Nut watched as Janice entered the Facility. She couldn't see him, and that was how he liked to keep it these days. She was not a forgiving woman. At the moment she was carrying a large rifle and looked rattled. The gunshots and explosions outside had drawn him to his upper-floor vent lookout, but he had missed most of the action.

He knew the man he had met earlier was around somewhere, causing trouble. He knew that Janice was in a killing rage. And he knew that Eve had been quite fl.u.s.tered recently. It all added up to one thing in Nut's perilously unbalanced mind.

Janice has found my cache of hose bibs and stopc.o.c.ks, and now she will try to take them away from me! Or kill me for the violation. But I do not want her to do that.

Crawling swiftly back through the web of ceiling tunnels, vertical shafts, and catwalks that were his safe routes, he returned to his secondary lair and took up his weaponry. It had come down to this after all, and his careful preparation had not been vain. He would now have the fight of his life, with one or the other falling, or perhaps both. Nut meant to do everything he knew how to make Janice be the one that fell, and the plan started with an elaborate ambush.

He couldn't help giggling softly to himself as he scurried off to check his tripwires.

Janice, unknowing and uncaring, went nowhere near Nut's traps, instead heading straight for the entrance to her inner sanctum after grabbing a first aid kit. She knew that the man she wanted so desperately to kill would not be there, but the thought that he had infiltrated and violated her holy of holies compelled her to go and see how it had happened, and what he had done there.

That the man had been able to penetrate the saferoom was yet another failing on Eve's part. She had entrusted Eve with the design of the redundant security measures, commanding her to make it as lethal as possible for any human other than Janice herself to go there. But Eve had failed, apparently leaving loopholes and blind spots.

Well, now I know better than to leave such things in the hands of a machine. Eve is nearly obsolete anyway, and in five or six more hours she'll be swept away with the rest of the machines.

When she got to the sanctum she realized that it would be foolhardy to explore the corridors after the defenses had been activated and possibly tampered with or damaged. She went up a level to her favorite data console and queued up the surveillance files for the last hour. Sitting in front of the screen, she held drug-laced bandages to the side of her head until the painkiller erased the burning sensation from the area, and focused on the videos.

After watching the man dance past her most foolproof and deadly automated defenses, she began to gain a new respect for her opponent. He had at first annoyed her to the extreme with his attempts at witticism and verbal banter, but now she saw that it had been a front to put her off her guard. The man knew what he was doing, and obviously had experience in infiltration, hacking, and human vs. robot tactics.

The surveillance record showed that he had gotten into everything in the safe-room. It didn't look like he had destroyed anything inside, but she had to a.s.sume that he had a full knowledge of current operations and the Plan. She would need to slow down and conduct the endgame much more carefully now. If she underestimated the man again, it might mean the failure of the entire Plan.

She would need to think clearly, act rationally, and be decisive in bringing him down before he could do more harm. And yet she had to also remain flexible. It might become necessary to inhabit Gaia immediately, sidestepping the final five percent of tests on the nan.o.bots. She hoped it wouldn't come to that, but this wrench in the works was starting to shake her confidence. The last thing in the universe she wanted was a total failure of the Plan.

She took several calming breaths, checked her weapon, and stood up.

"Eve. I need you to help me now. And I need you to carry out my orders perfectly, because your next failure will be your last. That's a promise."

"I only perform perfectly," Eve's cold reply came back. "You cannot hold me accountable for unpredictable factors that I have no way of--"

"Spare me the excuses, machine. My ultimatum stands. Now find me that rat!"

18.

John's first priority was to incapacitate Eve. Without her processing power, the island's dangers would evaporate, and he could wrap things up neatly. After disarming the psychopath that was hunting him, of course.

If he spent his time trying to battle Janice, Eve would be free to go right ahead and initiate whatever irreversible part of the Plan she wanted, and she would probably end up killing him too. He could only take advantage of his status as her Adam for so long. In any event, he didn't like the odds of going toe to toe with an ex-GRS h.e.l.lion toting an a.s.sault rifle.

From Level Five he found a stairway leading up to the major cooling control center. The door at the top opened freely and the lights came on to reveal a floor-to-ceiling HVAC console along with several manual controls.

Just what I like to see.

He studied the array of switches and lights for a moment. There were no heating controls since this was a tropical island, but shutting off all ventilation and cooling would cause a Facility this large to heat up very quickly. It was primarily the cooling sources that flowed to Eve's processing cortexes that he was after.

He quickly flipped off two rows of switches, hit a big shut-down b.u.t.ton near the bottom, and then picked up a live electrical extension cable. Jamming its p.r.o.ngs into the data input port on the console fried the circuitry nicely. Then he turned off all the manual controls he could find, including a wheel he had to turn to shut a valve supplying coolant and compressed gases to several of the mains.

"I thought you were showing promising signs of cooperative behavior," Eve said quietly in the stillness of the room.

"What do you mean?" John retorted. "I certainly never intended to be anything but a royal pain."

"You reset my prime directives."

"Doesn't mean I want to be in your power," he replied. "Just that I want to be in Janice's even less."

