Machines of Eden (15 page)

Finally he held the card
in his hands, and he let the branch fall to the floor.
O
ne of the snakes on the floor coiled,
disturbed by the
stick’s
clatter
, but
John
was already
backing away
out of reach.
Sweat
poured
off
his forehead and his heart thumped crazily in his chest, but he
didn’t leave the hut or announce his victory to Eve.

She hasn’t said anything
yet.

After the first task Eve
had immediately congratulated him, but she was silent this time. If
she could see him, why didn’t she announce his success? He hadn’t
seen any cameras or cables around the hut, and if she had a sky-eye
it wouldn't be able to see the hut’s interior.

Blind
spot
. A slow smile spread across his
face.
Yeah. Maybe. Don't get comfy; the
snakes won't allow for that
.

She
might be able to
track his
geo-location using the earpiece connection, but
only to within several meters
.
This chance wouldn’t come again.
Perhaps she was watching, but it was a risk worth
taking.

He climbed onto the
little table by the window
and sat cross-legged, keeping his back to the open window
frame to block any discovery of the
card
he was holding
. The adders couldn’t reach
him up here, and he
might have
a few minutes
of
precious privacy
.

He
touched part of the card to activate it, and waited while its
display surface slowly began to glow.
It
was in good shape
; the desk had
protected
it from the
elements and the monkeys
.
As it came on, he noticed that the networking
access terminal was permanently disabled.
Totally off her grid,
stashed here
in a place where Nut would never go. S
he
knew it was here
, but whoever put it here
effectively blocked her from ever accessing it. Looks like Eve
might not be quite as omnipotent on this island as she’d like me to
think
.

Just as
the card
became
fully initialized
and
readable,
Eve interrupted in a concerned
tone.
“
Adam, are
you all right? Have you got the
card
yet? I don’t hear
you.”

“
I’m okay,”
John
replied. “Just
trying to find the safest way of doing this. The whole floor is
covered with snakes. I know what puff adders are capable of, and
I’m not about to take a risk.”

“
Take your
time.”

“
Did you know that there
were adders in here?”
he asked.

“
Part of the test,
Adam.”

He
glanced down the list of documents the card
contained
.
They
were all l
ogs, organized by date. He
glanced through a couple and saw that they were mostly scientific
observations of the valley and notes about the ecosystems, health
of the populations, and other data of
purely
biological
interest.

“
You do have an antivenin
handy, right, Eve?”

“
Why, Adam, are you
planning on needing it?”

“
I hope not, but I’d feel
better if I knew it was available. These snakes are all over the
place.”

“
Just keep your distance
and
b
e
resourceful.
You should be able to find
the card easily enough.
”

She wants this computer so
bad she’s even helping me. There’s got to be something
more
in here.
He quickly found a password-protected portion of
the document system, and
cracked
it
.
Child’s play
just using the onboard tools.
The
creator
must not have expected any serious
hacking threats since the
card
is unlinkable
.

“
Still hanging in there,
Adam?”
Eve’s came through his
earpiece.

“
Yeah. Almost got
it.”

There were about two years’
worth of private diary-style entries, recorded by a user named
Glenn. Scanning through ten of them, he gleaned that Glenn must
have been the creator of the Facility. Some entries mentioned Eve
and the development of both the Facility and the progress of the
project. There was also a lot of rambling philosophy.

She wants her creator’s
private diary. Makes sense. But where is he now?
The last entry was dated years ago.

The snakes were getting
restless. Most of them were aware of the intruder in their hut, and
a few had started to move out of the boxes they were nesting
in.

Time to vacate.

He
stood up and
exited the
hut
, keeping well away from the
snakes
. “I got it. Don’t make me do
anything like that again
,
please
.”

“
Excellent work, Adam. Is
the
card functional
?”

There was no mistaking the
concern in
Eve’s
question
, and
John
smiled again.
“
Yes, I think so. It
looks fine.”

“
Wonderful. Please return
to the Facility and
insert it into
any console. Then you may have a
rest.”

“
A rest sounds very nice,
Eve, but I don’t really want to go back to the Facility just now. I
didn’t feel very safe there, with
crazies
attacking me
and gas shooting out of vents at me.
I
’d rather
keep
exploring.”

“
Adam, I—“

“
Also, I want to look
through this
card,” John said, leaving his
words hanging meaningfully in the silence.

“
That would not be
advisable
,” Eve replied a little too
casually. “
It’s just an observation
journal of the area
that a
worker recorded and then carelessly left behind.
I want the data, but you won’t find it at all
interesting.”

Yeah.
“But I am interested, Eve. If you really plan to make me a
partner in your little enterprise here, I need to get to know all
this stuff just as well as you.”

