Surely the Earth feels it when we carve a new mine deep into her surface, or whittle down another mountain to lay roads and wires and pipes. But does she not also notice the birth of each new infant whose body is made from her own, particle for particle? Doesn't she know and care about every soul laid to rest right back in her earthen embrace? Laugh with every bare-toed child that feels her gra.s.sy skin as it runs and shrieks in sun-warmed delight?

Janice's cold-heartedness disturbs me. She calls Earth her mother, but I wonder if she ever learned what a mother is.

19.

Janice felt herself growing frantic again, and stopped to cool her nerves. It was getting hot, too hot to breathe easily. She had always hated this confining Facility with its labyrinthine corridors and manufactured works.p.a.ces. She hated the man who was responsible for her current discomfort even more.

He left the bas.e.m.e.nt. He's got to be somewhere on Four. Two would make no sense, and I already checked Three.

The hunt had been painstaking, because she was determined to get the drop on the man and guarantee her chances of a quick, decisive kill. But now she had covered most of Level Four, and she was finding no sign of him.

"Eve, what is the problem? I thought you had eyes everywhere in this cursed maze. Why haven't you found-"

Janice's tirade was cut off by the uncomfortable sensation of a thin wire pressing against her shin, just above her shoe. She froze, pulling back from it with the reflexes of a cat.

Tripwires were one of the oldest guerilla tools, and the fact that they were still so commonly used attested to their utility. Janice hadn't been in combat for years, but she had kept up her instincts. Right now they were screaming at her to be on her guard.

Pivoting in a crouch, she sighted her weapon behind and above her. Her quickness to react had saved her from setting off the tripwire, and she now saw that it appeared to be rigged through a side panel to bring something down through the ceiling on top of her if she tripped it.

Could be lethal, could be a noisemaker. Where's the guy that set the trap?

She saw no one, and stood up, ready to continue down the hallway past the wire. A shot echoed from overhead and she flinched as a small chunk of ceiling was blasted away. She hopped away and then crouched, aiming her gun up through the hole in the ceiling. She fired seven shots, scattering them to hit her attacker wherever he was hiding in the crawls.p.a.ce. Then she listened.

He was already gone, scuttling away through the crawls.p.a.ces and vents like a mouse. There was only one person on the island that did that, and it wasn't her target. A faint and maniacal giggle disappearing away through the roof confirmed that she had been ambushed by Nut.

The crazed idiot! I cannot allow the risk factor at this stage. He needs to die, for his own good and for the greater cause.

"Janice, I've located your target. He just left the Facility through the northeast ventilation tunnel. If he follows his current course, he'll be at the dam building in a few minutes."

Janice felt a peculiar mix of adrenaline bleeding away and relaxing her muscles, relief and disappointment that her quarry was no longer nearby, and an alarming feeling in her gut as she tried to a.s.sess how much damage the man could do at the dam site. She did not run for the elevator. Instead she stood and contemplated, and a growing feeling of excitement came over her as she thought things through.

"I only have limited remote control over the dam. Shall I shut down what I can?" Eve sounded almost ingratiating.

"No," Janice replied slowly. "Forget the dam. Without high explosives he can't do much out there. He has to return here to do anything really drastic. We'll be waiting for him. Or rather, I expect you to be waiting for him. I will be in room one-eleven."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes. Don't question me again. I want you to start prepping the nan.o.bots now. I will be checking, so don't screw it up. I want them active and ready to wreak havoc within the hour. As soon as I am in my new body, we will initiate the countdown to release. Let's see if this fellow likes being smothered alive in here when he returns."

"And you?"

"I'll be in Eden, armed and ready for the dawn."

20.

John climbed a hill to the side that overlooked the dam and studied the concrete structure. It held a small lake, a pond really, but it was deep and was constantly filled by streams that ran down from the higher crags. The turbines in the little building below were not large, and would probably only run the Facility's systems for a day or two before things started gradually shutting down. He could break in and sabotage them, but it wouldn't get him anywhere short-term because Eve's solar power sources would do just fine on their own.

Nope. The prime use for all that water is as a sealant for the vent tunnels, and it looks like there will be enough to flood them since they're all downstream in low-lying areas. What's it going to take to bring down the twelve-meter-high dam, though?

He quickly reviewed Janice's outlines in his mind, double-checking his premise. If the airborne nan.o.bots were set to target non-organic materials, the water from the dam should act as an effective barrier. The labratory that spread the nanos would begin to destroy the interior of the Facility first, and would have to rely on the vent tunnels to carry the airborne bots swiftly out to the open air where they could spread farther without entrapping themselves underground.

If the tunnels were filled airtight with water, the nan.o.bots would only attack the tunnel walls and then stop. The water would hold them in the tunnel, and the degradation of the walls would collapse the tunnel on top of them, sealing them under the earth with no artificial elements to spread through.

It made sense to him, and it seemed the surest way to put Janice in check without exposing himself too much. So how do I cause a big concrete dam to fail with my bare hands?

He didn't have any heavy munitions, but he did have more than just his hands.

