by Aston, Tom
Stone glanced at the slip of paper.
Stone Forest 328 19.2 9.8179
Field Well 15 8.3 9.8827
Silvermine Mountain 169 15.9 9.8457
2 Trees 3 Trees 97 6.7 9.8837
Sitong 44 0.7 9.8249
It made no sense. Perhaps it wasn’t meant to. But Stone recognised the distinctive writing, and the fountain pen. It was written by Semyonov all right.
‘Why should I do it, Oyang?’ asked Stone. ‘If it’s too dangerous for you, with all your connections, your protection, your money. Why should I decipher it and go looking for the Machine?
Oyang paused, giving Stone another of his meaningful looks. ‘Let me show you something,’ he said eventually. He look a small device from his pocket, the kind of device he might use to open the doors of his car. He pointed the little grey fob at the stand of bamboo and pressed it with his thumb.
‘What are you doing?’ asked Stone.
‘Be patient,’ said Oyang. ‘You’ll find it interesting. It will explain a lot.’
Oyang stood for a few seconds looking at the bamboo, while one by one, the tiny green snakes began to uncoil from the bamboo and fall lifeless to the ground. Stone had already guessed what was happening. He stepped over and picked up one of the snakes, his thumb and forefinger behind its head for safety - but he needn't have bothered. It wasn't a real snake at all.
‘What is it?’ said Stone. ‘Metal and plastic?’
‘Yes, but the teeth are stainless steel,’ said Oyang.
Stone lay the snake along his palm and forearm. It was no more than twenty centimeters long, and barely thicker than a pencil. Another remarkable manufacture, with a slight iridescence in the green of its scales – light, and very life-like.
‘More amazing technology, Oyang,’ said Stone. ‘But you said it would explain something. About the Machine.’
‘No. I said you should be patient, Stone.’
Stone’s tongue almost froze. A stupid mistake, a crass error. Curiosity and over-confidence had undone him. For a split-second, his brain was shouting at his arm to shake, to cast the snake away. But Oyang had already hit the remote control. A tiny click with his thumb. The snake was alive again, and striking. Its tiny fangs sank like needle pricks into Stone’s forearm.
Stone’s arm shook, he pulled it loose, threw the snake into the bamboo. Too late. His vision was already blurred, his legs wobbling. He collapsed to his knees. He couldn’t see, and fell face first to the ground.
‘Patience,’ said Oyang once more.
Chapter 32 - 7:43pm 2 April - ShinComm Factory City, Shanghai, China
Stone came to inside the van. The van he’d arrived in a few hours before. He was hooded, but not handcuffed. A while later the door opened, and Stone smelled the warm, humid air of Shanghai again through the black cotton of the hood. There was a distant noise of a factory – whirring and grinding – but not loud. Stone felt it was cooler. No heat from the sun. It was already dark, or at least dusk, and Stone must have been out for hours in that van.
‘I am sorry for it, Stone,’ said Oyang’s voice. ‘But I couldn’t let you know where you were coming.’ Stone listened for the footsteps. Oyang was alone. Oyang had brought Stone here alone, and was leading him, tugging him by the sleeve toward the noise of whirring and humming.
‘This is the ShinComm Factory, Stone,’ said Oyang, ‘Or at least one of them. A half million people work for ShinComm, mainly at Dongguan and at Factory City next to this facility,’ he said as Stone heard himself led through a doorway. ‘But not a soul works in this facility. Even I was impressed when Semyonov first showed it to me.’ The humming and whirring and the occasional clanking and banging were louder. Stone could hear the echoes. They were inside a large shed or a hangar. Oyang removed the hood from Stone’s head.
It was not as Stone had expected. Electric motors whirred, machine tool robots hissed and whined. But entirely in darkness. The only light was the flash of welding sparks every few seconds. A hundred metres distant across the crowded shop floor, as the industrial robots, metres high, nodded, turned and clamped their beaks onto more metalwork. Welding and clamping, screwing and soldering. All happened in complete darkness. After a few seconds, Oyang flicked some switches, and a battery of arc lights buzzed and flickered into dazzling light. Robert Oyang had not been exaggerating. Stone was in a huge factory shed, but there was no human present.
