Lord of All Things Page 39

  “I’m simulating nanomachines,” Hiroshi said.

  “Why just simulate them? Why not build them?” She bit into another grape.

  Hiroshi’s eye twitched and he rubbed at it. “It’s something of a chicken-and-egg problem,” he admitted, wondering how on earth he could explain it best.

  “Chicken and egg?” Charlotte repeated, nibbling. “I don’t understand.”

  “I started with simulations because you can do everything with those—no risk, no trouble, no big investments. I had to write my own programs, of course, but that’s not difficult.”

  “Okay, but where does it get you? What can you do if you can do everything? What do you actually get apart from pretty pictures?”

  “Diagrams,” Hiroshi said. “Think of it as a drawing board for sketching microscopically small machines.” He turned to one of the monitors, where a new unit of some twenty million atoms was just taking shape. Every atom was represented by a tiny sphere, its color indicating which chemical element it was. “What you have to bear in mind is that atoms aren’t really little balls like you see here. Atoms are actually incredibly complicated things, almost inconceivably so. The paradox is that although atoms are supposed to be the smallest building blocks of matter, for the most part they actually consist of nothing but empty space and electrical fields. And every kind of atom is different. Every chemical element has properties that none of the others have. They have different valences; they form different bonds with other atoms; they act upon one another at different distances—all of that. You can’t just swap them out for one another like swapping a red Lego block for a blue one. An atom of copper behaves quite differently from an atom of iron; a phosphorous atom is different from an oxygen atom.…Every atom has its own geometry when you use it in a construction.” He smiled. “It would be an interesting question to ask—why are there so many different chemical elements anyway? I sometimes think that perhaps that’s how many Lego blocks you need to build a universe.”

  “And you’ve written all this into your program? It knows exactly how the various atoms behave?”

  “Quite. And I use it to test out variants. I’ve been using it for years now.” He held his hands up in front of him and curved the fingers inward to make a hollow globe. “Imagine that my system is like one of those Russian dolls where one doll fits inside the next. Right in the middle is the program representing the atoms, which calculates how they interact and group themselves if you place them in certain positions. Then, nested around that is a program that constantly shifts these positions and sometimes swaps elements, dropping in an iron for a carbon, or a sodium for a lithium, and so on.” He held his hands a little farther apart. “Then, one level further up there’s a program working to try out all the various strategies. Which changes are most effective? Is it better to take one small step at a time, or to swap out half of the atoms every now and again, or to shift them all to entirely different positions? Then, the highest level is a control program that looks at each molecule produced and decides what it might be good for. Whether it’s a useful building block. Then, it reports down to the lower levels whether there’s been an improvement, in which case they carry on with what they’ve been doing, or not, in which case they go back to the previous version. And on and on it goes. It’s a sort of synthetic evolution.” He lowered his hands. “Though the basic principle is still the same as it was on Paliuk. I’m basically building the same machines I had back then—positioners, transporters, prospectors, cutters, and so on. Just millions of times smaller.”

  “But you don’t know exactly how to build them.”

  “Ah but I do,” Hiroshi declared. Now they were getting to the heart of the matter. “I know just how to do it.”

  “Then why not build them?”

  “Because I would need one of these machines in the first place in order to build others.”

  She opened her eyes wide and then laughed out loud. “That’s a pretty pickle!”

  Hiroshi spun his chair around and reached for the keyboard of the computer he mainly worked at. This was where he fed software to all the other machines. “Pay attention now; I’ll explain everything. When we’re working at the level of direct manipulation of atoms—which they call nano-assembly, by the way—there are three main problems. You’ve already spotted the first one: the numbers problem. It’s not much use if all we can do is move one atom at a time. We’ve been able to do that for a while with scanning tunneling microscopes, or with AFM. But to build something that we could even see, we would need to move trillions of atoms, and then it matters enormously whether you can move ten or a thousand or a billion of them at once, since that means it could be one second or one year—or one hundred thousand years—until the thing’s ready.”

