Machines of Eden Read Free Page B

green met his
gaze. A few coconut palms with slim gray trunks served as an
advance guard ahead of the main jungle, looming out over the sand,
but for the most part the foliage followed a set boundary down the
beach in either direction.
    He was aware of an almost
total silence. The ocean lapped quietly at the sand. Far out he
could see the white crests of real waves, but they lost all power
long before they reached the beach. There were no cries of gulls or
other seabirds, and behind him the jungle was devoid of the usual
faunal cacophony common to the
tropics . That was enough to make him truly
uneasy.
    Real. But not as it should
be.
    He stood up with gritted
teeth and hung there for a minute or two, letting his body reorient
and fighting back a sudden swirl of nausea. H is face felt puffy with sunburn and
realized that he was intensely thirsty. He wondered how long he had
lain there.
    He walked toward the
nearest coconut palm. It jutted out at a low angle, almost
horizontal for several meters, before rising sharply to a head with broad leaves that cast a
substantial shadow on the sand below .
Scattered beneath were dried brown fronds and old coconut
husks that made a
dry rustling under his feet. He sat on the long trunk in the shade
and tried to think.
    He was on a beach. The
information his senses were giving him and his pain all seemed to
indicate that this was real. He had experienced some incredibly
persuasive dreams before, especially in Recovery when the meds were
wearing off, but this wasn’t like that. This felt real. He dug his
fingers into the rutted trunk.
    This is real. But where does that leave me? And how did I come here? He was having
trouble remember ing much at all about the last few
days.
    Already the dreaminess was
leaving him. Getting out of the sun and into the shade had
something to do with it. His mind began to revive fully, and all
his latent energies sent out feelers to feed the information his
mind needed into the central cortex and up to the various lobes
where the information built sequence on sequence into cause,
effect, strategy, and action.
    That was the way it was.
The mind was a computer, pure and simple, needing only water and
carbon and a few other little necessaries just as its plastic and
silicon imitations needed electricity. He
knew computers. It helped to reduce the human mind into such
accessible terms. It enabled him to get a handle on things, to
control his situation, and to formulate plans of action.
    He studied the beach. It
stretched far away before him, a white band with a green wall on
one hand and a rippling blue glass on the other. At the very edge
of his sight the beach bent away to the left and out of
sight , kilometers
distant . He turned and saw the same thing
in the other direction. There were no tracks or marks of any kind
on the sand, and no rocks jutted up from the beach or shallows. He
was overwhelmed with a sense of artificiality. He told himself it
was just a feeling, and he knew it was, but his mind retained the
impression of repetitive monotony, as though it were a holographic
that had run out of code and simply repeated itself
endlessly.
    There was nothing to
salvage in sight. He had the clothes he was wearing, a drab
short-sleeved military shirt and cargo pants. An impulse born of
habit caused him to pat his inner thigh, and he was relieved to
feel the comforting profile of the slim mini-toolkit strapped
there. At least he had something to work with beside his bare
hands, although it would do him little good in the
jungle.
    Things were coming back to
him now. Discharge, flight, Mochizuki. And then… the last part was
too chaotic in his memory to give him more than a vague picture of
night-time danger and the fear that had accompanied it.
    Doesn’t matter right now.
Right now I have to get out of the sun and get some intel. I’m
here, like it or not. Wherever here is.
    He re ached down and selected a heavy ,
dead palm frond, breaking off the blades
from the