Lord of All Things

by Andreas Eschbach

  For a moment her thoughts were a blank. She tried to imagine the world Hiroshi saw in his mind’s eye, but she couldn’t. All she knew was it would be a very different world from the one she knew.

  “Putting all that aside,” Hiroshi went on, “it’s early days yet. So far we’ve only been able to implement all the functions we would need for the units to replicate themselves. The first big hurdle is having the first complex create another. The hardest part there is what we call the cell division: creating a second control module that will accept the software from the first. It needs a lot of fine work to build such a module and particular parts. But as soon as it works, then off we go. Evolution can begin.”

  “Evolution? Didn’t you say just now that we’re dealing with something very different from a life-form?”

  “True enough. It’s a widespread fallacy, however, to think evolution applies exclusively to living beings. It doesn’t. Evolution has been at work in technological processes, too, from the year dot. If you want to have a chance of understanding industrial civilization today, then you must look at it as something that has evolved. There’s really no central control to speak of. We’ve had a history of centrally planned economies after all, and if we learned anything it’s that beyond a certain degree of complexity, central planning doesn’t work. Which is why these complexes have to develop on their own, in a quasi-evolutionary manner. New units will have to come along and perform further functions that hadn’t been needed before. Initially, that will happen under human guidance, but eventually the highest-level complexes will respond independently to human needs and do what we want them to do.”

  Charlotte looked at the coffee cup in her hand and studied the pattern. “Maybe. But I still can’t imagine how your minirobots would make me a cup of coffee. How it gets onto the table in front of me.”

  “We can run through that process. Ten years from now there’ll be a big multicomplex over in Brazil running the coffee plantations—”

  “You can skip that bit. I don’t even have any idea how coffee plantations work right now. I only just know how to make coffee. Grind, brew, filter, pour, and so on.”

  “All right then. The coffee beans come through the pipeline to the crusher units, whose function is—well, you can guess. Then the ground coffee falls into a container made up of form units, whose only function is to hold stuff. Heater units boil the water supplied by the pump units…”

  “Next you’ll tell me that there’s a coffee-filter unit as well.”

  “No, the coffee filter isn’t part of our flock; it’s another product. Just like the beans, it’s manufactured somewhere and brought to where you need it—”

  “Through another pipeline? A coffee-filter pipeline?”

  “I think it might make more sense to have a general-purpose transport pipeline to every house, bringing whatever is needed.”

  “And then?”

  “The transporter units carry the filter into place, the coffee percolates…”

  Charlotte moved her cup forward. “Now I’m curious.”

  Hiroshi raised his hands. “Maybe it’s just a perfectly ordinary coffee machine, and you have a humanoid household robot that picks up the coffee and brings it to you. Think about it—the functional units can reproduce as often as we like. Once there are enough of them, they can create whole factories building all sorts of things.”

  Charlotte shut her eyes for a moment. She had to, even if it wasn’t good manners. She was overwhelmed by the world Hiroshi had envisaged. She opened her eyes again and said, “I want to see something now. I suppose you’ve built a flock of robots?”

  “Yes, of course. That’s why we’re here. To test the first complex.”

  “Show me,” Charlotte demanded.

  They went into the tent Charlotte had already noticed that morning. Just as she had thought, it was a lab. Tables full of tools, computers, and precision machinery lined the walls; the middle of the tent was clear save for a gleaming, silver cube about the size of a small refrigerator, its skin shimmering like steel scales.

  “We’ve tested all the subroutines one last time,” Hiroshi declared as though he expected Charlotte to know what that meant. “As soon as we give it the go-ahead, there will be constant video surveillance of the complex at work, from all angles. What it does is fairly complicated, so we can expect a few faults. That’s what we’re working on at the moment—fault tolerance.”

  “But you do know that it basically works?”

  Hiroshi stopped in his tracks. “Let’s just say that I’m fairly sure.”

  “You must have tested something, you and your team.”

  “As I mentioned, we’ve tested the individual functions. But now comes the integration test. We haven’t been able to test the replication process as a whole, not yet.”

  Well then. She didn’t much care about the details. Charlotte put her hands on her hips and looked around. The lab tables were all cluttered with stuff. The men and women on Hiroshi’s team would be bored once their robots started doing all the work for them. They wouldn’t know what to do with their time.

  “Where is everyone?” she asked.

  “Probably swimming,” Hiroshi said.

  “Swimming? I thought your people were all work and no play.”

  Hiroshi smiled. “I sent them swimming so that we could have some time to ourselves. The test’s all ready; we just have to press the button. But I didn’t want to do that until you got here. I wanted you to see it with me.”

  There it was again, that strange link between them, the mystery of their connection. It had nothing to do with love. They liked one another, no question, and perhaps they had been lovers once, but whatever connected them was something else. Something that gave Charlotte the shivers.

  She took a deep breath. “Why? Why do I have to see it as well?”

  “Because it has to do with you. Because you were the inspiration for it.”

