Lord of All Things

by Andreas Eschbach

  “We’ve got a while until then.” Hiroshi nodded. “In principle, you’re quite right; my machine does consume more energy on average. That’s logical enough after all, since it’s replacing human labor. However, these machines will obtain all the energy they need for themselves. We needn’t worry about it.”

  “Oh yes? And how are they going to do that?”

  Hiroshi raised his arm and pointed skyward. “By using a source of energy that, in human terms at least, is inexhaustible. The sun.”

  “What do you mean? Are you going to fit out your minirobots with solar cells? I hardly think that would be enough.”

  “You’re quite right; it wouldn’t be. We’ll need full-scale power stations.” Hiroshi couldn’t stay in his chair. He stood up and walked around the conference table as he spoke. “You’ve seen one complex at work today, and you’ve seen a photograph of what this complex looks like when it’s at rest. It’s not much bigger than a small refrigerator. But please don’t let that image fool you into thinking that’s how things will look in the end, that every household will have its miracle machine, but everything else will stay the same. No, this complex is just the seed, and when it takes root and bears fruit we’ll see a completely new industrial structure where everything is connected to everything else and human labor is only needed now and again as a hand on the tiller. And even that will be needed less and less often as the structure develops its own ever-greater complexity, since we can use well-known computing principles and concepts, such as swarm behavior, intelligent agents, and neuronal networking, to give this new industrial system a considerable degree of autonomy. So, in the new world we not only have an Aladdin’s lamp in every kitchen but a complex of complexes that themselves are made up of further complexes right the way down as far as you like, and all these units will be connected to each other, exchanging material, information—and energy, too. There will be complexes that do nothing else but supply energy. And that will be a simple matter, simpler than you can possibly imagine at the moment.”

  “I look forward to seeing it,” the American growled for all to hear.

  “Current global energy consumption,” Hiroshi continued, “is somewhere in the order of fifteen terawatts. That’s fifteen thousand gigawatts, or fifteen million megawatts, and that includes all the energy we use to heat our homes, move goods and people, power our industry—everything. We obtain this energy by burning coal and oil, or by the fission of uranium atoms. There are one or two other methods as well.” He was walking along the window wall now, silhouetted against the dim cityscape that could be seen through the darkened glass. “But, gentlemen, compare this amount of energy, this fifteen terawatts, with the energy the sun pours down upon Earth every day and has done for billions of years. That’s one hundred eighty thousand terawatts—twelve thousand times what we currently need. Which means we would need to convert just one tiny part of the surface of Earth into a solar power station to make every other source of energy redundant.”

  “That’s still a heck of a large area.”

  Hiroshi stopped pacing. “On a globe it would be a spot you could barely make out. And again, bear in mind we have unlimited labor at our disposal. We would only have to program this power station; the machines themselves would build it. And maintain it.” He moved off again around the table. “Now you may well protest that the most suitable land areas—deserts, for instance—are mostly in politically unstable countries right now, and so on. Quite right. But here, too, my answer is that we will create abundance. Political instability is essentially the result of hunger, endemic disease, shortages at every conceivable level. Once we can give people everything they need, then politically unstable conditions will also be a thing of the past.”

  “But will your machines be able to do that? End hunger?” Timmermans broke in. “You’ll need to grow crops, and crops need land. And land itself is in limited supply.”

  “True,” said Hiroshi. “But we have unlimited labor at our disposal. We can tend gardens intensively where right now we have field upon field of monoculture. We can water every stalk of wheat individually if need be. We can make the deserts bloom.”

  “And run up against the solar power stations we’re building there.”

  Hiroshi laughed out loud. “Can you imagine a world where the deserts we take for granted today will have all disappeared, save for one tiny scrap of land? We can settle that conflict fairly easily.”

  Charlotte watched him finish walking around the huge table as if he were completing a ritual. Memories bubbled up inside her, each one rising through her mind and popping to show a picture of the little boy who had seemed so remarkable even then, the boy who was afraid of nothing, who would never turn away from any goal he had set himself. She had known him then, and she saw now that Hiroshi was still that boy, grown now, grown up, but a fully formed version of the seed he had borne within himself even then. Perhaps people never truly changed. Perhaps people were like the planets, following their orbits unswervingly and only looking different because they reflected different light.

  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. He’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.