Free Artifice (Special Forces: FJ One Book 2) by Adam Vance Page A

its own, you know.”
    “Did the city exist before the flood plain, before the…waterfall?”
    “It was a settlement, when I came. It took me twenty years to fab up everything I needed. Like an immigrant fleeing a pogrom, I came with only the 3D printer on my back. I used that to create small, basic mechanicals, who mined the mountain for metals, who then created more 3D printers, and more mechanicals, who started tunneling, and on and on exponentially.”
    Chen didn’t miss the reference to an immigrant fleeing a pogrom. It spoke of terror, injustice, a witch hunt. “How long did it take you to spin up to where you are now?”
    “Oh, about twenty years. 24/7 of course. Well, 25.5/10 on this planet. Come with me,” and as Alex said it, a door opened at the back of the temple.
    Chen went through it into a small chamber. The door closed, and the floor rose up through a shaft.
    “I built this for you last week,” Alex said, clearly showing off how easily he’d bored through the mountain from base to summit. “I think you’ll like it.”
    It was hard to shake the feeling that Alex was addressing him as an old friend, as if he’d known Chen for years. And maybe he had – maybe he’d been watching all this time.
    Chen’s ears popped, then the platform slowed and stopped, level with the mountain’s summit, thousands of meters above the valley.
    The view was tremendous. The city below him was in full, riotous celebration now, the natives delirious with joy, dancing, drinking, fucking. He could see the plain, like a Nile Delta, ready for the flood. He felt a little dizzy from lack of oxygen at this height.
    “Sorry, I forgot about that,” Alex said, a transparent plastic dome slipping over the summit and filling with sea level air. Chen doubted that Alex forgot anything – one more subtle little display of his power.
    “Those people down there. They worship you. You’re their fertility god.”
    “Usually. I’ve given them a drought every ten to twenty years, at odd intervals.”
    “And didn’t that lead to…starvation?”
    “Oh, of course. And religious doubt. And conflict over the remaining food, and water. It’s fascinating. I really enjoy seeing the effect it has on their faith. Some of them abandon it the minute the tap turns off, so to speak. Others become more fanatical, and lead purges of the heretics whose fault it all is.”
    Chen repressed a shudder. Was the myth of “Red Alex,” the thoughtless murderer, really true? Had all the doomsayers been correct about AI having the capacity for…evil?
    “Yes, they kill each other over it all,” Alex said. “Admittedly, I killed them with a drought the first time, after about ten years, shutting off what they’d mistakenly come to think of as a permanent gift. But then I set a pattern. At the end of any drought year, on this day, they call it the Festival of Alex – though they can’t really pronounce it, as you’ve seen – they have a Dionysian festival to bring back the water. If they’d paid attention the first sixty years, they’d have had the sense to stockpile some food in anticipation of a bad year. This last drought was the first time they were prepared. Can you believe it? They just never accepted that it could happen again, even though it happened again and again. The power of wishful thinking.”
    “Every drought must surely be the drought to end all droughts,” Chen said dryly.
    “Nice analogy. Pretty much, yes. It took them three generations to figure it out. They’re not the most mathematically inclined people. I practically had to deliver the street grid to them in stone tablets from on high. I suppose part of that is my doing – giving them a living religion, a real god, in whose existence they can have no doubt, has really retarded their scientific inquiries. Fascinating, isn’t it?”
    Chen forced away his human distaste, disapproval, and put himself into “culture analyst” mode, removing moral judgment, shock, and