into every building in the compound, finding little of value, but the ones that entered the main building never left it. After a while it became obvious to the crowd that the big building was nothing but a tomb, and they stopped going inside.

  There were no weapons or ammunition on the premises, of course. But the Gray military committee that reviewed the data feed from the abandoned Pretoria police headquarters building got quite a laugh at the body count. They included the statistics in a report recommending that surprises left behind in evacuated facilities would, at least for the short term, be remarkably effective in curbing the attackers’ enthusiasm for destruction.

  11

  John felt that he could rely on Eve to protect him to some extent, at least until he brought her the program and the data she wanted so badly. After that he was skeptical about his odds.

  To escape this island he needed to know more, more of everything. Locations of docks, boats, hangers. If there were none, he needed tools, equipment, a safe place to build his own means of escape, and time to do it in. It would be hard enough to evade Eve’s interference, but with wild cards like Nut and Janice roaming the island, escape would be nearly impossible. He needed to stay ahead of the game, play a few tricks of his own, hide some aces up his sleeve.

  It was the only way to beat an AI at its own game. Always move, they told you, always move and
keep moving, push the AI to its limits. When you stopped, when you waited, you gave the AI the time it needed to figure all the angles, make preparations, and box you in. Nothing could figure all the angles like a good AI. To remain static was to die. If he slowed down or became predictable, Eve could plan out infinite scenarios and prepare for them, crossing and forking him every way he turned. Her only limitation was her lack of imagination, and that was the key.

  John remembered his first sergeant again with total clarity. Imagination is the one thing the bots don’t have. Computers can only imagine what they are programmed to imagine. Their weakness is our strength.

  Even the best AI could only anticipate and plan for what they had personally experienced or been taught. Ultimately, they weren’t capable of creativity and intuition.

  Avoid patterns. Don’t rely on technology. Disrupt, twist, and break everything you see to limit the options.

  He had it all there in his brain. He just needed to find and exploit the blind spots, the break points, and the gaps in Eve’s experience. No AI could hold all the knowledge in the world, because the world was constantly changing.

  Turning his attention to the task at hand, John walked to the door of the mushroom dome building and slid it silently open. Inside was a large, open room taking up both stories of the building. Large generators hummed away and several huge battery silos were grouped along one side.

  Between this place’s solar roof and buoys running out into the ocean to harness wave power, West Station probably generates more than enough energy for itself. Its grid must feed into the main facility in the interior as well.

  There were some small living quarters in one area, screened off from the rest of the room, and a comms station and a small chemistry lab, but none of it appeared to have seen much use lately. Nothing caught John’s eye as being suspicious or crucial to the island’s purpose. He consulted a wall map of the station for use in emergencies and saw names for the other buildings: Storage 1, Storage 2, Implements, Beacon Room. One called Satellite A had been crossed out, and BU Data Bank was written in.

  That looked promising. He left the hub, scanning the cliff top for Janice before heading to the Data Bank Quonset hut he’d seen earlier. This time he avoided being seen by the cameras. Maybe Eve had seen him enter the hub, but she didn’t need to know exactly where he was, and he definitely didn’t want Janice to notice if she had access to camera feeds. There were only three cameras, and by hoisting himself up on top of the glass-walled bridge and crawling along the roof, he crossed without entering their ranges.

  The Data Bank was much larger inside than it appeared from the outside, and John realized that several sub-basements had been excavated into the chunk of hill this building was perched on. Most of the installation was below him; an iron staircase hugging the wall gave access to each level. The place was dark and cool. He pushed a button to slide the sunroof shutters open a little, and they let in enough light from the lowering tropical sun to illuminate the upper room. A faded sign on the wall said Eats. He was hungry, but the cupboards and boxes were all empty, so he descended the stairway.

  The first sublevel held computer terminals, with a large area cut out of the floor. Approaching it, John could see that it went all the way down; the other four levels had been hollowed out to accommodate a large tubular data center. Twenty-foot vertical storage rods, cocooned in coolant tanks, physical padding, and interference insulation, reached down multiple stories. They looked like they might be capable of two or three hundred petabytes or so, by current standards.

  It made sense; an AI like Eve would have devoured unimaginable amounts of data to achieve the experience level needed to run a place like this, with its science and construction projects. There was also all the biological data to track and sift through in the effort to design and balance an entire ecosystem as diverse as this one. That took a lot of computing power.

  He charged up one of the terminals and took a seat, giving his legs a much-needed rest. He was conscious again of his hunger. He’d have to eat soon or lose effectiveness. Hydrate too.

  “How’s it going in there? I see you’ve made it to the computer bank.” Eve sounded almost eager.

  Probably to cover up the fact that I found another blind spot.

