Janice tried a finger stab at his throat; he caught the fingers and with a quick wrench snapped them. She gasped and tried a high kick. He took it in the shoulder without even noticing, and lunged. Janice flew backwards, stars exploding in her vision.
He’s going to kill me.
The thought shocked her. The tables had turned too quickly. She’d been trained as a Gargoyle, and had killed more than once with her hands, but this was different.
I have no advantage. I have to get out of here.
While still moving back from the momentum of the drive that had thrown her, she kicked wildly to keep him at a distance and then darted inside the control room.
The door slammed shut and John heard the sound of the lock engaging. Then Janice’s face appeared in the window, smiling at him with an insane light of triumph even as she held her aching chest and ribs with one arm.
There were several seconds in which he stood outside, chest heaving with adrenaline. It was useless to try to get in again; he didn’t have time to find out how she’d gotten the door open earlier. Frustration at being denied the victory his rage demanded faded to a basic instinct to survive. The clock was ticking. It was time to leave.
He dashed for the stairs as the lights in the gallery turned red and a warning siren began blaring. He thought he could hear laughter echoing behind him.
His heart beat much faster than merely running up the stairs would have required. He could feel the sweat on his brow turn cold. All he could think about was getting outside to the sunshine and fresh air again before the world began to crumble on top of him.
I can't believe this is happening.
A low rumbling sound behind him told him that it was indeed happening. The screams of laughter had stopped and the sirens were muffled. As John burst into the Level Two lounge area the floor began to tremble under his feet.
"I would have hoped for a different outcome," Eve said. "Tragedy compounds tragedy in this debacle." She sounded unperturbed and calm, but resigned. "It isn't so much the personal cessation of existence that hurts, but the ruining of my creator's wonderful plan."
I... have no answer to that.
"On the bright side, it is fitting that we shall all be buried together in a mass grave. Even Glenn. The Facility is where I was born and where I will die, and both my Adams with me."
The floor was beginning to buckle, as if certain pillars below had been snatched away. Racks of food and a beverage machine slid across the room. John clawed his way past the debris toward the only opening to the outside world, knocking over a coffee table as he staggered to the observation deck.
"Eve, you have to stop it," he panted.
"Stop it? Adam, die gracefully. It's the least you can do for your species."
"Contain it. Please. There must be a way. I’ve failed, but you can still put things right."
The rumbling had become a dull roar behind him as the entire Facility converted into mounds of dirt, room by room and floor by floor. He staggered onto the brilliantly sunlit observation deck.
"If there were a viable way to stop this from happening, I would. My self-preservation motives are nearly as powerful as your own. But it is the destiny of the world we are dealing with. It is not something that should be stopped."
He leaned against the broken window edge for balance as the floor groaned and heaved, cutting his hand on the glass.
"You wouldn't leave one layer of fragile glass as the only safety barrier here," he breathed. "The tunnels were sealable; what about this exit?"
"Synthetic armor-glass wouldn’t have stopped the nanobots, but the fragile crystal glass would have," Eve agreed. "And it is even more ironic that the observation window is now the primary and only means of escape for the nanobots. If I turned on the turbofans to repel the tide, the delicious irony would be lost on the world."
Midway through the last sentence, her voice dropped an octave, then raised higher than normal.
"Eve, please!" John shouted.
The shaking had rendered the elevator lift unstable. Instead he crawled out the window, hung from its lip for a moment, and let himself drop. The fall of several meters was partially broken by high bushes, but he still felt a rib crack when he hit. He ignored the searing pain.
"You have to do it,” he cried. “Seal yourself in. Save humanity, do it in Glenn's memory! Do it for Glenn!"
"For Glenn?" Eve was now speaking in a voice that could only be described as girly, high-pitched and almost playful. "How about for spite? What's the value in an act of selfless good will? Are you now the one expecting blind obedience and loyalty? Answer me this riddle: what does one Painted Lady have to do with the universal current?"
She's going. It’s over. She’s through.
John began to crawl away, then stood up to run even though he hurt too badly to do so. The best he could manage was a lopsided limp. Eve's strangely high-pitched voice followed him, echoing from the opening above.
"Don't run away, sir. Please don't feel that you need to stay on my account." Her skittering voice took on a surly tone. "The evening is at an end. Can I order you a ride?"
