Machines of Eden Read Online Free PDF Page B

components, and hurled it far into the trees. Then he headed back toward the fence. Despite the risk of discovery,
there was something else he needed to know before he moved on .
    From the cover of the
trees, he followed the rusty fence line until he found what he was
looking for – a laser projector situated a meter off the ground on one post,
pointing down the fence line toward a receiver fifty meters away.
There was a second laser line half a meter apart from the first, a
corollary beam for greater reliability. Insects and birds could
interrupt one and not set off any alarm, but if both were broken it
meant something large was in the area.
    He studied the equipment
carefully. It was a surprisingly good setup. Unlike the
bot he’d destroyed, the security laser box was clean and
well-maintained. So was the power cable that fed it, and the
four-meter-high solar panel pole. The
panel itself was half-hidden in the tree canopy above. He scanned the maintenance
track , noticing wheel tracks where a mower
had come through not too long ago .
    His mind raced. The war
had left a lot of the more remote island groups in chaos, and
Restoration hadn’t completely pacified Australia yet. It would be
decades before they reached the South Pacific , if that was where he’d ended up .
The war had been officially over for a
while and i t was hard to conceive of a
place that hadn’t heard the news. But if this was an island it was
theoretically possible that this place had never been
demilitarized.
    Another possibility was
that they had heard and refused to demilitarize. Some of the more
fanatical Grays had ignored the armistice and fought on. But he’d
heard they were mostly isolated in the temperate zones. He’d never
heard of Gray holdouts in the tropics. On the other hand, this
could be a refugee camp. He’d heard that the islands were full of
them, scattered to winds during the war by choice or by necessity
and now grown accustomed to autonomy. Some had carved out nice
little kingdoms for themselves and resented outsiders.
    John shook his head. Without hard data on his position it was
useless to speculate. It could have been just one more
malfunctioning bot in the wrong place at the wrong time, a defunct
machine running on outdated programming. The disposal teams
collected thousands of them each year.
    Or …
    But he pushed the last
thought from his mind. There were other possible explanations, much
more upsetting. He didn’t want to consider those.
    The ASKALON-9 that attacked
him hadn’t displayed any upgrades, from what he had been able to
observe. No armor. No sophisticated subroutines. No weapons
systems. Minimal AI. No maintenance, but that told him little. The
ASKALONs were pre-war models – spare parts were rare. The unit’s
sheer age might have caused its failure. He shook his head again,
and headed for the hill.
    After t wenty minutes John noticed the sound
of water at the edge of his hearing, but the noise of the incessant
insects and his own heavy breathing made it difficult to judge the
size or precise location of the waterway. Passing through some thick trees, he emerged into the open
along the bank of a
river , blinking in the sudden
sunlight.
    The river was
perhaps ten meters wide. Although it moved slowly at his current
position, upstream it exited a
gorge between the hills from which he could hear the roar of whitewater. The milky brown water gave him no way to tell how deep the river was. He threw a stick into
midstream and watched it float, noting the point at which the current sped up around a bend .
    He could probably swim it,
but he didn’t like the idea for several reasons. The murky water made it impossible to
tell if there were submerged rocks or snags. He’d heard awful
stories of aquatic snakes, as well. But his greatest concern was
the lack of cover. Once he entered the water, he would be helpless
if another bot appeared. Just standing on the banks made him
uneasy, and he backed into the jungle