The Last Sword Maker

by Brian Nelson

  Now, sitting alone in the huge conference room, Eric felt the weight of doom more acutely than ever. It was late October, and a long, cold winter seemed to be settling in.

  Just then, Bill Eastman walked into the conference room, head down, and began pacing around, absorbed in his thoughts. Eric hadn’t seen him in weeks and thought it best to let him be. Finally, Eastman noticed him.

  “Ah, Eric, good morning.” He had his usual warm smile, but it felt forced. Before Eric could reply, Eastman said, “Listen to this …” And he launched into an idea for replication. When he was finished, he turned to Eric. “What do you think?”

  Eric knew right away that it was a bad theory. It would never work. But it seemed strange that Eastman couldn’t see it. Eric hesitated. He considered just lying, telling Eastman it was a great idea, super! That seemed the safest thing. But maybe it was a trick, a test to see whether he really knew his stuff.

  “I don’t think it’ll work,” Eric said. “In fact, I’m quite sure it won’t. It will take you years to code something like that. Nature is complex, but not that complex.”

  Eastman blinked and seemed taken aback. Eric felt his stomach grow cold, but he pressed on. “What if you changed it like this: instead of taking all that time to recode each assembler, why don’t you have one assembler pass code on to the other. Just let it be ‘born’ with the code.” Eastman gave a little nod, considering it; then he countered with a different idea.

  Eric shook his head. “I don’t think that’ll work, either,” he said, still worried that something didn’t seem right here. “If you don’t mind my saying so, you’re approaching this like an engineer when you need to look at it like a biologist. Don’t try to come up with a program for each nanosite. Make the nanosites program themselves.”

  Eastman looked skeptical. “Program themselves? How?”

  “Force them to evolve into the state you want. All you have to do is add a slight mutation factor. The nanosites that evolve toward the correct state survive. The rest die. It’ll be like mosquitoes building resistance to a pesticide. Billions, probably trillions, will die along the way, but the ones that survive will have the characteristics you want.” Eric was thinking it through now, liking the idea himself. “See, this way our assemblers won’t just be one type of tool, like a hammer. They’ll be any tool. Think of them as stem cells, capable of differentiating into whatever cells are needed.”

  “But how do you know they will program themselves?”

  “If their survival depends on it, they’ll adapt. It’s nature. We are talking about a life-form, after all, so just constrain their environment and let natural selection push them toward the state you want.”

  Eastman gave Eric a severe look, his eyes narrowed in concentration. “Wait right here, will you?” he said, and walked out.

  Now Eric was nervous. What had he said? Was Eastman upset? Eric couldn’t read his reaction. Was Eastman looking for an excuse to cut Eric loose? Was that it? Today was the twenty-eighth—two days until the next purging. Sure, he had figured out the replication error problem, but that was five months ago. All he had managed to do since then was get himself blown up.

  A minute later, Eastman returned with Behrmann. The Nanotech chief stooped to get through the doorway.

  “Eric, tell Jack what you told me.”

  He felt the sweat building along his hairline. He looked from one man to the other, now thoroughly wishing he’d kept his big mouth shut. He repeated his idea.

  “Hmmm,” Jack said when Eric had finished. “Interesting.” He stroked his beard, then turned to Bill. “I think someone might be out of a job.”

  “That’s exactly what I was thinking,” Bill replied.

  Eric’s heart sank. After all he had been through. He couldn’t believe it.

  “This is bullshit,” Eric began. “You can’t do this—”

  “And he obviously has little respect for his elders,” Jack said.

  “I know!” Bill exclaimed. “Even better!”

  Eric looked from one boss to the other, his jaw slack with perplexity.

  Eastman looked at him, stone-faced, then burst into laughter. They had been playing with him.

  “This could solve the issues with the neural tube development and the higher core functions,” Jack said to Eastman, as if Eric were no longer there.

