Hiroshi came to her side. “Dreadful, isn’t it? That’s what the industrial countries call recycling. It’s actually too much work for them to really sort through all their leftover rubbish once the easily recyclable materials have been taken for reuse. Cheaper just to load everything up in containers and ship it off to the Third World. Most of the time, countries like this have no other way to earn money than to allow them to unload their trash here and forget about it.”
“That’s revolting,” Charlotte said. She looked around, noticed again the wet hair of the people around her. “And you sent your team swimming in there?”
Hiroshi pointed back over his shoulder. “There’s a much more hygienic beach up by the jetty. This island’s not full up yet either. Otherwise, it would stink even worse than it does.” He pointed toward the curious, yellow, billowing mass she had seen from the helicopter. “All that over there comes from Europe. They pack their rubbish neatly into plastic bags.”
“It’s disgusting.” Charlotte suddenly felt dirty. “Couldn’t you have found some other island?”
Hiroshi shook his head. “It had to be this way. As soon as I heard about this island, I knew I wanted to carry out the tests here.”
“Why in the world would you want to do that?”
“Two reasons. First of all, because it makes it vastly easier for the complex to find new materials to build with. Working this way, I don’t need as large a starting configuration as if I had set out to mine for raw materials in the ground. And second, because it shows the potential this technology has to deal with the mess we’ve made of the world so far. Do you know how many landfills and garbage dumps there are on the planet? The number is beyond belief. The amount of trash is beyond belief. You could easily cover the whole surface of the moon with it. Even if my invention does nothing but clear up all the trash we’ve made, it would be a blessing for that reason alone.”
Why did that make her think of her house in Belcairn, Scotland, at the ends of the earth? Why did it make her think of Gary, of how she only wanted to be happy with him and for some reason was not? Charlotte came to with a start. It seemed like a betrayal to think that way.
Hiroshi was already fiddling around with his Wizard’s Wand. He steered the silver cube out of the tent step by step. Outside, they had painted a set of coordinates in green on the bare earth between the tent and the garbage dump; a great big cross marked the spot where the experiment would start.
“How are we for time?” Hiroshi called.
Miroslav looked at the big clock hanging on one of the tentpoles, which he had likewise set back an hour. “Thirty-three minutes still.”
“And everything’s ready?”
“Everything’s ready.”
“Okay,” Hiroshi said. “We don’t have to be quite so literal about the five minutes. We could just as easily have started half an hour before the fax arrived. Last check and starting sequence!”
Miroslav picked up a clipboard with a checklist. “Start video surveillance!” he called out.
“Running,” reported a man with a pronounced Asian fold to his eyes.
“Energy?”
“One hundred percent,” a woman with dark brown curls called back. She looked about forty and was far and away the oldest person on the team.
“Starting position correct?”
“Right on target,” Hiroshi said.
Miroslav got up, walked over to Charlotte, and held out a little black box that looked like some kind of remote control. “If you please,” he said, looking at her with eyes made enormous by his thick glasses. “Just press the button.”
Charlotte gave a start. “Me?”
“Please!” Hiroshi called out.
Did she have to? It wasn’t her job. She had nothing to do with all this. She had had a very different dream…But she took the device. What choice did she have? And she put her finger on the button. It was a large button, the only one on the box. The button that would start it all. Someone pointed a video camera at her. They were all smiling. Expectantly, as though Charlotte would make a valuable contribution by pressing this button.
Hiroshi’s gaze locked with hers, as though they were two magnetic poles bound together for all eternity. He smiled in invitation, a proud smile—so proud it was painful. As though he had done all this just for her. But why would he do such a thing? It was all so strange. Don’t think about all that now. Charlotte pressed the button, and outside in front of the tent, the block began to clatter and rattle.
So. It was done. If this was the start of a new world, then let it begin. She handed the remote control back to Miroslav and returned his smile as best she could. Everyone around her was leaving their places, going outside to see what was happening. Charlotte passed both hands over her face, gathered her hair back, and took a deep breath. Well then, she thought. Let’s take a look at what we’ve done.
When she went to join the others in the ring they had made around the silver block—around what the block had become—she couldn’t believe her eyes. Charlotte had already been impressed by what Hiroshi had shown her before, shocked by the speed and elegance with which the units moved. But compared with the spectacle before her, all that had merely been five-finger exercises, tricks the machine could perform with no effort at all. Now the complex was really getting to work. It made Charlotte shiver to look at it. To see this flock of robots, each no bigger than the palm of her hand, flitting about like jet-assisted ants, to watch the whole apparatus turn itself into a scuttling, clattering, rattling, humming form that changed shape every few seconds, creeping toward the garbage dump, putting out feelers, drawing them back, stretching itself out and then contracting, passing a steady flow of stuff through its body. It was breathtaking. The first little heaps of neatly stacked and sorted raw materials were already taking shape behind the machine: metal, plastics, wood, and so on.