  “The couch, for instance,” Charlotte teased.

  “For instance.”

  “And the other two problems?”

  “The other two problems,” Hiroshi declared, “are known as the ‘fat-fingers problem’ and the ‘sticky-fingers problem.’ ”

  “You guys invent fun names for things at least,” Charlotte declared and set about finishing all the rest of the grapes. “If nothing else.”

  “The fat-fingers problem is this—that you have to be able to bring an atom into position somehow. To do that you need a manipulator arm, which obviously has to be made on the atomic scale itself. Then you have to put a second atom next to the first so that the two of them can bond. So you need another manipulator arm—”

  “And sooner or later the arms are going to get in each other’s way,” Charlotte concluded.

  “Exactly. Even if you can avoid that with some nifty bits of construction—and I find that I can—there’s still the question of why the atom you’ve been carting around might even want to leave the end of the manipulator arm. It’s held in place by atomic bonds, and there is a whole array of those that might be in play at any one time—covalent bonding, ionic bonding, metallic bonding, the Van der Waals forces, dipole interactions, hydrogen bridging, and so on. So, it’s not enough to be able to move an atom where you want it; you also have to make the manipulator arm let go of it. That’s the sticky-finger problem.”

  “Which you have also solved,” she guessed.

  “To an extent,” Hiroshi said.

  “That doesn’t sound too convincing.”

  He turned to the computer. “I’ll show you where it all goes wrong.” He pulled up the image he’d studied more often than any of the rest, the image he knew by heart; the one that he had stared at until he felt drops of blood must be bursting from his forehead. “Here it is. I call it the impossible molecule.”

  He looked at the creation. Consisting of barely more than twenty thousand atoms, it was tiny by nanotech standards. It was shaped vaguely like a lancet, narrowing at one end. It didn’t narrow to a tip with only a single atom at the end, though, as one might expect, but rather into a complex intertwining geometry of various different atoms. A tube ran through the whole length of the structure so that atoms could be fed down toward the tip, and halfway down, the whole thing was pinched at the waist like a sandglass by the electric forces at work. It was beautiful. There was no other way to say it. Even if it was his nightmare, his greatest riddle, his unyielding enigma, it was beautiful.

  “This is the only structure I’ve found so far that solves all three problems of nanotechnology,” he said. “The only finger that really works. This molecule can position atoms without getting in the way of other manipulator arms, it can pick up and let go, and just to sweeten the deal, it has an astonishing throughput capacity. The only problem is that there’s no way to build it with the currently available means. There are a whole bunch of atoms in there that have to be in positions they would never take up on their own, bonding at angles that they couldn’t actually form.” He spun the image around and pointed at the screen. “Here, for example. This group of aluminum atoms—impossi
ble in that position. Or this area toward the back, the nest of carbon, hydrogen, and silicon atoms—can’t be done. But if you leave it out, the finger doesn’t work.”

  “That means either you have to find some totally different concept, or perhaps what you are trying to do can’t be done.”

  “It’s even more complicated than that,” Hiroshi confessed. “The big joke is that we could build this molecule if we already had it to work with. If we could manage to place all these atoms in what are actually impossible positions, then they would stay there. Look at this,” he said and started an animation he had written. A construction unit popped up on-screen and the animation started. Transporters brought atoms, holding them with the fingers and passed them to construction units that took hold of them with manipulator arms that similarly ended in fingers, which brought them to the assembly site and placed them in position. The units rippled and flowed gracefully as they moved, like the legs of a millipede.

  “It really looks like your complex from back on the island,” Charlotte said after watching for a while and seeing how the fingers built a duplicate of themselves. “By the way, I still have the scarf your machine knitted me.”

  Hiroshi had to smile. What a thing to think of right now.

  When the animation was over and the finished finger was clearly visible, Charlotte leaned back in her chair and said, “Well. You certainly have a problem.”

