Lord of All Things (35 page)

A man spoke up who had been silent until now, a serious-looking, brown-skinned man, doubtless Indian.

“Mr. Kato,” he said gently, almost imploringly, “what will people actually do in this world that you envisage?”

“They’ll do as they like,” Hiroshi answered straightaway. He replied almost as a reflex.

“Is that enough? To do as one likes? Only as we like?”

Hiroshi stopped pacing and looked at the man as though seeing him for the first time. “Do you do as you like, Mr. Chandra?” he asked. “Right now, at this very moment, are you doing something that you wouldn’t do if you didn’t have to?”

Chandra wagged his head in that curious gesture Charlotte remembered so well from her time in Delhi. Indians didn’t shake their head to say no, they wagged it.

“Not an easy question to answer,” he said. “I am attending this meeting in my capacity as director for India and East Africa. If the meeting had not been called, then doubtless I would be doing something else right now. I am primarily here because it is my duty. On the other hand, the discussion today has been so entirely fascinating that I would very likely have come of my own free will. Broadly, I can say that I hold a post I am very glad to have. If you asked me whether I would hold the same position even in a world where one was no longer forced to work for a living, then I would say yes. Because it’s interesting work and I feel I am doing something worthwhile. But that does not mean there are not parts of the job I do not enjoy so much. That’s entirely normal.”

Hiroshi nodded. “Well then. You’ve answered your own question. Art collectors will find that painters are still hard at work, but garbage collectors will probably find better things to do than go to work.”

“That’s fine, but what about waiters? Prison wardens? Lawyers? Nurses? Childcare workers? What about cooks? Are people only ever going to eat meals cooked by robots in the future?”

Hiroshi hesitated. The others may not have noticed, but Charlotte saw it. This was the first objection that actually ruffled him.

“I don’t know how the world of work will change in the future,” he admitted at last. “Nobody can know. The only thing that’s certain is it will change. Some jobs will disappear before others. Some jobs can never be replaced by robots. We’ll also have to establish what other kinds of satisfaction people find in their vocations, apart from money, since you can be sure money will no longer exist in its current form.”

“I think you are more likely to cause dreadful boredom for large swaths of the population,” the Dutchman chided him, pursing his lips. “Your invention will change the world so that most people will spend most of their lives in front of the television, since they will otherwise be bored to death.”

Hiroshi started pacing again. “I don’t believe that,” he said resolutely. “I think boredom is something that must be learned. A little child is never bored, at least not in the way you mean. Children always have plans; they’re always up to something. Being bored is something we learn in school and then, for sure, a great many of us learn it in our jobs. And then when we have become used to being bored, it’s hard to unlearn the habit, possibly because some fundamental biological mechanism that aims to save energy takes advantage of our shortcomings.” He had finished his tour of the table and was back at his seat. “Perhaps there will be a transitional era, a time of readjustment. Maybe. But in the long run, we will not be bored in the world to come,” he proclaimed, grasping the back of his seat as though he stood at a lectern. “We will simply stop doing boring things, and instead we will devote ourselves to the interesting things in life. And, gentlemen, no matter how hard I look, I can find nothing wrong with this future and no cause for concern.”

They sat there, unmoving, looking at him as though paralyzed. The spell only lifted when Larry Gu began to clap softly and broke the silence.

“Thank you, Mr. Kato,” he whispered in a voice that sounded like a dental drill in a neighboring room. “I think I speak for everybody when I say we have no objections to you continuing your work. We will all be pleasantly surprised by the world you are busy creating, and we are most interested—”

Just then, Hiroshi’s cell phone beeped. It was the worst possible time for it to happen. Charlotte noticed the gleam of displeasure at this interruption in the old man’s eyes. And she noticed how Hiroshi jumped.

“I beg your pardon,” he said, picking the phone up from the table. He turned pale when he read the message on the display.

Hiroshi had committed a terrible faux pas. Charlotte didn’t need to be told—she saw it in the eyes of everybody around the table and in their reactions. Doubtless, it was obligatory to switch off cell phones before a board meeting, and Hiroshi had simply forgotten—or perhaps he had deliberately neglected to do so.

He looked up. “I beg your pardon once more for this interruption. This is an emergency report from the test grounds that has been sent with priority override; any other message would have been put on hold. I am most dreadfully sorry for the unfortunate timing, but I am afraid we will have to return to Paliuk straightaway.”

“Has something happened?” Larry Gu asked.

Hiroshi hesitated, cradling the cell phone in his hand. “Let’s just say that an unexpected development in the experiment makes my personal presence there indispensable.”

He was getting home later every night, and it was all thanks to those damned blueprints. Even the doorman had noticed. “Good evening, Mr. Adamson. Hardly worth going home these days, is it?” he’d quipped recently.

