Lord of All Things

by Andreas Eschbach

  Visibly troubled that the guests were checking out when they had only just checked in that afternoon, the young man at the counter asked whether everything had been all right. They had paid for a night after all.

  “Yeah, yeah,” James grumbled. “Some business has come up though. Urgent. Always the same.”

  “When will I see you again?” Nancy Coldwell asked, pouting and looking at him with lovey-dovey eyes as they left the hotel. She was in love with him, all right—him and his money.

  “I’ll call you,” he said and put her in a taxi.

  He wondered how he could get his father interested in this business. But he didn’t spend long thinking about it; there was no point. Of all the CEOs on the planet, his father was the least likely to grab an invention like that and make it the biggest money spinner in history. All James had to do was remember all those philanthropic, tree-hugging, save-the-planet organizations his dad supported—mostly in ways the general public never even got to hear of—to know his father would much rather release the machine as a “gift to humanity.” Dad would probably give him that lecture again about all the inventions Benjamin Franklin had deliberately never patented.

  No. He wouldn’t breathe a word about it to his father. He would wait patiently until his time had come.

  Hiroshi saw her coming. At first, of course, he had no idea it was Charlotte at the wheel of the red SUV that came roaring up the hairpin bends. For some reason, he had felt the urge to go roaming through the empty rooms in the towers at the top of his house, which gave a quite different view of the mountains all around. He had stopped in front of the window that faced out front. That’s when he noticed the car and saw the breakneck speed it was doing up the curves.

  The roads hereabouts were ancient, never designed for speeds like that. Hiroshi held his breath as the car sped around the bend with the six-hundred-foot drop below and wondered whom he should call if it went off the road. Whether there would even be any point in trying to help. Then the car pulled up in his front driveway, and Charlotte got out. Well how about that? Hiroshi watched her talking to Mrs. Steel, no doubt explaining who she was and what she wanted, and he watched his housekeeper admit the guest. He ran his fingers through his hair and went downstairs. She was happy to see him there, but there was a curious gleam in her eyes as she said hello.

  When he took her by the arm to give her a tour of the house, she whispered, “Why didn’t you tell me the woman you live with is your housekeeper?”

  “I didn’t feel like it,” Hiroshi confessed. “Up until then you had always been the one who was with somebody whenever we met, and I thought it was about time to turn the tables.”

  “You’re an idiot,” she declared.

  He said nothing. She was probably right.

  “Do you actually have any furniture?” she asked once they had walked through the second empty room.

  “That’s a closet over there,” Hiroshi declared, pointing at a wall that looked no different from the rest of the paneling.

  She raised her eyebrows. “How could I possibly have overlooked that?”

  “I’m not so keen on furniture.”

  “Well, it’s kind of stylish. But it just looks a little empty. You don’t have much stuff, do you?”

  “Only what I really need.”

  “But you didn’t need such a big house.”

  “There are other reasons for that.”

  He wondered whether he should show her the lab. The main reason he bought the house, apart from its remote location, was the basement rooms. It had once housed a private sound studio that was not just soundproofed but cut off from the outside world in every other way as well. The country singer had spent his life expecting the onset of nuclear war; the first time Hiroshi had toured the house, he had found two years’ worth of canned food and army rations in a spare room. The supplies were all still there, though most of them were probably inedible by now.

  Hiroshi had ordered several million dollars’ worth of equipment for the basement and had imagined he would be able to use it all to gradually realize his project—on his own this time. He hadn’t imagined he would run into such fundamental problems, though. Now the lab stood mostly unused; he hadn’t been down there for almost a year. He’d show it to Charlotte some other time, he decided.

  “No sofa,” she remarked as they walked into his thinking room, the one with the basket chair. “You don’t seem to have many visitors.”

  “True. Rodney’s been here, but otherwise…well. Jens stops in from time to time to see if I have anything he can sell.” Noticing the name meant nothing to her, he added, “Jens Rasmussen. You met him back in Hong Kong. The thin, bald guy.”

  She nodded. “You do have a bedroom, though, don’t you? Or do you work around the clock these days?”

  It was a moment almost like back in Boston in the fog. Hiroshi looked at her and wondered whether she had come here intending to sleep with him or whether she was just considering the idea now.

  “No, I have a bedroom. Do you want to see it?”

  “For completeness’ sake.”

  He led her there. Even after all this time, he was very pleased with the room he had chosen. The window gave onto a thick tangle of pines right next to the house, a stand of trees that was almost intimate, where a spring burst out of the rock. When he woke up in the morning, the sunlight sometimes caught the stream and glittered as though a ghost were bathing there. The slender, sunlight-dappled trees were like a living tapestry, never the same from one day to the next.

  “You even have a bed. I’m reassured.” Charlotte had stopped in the doorway. She looked around, and though she wasn’t actually shaking her head, she looked as though she was thinking about it. “You’re a strange fellow, Hiroshi Kato.”

  “I concentrate on the essentials.”

  “And that’s your work. Which is bizarre, really, given that you actually want to abolish work. What will you do with your life once that happens?”

  Hiroshi had sometimes wondered that himself. He felt he was exerting all his powers to the utmost, stretching himself to the very limits. And that one day he would have to pay the price. Perhaps he would end up like Moses, who was said to have led his people to the Promised Land, though he never actually set foot there himself. Idle thoughts.

  “There’s not much chance I’ll ever have to worry about that,” he answered. “Come on, I’ll show you my study. You’ll like it—it’s crammed full of stuff. And I have two chairs there.”

  “Hey, two chairs. Big spender.”

