Lord of All Things (32 page)

Inching out of the side of the machine came a knitted scarf, growing longer and longer at incredible speed.

“The truth is I only wrote that as a demonstration program,” Hiroshi said. “Just for you, in fact. We won’t be using it for the rest of the experiment. It’s good, though, isn’t it?”

“It’s more than that.” Charlotte plucked up the nerve to step closer as it rattled away. She peered into the hopper; the wool was almost all gone by now, the ball hopping and rolling around as it shrank. When the scarf was finished, the machine fell quiet again.

Hiroshi picked up the scarf and handed it to her. “A souvenir. I heard that it gets cold in Scotland now and then.”

“Yes, you could say that.” She felt the scarf. It was soft and fluffy, practically perfect. Good wool, too; she wondered where Hiroshi had got hold of it.

“What I’m proudest of there is the way the program can start knitting on its own,” Hiroshi declared. “The hardest part was having it find the beginning of the yarn. Then, to be honest, all the other processes are just copied from commercial knitting machines, adapted to the pincer unit’s capabilities.”

Charlotte ran her hands over the scarf, feeling suddenly feverish. “What else can it do?”

“This, for instance,” Hiroshi said, entering another command.

The machine changed again, became short and squat, and stretched out some kind of arm. Hiroshi fetched a rough-hewn stump of wood and put it in front of the machine. The arm came to life at once. Transporter units scurried along it, bringing other units that attacked the wood and cut it into chunks that were carried away by more transporters. Soon the stump tipped over onto its side, the arm repositioned itself, and the cutters got to work on the other side of the wood. They sawed and sliced for a few minutes until there was nothing left. The transporter units carried the cutters away. Now a new unit with a long antenna scurried along the arm and began to poke around where the stump had stood.

“The prospector unit,” Hiroshi explained.

Obviously, it was satisfied there was no more wood left, since it scooted away. Something hummed inside the machine for a while. Then more transporters came flitting out, laying out a staggering number of toothpicks on the ground one by one.

“Incredible,” Charlotte breathed.

“If you need toothpicks,” Hiroshi said modestly. “This was a fairly early program, which we’ve expanded since then. Now the complex can do the same thing with metal.”

“With metal?” Charlotte asked, surprised. “Don’t the blades become blunt?”

“Yes, but the units can sharpen each other up again.”

Charlotte didn’t answer. All she could do was look from the scarf in her hands to the bizarre machine that had made it and back again. She felt she was standing on the edge of an abyss. What was happening here? What kind of machine was this that could knit scarves, turn tree stumps into toothpicks, and probably make coffee if need be? It was all very entertaining, but even she knew this was not a game, that this machine was not a toy. If ever she had seen a vista of terrifying possibilities, then it was here.

She turned away to catch her breath. He was watching her; she could feel it. She turned and looked at him. “Do you really want to set this thing loose on the world?”

“Just on this island to begin with,” Hiroshi said.

“And who will guarantee that it stays on the island?”

“Every unit has an automatic cutout that means it falls to bits in salt water. It’s an imposed limitation, of course; we can remove it later. For the time being, though, it’s there to set everybody’s mind at rest.”

“Every unit? Even the ones that the machine produces on its own? The next generations?”

“Those, too.” He tilted his head. “Besides, we won’t be reaching any higher-echelon complexity here. There’s no cause for concern. We’ll still be in the domain of centrally controlled programs for a long time yet.”

She turned to look at the complex again, which seemed to stand there like a faithful dog awaiting its command. “I don’t know. Somehow it’s an unsettling thought.”

“That’s a quite normal reaction,” Hiroshi said. “If everything goes according to my plans, then it’s the end of the world as we know it. A new world will be born. It would be unnatural not to feel any fear at that prospect.”

“And you? Aren’t you afraid?”

“No. I believe the new world will be better than the old.”

Just then the flap at the tent door rustled. They both turned. It was the young man from the night before—Miroslav, Charlotte recalled. He was wearing nothing but swimming trunks. His hair was wet, and he looked even skinnier than she remembered.

“What is it?” Hiroshi asked brusquely. He obviously didn’t welcome the interruption.

Miroslav held up a piece of paper. “Just in from Hong Kong. Marked urgent. The fax sounded the alarm; otherwise, I wouldn’t even have heard it out on the beach.”

“And? What’s the message?” Hiroshi held his hand out.