And despite that, he had gotten nothing done. He just sat there with the blueprints spread out on his desk, staring at them as though waiting for divine inspiration or for his gaze to burn holes in the paper. H
e
’
d noticed a few things, of course. That the paper on which the plans were drawn smelled faintly of something that might have been joss sticks. And that the Chinese didn’t care about sticking to international conventions for technical drawing. And that Hiroshi Kato didn’t seem to care about the conventions for anything.

All useless insights, of course. The truth was he spent his evenings staring at the plans until he felt his eyes would start bleeding, understanding nothing at all. He still had no idea what the big picture was supposed to look like when all these parts combined. Instead of understanding anything, he was developing a growing hatred of Hiroshi Kato in particular and of geniuses in general, of anybody capable of inventing things he would never have thought of in his whole lifetime. Things he only understood when he saw them finished and ready under his nose. Being able to recognize genius was his only useful talent, aside from a knack for business networking, and now it had failed him.

But this evening he had spotted something that might get him a little further. And he had only seen it because the ceiling light had begun to flicker so distractingly that he had to switch it off. Only then did he notice the tiny shadows cast on the paper by his desk lamp, impressions along the upper edge of the blueprint. They were numbers. Someone had put a piece of paper on top of this diagram and jotted something down, probably a telephone number. Adamson opened his desk drawer and took out a soft pencil. Carefully, he rubbed across the dents and grooves until he could see what they were. There was a name underneath the number: Mitch Jensen. The telephone number began with 703-482. That was the CIA’s dial code. He shoved the drawings aside, switched his computer on, and pulled up the internal phone directory. There was indeed a Mitch Jensen with the CIA, and that was his telephone number. Bingo. That could only mean he knew something about this whole business.

Adamson thought for two days about whether he dared use the number, and then late one afternoon he called this Mitch Jensen. First came the usual back-and-forth as they made sure they were speaking on a secure line, and then he introduced himself. “William Adamson. I’m head of robotics at DARPA. I’d like to talk to you about Hiroshi Kato.”

Mitch Jensen coughed. It sounded like a smoker’s cough, and it also somehow sounded as though Jensen didn’t take regulations quite as seriously as the rest. “I heard that you’re kind of obsessed with the guy,” he drawled, coughing again.

“So they say,” Adamson admitted cheerfully. “But that doesn’t mean much, does it? Just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.”

Laughter. Adamson felt he could work with a man who laughed like that.

“Okay,” Jensen said. “Do you ever happen to be in Langley? We could meet, have a beer.”

3

“What happened?” Charlotte asked once they were finally back in the limo on their way to the airport.

“Something went wrong,” was all Hiroshi would say.

Then he was on the phone to Miroslav. She heard nothing on his end of the conversation to shed any more light on the matter. Hiroshi simply repeated variations on “Hmm” and “I see” and “Ah crap.”

As they got in the car, he had told the chauffeur to get them there “as fast as you can,” and the man was using every trick in the book. He dodged into every gap in traffic and drove slightly above the speed limit, but would it make any difference in the end? The flight would take eight hours anyway, an eternity longer than the drive to the airport.

Charlotte felt so sorry for Hiroshi. For a moment it had seemed he had won a clear victory, that he had won them all over to his side—and then a single text had been enough to bring the whole thing crashing down like a house of cards. Not because of the interruption itself, though that was certainly a breach of etiquette, but because Hiroshi has been so clearly shaken by the news. They had left the board of directors in uproar. Even Larry Gu, who had been on Hiroshi’s side from the start, was visibly rankled. For the first time he had cast doubt on his own decision to support Hiroshi’s project.

Charlotte looked out at the cars and trucks flowing along the roads like corpuscles through blood vessels. She tried to imagine what might be going on in the conference room just then. They were probably still sitting there, talking till they were blue in the face. The American would be triumphant about his doubts, and the Dutchman would be saying he had told them so. And the rest of them would be glad the world as they knew it wasn’t going to change anytime soon
.

As she listened to the engine hum, she reflected that it had been built by human hands rather than by scurrying flocks of minirobots. Despite all the impressive progress he had made, despite all that she had seen, Hiroshi’s idea might simply be too ambitious to work. Perhaps he was aiming too high. But even then, was that so bad? She thought about it and realized she could forgive that kind of failure. Failure had a grandeur of its own. At least he had tried. She, on the other hand…she had run away from her own vision. There was no grandeur in that.

The limousine crossed the bridge, and the airport appeared in front of them. “I have to hang up,” Hiroshi said into the telephone. “Listen, Miro, you’ll have to manage everything on your own somehow until I get there. Don’t call while I’m in the air, got that? No matter what happens. Your call would be patched through the jet’s comms systems, and the company controls all those channels. I want to be the one who decides what information gets out and when. Okay?”