  “I was thinking the same thing. It might even fix the issues Ryan Lee is having with the interface.”

  Eastman unfolded an iSheet from his pocket. “Get me Drs. Velichko, Berg, and Lee,” he told the device.

  Eric realized his mouth was still open, and shut it. He was torn between his relief and a strong desire to slug both of them for scaring him like that.

  “Relax, Dr. Hill,” Eastman said with a smile. “We love your idea. What’s more, I’m really glad you had the courage to tell the boss his idea stank. What you said just now was right. The theory we’d been kicking around was a bad one, but neither Jack nor I saw it, because we are too set in our ways.” Eastman shook his head as if he was a little disappointed in himself. “See, Jack and I have been doing this for close to thirty-two years now, and our thinking and experiences have become so similar that we miss things we shouldn’t miss, we spend months on dumb ideas, and we don’t question each other. In short, we’ve gotten lazy.”

  Then Jack added: “The person who should be out of a job is me. I’ve been insisting that Bill hold on to this theory. But you’ve not only debunked it, you might have given us a fresh start.”

  Fifteen minutes later, the room was full. Assembled around the conference table were Olex, Jane, Ryan, Jessica Berg, Eric, Bill Eastman, and Jack Behrmann.

  Again Eric repeated the idea. “Forced evolution,” he was calling it—using the nanosites’ rapid replication process (five times a second, essentially) to oblige them to mutate into a desired state. Even before he could finish, they were all talking at once. Would it work? What problems could it be applied to? How quickly could they implement it? Within a few minutes, they were shouting over one another.

  Eric just sat there in a state of shock. Had this all come from him? The idea had just popped into his head—the most logical solution to the question Eastman had asked. It was such a tenuous thing. If Eric had thought of the problem himself, by himself, he would surely have dismissed it. After all, it was such a simple idea, someone else must have thought of it long ago, tested it, and discarded it. But because Eastman had been there, he had grasped the idea’s novelty—its obvious connection to all successful life forms. Now, as the rest of them discussed it, Eric was beginning to believe that it really was something special. That perhaps they had found a concept that the Chinese missed, and that they might be able to catch up.

  He felt a mixture of happiness and fear, like a man who realizes he has the winning lottery ticket in his hand, but hasn’t yet collected the money—feeling that at any moment some obstacle will rise up to dash his hopes.

  As if on cue, he heard Olex shouting over the din, “Oh, would you all just shut up!” The Ukrainian was shaking his head. “You sound like a bunch of horny schoolboys who have just discovered pornography.” He paused. “This has been done before. Mueller and Beckett tried this in the late nineties with bacterial cultures and got nowhere. It will mutate in a thousand different directions, and none of them will help you.”

  “No, no, no,” Eastman rebutted. “You’re missing the point of Mueller and Beckett’s work: they did succeed in creating several useful new strains. And given the huge gap in sophistication between their bacteria and our ‘base cells,’ their work only reinforces that it’s possible.”

  What followed was fifteen minutes of Bill and Olex fighting it out, each insisting that he was right and the other was wrong. Finally, Bill waved Olex quiet. “Enough! It’ll work. I’m sure of it. And you”—he pointed at Olex—“and Eric are going to prove it together.”

/>   Olex elongated himself in his chair and looked at Eric the way a well-dressed man might look upon a white drop of bird feces on his dinner jacket. “No,” he said irrevocably. “If you want me to prove that his theory is garbage, I’ll gladly do that, but I’ll do it alone.”

  Eric glared at the goateed face. Now it came down to honor. Admittedly, he wasn’t even sure his own idea would work. But he was ready to go weeks without sleep if it meant spiting Olex.

  “Bill,” Eric said, “I think it’s best if I work alone on this one. I wouldn’t want a colleague to discover that the idea works, and try to take credit for it.”

  A cold silence fell over the table. People just didn’t accuse Olex of pirating ideas. Only Jane showed an expression devoid of shock. She tightened her eyelids and pressed her lips together in a devilish grin. Oooooh, burn.

