Lord of All Things (34 page)

Timmermans pressed his lips together tightly, his face pale. The other men around the table—all men, Charlotte realized—glanced incredulously at one another.

“Mr. Kato,” said a heavyset Chinese man sitting by old Gu’s side, probably his bodyguard, “you had instructions not to begin the experiment until after this meeting.”

Hiroshi gave a curt nod. “Unfortunately, those instructions only arrived half an hour after we had started our test. To be frank, I had not reckoned with receiving any such instructions, since the original agreement gave me a free hand in everything related to this project.”

“You could have stopped the test,” the big man insisted.

“That would have invalidated the results,” Hiroshi objected. “So I decided not to.”

Murmurs rippled along the table like waves on a shore. Larry Gu lifted his finger once more and silence fell. “Well now, we can still stop it if we wish to,” he breathed. “Although perhaps we do not even need to. In any case, now that the test is done we are no longer dealing with mere theories and the, ah, limits of our imagination. We now have concrete data. At the moment I can only see that as an advantage.”

The next to speak was a stern American with sparse, red-blond hair who clutched the table tightly with both hands as he spoke as though to stop himself from leaping up and grabbing Hiroshi by the throat. “I’m interested to know what you think should happen with the products that your machine is—maybe—going to manufacture one day,” he barked. “Seems to me there’s a whole lot left unexplained here. For instance, who do those products belong to? And even before we get to that, what about the copy this machine makes of itself—if it does. Who does that belong to?”

Hiroshi unplugged his computer and closed it. The screen behind them winked out, and the room went dark once more even though it was broad daylight outside. The light was low, since the huge window was made of tinted glass, darker toward the top of the pane. It gave a view of Hong Kong, the tower blocks, the coast, and the sea, and though there must have been bustle and life down there, none of that mattered up here. It was as though the sun were setting over the city.

“You’re talking about who owns what,” Hiroshi stated.

“I am indeed. I’m talking about ownership, property. Property law. These are fundamental matters; perhaps the most fundamental of all in finance.”

“They are matters that will very soon be obsolete,” Hiroshi countered. There was a new note of steely certainty in his voice. This was getting interesting.

The American’s jaw dropped. Clearly, he hadn’t expected any such reply.

Hiroshi straightened in his chair. “Ownership is merely a concept that has been put forward as a solution to the problem of scarcity. Possibly not even the best solution, but nevertheless one that has stood the test of time. When there’s a shortage of something—or could potentially be a shortage, we’ve seen that argument as well—then people hurry to claim ownership so that the shortage won’t affect them. But if there is no shortage of anything—if there couldn’t conceivably be any such thing as a shortage—then it’s pointless to want to own anything. Why would you? Let’s take water as an example. How much water does each of you own, gentlemen?” he asked, looking round the table.

“I have a whole pool full,” someone said.

“That’s not water you can drink,” Hiroshi replied. “And you have no hesitation about replacing it with new water if it gets dirty. Why is that the case? Because, at least in the industrialized world, water is always readily available. It’s enough to know there is no shortage and that in the ordinary course of things, there never will be. Which is why most people don’t stockpile water, except for a few bottles of mineral water perhaps.” He put his hands on his computer. “I am developing a machine that will do the same thing for every conceivable consumer good and resource. Worldwide, and for everybody. Everything that anyone might need will be on tap. Available, whenever you need it, however much or many you need. What point would there be in property and ownership then? None at all. Two generations from now, nobody will even understand what we meant by it.”

The American gasped for air and squirmed in his seat, coughing and spluttering. “That’s…that’s crazy talk. That has got to be the nuttiest idea I have ever heard in all my born days. Property is just going to turn up its toes and die? Are you a goddamned
hippie or—what
are
you? Property is important. It’s part of who we are. People define themselves by it.”

“You’re mistaken. The terms people use to define themselves are culturally constructed, and they’re changing all the time. Let me ask you one thing: If you could have a car any time you needed one just by snapping your fingers—wherever you were and wherever you needed to get to—and if you could be quite sure this service would be available to you your whole life long, then would you still want to own one? Would you want to shoulder the burden of taking it in to be serviced, washing it, paying for insurance, and all the rest? I wouldn’t. I bet you wouldn’t either.”

