Part 16 (2/2)

”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 slas.h.i.+ng 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 relations.h.i.+p between us than we do. I think she wants us here, and she loves us. Even when we are ungrateful children.

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