  “Don’t make me laugh,” Olex scoffed. “To be mentioned in a footnote of one of my papers would be the zenith of your unremarkable career. Besides, your idea will never be published, because it is shit.”

  “Gentlemen!” Eastman said. “You will both do as I say. My Genetics chief and my architect will work together! And you’ll do it for the good of the team, not to gratify your egos.”

  * * *

  “Here is your spy,” the little man said, sliding an iSheet across the desk to General Meng. The general looked at the picture and made the kind of snorting sound that a teenager might give when his parents have done something unbelievably stupid. Then he gave a chuckle. This man? The spy? Then he sighed, realizing that he had wasted his money.

  Meng had hired the man on a whim—out of frustration, he supposed. It had certainly sounded good at first: the stories about how this bookish psychologist could practically read minds, how he had helped the police lock away dozens of criminals because he could tell when someone was lying. Besides, the man really hadn’t asked for much. All he said he needed was access to his archive of surveillance videos. Two years of it. Then he would plug it into his spiffy little computer and—poof—just like that, he’d be able to find the spy. It had sounded almost too good to be true. Now he realized that it was.

  Three months of work, and this was the result? Bo Li the spy? Hell, Meng had even put a team on Bo, just as he’d done with his forty top scientists. They had followed him around for a month and found nothing.

  Meng laid a menacing glare on the little man. “I really don’t appreciate you wasting my time. And the People’s Liberation Army doesn’t appreciate you wasting their money.”

  Much to Meng’s surprise, the man did not shrink back in his chair and apologize as any sensible, self-preserving subordinate would do. Instead, he pushed his glasses back up on his nose and stared right back at Meng with a look of supreme confidence.

  “General, that is your man.”

  Meng tossed the iSheet into the man’s lap. “Prove it!”

  The man took the sheet and started typing with his thumbs. A moment later, he placed the sheet back in front of Meng. It was a video of Meng with Bo Li. Meng remembered the meeting. It was right after he had put a team on Bo Li, and the two men were joking about it.

  “What we are looking for, General,” the little man explained, “is something called a microexpression. Many of our facial expressions are voluntary. For example, when you address your men, you put on the serious face of a commander. It’s like an actor. A mask. But that’s not what I want. I want an expression that is involuntary, an expression that tells me what is going on behind the mask. Everyone has microexpressions, and they open a very short window into a person’s mind. My computer program ran through every frame of video that you gave me—two years of footage from eight hundred cameras—searching for these expressions among your employees. I then took all the microexpressions I found, and parsed them for the specific emotions I was interested in: fear, guilt, distress, and shame, as well as smugness, pleasure, and contempt.

  “This man,” he said, pointing to Bo Li, “has thirty-five instances where his expressions show that he is knowingly deceiving you. Now, watch closely.”

  Meng looked at the video.

  “There!” the little man said. “Did you see it?”

  “I saw nothing,” the general said, “because there is nothing to see.”

  The professor gave him a patronizing stare. Meng cocked his head to the side. The man was going to be lucky to leave the room alive.

  “Please watch again, General, but this time in slow motion.”

  Both Meng and Bo Li were laughing; then the general got a call. At the moment that Meng turned to answer the phone, it happened.

  “There!” the little man said.

  For a split second, Bo Li’s expression changed dramatically. Even in slow motion it came and went very quickly, but Meng saw it now. The smile was gone, replaced by a look of worry and—

  “Contraction of the frontalis and the pars medialis (the raising of the inner brow) along with the pars lateralis (the outer brow), coupled with contraction of the risorius (the stretching of the lips), depressor labii (the parting of the lips) and the relaxing of the masseter (the slight dropping of the jaw). In other words, General, fear.”

  Yes, Meng thought, fear. “Go on!” he said impatiently.