“Some people take pride in having a car not everybody can afford.”

Hiroshi shrugged. “As I’ve said, that kind of thinking will no longer apply in future. There will be nothing that anybody cannot afford—cannot have any time he chooses.”

The American laughed out loud. “I think I’m going crazy here. What kind of business model is that? How do you intend to earn money this way?”

“I don’t,” Hiroshi replied nonchalantly. “Money will also cease to exist. When everybody can have whatever they want, what’s the point of money?”

The American looked at him, stymied. He opened and shut his mouth a couple of times like a fish out of water, but not a sound came out. The man finally sank back in his chair, slapped his hands down flat on the table in front of him in a gesture of helplessness, and gasped, “I give up. The guy’s living in cloud-cuckoo-land.”

Now an earnest, gray-haired Asian man leaned forward in his chair. Folding his hands, he said, “I would like to say a word at this juncture, Kato-san. Do I understand you correctly—that you want to create a situation where, thanks to your self-replicating machine, everybody will have as much as they want of whatever they want in abundance?”

“Precisely,” Hiroshi said, nodding. “Abundance is just the word. It sums up my whole project.”

“Good, then I have indeed understood. Please understand, however, that since this is the case, I must now express my concerns about the amount of raw material at our disposal. Even today we are already experiencing bottlenecks in the world supply of many materials, and we are still very far from being able to provide an abundance of all things to all people. The world population is also increasing, and if you now propose to supply all these people with abundance, are you not concerned that you will use up all the available raw materials in the blink of an eye?”

The men at the table nodded. Obviously, this was a concern shared by many. Charlotte looked up at Hiroshi expectantly. She had never thought about that, but it seemed to her a deeply relevant and disturbing point.

Hiroshi, however, seemed entirely at ease. “No,” he said immediately. “I am not concerned. In fact, I expect quite the opposite. Please bear one thing in mind: thanks to my machine, there is as much labor available on tap as we might wish—as much as we need. That not only means that we will be able to exploit the existing resources far more efficiently than the current cost structures allow, it also means recycling itself will be an inexhaustible resource. Under these conditions, I see no reason why we should have a recycling quotient of anything less than one hundred percent—in which case, the materials at hand will last literally forever, since they can always be reused.” He folded his hands. “If this seems utopian to you, please consider that nature operates exactly the same way and has done for billions of years. Every atom in your body, gentlemen, is billions of years old and has been in the bodies of the dinosaurs, the algae, and the unicellular organisms. Nothing is ever lost in the world of biological life—everything is simply reused again and again. I see no reason why we should not apply the same principle to lifeless matter, to the world of goods and machines.”

For a moment there was stunned silence all around the table. They were impressed, no question. Hiroshi had found the first chink in the armor of their incredulity, and if he kept on like this he would win them all over to his side. All of a sudden Charlotte wasn’t in the least bit tired; rather, she was on the edge of her seat. How often did you get a chance like this in life—to sit in the boardroom of a global corporation and watch world-changing decisions being made? Never in her life would she have believed that conference rooms really did look just like Hollywood showed them.

Someone cleared his throat. It was a roly-poly, cheerful-looking man who looked as though he wouldn’t hurt a fly. Appearances were deceptive—nobody lacking the killer instinct would ever have become a director.

“What about energy?” he asked. “Everything these machines do requires energy after all. There’s no way around that. I might even suppose that your machines use more energy than conventional production technologies. Where are you going to get all this energy? It’s common knowledge by now that our fuel sources are running low. Oil, uranium, whatever else we put in our tanks—it’s all running out. You can’t recycle those. Not even nature can. Everything’s headed toward entropy in the end, and the heat death of the universe.”

“We’ve got a while until then.” Hiroshi nodded. “In principle, you’re quite right; my machine does consume more energy on average. That’s logical enough after all, since it’s replacing human labor. However, these machines will obtain all the energy they need for themselves. We needn’t worry about it.”