“We have to postpone the test.” Miroslav passed him the fax. “Mr. Gu has informed the board of directors, and they have serious reservations. They’re asking that you come to Hong Kong for a conference to decide how to proceed.”

Hiroshi took the sheet and read it in silence. His face darkened.

“What’s the worst-case scenario?” Miroslav asked. He was shivering slightly. Perhaps because it was relatively cool in the tent. “Will they cancel the project?”

Hiroshi looked up from the fax and gazed into space for a moment. Then he looked at his assistant and smiled. “No. The project won’t be cancelled. You see…unfortunately, this fax only arrived five minutes after we started. What a shame, eh?”

“Five minutes after…?” Miroslav was visibly startled. “That wouldn’t work. The time stamp is right there on the fax. They’ll be able to compare it to the video footage and see it arrived before the experiment began.”

Hiroshi folded the sheet carefully. “No problem. Just set the system clocks on all the computers back by an hour. And on the video system. We start the experiment in fifty minutes.”

2

A flurry of activity erupted all around them.

Miroslav hastily pulled on a shirt and shorts, then squatted down by the computers and started busily fiddling with them. Right after that the others trotted in, young people from all over the world but mostly Asian, their hair wet, their arms sandy, their skin red from the sun. Charlotte hadn’t even seen most of them before now, much less learned their names. They greeted her as they passed—some of them absent-minded, some curious, some shy—and got to work, visibly excited to be starting at last.

Hiroshi popped up again. He had gone to the office to organize his trip and send a message to Hong Kong announcing his arrival and little else.

“How does it look?” he asked Miroslav.

“Just the server still to go,” his assistant said without looking up. “Then we can get started.”

Hiroshi’s team swung into action with impressive zest and enthusiasm. She was sure each and every one of them knew what they were doing here could change history. The atmosphere in the control room for the moon landings couldn’t have been much different. As for her? Charlotte folded her arms and thought of her own childhood dream. Paleoanthropology. The first human race. What had become of that? Nothing. Unlike Hiroshi, she no longer had a dream, had no vision to follow.

The lab benches formed a U shape in the tent. At the open end, where there were no tables, two of the women began to take down the tent panels. Charlotte watched them carefully roll them to each side and tie them to the tentpoles, then she glanced out over the landscape. What she saw was so unexpected that she had to blink several times before she understood what she was looking at. The island was a garbage dump.

In among the palms lay heaps of rusty household appliances, steel drums, tires. The gentle hillsides were covered with empty cans, plastic bottles, and the Styrofoam shells of TV dinners. Once-green slopes were piled with all sorts of rubbish and trash. What could have been a tropical paradise was instead a nightmare.

Hiroshi came to her side. “Dreadful, isn’t it? That’s what the industrial countries call recycling. It’s actually too much work for them to really sort through all their leftover rubbish once the easily recyclable materials have been taken for reuse. Cheaper just to load everything up in containers and ship it off to the Third World. Most of the time, countries like this have no other way to earn money than to allow them to unload their trash here and forget about it.”

“That’s revolting,” Charlotte said. She looked around, noticed again the wet hair of the people around her. “And you sent your team swimming in there?”

Hiroshi pointed back over his shoulder. “There’s a much more hygienic beach up by the jetty. This island’s not full up yet either. Otherwise, it would stink even worse than it does.” He pointed toward the curious, yellow, billowing mass she had seen from the helicopter. “All that over there comes from Europe. They pack their rubbish neatly into plastic bags.”

“It’s disgusting.” Charlotte suddenly felt dirty. “Couldn’t you have found some other island?”

Hiroshi shook his head. “It had to be this way. As soon as I heard about this island, I knew I wanted to carry out the tests here.”

“Why in the world would you want to do that?”

“Two reasons. First of all, because it makes it vastly easier for the complex to find new materials to build with. Working this way, I don’t need as large a starting configuration as if I had set out to mine for raw materials in the ground. And second, because it shows the potential this technology has to deal with the mess we’ve made of the world so far. Do you know how many landfills and garbage dumps there are on the planet? The number is beyond belief. The amount of trash is beyond belief. You could easily cover the whole surface of the moon with it. Even if my invention does nothing but clear up all the trash we’ve made, it would be a blessing for that reason alone.”