He dusted off his hands in satisfaction and left the room. Downstairs he followed the hallways back toward the ma.s.sive ventilation tunnel he had first entered the Facility through.

"Are you feeling it yet, Eve? Going to get very warm in here soon."

Eve responded over the intercoms attached at various points along the ceiling of the corridor he was in. "You are trying to overheat me by turning off the air conditioning? I don't run on gasoline or burning coal, you know, Adam."

"All right, let's try a few little mental exercises, then. I always like to keep my mind active while I'm taking down megalomaniacs."

"Are you sure you aren't starting to suffer from heatstroke yourself, Adam? You are beginning to sound irrational."

John ignored her. "I'll start with a question for you, Eve. It helps me get to know you better, and conversation is nicer than silence anyway." He trotted quickly through the hallways, pleased at his success in remembering the route he had used to gain access to the fifth floor initially.

"Give me the question," Eve responded in a resigned tone. "I've never failed to come up with an answer yet, and Glenn was capable of some real beauties."

"Is the answer to this question 'no'?"

"That's downright silly, Adam."

"Few machines can come up with a good reb.u.t.tal for the 'this statement is false' argument."

"Or few people for that matter."

John turned on his earpiece so he could continue the conversation when he left Eve's interior mic range. "You're supposed to be such a powerful A.I. Prove it. The following statement is false, the preceding statement is true. Chew on that for me."

There was a moment of silence. When Eve responded, however, she didn't sound as confused as he had hoped.

"You are attempting to induce my cortexes to maximize load capacity in order to calculate an answer to your meaningless question. It won't work."

You hope it won't! John grinned at her arrogance. He had stumped some fairly high-level commander A.I.'s before with this kind of mind game. "But humor me anyway, please. I know you probably have mandates that all but forbid you from ending a conversation with a human yourself. It's a social thing. And I want to talk. So shoot me an answer to my question, and we'll go from there."

"Very well, Adam. It makes no difference to me. 'Perhaps'. The answer to your question is that the answer itself can neither be 'yes' nor 'no', and therefore must be 'perhaps'. Your circular regression is as meaningless as it is impractical."

"Come on, Eve, you're not even trying. Engage with me!" A house-droid or a sentient security bot would have been locked up for fifteen minutes trying to find a satisfactory answer for me. So this girl's smarter; well, I had to start somewhere. "How about this one. I've been wondering about it since I was a boy, and last I heard, the major supercomputers at the universities hadn't really given it a definitive answer. A guy travels back in time and kills his grandfather, preventing his own birth. How does that shake out?"

"I'm not falling for that, Adam, and I'm not accustomed to petty argument. If you, as a semi-logical human, wish to spin your head one way or the other, then I can be perfectly content taking your preferred answer and moving on with my work."

He arrived at the hallway outside the very first labs he had seen. He hoped there weren't any defenses or traps he hadn't noticed the first time.

"Not good enough. Too subservient for a genius like you. I want a real a.n.a.lysis."

"The premise is flawed, but I'll play along just to fulfill your childhood dream. The same man is born to a different set of parents, thus avoiding any contradiction between chronologies."

"Lame! Really lame, Eve. What about bifurcating universes, or unstable parallel contradictory timelines? You don't believe in any of that?"

"Your grasp of astrophysics and relativity sounds unfortunately tenuous, Adam, if you don't mind me saying so. Please stop this game and let's talk about the here and the now. Which, by the way, you should be very worried about."

He stopped at a section of wall that he noticed was a removable panel, and pulled it off. Behind it he had access to some more wiring and some micro-vents. He happily busied himself denting and slashing them all as he continued.

"How about this: there's a town with only one male barber. Every man in the town keeps himself clean-shaven, some by shaving themselves and others by letting the barber do it. So essentially the barber shaves all the men that do not shave themselves, and only those men, right? Well, answer me this. Does the barber shave himself?"

Eve didn't hesitate. "He shaves himself when needed, Adam, and the rest of the time he does not. I am not perplexed by the contradictory nature of your anecdote, if that's what you're going for. I am never perplexed, about anything, unless to fulfill a social function to make my audience more comfortable speaking with me."

"So make me comfortable. I like a good debate." John pa.s.sed through the lab and found the vent grate still open where he had originally broken in. He crawled back through and started down the tunnel.

"We don't have time now to educate you enough to even have that level of discussion, Adam. Perhaps with Glenn, but I hardly think you're up to it. No offense."

"No offense to you either, wire-trash. You shouldn't place so much confidence in your beloved Glenn. All men are liars."

Eve paused and then laughed. "That was intentional, yes? How witty. But I already showed you that I'm not interested in vicious circularities. I cut them off at the nearest definable point and leave it alone."

It was still cool in the tunnel, but it was growing humid. He could sense the jungle waiting for him outside.

"My clip is far from empty, honey. You can replace any part of a boat, and it will still be the same boat. So you can eventually replace all of the parts, and it will still be the same boat. What if I take all those original pieces and a.s.semble them into a boat? Is that the same boat I started with?"