Had there really been so many separate units in the cube? A gleaming steel horde was scurrying about in front of her, like Lego bricks gone wild, more than twice as many as she had imagined fit in the block. The units hadn’t already replicated themselves, had they? They couldn’t possibly have done it that fast. No, now she could see: they were just getting to work. The little claws and blades and all their other tools were sweeping the ground clean and digging and cutting shapes for molding, then other units scurried over and beat the sides smooth, all in fluid movements, like a swarm of insects descending upon the island—a swarm of steel locusts that devoured not the fields but the heaps of rubbish. And now the first molten metal was flowing into the mound. It hissed, and steam and smoke rose up…
Charlotte came up to stand next to Hiroshi, who was watching his creation at work, a blissful smile on his face. “The energy,” she said. “Where do they get the energy for all this?”
She had been prepared to wait for him to shake himself free of his reverie, but she didn’t need to. Rather, he seemed delighted that she was so curious.
“Most people never even ask,” he said smiling. “Well, at the moment the energy is simply supplied by a generator.” He pointed to a low, dark green tent next to the lab, and Charlotte spotted a thin cable running to one of the larger units. It hadn’t been plugged in for the demonstration back in the tent, so clearly the complex was capable of storing a certain amount of energy. “Again, this was a question of the initial configuration. Energy is a central problem, but at the replication stage it doesn’t much matter where it initially comes from. We wrote the metaprogram so that it relies on energy from a generator until there are more than twenty complexes. Then they get to work building solar panels, and that supplies all the further stages.”
She looked at him and wondered once more what went on in this man’s mind. She would probably never understand him. “Twenty complexes,” she echoed. “Be honest now—are you ever planning to switch this machine off?”
He smiled enigmatically. “Th
ere will come a point when the machine can’t even be switched off.”
A sound that had nothing to do with the robotic units and their activity made all heads turn. It was the helicopter arriving.
“How long can you stay?” Hiroshi asked.
Charlotte blinked and considered what day it was, how long Gary would still be in London. “One week? Maybe two.”
“Okay. Come to Hong Kong with me, then.”
He eventually stopped counting how many hands he had shaken. “Rasmussen,” he told one and all. “Jens Rasmussen. I represent Mr. Kato’s interests.”
“Pleased to meet you,” they mostly said. “But he’ll be coming in person, too?”
“I’m expecting him.”
Rasmussen liked coming to Hong Kong—always had. Most people when they heard the name only ever thought of high-rises towering over the canyons of streets and teeming hordes of people all frantically going about their business. But those who got to know the city better were surprised to find they could walk along the island for hours on end. Strolling through forests and across green meadows, they came upon countless enchanting views of the coves and bays along China’s coastline, and ancient trees dating back to the days when Hong Kong was a sleepy little backwater.
It was a shame he would not have time to go hiking on this visit. When the board meeting had been announced, it was more like an alarm drill than an invitation. Everything was top of the line, of course—the hotel, the limousine that had picked him up, the tea and canapés served before the meeting. And, of course, Ku Zhong, Gu’s omnipresent and omnicompetent assistant, was taking care of everything, a broad-shouldered, stern-faced shadow who was loyal to his lord and master to the point of servility. Sometimes, at least by Western standards, beyond.
As always, the clearing away of the remaining food and drink signaled the meeting was about to start. Larry Gu never ate or drank at the conference table and never allowed anybody else to do so either. Two men from the security staff went around the room one last time with typically Chinese thoroughness. They left not one square inch of the walls or floor unexamined, even though the conference room was doubtless fully equipped with all the latest counterespionage technology. Then the great door at the front of the room opened silently. Rasmussen straightened his tie. It was all very theatrical. Gu loved that. Somebody had told him once that Gu had made a DVD compilation of all the moments in James Bond films that featured conference rooms, doors opening, walls turning around, and other architectural tricks. Apparently, he watched it over and over, especially whenever there was to be some new building work anywhere in his empire. And just like every time he saw Larry Gu, Rasmussen was startled to see that the ancient little man seemed even smaller than he had remembered him from the time before.
He pottered in through that enormous door with tiny little steps. It seemed to take hours for him to cross the five yards to the head of the conference table. Ku, expressionless as always, stayed by his side the whole time. Everyone in the room unconsciously held their breath as Gu clambered up into his seat. The chair was so big he could comfortably have lain down to sleep in it. It was always fascinating to see the white-bearded old man glance around the table and greet them all with a nonchalant “Huān yíng” as though he had just dropped by to say hello. The conference room had excellent acoustics despite its cavernous dimensions. Rasmussen had often wondered how this was possible. In any event, it worked, for Larry Gu would not allow microphones at his meetings. He spoke in a quiet, penetrating voice—and everyone in the room heard his every word.
“Now then,” he began, “let’s keep this short. You all know why we are here today. I think you should have had plenty of time over the last few days to study the documents you all received and to form your own opinions.” He looked around the table, twirling his thin white beard.
The first to raise his hand was Piet Timmermans, a wiry Dutchman, the company’s director for Europe. “To be quite frank, I cannot imagine how this might work,” he said when Gu had gestured for him to speak. “With all due respect for your decisions, Mr. Gu, and for Mr. Kato’s technical capabilities, which I am not in a position to judge, all of this is sheer science fiction. And the budget you have assigned to it is money out the window.” He peered over the rim of his glasses at the documents. “How much was that? Fifty million? There were many better things you could have spent it on, if you ask me.”