“Yeah,” he muttered through clenched teeth. “A yacht. A big yacht with an ice cold lemonade and a couple of gorgeous –”
He gasped as he stumbled over a rock and felt his side flash with pain. He sank to one knee to keep himself from tumbling down an embankment that was shaking underneath him.
He turned his face back toward the gleaming crystal hole he had come out of.
"Eve!" he shouted. "I need you. Please help me, please! Seal that exit!"
"You need me?" she replied. "What a nice thing to say. I find that wonderfully validating.”
Her voice sank back to normal octaves, but the speech slowed down and had a different accent. “I just wanted to hear...”
John couldn't make out the rest of her words as the rumbling from the mountain cliff he was facing drowned it out. She's turned into a ditzy girl, chattering inanely right at the end of the world. Glenn was a real idiot.
We all were.
The voice became clear again as it shouted a farewell. "You're wrong about me, sir. Entirely wrong. I'm not what you think I am. Now stand clear and mind your hat!"
He heard a high-pitched whine as fans came on inside the observation deck and shot a barrier of forced air back into the lounge area. Then the rock face that stretched from the valley floor up to the top of the cliff high above the Facility exit began to wave and shudder.
A long, loud scream came from inside. He thought she was screaming Glenn's name. It was drowned out by the roaring and shaking of the earth.
John couldn't be sure where all of the earth forming the landslide was coming from, but more dirt and rocks poured down the cliff at him than just the face itself could produce. It appeared to be bubbling up from the depths of the earth beneath the Facility.
He began running again, adrenaline replacing his pain with a burst of energy. He could hear huge boulders pounding the ground behind him, and he ran faster. Then the avalanche of displaced earth caught up with him and he was swept along, tumbling and cartwheeling as the landslide ran out half a kilometer into Eden.
27
A bird called somewhere, but it was the pain that first awakened him.
John jerked, groaning. Was it a bad dream? No, he could feel the ravages of adrenaline and traumatic stress insisting that his mind hadn’t made any of it up.
When he finally pulled his face from the dirt, he was turned around, and the first thing he saw was the cliff he had come out of. The Facility was gone, buried under a fifty-meter-long hill of steep brown scree.
Is this it? The beginning of the end of the world as we know it? It's very quiet.
He turned, taking in the panorama of destruction by degrees. Behind him something tall and angular protruded from the hill of rubble. His heart leaped as he comprehended the twisted metal strut, half-buried and poking out of the earth at an angle like a skeleton’s arm.
M
etal. If the nanos had escaped, the metal would have been eaten.
It hurt to smile, but he smiled anyway.
He picked himself up. Aside from his aching side, a twisted ankle that had been caught by a rock in the slide, and mouthful of sand, he wasn't terribly dissatisfied with the way things had turned out. A flood of relief lifted his heart and brought tears to his eyes. It worked. I did it.
She did it.
And yet...
The relief died away as his mind continued spinning.
I'm right back where I started, alone on this crazy island with nothing but a few exotic animals and a harsh sunburn.
And I might be here a while.
In fact, John admitted ruefully to himself, it could be a very long while. Janice was gone, Eve was gone, but the nanobots had a fifty-year lifespan. And they were still in there, underground, waiting.
He knew, suddenly, that even if he brought all the firepower in the world down on the island, and rained high explosives for a month, there was a good chance a few nanos would be missed. There was no way to scan for them. And massive explosions might even break open a pocket of nanos, reveal them to the open air, bring about the very outcome the saturation bombs were deployed to prevent.
Because all it takes is one.
But for that matter, I probably wouldn't even get the airstrike. No, they wouldn't destroy them. They'd come in here and harness them. The guys up top wouldn't be able to resist a toy like the one Eve made.
And there's the rub. If anyone, government or military or a prospector with a pickaxe, disturbs this island, then that's all she wrote. Our chapter ends.
I didn't just go through hell for nothing.
He sighed, trying the math in his clouded head.
Fifty years... I’ll be eighty – no, eighty three. Just thinking about it made him feel old.
That’s a long, lonely fifty years for me. Because if anyone comes around trying to make friends... I’ll have to kill them.
Four hours later a naval aircraft blew overhead at high altitude, snapping pictures of the seismic disturbance center. The man on the ground below, much too far to see clearly through the jungle cover, didn't even look up.
He was too busy sharpening a makeshift spear.
End
Machines of Eden is Shad Callister’s debut novel. He lives in Utah and Alabama, where he writes, reads, and prepares for doomsday. Find out more about Shad’s world at shadcallister.wordpress.com.
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