Lord of All Things Read online

  “Parts that move from place to place. Others that cut. Others that pump. What kind of machine could that be?”

  Adamson shrugged. “I have no idea. But I know genius when I see it at work, and this”—he pointed to the blueprints on the coffee table—“is genius. I’d like someone capable of thinking all that up working for us instead of for the Reds.”

  “Hmm.” Roberta Jacobs gazed pensively into empty space for a moment. “I don’t know whether that’s really where the front line still runs. Opinions vary on that one.”

  “What if we simply got in touch with him and made an offer? Hiroshi Kato, I mean.”

  The director opened her folder and looked at a sheet inside. “Money? I don’t know. I see here that Kato invented some device that’s been a worldwide sales success for years now—some kind of gizmo they sell in hardware stores and so on. In any case, he doesn’t need to worry about how to fund his retirement. According to my reports, whatever his motives are, money isn’t one of them.”

  Adamson looked at the plans in front of him and felt a pang. “There are other ways to motivate people.”

  Charlotte opened her eyes and stared up into featureless white space. Still dazed with sleep, she wondered whether she was in heaven, but then the moment passed and she realized that it was just the inside of the tent, a milky white expanse of cloth with no seams or other features the eye could linger upon held up by a nest of lightweight poles she could only dimly make out if the sun happened to shine directly on them. So she hadn’t dreamed it. She really had flown halfway around the world to a lone island in the middle of the Pacific to see Hiroshi’s idea.

  Why on earth had she done such a thing? She turned over in bed and propped herself up on one elbow. Though it was remarkably comfortable for a folding camp bed, she still felt the long journey in her bones. What had woken her? She had no idea. A noise. Voices. She could hear voices somewhere off in the distance beyond the tent walls, raised voices, and laughter. Okay. So they were having a good time out here. Good for them. But it still didn’t tell her what her part in all this was. Robots building other robots. Really, he could have just put that into a letter. File under “Happy Memories from Childhood Days.” Anybody else would have done just that. Anybody but Hiroshi.

  She was only here because she had needed to get away from Gary for a while. That was it. Get a change of air. She hadn’t really needed to come all the way to the Pacific for that, though of course the air here was excellent. Having said which…she sniffed. There it was again, that strange smell of rot, of decay. Every now and again a whiff of something like a garbage dump. So much for the good air here. Maybe she should have just gone off to the Highlands somewhere and holed up in a hotel. She didn’t really want to know what Hiroshi had thought up. For some strange reason, she was even afraid to find out more. Odd, when she really thought about it, but there it was.

  Charlotte got out of bed and looked around. There was her suitcase, open, everything there. A neat little folding washstand. And hadn’t Hiroshi said there was a shower around here somewhere as well? She wrapped the thin bathrobe around herself, picked up her toiletry bag, and slipped her feet into her sandals. She popped her head outside the tent. Broad daylight. A busy hubbub up ahead in one of the bigger tents, strongly suggestive of work and research, and then palms beyond…and then behind the palms something shining bright yellow, an intense, artificial yellow. Ah yes, she had spotted that yesterday from the helicopter. There was something back there. Probably part of the current experiment. Or another tent. Well, no doubt she would find out.

  The shower was in a tent right next to hers and clearly labeled. After she had washed she felt much better, and when she found a hair dryer ready and waiting for her back in her tent, she began to feel human once more. She’d just regard the whole interlude as some crazy kind of holiday. Maybe there’d be a chance to talk over old times with Hiroshi. About their childhood, for instance. Or if they were both brave, about what had happened between them back at Harvard. When she emerged into the more-or-less-fresh air, her hair dried, dressed for the day, a young Asian woman with henna hair popped up out of nowhere and waved to her.

  “Breakfast!” she called, her accent suggesting she might not know very much more English than this. Next thing, Charlotte was in the canteen tent, a big, bright, airy place with seven tables and more than forty seats. The tent walls were rolled up on the side facing the beach, giving a magnificent view of the Pacific. “The others already eaten; they at work,” the woman said as she served Charlotte coffee, a fruit basket, and a plate with a couple of croissants. They were as good as anything she could have bought in Paris. Shortly thereafter Hiroshi turned up; the waitress had obviously told him she was awake.

  “So?” he asked. “Did you sleep well?”

  “I’m gradually shaking off the feeling this is all a dream,” Charlotte admitted.

  He sat down across from her. “That’s odd, I’m just beginning to get that feeling. I can hardly believe you really came.”

  In other words, he was still in love with her. She looked down at her coffee. What was this connection between them? She felt she would never understand it. No more than she would ever understand Hiroshi. There was not a language spoken anywhere in the world that could help you really understand another human being.

  “So you buried yourself away all these years,” she pronounced. “In endless work. It shows.”

  “Did I bury myself? You just didn’t know where I was. Nobody knew. It had to be that way. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t keep up with what was going on in the world.”

  “You didn’t even tell your best friend where you were going. What’s his name? Rodney. I think he was really hurt.”