There were no machine guards, no yellow lines, no warning signs or stop buttons. Stone looked on in wonderment at a large manufacturing shed, run entirely by robots.
There was an array of different robots. In that sense it was no different from many modern factories. There were high-standing robots in the concrete, nodding and twisting with staccato movements. There were small platforms gliding around carrying materials. These weren’t unusual. Then there were grey, cone-shaped things about a metre high, which seemed to glide slowly over the white painted floor, but had no arms or pincers. What were they? Above all there was the constant buzzing hiss of MAV’s. Micro Air Vehicles, the insect-like robots Stone had seen before. Except these were smaller, about three centimeters long and a shiny indigo in colour. They appeared harmless – they were workers, hovering on gossamer wings, cleaning, polishing, cutting and carrying. More interestingly they were working together, carrying components in groups of exactly ten or twenty. Stone looked around and calculated there must be a hundred thousand of them in this one factory shed.
Stone’s favourite was what appeared to be a troop of monkeys swinging and jumping around a kind of turbine-less jet engine. Twenty monkey-robots, each thirty centimeters high, with legs and arms but no head - their sensors and hydraulics being packed into the mid-chest area. They had tiny hands with three fingers and an opposable thumb, and climbed and swung like silver-alloy simians, their movements rapid, staccato and precise. Most astonishingly, they moved in complete co-ordination, only millimeters apart but never colliding, and always pulling or placing at exactly the same time, or jumping or walking in perfect rhythm, like a tiny dancing troupe.
Stone realised his heart was racing. This was staggering technology. Corporations had spent tens of millions on robots which could barely cross a room without falling over a chair, yet here were a hundred thousand of them, working in intelligent unison.
Another thing. A workplace designed by humans bears signs of human thinking, even if the work is left to robots. It has a linear production track running through it. In this place, it was all going on at once, like the random access mind of a computer. Stone was reminded of what people said about Semyonov. An alien intelligence. Was this the Machine? The thing that had drawn Semyonov to China?
It wasn’t easy see what it was being manufactured, such was the profusion of machinery and activity. One item was certainly a small jet engine without turbines - a ram-jet for use in a missile, Stone thought. Over towards the other side of the shed there was the chassis of some kind of vehicle where the welding sparks flashed every few seconds. Electric motors in each wheel. There were also some tubes that looked like gun barrels, three metres long and made from a weird, blue alloy of cobalt.
Stone’s mind raced. He was looking at the mind of a computer, with programs and data spread at random across its hard disk, capable of performing hundreds of tasks at once.
‘This is very impressive, Oyang,’ said Stone. ‘You didn’t mention you were an engineer.’
‘Indeed I am no engineer, Mr Stone,’ with a small laugh of self-deprecation. ‘I am an old-style Chinese intellectual, a Confucian,’ said Oyang. ‘I labour with my mind and not my hands.’
A Confucian who likes Japanese girls in bikinis. ‘In that case,’ asked Stone. ‘Where does it come from? All this technology?’
Oyang looked almost embarrassed to talk about it, but continued, ‘These developments are - incredible. Even more incredible than they look to you. The true value of Semyonov’s facility here is its flexibility. The ideas we create on computer design systems can be ma
de reality by the robot workforce. Otherwise we would need thousands of highly skilled engineers just to design the process… But here, inspiration goes to idea, to design, to reality. All in record time.’
‘And the workforce builds you more workers if you need them,’ added Stone.
‘Up to a point, yes,’ nodded Oyang. ‘It’s a good system.’
A good system? That was an understatement. The implications would make an economist’s head spin.
‘ShinComm has five hundred thousand workers between Shanghai and our plant at Dongguan, yet the Development Center makes more money. That's because it creates high value goods.’
‘Tell me more, Oyang, I’m fascinated,’ said Stone to distract him. Oyang was so cultured, so image-conscious, almost a parody of himself. But intelligent nonetheless. ‘How many people know about this place?’