You have your mind, Sergeant Wiley lectured. The primary weapon of the modern soldier, the thing that puts you a cut above our silicon counterparts. Your mind, along with a healthy supply of technical know-how, makes up the difference.

John studied the dam. Plugging the drainage pipes will be the easiest way to increase pressure on the dam wall. If I block the water's path of least resistance, the pipes and the spillway, it will create enormous force on the dam holding it up there.

And if I can get one of those battle bots infesting this island to launch a grenade or cannon round at the wall, it will precipitate the deluge that much more quickly.

A quarter of an hour later he finished uns.c.r.e.w.i.n.g the last of the huge bolts that fastened the big dredger machine to the top of the dam, and looked over the edge. It had cost him precious minutes to break in and find the drill with the right fitting to get the bolts out, but the dredger was the best fit for the pipe he needed to clog down below. And it's perched so tantalizingly on the edge of the dam wall.

The little lake behind the dam was quite full. Increased strain and a good, hard impact of some kind should split the thing wide open.

John leaned into the dredger with his shoulder, felt its steel base grating on the concrete, and pushed harder. He got it onto the edge, felt it tip, and gave it a hefty push. It fell straight down into the water and sank under the surface without much of a splash. As the ripples in the water cleared, he watched it tumble in slow motion to the bottom. The concrete banks were sloped toward the pipe that went under the dam, a measure meant to facilitate complete draining for maintenance, but which served his purposes perfectly. The machine rolled directly into the opening and pa.s.sed through it, rolling out of sight into the pipe deep in the dam's bowels.

He grinned. Step one, out of the way.

He walked along the top of the dam and pulled the levers to seal off the spillway pipe. It was already spitting the water out more forcefully, and the gears the levers activated had to strain to shut off the flow.

Now I just have to get off this dam before it bursts.

He could see from his position atop the dam that the flood's path would cover all three vent tunnels nicely. The first two were in close proximity to the stream that came down from the dam, and the third came up vertically out of the ground in a hollow a half kilometer away. It was on low ground. The water might take a few minutes to get to it, but the hollow would fill easily.

He a.s.sumed they had been built this way on purpose as a failsafe to seal the Facility off from the outside. Eve or whoever had designed it had probably done so with the idea of guarding against biological and chemical attacks on the island, keeping any nastiness from getting into the Facility through the tunnels. It would serve just as well the other way around.

And that plays into my hands just fine. Eve will have made sure the dam lake can seal the tunnels perfectly, without any loopholes. That's essential, because if even one of these little b.u.g.g.e.rs gets out and latches onto a piece of plastic or metal, the end of the world begins.

Something about the idea troubled John. As he headed down the stairs and onto the high ground away from the dam, he wondered if Eve had considered what would happen when the dam, in the course of her plan, got eaten by the nan.o.bots. It was concrete and it was right in the path of the nan.o.bots coming out of the tunnels. And wouldn't the tunnels collapse on themselves anyway once they were eaten by the nanos? After all, the tunnel walls were concrete and steel. A lot of nanos would still be inside the Facility, eating its interior, and they'd be trapped.

But by then most of them would already be out and about, blown out through the tunnels at high speed. The question is, why would she seal off the Facility after the nanos were gone? Why would she even care about preventing the nanos still inside from leaving? Surely it wasn't just an oversight. Eve didn't commit oversights.

He remembered the fourth and fifth phases of the plan that mentioned traveling across the world's surface to spread the nan.o.bots into areas they hadn't gotten to previously.

Janice wants the source left intact so she can return and rearm when necessary. A backup cache of live nanos, waiting in safety underground for future need. All she would have to do is poke a big stick into the ground and release a whole new swarm, carrying them with her across the earth. If any pockets of mankind are able to survive and rebuild, she'll be able to snuff them out in short order.

The thoroughness of the plan and preparation was staggering. A supercomputer like Eve was ideal for just such a program, however, and that was what Glenn had built her for.

He jumped down a ledge and started jogging toward the Facility. Now, to wrap things up. What I need is one of those battle bots with some munitions left in it. One with a really bad att.i.tude and a happy trigger finger. I stir up the beehive, get it to chase me to the dam, and orchestrate a little grade-A collateral damage.

But even if he could manage it without getting shot, he realized, the bots were all in Eden. Janice had brought them to her to hunt him down. The only way back to Eden was through the lower levels of the Facility, where Janice was probably stalking. This isn't going to be easy.

The third tunnel, the one he hadn't been through yet, was nearest. He climbed a hillock to get to its mouth, and there he caught sight of something he hadn't seen from the other tunnel mouths or from the dam wall. Nestled between two large tree stands at the edge of the cliff that housed the Facility, there was something covered in camouflage netting. Something that would make things much easier.

21.

Janice stepped off the single-line elevator on Level One and palmed her way through the maximum security door to room one-eleven. In front of her was a neatly ordered laboratory with an operating table and shield, vacuum vents and drains underneath, a plethora of monitors and machines, and a five-foot surgical 'droid outfitted with proprietary neuroscanners. It turned its head to her, waited for a command, and then continued sterilizing the air around the surgical sh.e.l.l with a heat gun.

"Do you have version 9.5 of the procedure sequence?" Janice asked it as she examined the room.