“Oh yes? And how are they going to do that?”

Hiroshi raised his arm and pointed skyward. “By using a source of energy that, in human terms at least, is inexhaustible. The sun.”

“What do you mean? Are you going to fit out your minirobots with solar cells? I hardly think that would be enough.”

“You’re quite right; it wouldn’t be. We’ll need full-scale power stations.” Hiroshi couldn’t stay in his chair. He stood up and walked around the conference table as he spoke. “You’ve seen one complex at work today, and you’ve seen a photograph of what this complex looks like when it’s at rest. It’s not much bigger than a small refrigerator. But please don’t let that image fool you into thinking that’s how things will look in the end, that every household will have its miracle machine, but everything else will stay the same. No, this complex is just the seed, and when it takes root and bears fruit we’ll see a completely new industrial structure where everything is connected to everything else and human labor is only needed now and again as a hand on the tiller. And even that will be needed less and less often as the structure develops its own ever-greater complexity, since we can use well-known computing principles and concepts, such as swarm behavior, intelligent agents, and neuronal networking, to give this new industrial system a considerable degree of autonomy. So, in the new world we not only have an Aladdin’s lamp in every kitchen but a complex of complexes that themselves are made up of further complexes right the way down as far as you like, and all these units will be connected to each other, exchanging material, information—and energy, too. There will be complexes that do nothing else but supply energy. And that will be a simple matter, simpler than you can possibly imagine at the moment.”

“I look forward to seeing it,” the American growled for all to hear.

“Current global energy consumption,” Hiroshi continued, “is somewhere in the order of fifteen terawatts. That’s fifteen thousand gigawatts, or fifteen million megawatts, and that includes all the energy we use to heat our homes, move goods and people, power our industry—everything. We obtain this energy by burning coal and oil, or by the fission of uranium atoms. There are one or two other methods as well.” He was walking along the window wall now, silhouetted against the dim cityscape that could be seen through the darkened glass. “But, gentlemen, compare this amount of energy, this fifteen terawatts, with the energy the sun pours down upon Earth every day and has done for billions of years. That’s one hundred eighty thousand terawatts—twelve thousand times what we currently need. Which means we would need to convert just one tiny part of the surface of Earth into a solar power station to make every other source of energy redundant.”

“That’s still a heck of a large area.”

Hiroshi stopped pacing. “On a globe it would be a spot you could barely make out. And again, bear in mind we have unlimited labor at our disposal. We would only have to program this power station; the machines themselves would build it. And maintain it.” He moved off again around the table. “Now you may well protest that the most suitable land areas—deserts, for instance—are mostly in politically unstable countries right now, and so on. Quite right. But here, too, my answer is that we will create abundance. Political instability is essentially the result of hunger, endemic disease, shortages at every conceivable level. Once we can give people everything they need, then politically unstable conditions will also be a thing of the past.”

“But will your machines be able to do that? End hunger?” Timmermans broke in. “You’ll need to grow crops, and crops need land. And land itself is in limited supply.”

“True,” said Hiroshi. “But we have unlimited labor at our disposal. We can tend gardens intensively where right now we have field upon field of monoculture. We can water every stalk of wheat individually if need be. We can make the deserts bloom.”

“And run up against the solar power stations we’re building there.”

Hiroshi laughed out loud. “Can you imagine a world where the deserts we take for granted today will have all disappeared, save for one tiny scrap of land? We can settle that conflict fairly easily.”

Charlotte watched him finish walking around the huge table as if he were completing a ritual. Memories bubbled up inside her, each one rising through her mind and popping to show a picture of the little boy who had seemed so remarkable even then, the boy who was afraid of nothing, who would never turn away from any goal he had set himself. She had known him then, and she saw now that Hiroshi was still that boy, grown now, grown up, but a fully formed version of the seed he had borne within himself even then. Perhaps people never truly changed. Perhaps people were like the planets, following their orbits unswervingly and only looking different because they reflected different light.