Gu smiled, unconcerned. “Well, it was my money. I can’t take it with me after all.”
Timmermans shrugged. “Just my opinion.”
This was something that Rasmussen had liked about Gu from the very first. Larry Gu was absolutely merciless toward disloyalty—persistent rumor had it that in his younger days he had personally cut out the tongue of a treacherous business partner—but nobody in Gu’s employ had ever suffered any ill consequences from speaking his mind. Quite the opposite. Rasmussen couldn’t always follow Gu’s sometimes bizarre appointments and promotions, but he thought he saw a trend in which the old man surrounded himself largely with people who held different opinions from his own—although in recent years Rasmussen had come to suspect ever more strongly that Gu mostly did that for his own amusement.
Jeffrey Coldwell, director for North and South America, a bull-necked Southerner, was said to have an extremely checkered past. He had been growing increasingly restless, visibly irked that Timmermans had raised his hand before him. “I’m worried about quite the opposite,” he thundered when at last it was his turn to speak. “Let’s assume the damn thing really does work—then what? A universal machine that can manufacture anything at all, including copies of itself? Great God in heaven, if that’s not crazy, then I don’t know what is. I find it unbelievable that we were not told about this decision earlier. This kind of thing requires discussion. And, most importantly, before it’s had five years of investment and who knows how many thousands of hours of research and development. For instance, who actually owns the products the machine manufactures? Has anybody even considered these questions?”
“They belong to whoever owns the machine, I would say,” responded Zhou Qiang, one of the directors for Asia.
“Or whoever owns the raw materials,” countered Brad Summer, director for Australia. “You could make a case for that.”
“It may well be that we are entering uncharted legal territory here,” Larry Gu put in with a sly grin. He was clearly tickled to bits that he had caused such an uproar among his directors.
Coldwell slapped his hand down onto the table. “I simply don’t understand the business model. What’s this machine for? Somebody who buys this need never spend another penny in his life—the thing produces everything he’ll ever need. Isn’t that the idea? A universal machine that makes everything, produces whatever you want, completely automatically and at no further cost.”
“Exactly,” Gu confirmed, stroking his beard. “The modern equivalent of Aladdin’s lamp.”
“And then what? How are we supposed to make money off that?” Coldwell raved. “We’d be sawing off the branch we’re sitting on. Sawing off all the branches there even are—chopping down the whole damn forest. Sooner or later a machine like that would wipe out every industry there is. An atom bomb couldn’t do as much damage as this thing, if it really works.”
“Isn’t that somewhat exaggerated?” Brad Summer objected.
Rumor had it Coldwell couldn’t stand his Australian colleague. It certainly showed now as he barked, “Have you even read the dossier? Have you thought it through? This machine can duplicate itself. And once it’s done that, it can duplicate itself again. And again, and so on. Nuclear explosions work exactly the same way, in case you weren’t paying attention in school. All in the blink of an eye. We aren’t even guaranteed to sell more than a single one of these machines, if our first customer just gives away the copies for free.” He sank back down in his seat and shook his bull head, exhausted. “No. if you a
sk me, somebody didn’t think this through.”
Brad Summer raised his eyebrows, making his round face look rather bovine. “I don’t know what you’re getting so worked up about. It would be a good thing if everybody had what they needed.”
“Do you think so?” Coldwell shook his head. “Well, I don’t know how you Aussies do business, but the way I learned it, we earn money by finding out what people need but don’t have. That’s the only way the game works, see? Hey. Take my housekeeper, for example.” He waved an arm in what may or may not have been the direction of America. “Jessica Gomez, forty-two years old, single, two children. She’s got a heart of gold, she’s an amazing cook, as long as you like Mexican cooking—and you know what? I do. She keeps my house in tip-top condition. Okay. I pay her good money for that. Also okay. That’s the way it works. But you give this woman a universal machine that will stock her fridge and make the sneakers and sweatshirts for her boys, and do you think she’ll ever do a hand’s turn of work for me again in her life? She ain’t doing that because she’s bored. She’s doing it because she needs the money. If she had everything she needed, I’d never see her again.”
“And then you might have to iron your own shirts?” Gu put in, his voice dripping with sympathy that could only be meant ironically. He pointed at a cell phone that Ku Zhong was holding out to show him. “I am most unwilling to interrupt this splendid debate, but we have just heard that the jet with Mr. Kato onboard will be landing in less than half an hour. And we have also learned that Mr. Kato will be bringing a guest along, a lady. So if you still wish to fight, I request that you do so now.”
Hiroshi awoke to the soft, repeated chiming of a gong, slightly louder each time. The alarm clock. Of course. He put out his hand and switched it off.
Even in the company jet, the flight to Hong Kong took almost eight hours. Since they would head straight into the conference room when they arrived—and he had to be in top form once he got there—and since there was a comfortable bed in the plane, they had lain down to get some sleep. Chastely, fully dressed, but it had been good. And it was wonderful to hold Charlotte in his arms again.
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