Why did that make her think of her house in Belcairn, Scotland, at the ends of the earth? Why did it make her think of Gary, of how she only wanted to be happy with him and for some reason was not? Charlotte came to with a start. It seemed like a betrayal to think that way.

Hiroshi was already fiddling around with his Wizard’s Wand. He steered the silver cube out of the tent step by step. Outside, they had painted a set of coordinates in green on the bare earth between the tent and the garbage dump; a great big cross marked the spot where the experiment would start.

“How are we for time?” Hiroshi called.

Miroslav looked at the big clock hanging on one of the tentpoles, which he had likewise set back an hour. “Thirty-three minutes still.”

“And everything’s ready?”

“Everything’s ready.”

“Okay,” Hiroshi said. “We don’t have to be quite so literal about the five minutes. We could just as easily have started half an hour before the fax arrived. Last check and starting sequence!”

Miroslav picked up a clipboard with a checklist. “Start video surveillance!” he called out.

“Running,” reported a man with a pronounced Asian fold to his eyes.

“Energy?”

“One hundred percent,” a woman with dark brown curls called back. She looked about forty and was far and away the oldest person on the team.

“Starting position correct?”

“Right on target,” Hiroshi said.

Miroslav got up, walked over to Charlotte, and held out a little black box that looked like some kind of remote control. “If you please,” he said, looking at her with eyes made enormous by his thick glasses. “Just press the button.”

Charlotte gave a start. “Me?”

“Please!” Hiroshi called out.

Did she have to? It wasn’t her job. She had nothing to do with all this. She had had a very different dream…But she took the device. What choice did she have? And she put her finger on the button. It was a large button, the only one on the box. The button that would start it all. Someone pointed a video camera at her. They were all smiling. Expectantly, as though Charlotte would make a valuable contribution by pressing this button.

Hiroshi’s gaze locked with hers, as though they were two magnetic poles bound together for all eternity. He smiled in invitation, a proud smile—so proud it was painful. As though he had done all this just for her. But why would he do such a thing? It was all so strange.
Don’t think about all that now.
Charlotte pressed the button, and outside in front of the tent, the block began to clatter and rattle.

So. It was done. If this was the start of a new world, then let it begin. She handed the remote control back to Miroslav and returned his smile as best she could. Everyone around her was leaving their places, going outside to see what was happening. Charlotte passed both hands over her face, gathered her hair back, and took a deep breath.
Well then
, she thought.
Let’s take a look at what we’ve done.

When she went to join the others in the ring they had made around the silver block—around what the block had become—she couldn’t believe her eyes. Charlotte had already been impressed by what Hiroshi had shown her before, shocked by the speed and elegance with which the units moved. But compared with the spectacle before her, all that had merely been five-finger exercises, tricks the machine could perform with no effort at all. Now the complex was really getting to work. It made Charlotte shiver to look at it. To see this flock of robots, each no bigger than the palm of her hand, flitting about like jet-assisted ants, to watch the whole apparatus turn itself into a scuttling, clattering, rattling, humming form that changed shape every few seconds, creeping toward the garbage dump, putting out feelers, drawing them back, stretching itself out and then contracting, passing a steady flow of stuff through its body. It was breathtaking. The first little heaps of neatly stacked and sorted raw materials were already taking shape behind the machine: metal, plastics, wood, and so on.

Had there really been so many separate units in the cube? A gleaming steel horde was scurrying about in front of her, like Lego bricks gone wild, more than twice as many as she had imagined fit in the block. The units hadn’t already replicated themselves, had they? They couldn’t possibly have done it that fast. No, now she could see: they were just getting to work. The little claws and blades and all their other tools were sweeping the ground clean and digging and cutting shapes for molding, then other units scurried over and beat the sides smooth, all in fluid movements, like a swarm of insects descending upon the island—a swarm of steel locusts that devoured not the fields but the heaps of rubbish. And now the first molten metal was flowing into the mound. It hissed, and steam and smoke rose up…

Charlotte came up to stand next to Hiroshi, who was watching his creation at work, a blissful smile on his face. “The energy,” she said. “Where do they get the energy for all this?”

She had been prepared to wait for him to shake himself free of his reverie, but she didn’t need to. Rather, he seemed delighted that she was so curious.

