Machines of Eden Read Online Free PDF

was
caught in some creepers, thrashing and kicking to free itself. It
would only take seconds until it resumed the pursuit, but the
opportunity was exactly what he’d been waiting for.
    The ASKALON units were not
armored, but you still had to know where to hit them if you wanted
a sure kill. He’d lost more than a few friends to partially
disabled bots. You had to be sure. This one ran on power cell
technology, but access to the cell was protected by its
carapace.
    John scrambled four-legged across a patch of open ground and got
behind a banyan tree. The machine freed itself from the last of the
creeper and went still, its sensor array moving back and forth.
With its optical lens broken, it was reliant on infrared, and
infrared had limitations.
    He couldn’t be sure what
the exact capabilities of this bot were. He knew the specs of the
ASKALON series by heart, but modifications were so common it was
more realistic to assume it had been upgraded than not. He
carefully peered around the edge of the banyan trunk.
    The bot was motionless
except for its head, which was in a slow, 360 degree scanning
pattern; it was likely to remain that way until it reacquired its
target or until its recall programming activated. That could take
anywhere from ten minutes to ten days. Sergeant Wiley rasped
in John’s mind: the bots’ predictability is
their greatest weakness.
    He searched the ground,
found a half-buried stone, and gently tugged it loose. The bot’s
head was cycling away from him when he sprinted from behind the
banyan, praying that this one wasn’t baiting him with a
sophisticated decoy routine. Three quick steps, noiseless in the
damp leaf mold of the jungle floor, and he brought the rock down
hard on the bot’s head with crushing force.
    It jerked under the impact,
all sensory equipment destroyed, and he struck again, this time at
the base of the neck where its wiring was exposed. In a crackle of
sparks and ozone, the bot lurched forward and collapsed, facedown.
Instantly he was on it, hands ripping away the carapace to get at
the power cell and the brainbox. Only after they were torn free did
he relax.
    Not bad for just bare
hands and a rock.
    John didn’t consider
himself a violent person, but he enjoyed the rush from his quick
victory. He didn’t feel the slightest trace of regret at the
violent destruction of the bot. He had taken out far too many of
them in his time for it to bother him.
    Some people liked bots too
much. They were so helpful, clean, and polite. Totally subservient.
Reliable. And although they had no personalities unless programmed
that way, people projected personalities onto them, said thank you
when a bot performed a service, viewed them as if they were sentient . It was
harmless most of the time, but he had heard stories. A woman ran
back into a burning house to save “Kenny” and they found her
charred body embracing the red-hot house bot. Stuff like
that.
    And bot-love could get you
killed when the bots were your comrades in arms. When you’d been
fighting alongside a bot for weeks, calling it by a nickname, and
had your life saved by it, it was surprisingly difficult to let it
die, or refrain from running under fire to drag an injured one to
safety. You felt loyalty to it in spite of yourself. It was a
psychological phenomenon that took some mental discipline to
overcome.
    Not a problem for me. This
bot had it coming.
    Now that he was up
close, John could
see that the bot was even older and less maintained than he’d
supposed. He looked for other distinguishing features, but there
were none visible. He had no time for deeper examination. The bot
had been patrolling the fence, and he ha d tripped a sensor it
was monitoring when he climbed it. It was
an even bet that someone somewhere was monitoring the bot in turn. There was no telling what kind of
response might be sent out.
    Time to go.
    John grabbed the power cell, noticing that it was much newer and
cleaner than any of the bot’s other