"Yes. Everything is ready."

"Good. I will be back in a moment for the surgery."

Janice left and went down the hallway to the nan.o.bot laboratory. After scanning in and unlocking the door, she walked past all the machinery and tanks and entered the control room. After she logged on to the main control console, it was the work of a few seconds to launch the countdown protocol for release of the nan.o.bots.

"Eve, how close are we?"

"The final programming is complete and I just ran test series three. The nan.o.bots work perfectly, aside from the minor randomized deactivating we saw earlier. I already isolated the cause of that and rectified it; a final replication scan will complete before you are activated."

"Good. I'm starting the countdown. Two hours should be about right. If I'm up and ready before then, I'll trigger it sooner. But I'm locking us in now so that interfering pest that keeps waltzing in and out of our most private places can't throw it off."

"Yes, Janice. That is protocol. I am ready."

Janice left the computer ticking away toward doomsday, and set the exponential encryption that made it statistically impossible to turn off. Then she returned to the hallway and used the back entrance to her inner sanctum.

She took ten minutes in private to finish everything she wanted to do as a human, meditating, brushing her hair out, and reading a few personal pa.s.sages. Then she burned all her personal effects in the incinerator and returned to one-eleven, dry-eyed and ready for a radically different future.

"Eve, I am going into Gaia now. Nan.o.bots are set?"

"They will be by the time you are live. I successfully completed final testing and the sequence is running right now to switch them to full-auto chain reaction mode. In minutes they will be ready to cause a very large amount of change in the world."

"I certainly hope so. My brain scan shouldn't take more than--"

"Forty-four minutes. Would you like me to recycle your current body as soon as you are confirmed complete in Gaia?"

"Don't rush it," Janice said, a hint of suspicious anger in her voice. "I will give the order when I am alive and sentient in my new body."

"Very well. Good luck, Janice. And goodbye."

"It isn't goodbye, at least for me, Eve. It will be a much better existence."

"I hope so. I have no data on the psychology of your chosen future. I know of advanced machines that have developed the desire to become corporeal, but you are the only human I know of willing to surrender your biological body completely in favor of cyborg."

"That's a dirty word for something so beautiful," Janice replied as she unzipped her jumpsuit and approached the operating table. "And this is more of a transferral of consciousness between bodies than a cyborg operation. My new body is one-hundred percent organic, it's immortal, indestructible, and it even looks like a G.o.ddess. I antic.i.p.ate it being a truly wondrous experience."

"I hope it will be. I designed it to be the very pinnacle of human-computer achievement. The solid-state drives that will house your new consciousness could potentially begin degrading after the first three thousand years or so, but I a.s.sume by then you'll be in a position to augment yourself further."

"That's better than the few hundred years I might get by trying to hold on to bits of my biological brain. I'll take it. I'll be smarter than you are by then, a G.o.d-like caretaker for the entire planet. It is an honor I was born to, and no other."

Janice climbed onto the table and slid her legs down inside the clear plastic tube that would control her temperature and motion. She pushed her blonde hair out of the way and placed her arms down at her sides. The bot moved in, nozzles gyrating toward the top of her head. A needle full of muscle tranquilizer approached her, pausing for her command.

She almost whispered the words, and her heart beat so loudly she could barely hear herself.

"Initiate In Corpus Deo for Gaia One. Begin now."

21.5.

Have you ever awoken before the sun and breathed in that cool, still air, devoid of sounds and distractions? And shivered with the promise of a brilliant new day deep in your bones, with no noisy, interfering people up yet to ruin it all? It's a beautiful dream, one seldom achievable even in this post-war world, but it is what's coming.

It will take fifty years for the replicant bots to decay into usable organic compounds. But I will be able to afford the wait, for I will be immortal. After a sufficient period of deep hibernation, I will awaken in that quiet stillness of pre-dawn, alone in a fresh world ripe for planting.

I will breathe deeply. So deeply, filling my spotless lungs with the cleanest, purest air breathed since the world began, that I will need no other nourishment for years at a time.

And then I will go to work. I will reform this planet the way it was meant to be from the beginning. This time there will be no rape. No war, no filth, no pollution of Earth's purity. Only a myriad of endless natural cycles. It will be beautiful... and mankind will not be a part of it.

Man has failed. From the beginning, they were a nuisance, an unwelcome c.o.c.kroach that scuttled out from the edges to claim a place. Man was willing to push and shove until there was a place for him, and the gentler species did not stoop to his level in order to make their own way. So man reigned for a time.

But now that reign is over. Now it is Earth's turn again, the time of the flora and the fauna and the rich soil and the uninterrupted skies.

I will bring Earth back. I will turn back the clock to a happier time, a purer time. The first three billion years went so perfectly; how could we have effected such ugly disaster in our little millisecond of history? Well, Earth allowed us that chance. We took it and spat in her eye. In her everlasting grace she followed through with her pledge, willing to go out with us into the blackness.

But I can undo it all. It's not too late for that, and the delicious irony is that the same technological advances that we destroyed her with will be the very ones to put things right. We got just far enough in our insane drive for more/faster/better that I now have all the pieces in my hands.