  “With pleasure. Now let’s go back two years.” Soon Meng was watching himself with Bo Li again. Bo Li was being his usual self—joking and playing around, talking about how his wife’s food always gave him the most painful gas. Meng found himself snickering all over again.

  “There it is!”

  Again Meng saw nothing. And again the little man replayed it in slow motion.

  “That is distress,” the man said. “It’s a slight raising of the eyebrows caused by trace contractions of the frontalis and the pars medialis. Then he expresses fear again. He is very nervous. In fact, he is more nervous in this clip than any other, which leads me to believe that this is when he first began deceiving you.

  “Now look here,” the man said. He ran through a series of twelve different clips, each one capturing a microexpression. They were similar, but over time the fear and the distress went away, replaced by expressions of contempt, smugness, and pleasure.

  “Looking at these chronologically, we can see how he changes. He slowly begins to enjoy himself. In these more recent clips, you can see the lips curl from the pull of the zygomatic major and the tightening of the buccinator. That’s contempt. He knows he’s outsmarting you, and he’s enjoying it.”

  “And here he is smiling at your joke, but it’s a fake smile. See? Only the zygomatic major is being contracted. A true smile always incorporates the orbicularis oculi and the pars orbitalis. You might think of it as a light in the eyes. It can’t be faked.”

  Meng felt an uncomfortable heat building behind his temples. Bo Li the spy? Was it possible?

  Yet he saw that it was true. The little man was right. But somehow, that just made him hate the man even more. In fact, he somehow seemed complicit in this. It suddenly seemed to him that both Bo Li and the nerdy psychologist were making fun of him together. They both thought him a fool.

  “Get out,” Meng said in a low growl.

  “Sir?”

  “Out!”

  “But I should really show y—”

  “GET OUT!”

  The man moved at last, and he moved fast, like a man who suddenly realizes he has stumbled into the lair of a wild animal. He paused for only a second, his eyes falling on his iSheet. He wanted to pick it up, but Meng’s lethal glare made him think better of it. He grabbed up his briefcase and made a hasty retreat for the door and was gone.

  For the next three hours, Meng sat at his desk reviewing each of the video clips, looking for Bo Li’s … What had the little man called them? Microexpressions. His mind was a dark sky of piling thunderheads. Again and again he watched, looking for the signs. He had considered Bo Li an ally, one of the
few men he could really trust. Loyal to the party, to his country. A friend. A brother. Gē men.

  Here he is smiling at your joke, but it is a fake smile.

  Now he had to rewrite all his memories, all the jokes and laughter, and replace it with deception and betrayal.

  After he had watched each clip twice, he started all over again. Again and again he found what he was looking for, and again and again he felt a fool for not seeing it before.

  The iSheet began to shake in his hands, and he dropped it in annoyance. He was shaking with rage. Then it dawned on him that something else was driving his anger. Something small and defenseless. He touched his pocket. It was there: a folded sheet of photographic paper with three blurry black and white images on it. An ultrasound of his unborn child. Da-Xia was four months pregnant, and it was a girl. A girl to replace Lien, the daughter he had lost in Tibet. He pulled out the images and looked at them again. He saw, or imagined he saw, the resemblance already. His nose, her mother’s lips, and, impossibly, his dead wife’s eyes. This was why he had to rid the country of terrorists and separatists and nonbelievers.

  And traitors.

  But how to take care of Bo Li? For a long time, he had fantasized about how he would kill the traitor. But it would not be so easy now. Bo Li’s family and, more importantly, his family’s connections meant that it would have to be handled very delicately. In fact, Meng knew he was not powerful enough to denounce Bo Li at all. Bo Li’s friendships with half the Central Committee meant that he could just turn around and accuse Meng, and that was a battle that Meng would lose, regardless of the truth. No, he would have to end this in a way that did not risk his career—in a way so that none of it was ever made public.

  The iSheet had stopped at the end of the final video clip, frozen on the smiling, happy face of Bo Li.