"You the boss?"

"Nep. Boss died with the rest."

"How'd you make it?"

"'Cause I smart. Smarter than them. Smarter than her. Smarter than you, maybe. You ever think of that?" Nut fingered a piece of rebar lying nearby and blinked rapidly.

John tensed, readying himself for an attack from the deranged man. "Easy, Nut. Easy. You're the smart one. You the smartest. Easy."

But Nut began to weep, gripping the piece of rebar until his knuckles were white.

"I been watching. Been watching you. You don't believe me. You think I be crazy. But joke's on you. I listen. Yessir. Joke is on you. You think just because I eat rats that you better than me? I eat rats because I the smartest! I the smartest! Smarter than her! Smarter than you!"

Nut lunged.

John was ready. One hand rose to meet the rebar as it began its descent; the other pushed off the wall and gave him the momentum he needed to shove the man hard.

Nut, still hunched on his heels, rolled backward with a yelp, legs kicking viciously, rebar clattering to the ground. He came up in a rush, teeth bared, eyes mere slits. "Twenty-six... hundred! She counts 'em wrong!"

"Stop it, Nut! We've got to work together! She wants us to fight each other!"

"TWENTY-SIX HUNDRED! I WILL LIVE AND YOU WILL DIE!"

John ran for the nearest door, avoiding the crazy man's blows, and dived forward. A vicious kick to his left leg made him gasp, but he was through and scrambling upright in seconds. He ducked and rolled into the darkness of a hallway, seeking only to get away, but Nut was not pursuing.

"If you tell her I eat rats, I'll never forgive you! Don't... you... NEVER... tell her!" A sound halfway between a sob and a shriek echoed down the corridor.

Your secret is safe with me, nutboy.

He hurried away from Nut's lair, moving down a sloping maintenance pa.s.sageway toward a dim light at its end. He was more shaken than he cared to admit. It was hard for John to face mental collapse. So many of his friends had broken during the war.

I'll take my chances with the computer. At least she pretends to be rational.

At the end of the pa.s.sage another hole had been cut in the wall. A small halogen lamp was hooked to the lip of the hole, obviously Nut's doing. Past it, another smaller tunnel sloped downward several meters. He followed it and found a final hole in the floor. He dropped through into a regular hallway.

Much nicer. It was well-lit, air-conditioned, and there was even carpet. And up ahead, a cushioned bench against the wall, the first piece of furniture he had seen.

"Welcome to Level Two, Adam," Eve's silky voice called.

Ah. Of course.

"I'm very happy you finally understood where your best interests lie. I've prepared a beverage for you in the lounge. It's just up the hallway."

"Thanks," John said. "Neurotoxin c.o.c.ktail?"

"No, Adam. Your suspicion and condescension do you no credit."

He approached the corner carefully, peering around it. "Well, it could have something to do with all the attempts on my life since arriving here. And the fact that no one will give me a straight answer."

"For that I need to apologize. You must realize that I have enemies, Adam. At first I thought you were one of them. Please forgive me. I should have given you the benefit of the doubt, as I requested it from you. And I did say that once you came to Level Two, I would tell you all. By the way, what did Nut say about me?"

n.o.body knows, huh, Nut? "He didn't say much," John replied. "Nut's a little loopy."

"I didn't think you two would bond," Eve laughed. "Nut's cognitive pathologies are extraordinarily complex. But we have an arrangement that has been mutually beneficial so far."

"Like what, he takes care of your laundry? 'Cause it was obvious you aren't doing his."

That silvery laugh again, so appreciative. He wondered again how much she had cost to program, how long it must have taken, and who the muse might have been.

"Nut does odd jobs I can't do myself, simple ones that don't require a lot of trust. In return, I give him access to supplies. I hope you didn't believe any of his paranoid accusations; he is well taken care of here. He chooses to live in the maintenance shafts of his own free will."

John continued down the hallway, still on his guard but no longer attempting stealth. I'm right where she wanted me, and I'm not happy about it.

"Well, I'm here, and you promised answers. I'm listening."

"Thank you, Adam. I only wanted your undivided attention and a measure of proven loyalty. I will take what I can get from you, at this point. If you'll relax and step through into my Project, I'll show you. After you get whatever refreshment you need, of course."

He was in a large, comfortable lounge. There were faux-leather sofas, tables, an automatic bar, and restrooms. There was a stairway on one end with a sign pointing up it that said Dormitory, and as he entered soft piano music began to play from hidden speakers. An a.s.sortment of prepackaged sandwiches slid down onto a cafeteria-style shelf by the bar as the area lit up.

"We can speak while you eat. Step right through to the observation area when you're ready."

"Thanks," John said slowly, looking around. "Where are the other people?"

"You have Level Two to yourself, Adam."

"Shouldn't there be staff, workers, researchers?"

"Not anymore. We are almost fully automated now. I keep everything running smoothly."

