Lord of All Things

by Andreas Eschbach

  The two of them paced out the area where the complex had been at work. It looked like a bomb had hit the site. Yellow poles sprouted from the ground everywhere to mark units that had lost their connection to the main complex at one point or another and never made contact again. It didn’t help that the units were scattered around among heaps of scrap and garbage. Nevertheless, the security cutouts had done their job: the central guidance program had correctly assessed the situation as beyond recovery and switched itself off as intended. That data log was also stored and available. Enough data for several years of further analysis. A few units had made it to the shoreline, where the seawater had washed over them. Also as intended, they had fallen to bits as the cutout kicked in.

  “Take pictures of that as well,” Hiroshi said. “That should calm them down. At least it shows that there was never any danger from the test.”

  “It’s done,” Miroslav replied. “I’ve been photographing absolutely everything. This is the most photographed garbage heap in history.”

  After that they studied the video footage together. Everybody else had already watched the events unfold so many times that they knew the story by heart. “There. This is the point where that unit first loses contact,” someone would say, sucking nervously at a cigarette or drinking straw. “Now the fallback routine kicks in. The main action is abandoned, and it reestablished…Yes! Got it!”

  It was as though they hoped that the film had changed since last time they had watched it.

  The main cause of failure was all too obvious. All the original units had been marked with UV paint so that they could be easily identified simply by switching to the matching spectrum on the video footage. That way they could follow exactly which element was doing what and when. The units that the complex had built on its own had no such markings, making things a little more difficult. But all they needed to do to spot the real cause of the problem was play the footage back in reverse from the moment things finally went off the rails. Seen like this, it was obvious everything had started to go wrong with one of the third-generation units—ones that had themselves been built by units of the preceding generations.

  “The complex can’t build its own units with the necessary precision,” Hiroshi declared, his hand on the video “Stop” button. “That’s where the trouble lies, I’m sure of it. The defects accumulate with each step along the replication pathway, and then eventually we get malfunctions.”

  Everybody nodded. They had all reached the same conclusion already.

  “It’s like with audio cassettes back in the old days,” said Therese, the only one who was old enough to remember life before the digital era. “You would make a tape, and it sounded good. If you copied that tape to another cassette, you got a little white noise. Copy it again and there was more, until you eventually had a tape that was all crackle and hum and no music at all.”

  It was a vicious circle, as so often the case with technology. If they wanted to make the new parts with greater precision, then the units would have to be more complicated, meaning in turn they would be harder to manufacture and require more parts. And so on, round and round. It felt hideously like an insoluble paradox.

  He saw his life’s work in ruins before him.

  Hiroshi threw himself once more into his diagrams and sketches, drawing, thinking, racking his brain for hours on end. It couldn’t be true. It couldn’t be true it didn’t work. There had to be some way to make it right. He had been so sure that it would work, as sure as he was that the sun would rise every morning. Perhaps he had just overlooked something. Every little detail counted in technical work, every decision led somewhere and had consequences that could not be foreseen when you first stepped down that path. He had to go back to the beginning, back to the roots of the idea, back to the source. Back to the dreams that had started it all. Those dreams—they had been so vivid; he had seen so clearly how everything moved, how everything was connected, like clockwork that would run for eternity. The problem he was grappling with here could not be insoluble. There had to be a way. The principle was right.

  At some point Charlotte appeared and put her hand on his arm, rousing him from his thoughts. “You never give up, do you?” she asked.

  Hiroshi rubbed his face with both hands and felt stubble. He could smell sweat—his own. He was also very hungry. Dimly, he became aware he had been poring over the documents for several days now, interrupted only by short naps on the bare ground. “I haven’t been taking care of you as my guest,” he mumbled, embarrassed. “I’m sorry. It’s all so…” He looked around and spotted the diagrams that were all that was left of his dreams. “I’m doing something wrong. I just don’t know what.”

  “I should get back home. I need to set off soon.”

  He blinked. Ah yes. She couldn’t stay forever. Of course not. She wanted to get back to her Scottish handworker, the man who built musical instruments that actually worked.

  “I’ll tell them to send the helicopter,” he said. “And I’ll get them to book your flight back.”

  “Miroslav has already taken care of all that.” She gave a sad smile. “I just wanted to say good-bye.”

  Now he could hear it. The helicopter was already on its way. He was losing his grip.

  He saw his life’s work in ruins before him.

  “Then at least I’ll come with you to the landing pad, if you’ve got no objection,” he said, standing up.

  She stood before him, put her arms around his neck, and kissed him. “No objection at all,” she whispered. “But after that you should go and clean yourself up. Remember, Archimedes had his best idea in the bath.”

  She caught her onward flight in Manila without having managed to reach Gary and let him know she was on her way. She tried to tell herself it wasn’t her fault if he had his phone switched off the whole time, but nothing helped. She still felt it was somehow her mistake, that she was doing something wrong.