They went through the obligatory checks and controls in record time and were driven onto the runway in a little electric cart. It was windy, and Charlotte had to hold her hair down. The jet was on the tarmac, but at least twenty technicians in gray overalls were still scurrying around and over it. Charlotte felt queasy at the thought of the hurry they were in to get the plane cleared for takeoff.

Hiroshi worked straight through the flight. He sat at the table with his computer open before him, never turning his gaze from the screen. He read, studied, wrote, and pondered his problems without ever even noticing she was there. Charlotte let him be. She could see he was in despair, even if he didn’t want anyone to know. She knew all the same. Although she was still tired, she was so amazed by everything that had happened that she couldn’t rest. She could have watched a movie but didn’t want to disturb Hiroshi. At some point she went to the back of the plane and lay down on the bed, even though she was quite sure she wouldn’t sleep. But she fell asleep after all, into dreams of deep chasms, falling without end.

“He saw his life’s work in ruins before him.” Hiroshi had read that sentence in a book somewhere, and now he remembered it and thought,
So that’s what it feels like
.

Miroslav had left everything as it was when things came grinding to a halt. He had kept the video surveillance going to the very end and secured all the footage; they would be able to analyze everything.

The two of them paced out the area where the complex had been at work. It looked like a bomb had hit the site. Yellow poles sprouted from the ground everywhere to mark units that had lost their connection to the main complex at one point or another and never made contact again. It didn’t help that the units were scattered around among heaps of scrap and garbage. Nevertheless, the security cutouts had done their job: the central guidance program had correctly assessed the situation as beyond recovery and switched itself off as intended. That data log was also stored and available. Enough data for several years of further analysis. A few units had made it to the shoreline, where the seawater had washed over them. Also as intended, they had fallen to bits as the cutout kicked in.

“Take pictures of that as well,” Hiroshi said. “That should calm them down. At least it shows that there was never any danger from the test.”

“It’s done,” Miroslav replied. “I’ve been photographing absolutely everything. This is the most photographed garbage heap in history.”

After that they studied the video footage together. Everybody else had already watched the events unfold so many times that they knew the story by heart. “There. This is the point where that unit first loses contact,” someone would say, sucking nervously at a cigarette or drinking straw. “Now the fallback routine kicks in. The main action is abandoned, and it reestablished…Yes! Got it!”

It was as though they hoped that the film had changed since last time they had watched it.

The main cause of failure was all too obvious. All the original units had been marked with UV paint so that they could be easily identified simply by switching to the matching spectrum on the video footage. That way they could follow exactly which element was doing what and when. The units that the complex had built on its own had no such markings, making things a little more difficult. But all they needed to do to spot the real cause of the problem was play the footage back in reverse from the moment things finally went off the rails. Seen like this, it was obvious everything had started to go wrong with one of the third-generation units—ones that had themselves been built by units of the preceding generations.

“The complex can’t build its own units with the necessary precision,” Hiroshi declared, his hand on the video “Stop” button. “That’s where the trouble lies, I’m sure of it. The defects accumulate with each step along the replication pathway, and then eventually we get malfunctions.”

Everybody nodded. They had all reached the same conclusion already.

“It’s like with audio cassettes back in the old days,” said Therese, the only one who was old enough to remember life before the digital era. “You would make a tape, and it sounded good. If you copied that tape to another cassette, you got a little white noise. Copy it again and there was more, until you eventually had a tape that was all crackle and hum and no music at all.”

It was a vicious circle, as so often the case with technology. If they wanted to make the new parts with greater precision, then the units would have to be more complicated, meaning in turn they would be harder to manufacture and require more parts. And so on, round and round. It felt hideously like an insoluble paradox.

He saw his life’s work in ruins before him.

Hiroshi threw himself once more into his diagrams and sketches, drawing, thinking, racking his brain for hours on end. It couldn’t be true. It couldn’t be true it didn’t work. There had to be some way to make it right. He had been so sure that it would work, as sure as he was that the sun would rise every morning. Perhaps he had just overlooked something. Every little detail counted in technical work, every decision led somewhere and had consequences that could not be foreseen when you first stepped down that path. He had to go back to the beginning, back to the roots of the idea, back to the source. Back to the dreams that had started it all. Those dreams—they had been so vivid; he had seen so clearly how everything moved, how everything was connected, like clockwork that would run for eternity. The problem he was grappling with here could not be insoluble. There had to be a way. The principle was right.

At some point Charlotte appeared and put her hand on his arm, rousing him from his thoughts. “You never give up, do you?” she asked.

Hiroshi rubbed his face with both hands and felt stubble. He could smell sweat—his own. He was also very hungry. Dimly, he became aware he had been poring over the documents for several days now, interrupted only by short naps on the bare ground. “I haven’t been taking care of you as my guest,” he mumbled, embarrassed. “I’m sorry. It’s all so…” He looked around and spotted the diagrams that were all that was left of his dreams. “I’m doing something wrong. I just don’t know what.”