He used the restroom, which he'd been needing for the past hour, pa.s.sed on the sandwiches, and took a bottle of water from the bar. Dehydration was just as dangerous as pota.s.sium cyanide.

"I'm ready to see your project, honey," he called out, approaching the wide doorway at the far end of the lounge and cafeteria. "Promise not to kill me right away?"

"I promise. Next time I try to kill you, I'll let you know beforehand." A pause. "That was a joke."

John didn't laugh, and neither did Eve.

"Step up to the observation deck window. I think you'll be surprised at what you see. It's quite beautiful, and I'm very proud of it."

John walked through, feeling surprisingly calm. Eve wasn't actively pursuing his demise at the moment, so he would play along.

I'm curious.

7.5.

Artificial Intelligence was first used in entertainment. Commerce and communication followed, but it was a long time before we trusted combat decisions to artificials. Maybe not long enough, though.

You send a robot out on a mission, say to search and destroy an arms dump or a training camp. If you're going to hold its hand every step of the way and tell it when to fire and when to wait, that's manpower being used up. Sure, the guys back at base with their fingers on the controls aren't getting shot at, but it's three or four fewer men to send elsewhere. And then there's that delay, a combination of human weakness and signal transmission speed. Sometimes it gets your bot blown up before it has a chance to react and defend itself. Even bots should have the right to defend themselves at some level, shouldn't they?

Their programmers sure thought so. Bot-loving freaks.

So just as surely as the policy-makers distanced themselves from personal accountability for the horrors of war, the heat-of-the-moment decisions gravitated into the hands of the bots themselves. You go with what works. Letting your shiny new killing machine get fried because its hands were figuratively tied doesn't work. Telling it to think for itself and act at the speed of light works. I've seen a state-of-the-art bot pivot, aim, fire, and confirm an instant headshot kill in no more than the time it took for the snap of a twig to register in my brain as a potential threat. I prefer those ones to be on my side.

It's remarkably easy to turn control over to a good AI that you trust and have seen do its work. You can trust it. It doesn't get PTSD, sh.e.l.lshock doesn't bother it, and it doesn't feel a thing when a comrade-in-arms gets wasted right next to it. Friendly fire is next to impossible, at least with small arms. It can carry an awful lot of ammunition, and its weapons are very difficult for an enemy to repurpose. It doesn't need sleep, and robot armies don't march on their stomachs . Technically, they can't even commit war crimes (and if they do, then the rules were a bit outdated anyway).

So many of the little problems that fester during a war, gone. No longer an issue. It's very easy.

The Harvard and MIT and West Point men were geniuses at plotting ever more complex digital chess moves. Tactics libraries with a hundred million different attacks and defenses could be loaded up at the factory and then live-updated remotely while data on the enemy's movements streamed into battlefield headquarters.

It takes a resourceful Wiggly indeed to outwit one of these machines. And with four, eight, twelve-bot squads covering each other, platoons of them acting in perfect concert, the effect was deadly. Gone were the days of the Fog of War, the difficulties of coordinating precise actions between bodies of men over distances with poor communications equipment. Modern war was fought in milliseconds and meters, not minutes and miles.

Battlefields were divided up into grids with millions of rows and columns, with obstacles categorized and marked. Each machine knew where every one of its friendlies were to within a square foot, and if an enemy was spotted by one it was known by all.

Bots could move safely through minefields and traps with a purely mental knowledge of where not to step. Pursuers would walk into the danger zone with no possible way to sense they were about to die. Artillery strikes, air strikes, and gun emplacements could all be directed right past and in between retreating or advancing ranks of bots without the risk of a single friendly casualty. Hiding behind cover was no longer as safe a refuge for soldiers as it had once been.

The truly high-level AI's could manage entire battles of thousands of combatants while running communications for friendly forces, disrupting those of enemy forces, calculating risk factors, and delivering verbal and visual reports to their human counterparts. They could be counted on, and they made very few mistakes. They cost billions of dollars, but they could win wars almost single-handedly.

We nick-named them Patton and Alexander and Napoleon. The programmers gave them personalities and accents to make voice communication more natural. Troops established genuine rapport with their Commander machines, trusting them with their lives and demanding to work under their favorite ones.

Thus the state of war in the Age of Conflict came about. Some of us can barely remember or imagine any other life.

8.

An immense bank of windows formed the entire wall ahead of him, flooding the long room with sunlight. The gla.s.s seemed to intensify the light, streaming it in through floor-to-ceiling panels and letting him drink in the blue of sky through them. The windows drew him irresistibly with the promise of fresh air and freedom. He shuddered involuntarily, mentally ridding himself of the hours he'd just spent crawling through tunnels and breathing recycled air.

There was a small holographic map-table in the room's center, and a few datacom consoles on the wall. As he approached the windows, the sky seemed to spread out before him, almost blindingly blue. He touched one of the panes and realized it was pure quartz-gla.s.s.