  She couldn’t sleep. She would probably never be able to sleep again. The stewardess brought magazines and was so solicitous that Charlotte read one after another, hoping that perhaps she would nod off midarticle. Politics! That had always been the surest way to put her to sleep. No wonder, since her father was an ambassador. But this time not even politics helped. Then she chanced upon an article about recent archaeological finds. Researchers from the US and Germany had examined a find from Ethiopia, the bones of animals hunted for their meat more than three million years ago, and discovered clear traces of early human tool use. This didn’t quite turn paleoanthropology on its head, but it did cast doubt on what had been fairly fundamental assumptions. The assumption that only Homo knew how to make stone tools, for instance. Homo hadn’t been around three million years ago. Which meant that Australopithecus already knew how to make and use tools. That would date the start of the Stone Age further back by almost a million years—a major shift for prehistory’s frame of reference.

  Charlotte shut the magazine, put her head back, and closed her eyes. It was as though the topic were following her around. She picked the magazine up again and looked at the masthead. It wasn’t a specialist journal, of course, but it looked like a reputable news source. She had no idea what to make of it. She had thought that chapter of her life was over. She had had a strange vision, sure, but nothing had come of it. She had found no convincing way to test her idea. And she had attended one of the best universities in the world, thanks to her mother, who would have been satisfied with nothing less. Perhaps she should just have a child.

  While she was waiting to board the plane to Aberdeen, the last leg of her trip, she unpacked the red scarf Hiroshi had given her. The scarf his machine had knitted. There was something strange about it. Charlotte held it in both hands, closed her eyes, and tuned out the hubbub of voices and loudspeaker announcements in the boarding area that surrounded her like acoustic fog. She concentrated wholly on the scarf. She felt where the wool had come from
. She had a fleeting impression of the shearer who had taken it from the sheep—an Australian, a tough, pious man who was in love with a girl from the wrong religion and felt torn in two. Then she saw a lightning image of the machinist in the woolen mill who had spun it into yarn, felt her worries about a rash she had developed in an intimate area, her fear it might have something to do with a man she had slept with. So far it was all as Charlotte would have expected. But there was nothing at all about how the scarf was actually made. A yawning void. It was as though the wool had simply knitted itself into a scarf on its own. It was the strangest article of clothing she had ever held in her hands.

  It was strange to come home and not be met at the airport. She took a taxi, remembering even as she did so that she would have to be careful with money again; she had been happily able to forget all that during her trip. Having to think about such things once more was like running her tongue over her teeth and finding a gap. The taxi driver was friendly and in a chatty mood. He took her for a tourist and gave her a card with his cell-phone number.

  “Day or night, just call and I’ll be at your doorstep,” he said. “There are too many dodgy blokes in this business. You book a cab in advance and then they never even get out of bed. Not what you need when there’s a flight to catch, is it?”

  Charlotte liked his go-getting attitude. She put the card in her bag. As they pulled up, she saw Gary’s car parked in front of the house. She should have been pleased he was home, but for some reason she had a hollow feeling in the pit of her stomach. She still had to catch her breath after everything that had happened. Make sense of all that craziness in the South Pacific.

  There was a smell of fresh grass and wood smoke in the air. It seemed to have rained that morning, with drops still glittering on the bushes and the fields. Charlotte took her suitcase and carried it up to the house. She opened the door. Gary was sitting at the kitchen table and looked up, startled. Opposite him sat a girl. Younger than Charlotte and rather plain: thin, with a sharp nose and brown curls all over the place. Charlotte put down her suitcase but couldn’t say a word. It was clear what was going on here. Of course. But that wasn’t what troubled her so. What troubled her was how relieved she suddenly felt.

  Gary leapt to his feet. As he hurried over to where she stood, he seemed to take pains to stay between her and the girl. “Come outside with me for a moment,” he said awkwardly. “There’s something I have to explain.”

  Charlotte shook her head. What could possibly need explaining? But she followed him. And so they stood in front of the slumped, crooked house that had been their home. Gary, too, was standing crooked and slumped, nervously picking lichen out of the cracks in the wall, unable to say a word—a pitiful sight. Charlotte looked away. She didn’t want to remember him like this.

  “Go on then, say it. Who is she?”

  Her name was Lilith, he finally confessed. Her father owned the auction house where Gary worked. One day she would inherit it—“And for goodness’ sake, Charlotte, don’t get the wrong idea, but at least it offers a bit of security. It’s better than scraping by with odds and ends of work up here in a Scottish backwater.…And besides, I was sure you were never coming back,” Gary concluded lamely. “Take a break, you said—you know how that always ends. I could see that someone like you wasn’t going to waste her time explaining to someone like me…” He trailed off, as though he had run out of words. A last, lonely raindrop dripped from the eaves above and splashed on his head. He blinked but didn’t say another word.

  “And you just thought, why wait?” Charlotte looked at the man she had lived with for more than two years, the man she had loved, and knew it was over.

  He said nothing. She hugged him. Startled, he let it happen, even clumsily tried to return the gesture.

  “Look after one another,” she said. “I’ll let you know where to send my things as soon as I know myself.”

  Then she went and got her suitcase as the thin girl watched, alarm showing in her eyes. Back on the street, she took out her phone and the driver’s card. She reached him as he was still on his way back to Aberdeen.