“I should get back home. I need to set off soon.”

He blinked. Ah yes. She couldn’t stay forever. Of course not. She wanted to get back to her Scottish handworker, the man who built musical instruments that actually worked.

“I’ll tell them to send the helicopter,” he said. “And I’ll get them to book your flight back.”

“Miroslav has already taken care of all that.” She gave a sad smile. “I just wanted to say good-bye.”

Now he could hear it. The helicopter was already on its way. He was losing his grip.

He saw his life’s work in ruins before him.

“Then at least I’ll come with you to the landing pad, if you’ve got no objection,” he said, standing up.

She stood before him, put her arms around his neck, and kissed him. “No objection at all,” she whispered. “But after that you should go and clean yourself up. Remember, Archimedes had his best idea in the bath.”

She caught her onward flight in Manila without having managed to reach Gary and let him know she was on her way. She tried to tell herself it wasn’t her fault if he had his phone switched off the whole time, but nothing helped. She still felt it was somehow her mistake, that she was doing something wrong.

She couldn’t sleep. She would probably never be able to sleep again. The stewardess brought magazines and was so solicitous that Charlotte read one after another, hoping that perhaps she would nod off midarticle. Politics! That had always been the surest way to put her to sleep. No wonder, since her father was an ambassador. But this time not even politics helped. Then she chanced upon an article about recent archaeological finds. Researchers from the US and Germany had examined a find from Ethiopia, the bones of animals hunted for their meat more than three million years ago, and discovered clear traces of early human tool use. This didn’t quite turn paleoanthropology on its head, but it did cast doubt on what had been fairly fundamental assumptions. The assumption that only
Homo
knew how to make stone tools, for instance.
Homo
hadn’t been around three million years ago. Which meant that
Australopithecus
already knew how to make and use tools. That would date the start of the Stone Age further back by almost a million years—a major shift for prehistory’s frame of reference.

Charlotte shut the magazine, put her head back, and closed her eyes. It was as though the topic were following her around. She picked the magazine up again and looked at the masthead. It wasn’t a specialist journal, of course, but it looked like a reputable news source. She had no idea what to make of it. She had thought that chapter of her life was over. She had had a strange vision, sure, but nothing had come of it. She had found no convincing way to test her idea. And she had attended one of the best universities in the world, thanks to her mother, who would have been satisfied with nothing less. Perhaps she should just have a child.

While she was waiting to board the plane to Aberdeen, the last leg of her trip, she unpacked the red scarf Hiroshi had given her. The scarf his machine had knitted. There was something strange about it. Charlotte held it in both hands, closed her eyes, and tuned out the hubbub of voices and loudspeaker announcements in the boarding area that surrounded her like acoustic fog. She concentrated wholly on the scarf. She felt where the wool had come from. She had a fleeting impression of the shearer who had taken it from the sheep—an Australian, a tough, pious man who was in love with a girl from the wrong religion and felt torn in two. Then she saw a lightning image of the machinist in the woolen mill who had spun it into yarn, felt her worries about a rash she had developed in an intimate area, her fear it might have something to do with a man she had slept with. So far it was all as Charlotte would have expected. But there was nothing at all about how the scarf was actually made. A yawning void. It was as though the wool had simply knitted itself into a scarf on its own. It was the strangest article of clothing she had ever held in her hands.

It was strange to come home and not be met at the airport. She took a taxi, remembering even as she did so that she would have to be careful with money again; she had been happily able to forget all that during her trip. Having to think about such things once more was like running her tongue over her teeth and finding a gap. The taxi driver was friendly and in a chatty mood. He took her for a tourist and gave her a card with his cell-phone number.

“Day or night, just call and I’ll be at your doorstep,” he said. “There are too many dodgy blokes in this business. You book a cab in advance and then they never even get out of bed. Not what you need when there’s a flight to catch, is it?”

Charlotte liked his go-getting attitude. She put the card in her bag. As they pulled up, she saw Gary’s car parked in front of the house. She should have been pleased he was home, but for some reason she had a hollow feeling in the pit of her stomach. She still had to catch her breath after everything that had happened. Make sense of all that craziness in the South Pacific.

There was a smell of fresh grass and wood smoke in the air. It seemed to have rained that morning, with drops still glittering on the bushes and the fields. Charlotte took her suitcase and carried it up to the house. She opened the door. Gary was sitting at the kitchen table and looked up, startled. Opposite him sat a girl. Younger than Charlotte and rather plain: thin, with a sharp nose and brown curls all over the place. Charlotte put down her suitcase but couldn’t say a word. It was clear what was going on here. Of course. But that wasn’t what troubled her so. What troubled her was how relieved she suddenly felt.