Machines of Eden Read Online Free Page B

Machines of Eden
Book: Machines of Eden Read Online Free
Author: Shad Callister
Tags: Artificial intelligence, island, Robots, postapocalyptic, Nanotechnology, doomsday, future combat
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outwit
hunger.
    Nine billion prewar humans
on the planet. Too many. Earth supported the burden until she could
no longer do so, and then purged herself. Only so many, and no
more. We forgot that law. We forgot only so many and no more, and
we paid for the forgetting.
    War came, war like nothing
we’d ever imagined. The used died by the thousands, by the hundreds
of thousands, by the millions. Like locusts they came, locusts with
a hunger swollen and never satisfied, enraged at the devastation of
the Earth. At the waste.
    Science could not kill them
all without killing the users as well, and we were not so far gone
that we had forgotten that. Not so far gone as that. There were
ways to end it all, end everything, but we wanted to live. In the
end, we strove for survival like any animal.
    Chemicals, bleak clouds
that shriveled leaves from trees, burned lungs, blinded babies,
choked and killed and maimed, poisoning the already groaning Earth
with miasmic vapors.
    Viruses, bacteria, the
superbugs of a thousand sealed jars were let loose like the plagues
of Egypt, dropped from the sky in silent bombs with silent
detonations. Humans dropped like flies, vomiting blood, the Red
Death tearing at Prospero’s throat. The worms feasted.
    The factories spewed forth
their guns and cartridges by the billions. Tanks, choppers, planes,
hovercraft. Mines. Grenades, missiles, rockets. Smartbombs.
Clusterbombs. Burrowbombs, bunkerbusters, laser guided precision
systems, gunpowder giving way to particle beams, light energy
weapons. The technology jumped ahead, spurred by the men in white
coats who took such meticulous notes and sipped their coffee with
such dedication.
    Bots. Androids and gynoids.
Cyborgs. Oceans of money evaporated into war clouds which rained
down the bots and bombs. Joysticks clutched in chubby fists that
steered death through the sky in streaks and never saw the starving
things they vaporized.
    We will win, they said. We
will win. It is our right. Earth is ours. We are not the
Earth’s.
    That was when I left
them.
    Sick with anger, I swore I
would end them. Cleanse the earth. Take off the mask and breathe
clean air again.
    We wore them down, and
spent ourselves like water doing it. We won. The Greens won. The
Grays lost.
    I wish it was that
simple.
    We all lost. When the Earth
dies, no one wins.
    And Earth is dying. Too little,
too late. After all the killing, all the death, all the rot and
waste and ashes, we may have past the point of no return when the
Earth begins her swan song and we can do nothing but
watch.
    So we wait.
    We watch.
    We hope.
    We ally Science with
Nature, as we should have done from the beginning, and pray that
together they can heal Earth.
    Pray for a new
Eden.
    If we are given another
chance, we will change, we will be different.
Human ity can change.
     
    The serpent has left the garden. Eden is safe.
     
    Please .
     
     
     
     

4
     
    John almost ran into the fence. He
had been moving fast, in as straight a
line as he could manage, toward the antenna on the heights . The forest floor was
dank and slippery and so he focused on his feet and where he was
putting them. The fence was in his face almost before he could
stop.
    It was an old fence made
of chain links, rusted in the humid air. Taller than he was by a
good meter and a half, disappearing in either direction. There were
the remains of some razor wire along the top. On the far side, he
could see that the jungle was cleared in a meter-wide swath
parallel to the fence; a maintenance track of some sort. He threw a
stick against the fence to check for current. Nothing. The fence
looked long abandoned, and the track was already choked with undergrowth .
    The rusted links bit into
his fingers as he clambered up awkwardly, fence bending inward with
his weight. A distant memory of childhood, when his sneaker toes could fit easily
into the links, crossed his mind. At the top he paused a moment,
picking a landing spot, and then jumped. He landed with

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