‘A few senior managers in ShinComm. Semyonov needed a few people to work with him, and he showed it to me only once. I didn’t see at first how important it was. The key to the system,’ explained Oyang. ‘Lies in massively parallel computing software. Each of the machines and robots is connected in a huge wireless system.’
Stone thought of Semyonov, with his intelligent search systems built from thousands of machines hooked together.
‘And all of the computing power – every chip in every robot and every flying bug - can be used at once,’ said Stone. He was beginning to get his head round it. The theory was one thing – but as a practical achievement, it was preternaturally impressive. Whole research labs, universities – whole industry sectors had worked on this kind of thing for years and made only baby steps forward. Yet here was the future - fully realised.
‘So this is the Machine, Oyang?’ asked Stone. ‘This is why Semyonov came to China?’
Oyang looked mystified. ‘No. This is not the Machine. Just a manufacturing facility. But I can tell you all the innovations you see here were Semyonov’s ideas. All his doing. He was a remarkable man, Professor Stone. We shall miss him a great deal.’ Oyang gave the impression that he missed Semyonov personally. Although anyone would miss a human money-tree, which was what Semyonov had been to him. ‘Everything here came from Semyonov xiansheng. But now he’s dead.’
‘So now Semyonov is dead, all this technology just – stops?’ asked Stone.
‘Possibly. Where can you find a person to understand it all?’ said Oyang, looking to left and right. ‘You can’t. So perhaps it is finished.’
‘What about the Machine? Is that finished too?’
‘The Machine, I believe is different. Steven Semyonov told me they had discovered something very important, and that was why he wanted to invest in China. And the Chinese scientists needed Semyonov.’
‘They needed him? Or his money?’
‘Money?’ Oyang laughed. ‘The money was simply evidence of his good faith. Nothing more. No one needed money.’
‘Twenty-five billion. That’s a lot of good faith.’
‘One, five, twenty-five… The amount was not important. The important thing was that it was all he had. And he was forbidden to leave China. That was the second condition that China imposed.’
‘It must have been a hell of a discovery they’d made to tempt him here,’ said Stone. ‘So what is this thing – the Machine?’ asked Stone.
‘I do not know. Like you, I would like to know,’ he said. ‘But let me tell you something, Stone. Semyonov said none of this would be possible without the Machine. That is why it matters so much. Especially now Semyonov is dead. We have to find it.’
It was like Oyang wanted to unburden himself. He’d already said that the Machine was extraordinarily powerful, and that the Americans and Russians and Chinese would fight to get it. But the Machine was already here in China. The Chinese leadership knew that, and that made it an extremely dangerous topic of discussion for Oyang, or anyone else.
Now, with the information he’d given to Stone back at his house, Oyang had just handed Stone the job of finding the Machine. A job which, rightly or wrongly, he thought was too dangerous to take on himself.
Chapter 33 - 9:26pm 2 April - Shanghai, China
Oyang’s men dropped Stone near the Pujiang Hotel on the river. It was the only one he could remember from his backpacking days. He had no intention of staying there of course. He waited till they’d gone and then made his way across the city in the darkness. The Shanghai evening took him into its dark, humid bosom. The warm breeze, the roar of traffic, the ambient smells of car exhaust and fried noodles from a thousand eateries open to the streets. Like Hong Kong, Shanghai teemed with even more people after dark.
For Stone it was the best time. He could go about as just another person in the hoards, rather than a “yellow-haired Ouzhouren” - a European, as Ying Ning termed him. He made for Xizang Street. The apartment block where Ying Ning had told him to stay.
The apartment was bare – just a single room and tiny bathroom. Stone checked it for bugs or hidden cameras as best he could. Found nothing – not that it mattered. He was hardly going to be chattering to anyone in there. For Stone this kind of lonely paranoia was normal life.
He took out Semyonov’s cryptic writings and connected his laptop to the Internet. Stone wasn’t about to take any notice of Robert Oyang’s injunction against making Internet searches. Especially not now.