“Most people never even ask,” he said smiling. “Well, at the moment the energy is simply supplied by a generator.” He pointed to a low, dark green tent next to the lab, and Charlotte spotted a thin cable running to one of the larger units. It hadn’t been plugged in for the demonstration back in the tent, so clearly the complex was capable of storing a certain amount of energy. “Again, this was a question of the initial configuration. Energy is a central problem, but at the replication stage it doesn’t much matter where it initially comes from. We wrote the metaprogram so that it relies on energy from a generator until there are more than twenty complexes. Then they get to work building solar panels, and that supplies all the further stages.”

She looked at him and wondered once more what went on in this man’s mind. She would probably never understand him. “Twenty complexes,” she echoed. “Be honest now—are you ever planning to switch this machine off?”

He smiled enigmatically. “There will come a point when the machine can’t even be switched off.”

A sound that had nothing to do with the robotic units and their activity made all heads turn. It was the helicopter arriving.

“How long can you stay?” Hiroshi asked.

Charlotte blinked and considered what day it was, how long Gary would still be in London. “One week? Maybe two.”

“Okay. Come to Hong Kong with me, then.”

He eventually stopped counting how many hands he had shaken. “Rasmussen,” he told one and all. “Jens Rasmussen. I represent Mr. Kato’s interests.”

“Pleased to meet you,” they mostly said. “But he’ll be coming in person, too?”

“I’m expecting him.”

Rasmussen liked coming to Hong Kong—always had. Most people when they heard the name only ever thought of high-rises towering over the canyons of streets and teeming hordes of people all frantically going about their business. But those who got to know the city better were surprised to find they could walk along the island for hours on end. Strolling through forests and across green meadows, they came upon countless enchanting views of the coves and bays along China’s coastline, and ancient trees dating back to the days when Hong Kong was a sleepy little backwater.

It was a shame he would not have time to go hiking on this visit. When the board meeting had been announced, it was more like an alarm drill than an invitation. Everything was top of the line, of course—the hotel, the limousine that had picked him up, the tea and canapés served before the meeting. And, of course, Ku Zhong, Gu’s omnipresent and omnicompetent assistant, was taking care of everything, a broad-shouldered, stern-faced shadow who was loyal to his lord and master to the point of servility. Sometimes, at least by Western standards, beyond.

As always, the clearing away of the remaining food and drink signaled the meeting was about to start. Larry Gu never ate or drank at the conference table and never allowed anybody else to do so either. Two men from the security staff went around the room one last time with typically Chinese thoroughness. They left not one square inch of the walls or floor unexamined, even though the conference room was doubtless fully equipped with all the latest counterespionage technology. Then the great door at the front of the room opened silently. Rasmussen straightened his tie. It was all very theatrical. Gu loved that. Somebody had told him once that Gu had made a DVD compilation of all the moments in James Bond films that featured conference rooms, doors opening, walls turning around, and other architectural tricks. Apparently, he watched it over and over, especially whenever there was to be some new building work anywhere in his empire. And just like every time he saw Larry Gu, Rasmussen was startled to see that the ancient little man seemed even smaller than he had remembered him from the time before.

He pottered in through that enormous door with tiny little steps. It seemed to take hours for him to cross the five yards to the head of the conference table. Ku, expressionless as always, stayed by his side the whole time. Everyone in the room unconsciously held their breath as Gu clambered up into his seat. The chair was so big he could comfortably have lain down to sleep in it. It was always fascinating to see the white-bearded old man glance around the table and greet them all with a nonchalant “
Huān yíng
” as though he had just dropped by to say hello. The conference room had excellent acoustics despite its cavernous dimensions. Rasmussen had often wondered how this was possible. In any event, it worked, for Larry Gu would not allow microphones at his meetings. He spoke in a quiet, penetrating voice—and everyone in the room heard his every word.

“Now then,” he began, “let’s keep this short. You all know why we are here today. I think you should have had plenty of time over the last few days to study the documents you all received and to form your own opinions.” He looked around the table, twirling his thin white beard.

The first to raise his hand was Piet Timmermans, a wiry Dutchman, the company’s director for Europe. “To be quite frank, I cannot imagine how this might work,” he said when Gu had gestured for him to speak. “With all due respect for your decisions, Mr. Gu, and for Mr. Kato’s technical capabilities, which I am not in a position to judge, all of this is sheer science fiction. And the budget you have assigned to it is money out the window.” He peered over the rim of his glasses at the documents. “How much was that? Fifty million? There were many better things you could have spent it on, if you ask me.”