  “Am I supposed to be happy about that?” she murmured, and she shrugged as though she wanted to cast a weight from her shoulders. She looked at the gleaming metal block in the middle of the tent. “Is that it? The complex?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you make it do something? So that I can see what it looks like.”

  “No problem.” Hiroshi hunched over a keyboard, tapped in a command, and then picked up a dark gadget that looked like a pocket flashlight gone wrong. “This is an upgrade of my Wizard’s Wand, with integrated laser pointer and Bluetooth connection. Ninety-nine dollars in most DIY stores.”

  He switched the thing on and pointed its thin red beam at a clear spot on the tent floor, about three meters from the metal block. It was fascinating. The block started to move, then fell apart into hundreds of individual parts. It looked as though thousands of steel-winged insects had clustered together to form a cube and were now going their separate ways. A few seconds later all the various parts were in motion, flowing like a stream of gleaming chrome-plated Lego bricks across the gray-brown floor, rustling and clattering as they threw themselves noisily into the task of moving from one place to another. Less than thirty seconds later the block was standing where Hiroshi had commanded it to go with the laser beam, and after the last unit had settled into place, the silence returned.

  “Wow,” Charlotte said. “You really are a wizard.”

  Hiroshi bent over the keyboard again and entered more commands. “We’ll do the whole thing again, but slower, so that you can see how it works.”

  Another laser beam, and the block began to rattle and hum once more, making a scraping, scratchy sound. This time, though, she could see it was not one flowing movement but more like a tiny army striking camp. First, a series of little square units detached themselves from the rest and climbed down the other units’ backs like acrobats in a circus. Then they laid themselves down on the floor, unrolling like a long tongue, pointing to
ward the new position.

  “These are the positioner units,” Hiroshi commented. “They make the map, so to speak, for all the other units to read.”

  Now a whole crowd of other units followed. She could see at this speed that they were all different, and that most of them didn’t move on their own. They were carried along by units zooming back and forth like little flatbed trucks along the road that the positioners had marked out.

  “Transporter units. The name says it all, doesn’t it?”

  As the block took itself apart, she could see how a scaffold of positioner units gave the whole thing its shape. These, too, gradually left their places and threaded their way through between the transporters to re-create the structure in the new position. Eventually, all the units were there anew, all neatly in place. The last positioner units into the cube were those that had first rolled out onto the floor.

  Charlotte hadn’t expected to be this excited. “That’s amazing! What else can it do? Show me something else.”

  “I’ve programmed something in specially,” said Hiroshi, clearly pleased she liked his toy. He put down his Wand and typed in a few more commands. With its characteristic scurrying rustle, the block changed into…some other shape. A weird-looking machine with a hopper on the top and a tangle of rods and spines on one side.

  “What’s that?” Charlotte asked.

  “One moment.”

  Hiroshi rooted through a drawer, then another, until finally he had found what he was looking for: a big ball of red wool. He walked over to the transformed machine and threw the wool into the hopper. The machine hummed into life, creaking and clattering, and began to knit.

  “That’s unbelievable,” Charlotte exclaimed.

  Inching out of the side of the machine came a knitted scarf, growing longer and longer at incredible speed.

  “The truth is I only wrote that as a demonstration program,” Hiroshi said. “Just for you, in fact. We won’t be using it for the rest of the experiment. It’s good, though, isn’t it?”

  “It’s more than that.” Charlotte plucked up the nerve to step closer as it rattled away. She peered into the hopper; the wool was almost all gone by now, the ball hopping and rolling around as it shrank. When the scarf was finished, the machine fell quiet again.

  Hiroshi picked up the scarf and handed it to her. “A souvenir. I heard that it gets cold in Scotland now and then.”

  “Yes, you could say that.” She felt the scarf. It was soft and fluffy, practically perfect. Good wool, too; she wondered where Hiroshi had got hold of it.

  “What I’m proudest of there is the way the program can start knitting on its own,” Hiroshi declared. “The hardest part was having it find the beginning of the yarn. Then, to be honest, all the other processes are just copied from commercial knitting machines, adapted to the pincer unit’s capabilities.”

  Charlotte ran her hands over the scarf, feeling suddenly feverish. “What else can it do?”

  “This, for instance,” Hiroshi said, entering another command.

  The machine changed again, became short and squat, and stretched out some kind of arm. Hiroshi fetched a rough-hewn stump of wood and put it in front of the machine. The arm came to life at once. Transporter units scurried along it, bringing other units that attacked the wood and cut it into chunks that were carried away by more transporters. Soon the stump tipped over onto its side, the arm repositioned itself, and the cutters got to work on the other side of the wood. They sawed and sliced for a few minutes until there was nothing left. The transporter units carried the cutters away. Now a new unit with a long antenna scurried along the arm and began to poke around where the stump had stood.

  “The prospector unit,” Hiroshi explained.

  Obviously, it was satisfied there was no more wood left, since it scooted away. Something hummed inside the machine for a while. Then more transporters came flitting out, laying out a staggering number of toothpicks on the ground one by one.

  “Incredible,” Charlotte breathed.

