Machines of Eden (18 page)

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
.
N
othing 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
th
is 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
.
N
othing 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
the
ir
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
acces
s, and p
ulled 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. T
he 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 was 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
. T
hen 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 i
nside
its doorway there was a cabinet door
labeled “Avalon-B”.
It was
locked.

I do not have time for
this.

“
Eve, someone just shot at
me. Any ideas who?”

Silence.

“
If I am killed, you don’t
get your code. Period.”

Her response was muted,
almost humble. “It may be Janice. She has a...fickle temper. Be
careful. There isn’t anything I can do at this point.”

He slammed his fist
against the
cabinet
, rattling it.
“Why didn’t you
mention that she saw me?”

“
I didn’t know,” Eve
protested. “She’s a very devious person, and she… may not trust me
completely.”

The problem was time. The
shooter could be
approaching,
repositioning
, or remaining in ambush,
waiting to shoot the second
John
left the tower. He had to assume
she
was coming. That
meant he had three, maybe four minutes.