  A gong chimed somewhere at the back of the house. Hiroshi shrugged. “Who doesn’t? At any rate, it passes the time. That was the signal that lunch is served.”

  As they ate, Charlotte told him more about the expedition she would be taking part in. “The leader is a man called Adrian Cazar, a climatologist at Boston University. He wants to survey a Russian island in the Arctic where the effects of climate change are particularly obvious. It seems the island has been covered in ice for at least the past hundred thousand years. Now the satellite images show us the ice sheet has collapsed twice recently—once seven years ago, and then again last October. He asked me to join them.”

  “And what do you expect to find there?” Hiroshi asked, intrigued. “As a paleoanthropologist?”

  Charlotte pointed her fork at him. “Good question. I once happened upon a passing remark in a travel report about Siberia that human artifacts dating back at least ten thousand years have supposedly been found on islands in the Siberian Arctic. As I say, it was just mentioned in passing. I expect the author didn’t even find it remarkable.”

  “But you did.”

  “It set the alarm bells ringing. Ten thousand years ago? There were hardly any humans on the planet at that point. Back then our big problem was survival, not overpopulation. Nobody was suffering from obesity. Why in the world would humans have settled such an inhospitable region? If you have a free choice, then you go and live where life is best, don’t you?” She dug her fork into the vegetable gratin. “As far as I could check up on it, it’s true. And I’ve been interested in the topic ever since.” She pointed at her plate. “This tastes wonderful by the way. The fresh herbs are fantastic.”

  “I’ll be sure to tell her.” Hiroshi thought about all this. “But you don’t know whether you’ll find anything on this particular island, do you?”

  “No,” Charlotte sighed. “I’m beginning to think it was a crazy idea. I’ll probably find that my main job is interpreter, since none of the others speak Russian. It might have come in handy as well that my father’s the French ambassador to Russia. We needed a lot of clearance papers—it’s a restricted military zone up there. And perhaps…” She stopped. There was one more thing she had wanted to say, but she thought better of it at the last moment.

  Hiroshi looked at her. “Perhaps?”

  “Oh, nothing.” She forced a smile. “I’m being positive about it. Three months on an island where it never gets warmer than ten degrees even in high summer. If nothing else, it will be an unforgettable experience.”

  CHARLOTTE’S ISLAND

  1

  At last, they were sitting in the helicopter that would bring them and their equipment to Saradkov Island. It was a big Russian Air Force machine that looked like a flying train wagon on the inside and generally gave the impression of having seen service in the Second World War. The pilot was a man with Mongolian features and an unfriendly kiss-my-ass attitude. He had grunted a few words of greeting and then not said another word since. Despite the bitter cold, the first thing he did was to take off his flight jacket, and now he was sitting at the joystick with his shirt half-open. He wore an Elvis T-shirt beneath it.

  The copilot, however, was cheerfulness itself. He was astonishingly young—in fact, Charlotte found herself thinking, he looked like a high-school kid, some happy mother’s pride and joy. She found it hard to believe he could fly this helicopter. But he was friendly and interested in the expedition and spoke pretty good English—as one might expect of pilots these days, Charlotte reflected. In fact, all the Russians they had dealt with so far had spoken at least passable English. Most of them were so keen to try out what they knew on the American visitors that Charlotte increasingly felt she had nothing to do. She would have to look at the whole thing as an interesting adventure holiday, she told herself, snuggling deeper into her down jacket. It was as thick as a sleeping bag, but she was still shivering. Three months on an Arctic island. How often did a person get to experience something like that? That said, she was gradually coming to realize why the Arctic islands were not a particularly popular holiday destination.