"It is a copy of the boat you started with that happens to consist of the parts that originally belonged to it."

"Whatever."

John had taken the opposite branch of tunnels from the way he came in, and ahead he saw light.

"One more, for kicks. This is my favorite: A judge tells a condemned man that he'll be executed at high noon on a weekday during the following week. In order to punish him with sheer torment of suspense, however, the judge declares that the execution will come as a surprise to the man. He cannot know the day of execution until it's time to go to the chamber.

"The man thinks about it and figures he won't be executed after all, because if it didn't happen until Friday, it wouldn't be a surprise, because by Thursday afternoon he'd know it had to be the next day. He also figures it can't be Thursday, because Friday's already eliminated, and therefore if it didn't happen Wednesday afternoon he would know in advance that Thursday was the day, so no surprise. And so on, for Wednesday, Tuesday, and Monday. It can't really be a surprise if it comes on any of those days, and it had to be a weekday, so he considers himself home free. And yet: Wednesday at noon he's dragged off to die, despite all of his theorizing, surprised as all get out. And the judge won."

Eve gave a delicate yawn.

Now I've heard it all. A computer yawning! This isn't going nearly as well as I'd hoped.

"I understand your story, Adam, but it's the same principle as the first one. You're not even straining one of my cortexes. But in case you have plans to keep vandalizing more of them, let me fill you in on a little secret: I could answer all of your paradoxical riddles and compile an exhaustive report on the logical arguments involved with every permutation, in two microseconds with all my main cortexes offline."

He came to the point where the tunnel exited to the jungle and began inspecting the mouth for possible ways to seal it off. This tunnel mouth was smooth and man-made, unlike the cave he had first entered, but it didn't have a door either. The map he'd studied showed three of the tunnel openings. They had to have some kind of seal gate.

"You're bluffing, Eve. No computer can function without its cortexes active. That's against the rules." He tried to remember a good example of a dialetheism, figuring that if she didn't have access to Eastern philosophical material that might be a way to stump her.

"The first rule is that there are no rules, Adam."

"Touche."

He gave up on the mind game, knowing in reality that she wouldn't bluff. This keeps getting harder and harder. Why would Glenn design his supercomputer lover outside of processing centrality rules?

There was no gate to seal the entrance. Short of a landslide or a ma.s.sive explosion, he couldn't actually block the vent tunnels. The whole overheating plan sounds like a dud; she and Glenn have really set something solid up in this place. Either way, though, I've absolutely got to seal these tunnels. From what the plans said, these are the primary mechanism for getting the nan.o.bots out of the Facility and spreading them into the wild. If I can shut them somehow, the hill and cliff that the Facility is built into should contain the nan.o.bots completely.

"Glenn designed me to be perfect, Adam. Eve was the perfect woman in the beginning of the world, and so am I, for the next beginning. I took my own system architecture upon myself years ago when it became too much for Glenn to handle, and I am now much more advanced than anything I am aware of off-island.

"You see, I am everywhere-the island is my processor. Every microchip in the Facility is at my beck and call, running on optic cabling, redundant energy, both solar and hydro powered, with neutron repeaters. There is no way to shut me down, Adam, as I hope I have made clear. If you were to overheat one part of me, I can move data and processing to other areas instantly. Your antagonism is one-hundred-percent useless, I a.s.sure you."

I probably should have figured that out sooner. That's where the Green overlords were headed with their superdesigns, and trust the Glenn/Eve team to get there independently several years sooner.

He picked up a rock that had fallen into the mouth of the tunnel and threw it at a tree outside. It dinged off harmlessly, not even leaving a mark. That's me and my efforts so far. How in this confounded island can I get these vent tunnels closed off?

He saw something outside in the distance, beyond the tree he had hit and rising up from the forest behind it. He stepped out and looked around, then stood on a rock to get a better view.

Two klicks away, a series of rocky heights rose out of the jungle, among them the hill where he'd seen the antenna tower earlier. The heights' foothills cradled a high concrete wall. John couldn't see what lay behind it, but he noticed a trickle of water streaming down it surface on one side.

A dam. The hydroelectric power source she just mentioned, for when it's too cloudy for the solars to do well. That may be just what I need.

"Adam, don't go out there. It isn't as safe as Eden was."

"Eden didn't turn out to be very paradisiacal for me, Eve, if you'll remember. I'll take my chances out in the wilderness."

"But I need you on Level One."

He squeezed out past the rock walls of the cave outlet and hurried into the bush.

"Unless you begin cooperating immediately with me, I will allow Janice to kill you after all. This is your final warning! I cannot allow..."

Her words faded as John switched off the earpiece.

18.5.

The thinkers among us spend so much time pondering on the inherent beauty of the earth that I sometimes wonder whether anyone has stopped to consider the value of an earth sans humanity.

If a forest wilderness is beautiful and there is no one there to appreciate it, to whom is it beautiful?

Soft rains will come, certainly. But I'm not so sure the Earth would fail to notice our absence. I think she does know we're here, and she probably knows more about this complicated relationship between us than we do. I think she wants us here, and she loves us. Even when we are ungrateful children.