Part 16 (1/2)
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.