Ironstone Forest 328 19.2 9.8229
Field Well 15 8.3 9.8218
Silvermine Field 169 15.9 9.8229
2 Trees 3 Trees 97 6.7 9.8219
Sitong 44 0.7 9.8249
It looked easy – so easy in fact that Stone wondered why Oyang hadn’t figured it for himself.
But it turned out it wasn’t easy. Stone tried sections large and small, and found, amongst other things, information on the Silvermine Bay Hotel, in Hong Kong, the fossilised trees in the Isle of Wight, and the web site of an Australian rugby league player named Malcom Twotrees. In other words, nothing.
-oO0Oo-
In the end Stone went out to eat. He went across some grass, picked his way through the cars and scooters across a snarled-up four-track road, and made for a cluster of street traders, stir-frying under the elevated highway. He ordered squid with chilli, noodles and beer and sat down at a trestle table. The cook shot oil into the pan from a squeezy bottle, and flames from the wok flashed in the darkness, half shutting his eyes against the smoke.
Stone’s watch said ten-thirty. He took out Semyonov’s hand-written note again, and looked at it, the light of the fire flickering on the paper. Something about the numbers had been playing with his subconscious. All the 9.8 figures on Semyonov’s scribblings. The values were almost the same but not quite. The differences were counted in ten thousandths of the total. A millimetre in a metre, or less than a metre in a kilometre. There must be significance in these tiny variations.
What was almost exactly 9.8? And why would it be a big deal if there were tiny variations? Stone ate the food, but found himself still looking at the figures when he’d finished.
It felt like the answer was lying just under the surface of his mind. He knew this. He knew the answer. Something was distracting him from it. It felt like someone was shouting at him from his subconscious. Stone tried to concentrate, to let it come to the surface. He realised he’d been staring into the darkness. He’d finished the noodles, but his beer was untouched.
Something was wrong. It was shouting at him. Not the number. Something else was wrong. The rider on the scooter with the full-face helmet. Stone was sure it was the same bike and the same helmet he’d seen following the taxi earlier, as the taxi had raced through the tunnel.
Stone tucked Semyonov’s figures back into his pocket, his senses suddenly alert, his mind clear. He made a few remarks to the laoban, and took another five minutes to finish his beer from the plastic glass, while keeping tabs on his follower. The guy was coming and going, flitting about, but finally disappearing from view. Stone drained his glass, paid and shook the hand of the laoban.
Stone walked back to Xizang Street, talking care to stay in the shadows. No sign of the rider now.
Stone took care to lock up and search the apartment again. Not much to check of course. One room, plus bathroom and bare at that. Not much scope for ninja-warriors to leap out from behind the sofa, but his senses were still on high alert.
He took a shower, his mind still whirring. Old “sticketh closer than a brother” out there on the motor scooter was going to be a big problem. Assuming it was the Gong An following Stone, he could be picked up at anytime. And even if he wasn't picked up, what could he do under such tight surveillance? It was also bad for Oyang. Oyang had gone to great lengths to hide Stone’s visit to his place, and ensure he hadn’t been tracked. Yet the rider must have followed that panel van up to Oyang’s place too.
Stone washed himself, wondering how he was going to shake off his tail. The more he thought of it, the worse it was. If it was bad news for Stone and Oyang, it was even worse for Ying Ning. If Ying Ning made contact as planned she could end up before a people’s court in days. After drying himself with a diminutive towel and spraying on a particularly ineffective brand of Chinese deodorant, Stone lay down and pulled the sheet over himself.
It was only then, half-waking and half-sleeping, that something flitted across Stone’s mind, something that had bubbled around his subconscious all evening. Behind all the distractions, below the surface. 9.8 metres per second per second. The constant of gravity.
Chapter 34
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UFOWATCH BLOG
We’d expect news outlets to be full of rumors from “friends” of billionaire genius Steven Semyonov, speculating on why his new “friends” from Beijing decided to send a coal truck to welcome him to China. But it turns out Semyonov had no “friends”. Boring huh?