  “That was quick,” was all he said.

  TRAVELS

  Adamson wondered yet again how Rhonda coped with the twins every day. He was drenched in sweat from the mere attempt to comb Mia’s hair. At least she wasn’t delightedly decorating the bathroom with her mother’s expensive shampoo like her sister, Jane, who was well on her way to dirtying the clean dress he had finally managed to put on her. The basic lesson of every management course he had ever taken was to concentrate on one task at a time. In a household with two four-year-old children, that was a joke.

  “Stay still a moment,” he ordered, lifting the brush in what he hoped look like a convincing threat.

  “But it hurts!” Mia protested, looking at him with big eyes.

  He put the brush back down. It was no good; these girls could twist him round their little fingers when they wanted to. Of course it hurt. The twins had their mother’s hair, and she spent a good deal of time every morning cursing in front of the mirror. She needed more time just to keep her hair in order than he took for his whole morning routine.

  “Jane,” he scolded, “you leave that alone, that’s Mummy’s shampoo. She doesn’t want you playing with it. Wash your hands now, there’s a good girl.”

  Multitasking. Known and proven to be inefficient—any manager who boasted of using the technique only disqualified himself from any job that really mattered—but when dealing with children, it was the only possible strategy.

  Rhonda stuck her head around the bathroom door. “Say, did you go see the doctor yesterday?” she asked. Gray-white spatters of some unappetizing-looking substance clung to her face and apron, doubtless part of the recipe she was trying out.

  “Of course I did,” he said. “By the way, you have something on your face there.”

  Rhonda rolled her eyes. “I have something all over. When I’m finished making this pie, we’re going to have to rip out the whole kitchen and build a new one. So what did he say?”

  “What would he say? Everything’s okay. If I wanted to jump aboard a space flight tomorrow or take up deep-sea diving, I would have his full medical blessing.”

  She groaned piteously. “Is life even remotely fair? We women subject ourselves to sports and gyms and who knows what and try every diet that’s going, and we just get more and more out of shape. You spend your whole day sitting on your butt, you eat like a lumberjack, and you’re as fit as a fiddle.”

  “You’re not out of shape,” he objected. He’d learned in recent years what a husband ought to say at such moments.

  “You’re lying, Bill Adamson,” she shot back, flattered.

  He reached out a hand. “Come on, let’s get that blob off your nose. It looks like bird crap.”

  “Bill! Don’t use that language in front of the children.” The fond smile switched to an angry glare. Don’t even try to understand women.

  “Bird excrement?” he suggested.

  “You’re impossible,” she said. “I have to go blow up the kitchen.”

  And with that she was out the door.

  The two girls looked at their father, aghast. They looked lovely in their blue dresses. Lovely, except for the knots and tangles in their hair.

  “What’s Mummy doing now?” Mia asked. She was always the more nervous of the two.

  “She’s just trying out a new recipe,” Adamson explained. “That’s because it’s Uncle Mitch’s birthday today, and he’s coming over to dinner. It just turns out to be a more difficult recipe than Mummy thought.” And then inspiration struck. “But I bet if you two girls come here and let me brush your hair nicely, we might be able to stop the kitchen from exploding.”

  Mitch turned up twenty minutes late as always, nevertheless looking as though he had been in a hell of a hurry. Unlike his sister, who grew rounder wi
th every passing year, the CIA analyst looked hungrier—and more watchful—as the years went by. He looked like a bird of prey, Adamson mused.

  “So? What’s new?” Adamson asked once they had all given Mitch his presents.

  “No talking shop at my dinner table,” Rhonda scolded.

  So they waited until after dinner. Adamson went out on the deck to join his brother-in-law, who was smoking his after-dinner cigarette.

  “You heard that Larry Gu died?” he asked.

  Adamson nodded. “It made the news. Google Alerts helps me with stuff like that.”

  “Okay.” Mitch leaned forward, propped his elbows on the balcony, and took a breath of the cool evening air. “So it looks like Beijing has nationalized his company. They don’t call it that anymore—those guys ain’t dumb. But it comes down to the same thing. State-run enterprise. In other words, it belongs to the party.” He gave a humorless laugh. “Did you know that the Communist Party of China is the world’s biggest capitalist? Nobody in the world has more money than those guys. All those state-owned corps—Gazprom, Saudi Aramco…they’re all huge. It defies belief. If they were actually traded on the exchanges, big bad capitalist giants like Google, Microsoft, Exxon, and so on would be small fry. That’s something these goddamned pinkos should wise up to.”

  Adamson cleared his throat. It wouldn’t be wise to get involved in such arguments, or they’d be out here all night. “Do we have any idea why they did that? Or was it just on principle?”

  “Not at all. Most of the time they let Hong Kong corporations go their own way. Special Economic Zone—you know the drill. The Chinese are completely pragmatic about these things. No, from what we can tell, they’re looking for something they suspect the company has hidden away.” Mitch glanced at him mockingly. “A machine our friend developed.”

  “Well fancy that,” Adamson said, unsurprised.