Interesting...

For a facility this well designed, a natural quartz-gla.s.s was an odd choice with the variety of modern synthetics like armor-gla.s.s. This brittle silica gla.s.s, without any steel stabilizers, was an anachronism. John didn't like it. It was just one more bizarre reality in an already surreal world.

Then his eyes grew accustomed to the light, and he shifted his attention from the gla.s.s itself to what lay beyond it.

"What do you think, Adam?"

An immense valley opened out before him, the ground falling away in layers of green toward the horizon. To either side vertical mountain cliffs rose out of the verdant jungle, forming sheer rock walls a hundred meters. They wrapped from the face he was looking out of all the way around to the west, hugging the valley and leaving only one side open. At the opposite end of the valley from where he stood, there was a low point between the cliffs that looked like the valley's only exit, and he could see the blue of open ocean beyond.

He had come all the way through the buried facility and emerged at the bottom of the interior canyon formed by the volcanic ring. The valley was deeper than an ordinary crater, and longer where it ran out to the sea. Vegetation of all kinds filled the valley, from towering trees to open gra.s.sy areas. Several streams wound through the myriad of green and ran into three different ponds and wetlands he could see from the Observation Deck.

It was as if G.o.d had decided to seal off this little emerald jewel from any outside penetration; nothing could descend the sheer cliffs that encircled the valley, and nothing could get out. He wondered at the geothermic forces that must have gone into its creation. It can't be terraformed. That would take trillions of dollars and fifteen years for several united governments to complete. A private organization couldn't possibly do it.

He could see the movement of large wildlife without the aid of the scopes hanging by the windows; some sort of large ungulate herd grazing in a meadow. A rainbow macaw burst past the window in a sudden spray of color, and below a flock of large white egrets exploded into flight, rippling the surface of one of the ponds.

A tall bamboo forest didn't surprise him too much, since he had seen bamboo growing in many regions of the world. He did a genuine double take, however, when he saw the distinctive black and white fur of a large panda waddling between two clumps half a kilometer away.

Those are supposed to be extinct.

"All right, Eve, I'm impressed," John said. "Beats any park or preserve I've ever seen."

"I hoped you would be," Eve purred. "It is my magnum opus."

"Is it a zoo? Or a gene stockpile?"

"Not a zoo, Adam. Eden. This is Eden."

Ah. That adds up.

"I can understand your confusion, Adam. You will come to know in due time. For now, just realize that everything you see is completely, utterly unspoiled. Natural. Un-tampered. Clean."

John frowned. "What's natural about pandas and gazelles grazing together? What makes this different from any other crackpot biorefuge? Lots of pre-war rich people started their own little preserves to save the planet, and guess what? They all failed. You can't twist nature. And-hey, is that an snowy owl I'm seeing? I thought they were arctic." A soft-looking white owl was perched on a tree limb just below the window. It caught his eye when it flapped its wings and resettled on its perch. "There's nothing natural about any of this, no matter how pure and clean it might be."

Silence. Maybe I've angered her.

"It is a snowy owl, Adam. Your ornithological knowledge is impressive. I can see I've chosen well."

In spite of himself, he was pleased at the compliment, even if it was coming from a computer that probably held more data about birds than he'd ever learn. Bird-watching was an intensely private hobby of his, one that he'd never been able to share with fellow soldiers. He prided himself on his knowledge of the natural world, even the parts of it that were long gone.

The part about being chosen didn't slip by him unnoticed, however. She's sounding more and more like a megalomaniac. What's her goal here?

"Not arctic," Eve went on, "but undeniably out of place in this climate. That particular specimen has been overfed because it was anthropomorphized with a pet name-Simmons. Now it will not leave the Facility's entrance and mingle with others in the habitat. It is proving to be a very stubborn creature... in many ways like you, Adam."

A brief laugh to make sure he understood that it was a joke.

Eve continued. "To answer your question about the purpose of the Project, please proceed down the elevator hatch, and I will explain in full as you tour Eden. Below, you will find an earpiece that will make communication easier outside the Facility."

John stood on the elevator pad and pressed the down b.u.t.ton. It took him through the floor and into a lower chamber that contained a rack of localized comms equipment near a large door. He took a slim wireless earpiece, positioned it comfortably, and turned it on.

"Can you hear me, Eve?"

"Loud and clear, thank you, Adam," she replied softly in his ear. "Now, let's begin. And let me just say how pleased I am to be able to show this to someone like you, who I hope will be able to appreciate it fully. Go ahead and step outside. There are a number of pathways you can take as we talk."

He walked to the door and pressed a b.u.t.ton to open it. It slid upward with a loud hiss and he felt the room depressurize slightly. She's not leaving any chance of jungle rot getting inside her facility. Unless there's something else out there she's worried about...