  “If you need toothpicks,” Hiroshi said modestly. “This was a fairly early program, which we’ve expanded since then. Now the complex can do the same thing with metal.”

  “With metal?” Charlotte asked, surprised. “Don’t the blades become blunt?”

  “Yes, but the units can sharpen each other up again.”

  Charlotte didn’t answer. All she could do was look from the scarf in her hands to the bizarre machine that had made it and back again. She felt she was standing on the edge of an abyss. What was happening here? What kind of machine was this that could knit scarves, turn tree stumps into toothpicks, and probably make coffee if need be? It was all very entertaining, but even she knew this was not a game, that this machine was not a toy. If ever she had seen a vista of terrifying possibilities, then it was here.

  She turned away to catch her breath. He was watching her; she could feel it. She turned and looked at him. “Do you really want to set this thing loose on the world?”

  “Just on this island to begin with,” Hiroshi said.

  “And who will guarantee that it stays on the island?”

  “Every unit has an automatic cutout that means it falls to bits in salt water. It’s an imposed limitation, of course; we can remove it later. For the time being, though, it’s there to set everybody’s mind at rest.”

  “Every unit? Even the ones that the machine produces on its own? The next generations?”

  “Those, too.” He tilted his head. “Besides, we won’t be reaching any higher-echelon complexity here. There’s no cause for concern. We’ll still be in the domain of centrally controlled programs for a long time yet.”

  She turned to look at the complex again, which seemed to stand there like a faithful dog awaiting its command. “I don’t know. Somehow it’s an unsettling thought.”

  “That’s a quite normal reaction,” Hiroshi said. “If everything goes according to my plans, then it’s the end of the world as we know it. A new world will be born. It would be unnatural not to feel any fear at that prospect.”

  “And you? Aren’t you afraid?”

  “No. I believe the new world will be better than the old.”

  Just then the flap at the tent door rustled. They both turned. It was the young man from the night before—Miroslav, Charlotte recalled. He was wearing nothing but swimming trunks. His hair was wet, and he looked even skinnier than she remembered.

  “What is it?” Hiroshi asked brusquely. He obviously didn’t welcome the interruption.

  Miroslav held up a piece of paper. “Just in from Hong Kong. Marked urgent. The fax sounded the alarm; otherwise, I wouldn’t even have heard it out on the beach.”

  “And? What’s the message?” Hiroshi held his hand out.

  “We have to postpone the test.” Miroslav passed him the fax. “Mr. Gu has informed the board of directors, and they have serious reservations. They’re asking that you come to Hong Kong for a conference to decide how to proceed.”

  Hiroshi took the sheet and read it in silence. His face darkened.

  “What’s the worst-case scenario?” Miroslav asked. He was shivering slightly. Perhaps because it was relatively cool in the tent. “Will they cancel the project?”

  Hiroshi looked up from the fax and gazed into space for a moment. Then he looked at his assistant and smiled. “No. The project won’t be cancelled. You see…unfortunately, this fax only arrived five minutes after we started. What a shame, eh?”

  “Five minutes after…?” Miroslav was visibly startled. “That wouldn’t work. The time stamp is right there on the fax. They’ll be able to compare it to the video footage and see it arrived before the experiment began.”

  Hiroshi folded the sheet carefully. “No problem. Just set the system clocks on all the computers back by an hour. And on the video system. We start the experiment in fifty minutes.”
r />   2

  A flurry of activity erupted all around them.

  Miroslav hastily pulled on a shirt and shorts, then squatted down by the computers and started busily fiddling with them. Right after that the others trotted in, young people from all over the world but mostly Asian, their hair wet, their arms sandy, their skin red from the sun. Charlotte hadn’t even seen most of them before now, much less learned their names. They greeted her as they passed—some of them absent-minded, some curious, some shy—and got to work, visibly excited to be starting at last.

  Hiroshi popped up again. He had gone to the office to organize his trip and send a message to Hong Kong announcing his arrival and little else.

  “How does it look?” he asked Miroslav.

  “Just the server still to go,” his assistant said without looking up. “Then we can get started.”

  Hiroshi’s team swung into action with impressive zest and enthusiasm. She was sure each and every one of them knew what they were doing here could change history. The atmosphere in the control room for the moon landings couldn’t have been much different. As for her? Charlotte folded her arms and thought of her own childhood dream. Paleoanthropology. The first human race. What had become of that? Nothing. Unlike Hiroshi, she no longer had a dream, had no vision to follow.

  The lab benches formed a U shape in the tent. At the open end, where there were no tables, two of the women began to take down the tent panels. Charlotte watched them carefully roll them to each side and tie them to the tentpoles, then she glanced out over the landscape. What she saw was so unexpected that she had to blink several times before she understood what she was looking at. The island was a garbage dump.

  In among the palms lay heaps of rusty household appliances, steel drums, tires. The gentle hillsides were covered with empty cans, plastic bottles, and the Styrofoam shells of TV dinners. Once-green slopes were piled with all sorts of rubbish and trash. What could have been a tropical paradise was instead a nightmare.