  “So far, so good,” he said. “Give me a minute here to locate the files. Why isn’t this available on the network for you to access?”

  “The data center is,” Eve explained, “but this specific file set is locked down due to a system design oversight. I haven’t been able to get a tech in to remedy the situation for a few years. You are already proving to be a wonderful asset, Adam. We will accomplish great things together.”

  We’ll see about that.

  John spent a few minutes navigating around the system, getting an idea of the overall structure of the databases and type of information he was dealing with. As he had suspected, there were massive amounts of scientific data, some homegrown and some brought in from outside the island. There was enough to fill many encyclopedia datacenters with all they ever wanted to know about biology, ecology, geology, climatology, weather patterns, and a hundred other subjects, with number sets and statistics to back it all up in various scenarios. The sheer scope of it all was staggering. Whatever else she was, Eve was serious about creating a self-sustaining ecosystem, not only on this island, but elsewhere.

  What caught his eye was a large series of files on nanotechnology. It didn’t seem to fit with the other files. There was also a lot of material on the Gaia hypothesis he had read about in Glenn’s journal, and a series about doomsday scenarios the planet might conceivably face.

  He also spotted a huge number of drives devoted to areas of AI construction, such as developing personality traits, connecting ideas, generating original thought, and mentality security. It was the material Eve had learned from as she grew, so it wouldn’t help him control her, but it was interesting to trace the evolution of her thought. He didn’t have time to sift through it all now, but he zeroed in on her “Beliefs and Worldview” file and found that she had indeed been programmed with a specific ideology set, probably inherited from her creator, that included a Judeo-Christian creationism history, along with an eclectic set of almost spiritualist “the Earth is our mother” kinds of ideas.

  Interesting mix. I wonder what she'd be like as a real person.

  “Adam, you should be able to just run a search and find the Rib. I don’t believe the files are particularly well hidden. Are you having any problems?”

  “I’ve got it. I was just getting used to this archaic system. Computers aren’t my forte.”

  “And what is your forte?”

  “Sod farming. And the production of kippered snack foods.”

  “The truth, if you don’t mind.”

  “I mind.”

  “Very well.”

  John found the Adam’s Rib directory, ran a few quick hacks to get around the digital tripwires that might notify someone of his access, and pulled up some of the files in the Rib group. It appeared to be a set of surgical instructions, pre-built sequences to be followed by a surgical computer in some kind of extremely complex operation involving a human and some cybernetic components. Despite his limited medical knowledge, the files made him distinctly uneasy. No way am I letting Eve get her hands on this stuff.

  He plugged the datacard into the console’s port and tried to copy the files, but got a whole host of denials. The files were hard-coded in such a way that they could only be removed from the database by putting them on an Avalon self-decrypting card.

  “Uh, Eve? Looks like somebody doesn’t want the Rib leaving this data center. Do you know where I can get an Avalon card around here?"

  “What an irritating complication,” she said. “There should be a small supply of them in the north tower there at West Station. You’ll have to go and get one.”

  At first glance it would seem like an odd way to go about a file transfer, but when John thought about it the reason wa
s clear: whoever had set this up wanted it to be physically impossible for a bodiless machine to access the files. Someone would have to physically go and get the card, stored externally, probably with its own set of hoops to jump through, and then return here with it.

  “Okay, I’ll be back.”

  He put Glenn’s card away in his pocket and went back up the stairs. Outside, the sun was beginning to set far out to sea. He quickly spotted the north tower; it was off by itself and clearly the only one to the north of the hub. He didn’t bother to sneak around now that Eve was following his movements anyway. He re-crossed the bridge to the central hub without incident and followed the walkway around to the suspension bridge. It looked sturdy, but a stray gust of wind shook the bridge just as he stepped onto it, and he stumbled.

  There was a whipping noise behind his ear. Then came the noise of the shot, a high-powered rifle. The bullet pinged off a support cable and ricocheted away with a low whine. Bending down low, John hurtled across the bridge, which bounced and jostled crazily, and somersaulted into the open vestibule of the north tower’s entry.

  He paused to let his eyes adjust to the gloom. He thought the shooter was back across the chasm, and if so, he’d have some time to prepare. A door led into the main tower, but he lingered at one of the windows trying to spot his attacker without exposing himself. The bullet had to have come from high ground somewhere, but he couldn’t tell if it was fired from the top of another tower or the headland.

  This picnic is really falling apart. Going to have to put some hurry on now.

  Nothing moved outside and he saw no bots or static gun emplacements. He considered the possibility of a human sniper as he moved quickly down a hallway, trying to calm his beating heart.

  That’ll be the hunter who shot the deer I found. A bot would have laid on the firepower.

  He found the room marked Data Supply. Just inside its doorway there was a cabinet door labeled “Avalon-B”. It was locked.