  “I’ve visited him since then and explained,” Hiroshi said. “He understands. But okay, perhaps he only forgave me because he’s happy anyway. Who knows.”

  “Happy? What’s his news?”

  “He got his dream job—working for the SETI project. He’s married, too. His wife’s an astronomer. I imagine the two of them talk night and day about the missing-aliens problem.”

  Charlotte tore her croissant into little morsels. Married. The word was like a black hole. Why hadn’t she married Gary? For some reason, it had felt like the wrong thing to do, and then it felt wrong that it felt wrong.

  “And your parents?” she asked. Questions, that was the thing: ask questions and stop him from asking about her. She didn’t want to talk about herself, not today, not now. “How are they?”

  Hiroshi’s face fell. “My mother’s fine. She has a job she likes, and she’s always arguing with her boss, which she also likes.” He sighed. “My father died.”

  She lifted her head and felt a pang, even though she had never known the man. She had only seen a photo and knew what Hiroshi had told her.

  Ah yes. And there was what she knew from the penknife.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” she said. “Did the cancer come back?”

  Hiroshi shook his head. “Not even. He just went for a routine checkup at the hospital. Like every year. But somehow one thing led to another, there was an infection that needed treating, fever or I don’t know what, and in the end he died.”

  “That’s dreadful. He wasn’t even that old, was he?”

  “Just over fifty.” Hiroshi’s eyes clouded over with sadness. “That was two years ago. I came out of hiding for the funeral and flew to America. I owed it to him, I think. And that was when I finally met his family.” He sighed. “I can’t even bring myself to call them my family, although I suppose they are. Anyway, it was hatred at first sight. The coffin was hardly in the ground and they were already setting out to make sure I would never get a dime of the Leak family fortune. As if I cared about that. It’s enough that I share chromosomes with those people.” He laughed bitterly. “It would be an interesting case study in US law. It turns out that when they had my fat
her sign the settlement, they had built some clever little loopholes into the contract so that when he died the money they had given him would revert safely to the family. That was really interesting.”

  She looked at him. It must have affected him deeply, but he wouldn’t let it show. “That’s a horrible story.”

  “And so unnecessary. As if an inheritance meant anything to me. Anyway, I don’t want their money.”

  He let the sentence hang in the air, so Charlotte found herself asking, “What do you want?”

  He looked at her. “I don’t want their money. I want to destroy their world.”

  He wouldn’t say anything more about it, and when she tried to ask about what had happened, all he said was, “It doesn’t matter.” He seemed to regret having let the remark slip. That was when Charlotte really became interested in what he might have dreamed up out here.

  When she demanded that he finally tell her the secret as he had promised, Hiroshi asked, “Do you remember what I was telling you last night?”

  Charlotte nodded. “Robots that build robots.”

  “Exactly. Except that it’s not as easy as you might imagine. Once you get down to brass tacks, you soon realize any kind of machine that makes stuff is much bigger than the stuff it makes, and much more complex, too. To make even a dumb little plastic party hat, you need a machine as big as a bus, and to make a bus, you need a factory the size of a city block. And so on. There’s no such thing as a machine that can make a copy of itself.”

  “With one exception,” Charlotte added. She had to speak up. She had thought of it last night as she was falling asleep.

  Hiroshi looked at her, suitably impressed. “What would that be?”

  “Women,” she said. “Women can make copies of themselves. With a bit of software from the man, but there are species where the female doesn’t even need that.”

  He laughed, visibly relieved he hadn’t overlooked something. “Well, okay. But those are living beings. That’s fundamentally different. The new life-form they make is much smaller to begin with, and then the trick is that it can grow by itself. That works for living creatures, but just try it with a table or a DVD player.”

  “If you’d come up with women as an example, you’d better believe I would have something to say about it. Comparing women to machines—ugh!”

  He shook his head. “Honestly, I never thought of it. Not in all these years. Probably because I don’t want other living beings to take over the work that has to be done. We tried that model once—and we know how that turned out.”

  Charlotte drained the last of her coffee. “Okay, so now it’s your turn. Hiroshi tries his model.”

  He leaned back and folded his hands in front of him. “I approached the problem from the other end. What’s simple to build, and what sorts of machines can we build simply? That was my basic question. Look at it that way, and it’s really more of a geometrical problem. What’s the simplest form a machine can take? What’s the very bare minimum? I spent years pondering these questions when I was a kid—”

  “When you were a kid?”

  “I realized quite early on it wouldn’t be all that simple to make a robot that can build robots.”

  “I imagine you did.”