  For a while it had seemed they would spend most of their three months just getting there. The group had met in Amsterdam, where they were joined by Leon van Hoorn, a Dutch photojournalist who worked for various well-known magazines and whom Adrian had somehow persuaded to come along and document their expedition. Leon was at least ten years older than the rest of the group and had already been all over the world; when he began to tell one of his stories, she felt like a timid homebody. He was also a big man in excellent shape who gave off an air of unshakable self-confidence. He made her feel he would be watching out for her, and Charlotte felt much better having the journalist along as part of the group. Even now he looked as though he flew in helicopters the way a Parisian took the metro. He was sitting opposite Charlotte and flirting at the top of his voice with Angela MacMillan, the biologist, who sat next to him with a book on her lap.

  A book! Charlotte couldn’t imagine how anybody could concentrate on a book in a situation like this—in the belly of a roaring, rattling aircraft that stank of diesel fumes, where the noise threatened to shake every bone in their bodies to powder. But Angela was, if anything, cooler than Leon. A stern-looking woman with a helmet of close-cropped hair—“Washing and brushing your hair is just a waste of time,” she had declared—the biologist was admirably tactless and always said exactly what she thought. “I don’t know what you’re doing here,” she had told Charlotte to her face as soon as they shook hands for the first time. And when Leon van Hoorn had been recounting his adventures in Antarctica, she asked him what it was like having sex in such conditions. Leon had laughed and asked why she wanted to know. “Well, I like the look of you,” Angela had said without further ado. “Could be I jump your bones.” That had left even the worldly Leon speechless.

  So far, though, nothing further had come of it that Charlotte could see. From Amsterdam they had flown to Helsinki, since Adrian had gotten it into his head that he had to see as much of Europe as possible while he was there. In the hotel the two women had shared a room, and Angela had declared she still had to take a good look at Leon, then launched into a lecture on the varieties of courtship behavior in the animal world and the function of each. Charlotte understood about half of it. That was the first time she had seriously felt she was in the wrong place. Angela wasn’t for the fainthearted, but she was a lot of fun. Charlotte wondered how she would get on with her father, the diplomat, the man who practically never said what
he was really thinking.

  From Helsinki they rented a car and drove to St. Petersburg, where Adrian wasn’t satisfied until he’d taken a city tour. The next day they took the train to Murmansk, which was the first time Morley got sick.

  Morley Mann was a climatologist, like Adrian. He specialized in computer climate simulations, and he was Leon’s opposite in every way: tousle-haired, rail thin, diffident, and so vulnerable that he awoke protective instincts in even the toughest among them. In St. Petersburg he had insisted on getting something to eat before they boarded the train and chose a fast-food stand that looked so unappetizing that Charlotte wouldn’t even have trusted their paper napkins. “I have to keep my blood sugar up,” Morley had explained. Shortly after Volkhov, he had rushed to the toilet to throw up for the first time. It was clear Morley would have trouble up in the Arctic.

  Adrian had told her Morley had insisted on coming along. For the experience. To prove he was a man, perhaps. She learned that he had read a self-help book telling him to do what he was afraid of and was determined to follow its advice. Which was why he was now hanging slumped in the safety webbing, white-faced and halfway to a coma.

  “Don’t worry about me,” he had croaked. “I’ll be fine once we get there.”

  In Murmansk they had collected the equipment that had been shipped ahead and boarded a Russian Navy icebreaker, which took them to a military base on Novaya Zemlya. Inevitably, Morley had gotten seasick on the way. At the base their equipment was thoroughly examined for something like the seventh time before they were allowed to load everything onto the helicopter. Then they took off. It made no difference that it was already evening; they were north of the Arctic Circle, and the sun would not dip below the horizon until October.

  Adrian told the copilot everything there was to tell about the expedition: that they were from Boston University, that the data they collected on Saradkov Island would be fed into a worldwide project researching up to a hundred polar islands over the coming years in order to improve climate models, that Saradkov would be the first Russian island in the database. He had already repeated these details a hundred times to the sponsors and funding bodies, to the press, and even to her, Charlotte. When he was done, the copilot asked whether Adrian had heard that Saradkov was also known as Devil’s Island. Charlotte put her head back and shut her eyes, pretending she hadn’t heard. She had deliberately said nothing to Adrian about the legends.