“
As you like. I’m telling
you that it’s just a series of logs. If you want to look through
them, go ahead, but not now. The third task awaits.”

“
You just offered me a
rest break, now you’re in a hurry. And I thought we had all the
time in the world here.”

“
I’m not going to argue
with you, Adam. You may either return the
card
to the Facility, or continue on
to the third task, located
just off
the sea cliff to the west. I advise that you
complete the third task before dark, however, or you may find it
impossible. And you know what will happen if you fail.”

John
cleared his throat. “I think I’ll head for the sea cliff. Let
me know when I’m getting close.”

“
I will.”

Now she’s sulky and curt.
Programmed just like a woman
.

He began reading through
the posts, holding
the card
in one hand as he walked slowly toward the
western end of the valley.
H
e stumbled
a few times
, but the content was
fascinating.

Book of Glenn

Beginning

These entries are intended
to be confidential, off limits even to
Eve
and Janice.
It’s not that I don’t trust
them; it’s that I cannot trust anyone. There is too much at stake
here. My work is too important to fail. The caprices of men, women,
and machines cannot hamper what I am about. These topical entries
are designed to be searchable and can serve as a diary of thoughts
and motives for the future interested parties that will surely wish
for the information.

Island Eden

The offers of both sides in
this epic war are matters of public record. They each badly wanted
me to join their side, and they wanted even more badly for the
other side not to have me. I had to flee. The state of my personal
life being what it was (see Personal Diary of Glenn, Early Midlife
Volume), I was able to leave quickly with no attachments and no
regrets. I simply walked away from the cyclone that was enveloping
the world, and came here.

This island was
the site of a century-old military research
installation
. S
tudents sometimes spent time
here
doing research because it had
been turned over to
several
of the international universities for their
use
as a joint property
.
I was one
of those students decades
ago
, and
I
realized that the island would be
the perfect hiding place
for me as the
world went mad. It is
worthless as a
strategic position,
being
too far from any country or shipping
route
, and I have been proven correct in
my estimation that I would be undisturbed here
.

If I could bring some real
help to the island, I wouldn’t have to waste so much of my time on
the minutiae of the day-to-day. There is only so much that can be
automated under Eve, and it is near-impossible to find trustworthy
hands to do the work. I have been fortunate in convincing Janice to
join me; she at least has initiative, although sometimes I find her
fervor off-putting. I think she will prove crucial to the Project,
but it is frustrating to have to share and communicate with a
human. We humans are such inefficient creatures, so bad at relating
one to another. I increasingly find that I prefer Eve to any human
company. Certainly I trust her more than Janice in many ways,
although telling her that would put Janice in jeopardy. Eve has all
the jealousies of womankind incorporated within her perfectly
modeled brain.

My ideas for the island and
what I want to do here are beyond large-scale. This isn’t the place
to go into detail, but I may say with some certainty that this
place will one day become known as the New Garden of Eden.
Following the strain of beautiful logic that flows not only in my
mind but along the neural pathways of Gaia herself, I can see that
I am to become much more than just a scientist. After all, Eden
needs a Creator, an Adam and an Eve, and Fruit.

Some may question my
mingling of the Eden story with the truths of Gaia, but it will all
become clear when my work is finished. All these symbols can be
distilled into one glorious story. It is my story, and I will tell
it.

Mother Earth

The earth lives. We can see
this, yet so many refuse to accept it as fact, thinking that only
parts of it live discretely. I ask, if all parts of a whole live,
does not the whole have a life unto itself? The people will come to
see in time, or they will pass away like the exuvia of a moulting
snake.

The earth is our host, our
mother organism. We exist upon her surface, therefore we can be
either parasites or symbiotes. The unfortunate recent history of
mankind has shown that we are generally parasitic in nature, but it
wasn’t always that way. Bygone epochs have seen communities that
lived close to their Mother, nurturing and being nurtured in kind.
To this we must return, or we will be cleansed. The biblical Flood
is a symbol for a very practical threat that we all
face.

Eve

I have poured more of
myself, my sweat and my energy and my soul, into Eve than into
anything before. She will be my masterwork. God Himself has
directly inspired her creation. He showed me how to design Eve’s
superstructure. It is good.

In spite of this, I cannot
place full confidence in her. There are ghosts in the machine, a
phenomenon that I fear is unavoidable in AI’s patterned after the
superhuman mind. I need her to be autonomous and capable of almost
unlimited thinking power, but she is almost too advanced. As she
has developed I have noticed her exhibiting inexplicable behavior
and drawing conclusions I never intended her to have. I cannot
explain these self-emerging ideas from her original architecture,
and I am unable to isolate them. This will necessitate relieving
her of some of the power I’ve granted her as soon as it is no
longer expedient. For the present, I must simply watch her
self-development carefully.