  He didn’t respond directly but seemed sunken in reminiscence. “It’s really very practical to still be a child, to know little or nothing of what they call reality. It means you can sometimes go down paths that a grown-up would refuse to consider. An adult would say, ‘Well, that wouldn’t work anyway, I know that much.’ So he stays on the beaten track, while the child is cheerfully striking out in entirely new directions. At the time I said to myself, ‘Well, a robot may not be able to build a whole other robot, but perhaps it can build an arm. And even if it can’t build an arm, then it can at least build a finger. Then you can have another robot build a foot, and so on.’ Eventually, you’d have enough fingers and arms and feet and heads to be able to put together whole robots after all.” He opened his hands out into a fan and then interlaced his fingers. “Of course, it doesn’t work that way either, but the basic premise was good and took me other places. My idea was to build not a single robot but an ensemble of several functional parts, each as simple as possible in itself. Then, taken together, these make up an effective whole and can work with one another. Then, depending on how they arrange and align themselves, they can actually build more functional parts. I call the whole thing a ‘complex.’ ”

  Charlotte shook her head. “I really can’t imagine how that would work. Sorry.”

  He looked at her thoughtfully. “Okay. Imagine you have a very simple machine composed of, say, just twenty-six parts. On its own it only knows how to make one of these parts. However, you also have twenty-five other machines that also each know how to make one other part. Then in the end you would have enough for one more machine, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yes.” Charlotte considered all this. “But the other machines—what if they are made up of other parts in turn?”

  “Then you’ll need a few more machines.”

  “And they in turn are made of other parts. The whole thing gets out of hand.”

  Hiroshi raised his brows. “That’s what I meant when I said it’s more of a geometrical problem. You have to construct the parts so that each of them has as many uses as possible.”

  “And you did that.”

  “I had an uneventful childhood and not much else to do.”

  Charlotte thought about it. “I can’t really imagine what such a machine would look like. Only twenty-six parts and able to produce one of its own constituent pieces.”

  “It’s just an example. In reality, once again it’s a little more complicated than that. You have to be able to make the parts from something, meaning raw materials have to be extracted somehow. Then you have to shape them, drill them, and so on. So what I did was to break down all the processes of machine-tool technology into the most basic possible steps, into their constituent parts, so to speak. And then I developed the simplest possible machines that could perform one or at most two of those functions.”

  “What kind of functions should I be thinking of here?”

  He ticked them off on his fingers. “They have to be able to saw, join, weld, quench, clamp, cut, turn, drill, press—”

  Charlotte waved a hand. “Okay, okay, I understand.”

  “Not all of those functions are equally important. Some of these functions have to be able to interact with the world around. So one such function is to be able to identify raw materials, and that’s done by a unit I call the prospector. But then the material is actually extracted by another unit, the miner. Then it’s taken away to be processed by the transporter. And so on. Then there are two absolutely central functions on top of all this. The first is power generation and transmission, which is the most fundamental of all, since nothing happens without energy. And the second is programming. There has to be some control system for how all the individual pieces work together. If a unit ends up in the wrong place or starts work at the wrong moment, then the whole thing falls apart.”

  Charlotte tried to imagine how that would work. She looked down into her cup as she pondered, so that Hiroshi asked whether she wanted more coffee.

  “No, thanks. I…” She tried to put into words the images that were going through her head. “So what you’ve done, almost, is build a flock of little robots that are all different but that can make more of themselves by working together. And they build the other robots one by one rather than all at once. Have I got that right?”

  “Exactly!” He was enthusiastic now. “You’ve said it just right. That’s exactly it. A flock of robots under central control. And they reproduce by working together to build one part after another until there’s another flock. That’s the basic idea.”

  Charlotte picked up her cup. “But once you’ve got a flock of robots, how does it
make me a fresh cup of coffee?” She couldn’t imagine that, no matter how hard she tried. Had she argued him into a corner with her question? It certainly didn’t look like it.

  Hiroshi’s eyes lit up. “Excellent question.” He was beaming all across his face. “And you’re quite right—at the moment they can’t. That has to do with the way coffee is produced—you have to plant the bushes, tend to them, water them, harvest the beans, and all of that, then you have to process your harvest until you eventually have roasted coffee beans to grind and brew. All that lies in the future for the time being. There have to be a great many more of our complexes—our flocks, as you say—before some of them can devote themselves full-time to coffee. In every case, a complex is a unit in its own right that can communicate with other complexes at a higher level—in this instance it would be a ‘coffee complex,’ a flock of flocks, all busy producing coffee. Later on we could have as many of these higher levels as you can imagine—flocks of flocks, and flocks of flocks of flocks. The higher the level, the less central control or programming these complexes would need. Rather, they’d increasingly be able to work together as a sort of swarm. That’s the way our brains work, more or less.”

  “But there would have to be a ‘ship complex’ to transport the coffee, wouldn’t there?”

  “Not necessarily. The complexes could do their work in totally different ways from humans. I can quite easily imagine that a sufficiently large number of functional units could make a sort of pipeline on the seabed and then pass the coffee on to its destination one bean at a time.”

  It was a breathtaking image. “A pipeline on the seabed? You would need an incredible number of units for that.”

  “So what? They make themselves, on their own, as many as I choose. All I have to do is write the program for it. As soon as it’s written, the whole thing just happens by itself. Programs don’t wear out.”