Lord of All Things Page 33

  He looked at her, studying her face, quite relaxed in sleep, calm and as beautiful as ever. She would always be beautiful her whole life long; she was that kind of woman. It felt so incredibly right that she was there with him. Hiroshi didn’t want to think about the fact she would be leaving him again in a few days to go back to her Scottish craftsman. She must be like a fish out of water with a man like that.

  A map displaying the plane’s route had appeared on the little screen on the wall above them. He saw they would be landing very soon. In half an hour at most. Hiroshi looked away, buried his face in Charlotte’s neck, and wished this moment would never end. The movement woke her, however, and she sat up, dazed with sleep. She looked around and seemed quite startled before she remembered where she was.

  “Oof,” she said. “Are we already there?”

  “Not long now,” Hiroshi said sadly.

  “The time passed quickly.” She felt the mattress. “A real bed in an airplane is something else again, I have to say. I’m used to narrow seats.”

  Hiroshi sat up reluctantly. “We should freshen up. You can go use the bathroom first if you like.”

  “What passes for a bathroom on a plane,” she said but crawled past him eagerly enough and vanished into the tiny cabin.

  Hiroshi used the time to check his mail. Miroslav had sent him video clips showing the first new units being assembled and joining the complex. He showed them to Charlotte when she returned, freshly combed and smelling of something good.

  “It’s crazy,” she said, genuinely impressed. “It really works. Your complex has had its first children.”

  Hiroshi made a face. He didn’t like the comparison, even if everyone used it. “They’re not children. They’re replicas. Machines.” He looked up. “Otherwise, what we’re doing there on Paliuk would be considered child labor.”

  She laughed, not seeming to understand he was serious. “I’m just saying. This construction is somehow so—how can I even put it…? Not one of your machines looks anything like what one would imagine they should. To be honest, I’ve been asking myself the whole time how you came up with all the ideas for it.”

  Hiroshi looked at her. How beautiful she was. And how she belonged to him, even if she didn’t want to see it. “Do you want to know the truth?” he asked.

  She raised her eyebrows. “Of course.”

  “Most of it I dreamed.”

  “Dreamed?”

  “Yes. Even when I was a kid, I would spend all day racking my brains over some problem and then the answer would come to me at night in my dreams.”

  He could still remember those dreams vividly. They had been bold, colorful, and somehow quite different from his other dreams, even the erotic ones—which had sometimes been fairly bold and colorful themselves. If he had been even the slightest bit religious, he would have been ready to swear some god had talked to him and revealed the shapes of everything he was to build.

  “You dreamed it,” Charlotte said again, tucking a strand of hair back from her forehead, lost in thought. “That’s really very strange.”

  A soft chime, different this time, then the pilot’s voice. They had permission to land, and regulations required that all passengers strap themselves in for landing. Hiroshi switched off his computer, shut the lid, and put it away.

  “Are you worried about what they’re going to say?” Charlotte asked once they were sitting alongside each other, their ears popping as the plane rapidly lost height.

  “Why should I be worried?”

  “Because you ignored clear instructions.”

  “And what are they going to do, apart from get a little worked up?”

  She turned to him and looked at him in that way of hers he liked so much, that made him feel so close to her. “Aren’t you afraid that one day you’ll go too far?” she asked.

  Hiroshi thought for a moment and then shook his head. “No. I’m only afraid that I won’t go far enough.”

  Obviously, she hadn’t slept quite enough on the plane. As the car stopped in front of the huge glass tower block and they were supposed to get out, Charlotte was suddenly utterly overcome by exhaustion. She would have liked more than anything to stay in the car, curled up on the soft, warm leather of the backseat, and shut her eyes.

  “Will they even let me in?” she asked Hiroshi, hoping she would be escorted to a hotel room somewhere to sleep it off.

  Hiroshi, however, seemed fit as a fiddle. “They’ll have to,” he said, squaring his shoulders. “I’ve already announced you.”

  Charlotte struggled to keep her eyelids open as gravity tugged them down again. “Announced me? What as?” Hopefully, not as his fiancée or something embarrassing like that.

  Hiroshi gave a quick smile. “As my muse.”

  “Oh my word!”

  It was no good, though. The chauffeur shut the car door and wished them a pleasant stay; other staff in smart uniforms rushed up to take charge of their baggage and hold the gleaming doors open for them…and in they went. A vast cavern of glass and steel swallowed them up. The elevator was about as large as a student apartment, albeit unfurnished. They went up and up until it seemed they would reach the sky itself. Security guards scanned them with flat, plastic-shrouded wands. “In case of bugs,” one of them told her, a shy young man who clearly liked the look of her but was determined not to let her notice.

  Then the conference room. A table the size of an airfield, where men in dark suits stood up and shook their hands and said how very glad they were to see them. It was so cool that Charlotte shivered. She would have liked a cup of coffee, but Hiroshi had explained on the way over that would be impossible during the meeting itself.

  Hiroshi introduced a bald, wiry man as Jens Rasmussen, his business partner for all his other inventions. Rasmussen seemed a little more relaxed and a whole lot more pleasant than the others around the table. And then finally, the boss of the whole corporation, Larry Gu, a wizened old man who looked like a white-bearded cicada. He didn’t stand up to greet them but simply bowed slightly in his seat.

  At last, they got to sit down. Charlotte ducked her head down between her shoulders and told herself the meeting couldn’t last forever.

  “Welcome,” said the old man in a soft voice, almost a whisper. “I am particularly pleased to meet a living, breathing muse, if only once in my life.” The muted laughter around the table stopped as soon as Gu lifted his hand—not even lifted; he simply put his hand on the table and raised one finger. He had trained his people well, she had to hand it to him. “We have prepared a few questions before your arrival, Mr. Kato, and we hope you will be able to answer them to everyone’s satisfaction. We are all agreed that your experiment is a quite extraordinary feat of research, albeit with no clear result as yet, and that it therefore deserves our fullest attention. Mr. Timmermans, your own objection, please.”

  A thin man who looked like he could have been a particularly humorless school principal raised his head. “Piet Timmermans, director for Europe. I’ve studied your proposal, Mr. Kato, and I have to say I am fundamentally not convinced. I don’t wish to accuse you of seeking to perpetrate a deliberate swindle here. But I must assume you are simply mistaken. If your proposal had been placed in front of me five years ago, I would have turned it down flat and refused to invest so much as a penny. I simply cannot imagine a machine of the sort that you describe here could function at all.”

  Hiroshi had been sitting still as a statue, staring straight at the man on the other side of the table. When it was clear he had said all he had to say, Hiroshi came to life. “Well, Mr. Timmermans, I don’t wish to rush to judgment on your powers of imagination,” he replied politely enough, but with an edge to his voice Charlotte had never heard before, “but you are quite mistaken.”

  He opened up his computer and unspooled a thin cable from a little hatch in the table Charlotte hadn’t noticed before
, then plugged it in. The next moment a screen behind them lit up, and the image on Hiroshi’s computer appeared.

  “I received this video footage from the Pacific shortly before we landed,” Hiroshi declared and began to play the series of clips that he and Charlotte had already watched on the plane. The video showed the machines building a new unit from parts they had themselves produced, the new unit quivering and quaking into motion, and then joining the flock of other units as though it had been with them from the start. “You see, the machine works and works exactly as planned.”

  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 eff
iciently 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.”