  “Keep your cool when we have lunch in the dining room,” Hiroshi said, shutting the bedroom door. “There’s even six chairs around the table in there.”

  “Good thing you warned me.”

  Why had she actually come? Not to poke fun at him, surely? He asked her.

  “I felt like it, if you can believe that,” she said.

  But that wasn’t the real reason, he knew. Just as she knew as well that the answer wasn’t enough.

  “I’ve agreed to go on an expedition that will last three months, and…well, I thought I’d come and see you before I set out.”

  She didn’t seem to want to talk about this expedition. From the sound of it, it wasn’t just another trip to see early hominid fossils in some research lab or museum.

  Hiroshi wasn’t quite sure what he should say to that. Since they had just then reached the study door, he simply opened it wide and said, “Well. This is it.”

  She stood in the doorway and heaved a deep sigh. “Aha. It’s almost…cozy.” She had to laugh then, and she passed her hands over her face as though she needed to rub her eyes. “To tell you the truth, it looks a bit like a high-end computer store.”

  Hiroshi walked in. “These are no ordinary off-the-shelf computers,” he explained. “They’re high-performance UNIX workstations with parallel processors—what t
hey call supercomputers. If you want more computing power than I have here in this room, you would have to go to NASA or IBM or the labs where they simulate nuclear explosions.” That was only a bit of an exaggeration. He was really rather proud of what he had achieved here with relatively modest expenditure. And in a much more appealing setting than those boring computer clusters in their stark, air-conditioned halls.

  Charlotte followed him; it seemed she had to make an effort to cross the threshold of this room. The motion detector kicked in, and the computer screens came to life one after another, showing the simulations that were running right now. She stood between the monitors and folded her arms. She looked at the images as though she were in an art gallery.

  “What are these pictures?” she asked at last. “They look like molecules or something. Huge molecules.”

  “That’s what they are,” said Hiroshi.

  She turned around indignantly. “I thought you were working on robots?”

  “Those are robots.”

  “You just said yourself that they’re molecules.”

  He pulled up a chair for her. “Sit down. This will take a while.”

  She sat down obediently, crossed her arms, and glanced back and forth from him to the screens. He sat down across from her. He wasn’t sure he could explain all this in such a way that anyone else could understand. He hadn’t expected Charlotte to actually visit, and now she was really here, as beautiful as ever, if not more so. He was at least as irritated as he was pleased. The whole thing was very complicated.

  “The problem with those robots back on Paliuk,” he began, “was that the replication wasn’t exact enough. The first-generation units were copies of the originals, sure, but only to within a certain percentage tolerance. They were just a little bit imprecise. That meant that the second-generation units were even less precise, and all of those small errors added up over time. It was inevitable that at some point they’d make a unit that couldn’t dock with the others, that had a groove that was too wide or too narrow, that couldn’t clasp hold correctly—whatever it may have been. A unit sufficiently imprecise that the whole complex couldn’t work together any longer.”

  Charlotte nodded. “I remember. We could see that on the video footage at the time.”

  “Exactly.” That was right. She had still been there to see it. He remembered now. “The cause of all that was the manufacturing process. You saw how the units worked. For instance, how they dug molds, cast the parts, and then finished them the way you always have to with casting work. But they could only work with limited precision—for technical reasons. If I had wanted them to work with greater precision, then I would have had to build larger, more complicated units. That in turn would have meant making more new parts for every step of the replication and making them more precisely, and that would have been more complicated in turn…well, so on and so forth. We would have been running in place. The geometrical progression could have just stretched onward to infinity.”

  Charlotte looked skeptical. Perhaps she was regretting she’d even come. “It does sound as though it would fundamentally never work.”

  “Yes, that was my fear for a while. But then I thought of another way to approach it. A way that doesn’t just avoid the whole problem of imprecision from the get-go, but even opens up a whole new array of possibilities.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “Building the new units not piece by piece, but atom by atom.”

  Her eyes widened. “Nanotechnology.”

  “Yes, that’s the popular term, though it’s a broad field encompassing very diverse technologies and implementations. What they mostly have in common is they work on the nanometer scale. The laws of nature are different down there; they’re not what we’re used to in daily life.”

  Charlotte frowned in thought. He could see she was pondering the matter. Clearly she knew the concept—well, no surprise there. Who didn’t these days? Nanotechnology had been hyped up for years now. He had made good money off the trend himself with a couple of inventions spun off from his main research. There was hardly a car manufacturer these days who didn’t offer supposedly scratchproof and self-cleaning nano-paints so that you never needed to visit the car wash again. For a while, nano-coated toilet bowls had been the latest thing. They would never need cleaning, or so it was claimed, since nothing—not dirt, not bacteria—could cling to the nanotech surface on the inside. Hiroshi had analyzed the coating and had known straightaway what would actually happen. The coating inexorably broke down over time—through quite normal external influences, such as oxidation and exposure to ultraviolet light—so that the dirt actually clung all the more tightly and could hardly be removed at all. Since that had become public knowledge, everyone had stopped buying nano-coated toilets.

  “Isn’t that using a sledgehammer to crack a nut?” Charlotte asked. “I mean—hello? Atom by atom? How long does that take? Is that even possible?”

  “Perfectly possible. Otherwise, we’d hardly be sitting here. Nature’s been doing it for billions of years. There are any number of processes running inside a cell that work by manipulating individual atoms. DNA is a highly efficient data-storage medium. It saves information by arranging individual molecules in a particular order. Protein synthesis is a nanotech process. And so on. There’s no question it’s possible.”

  “Okay, but those are cells. Which brings us back to biology, though. You never wanted to go there.”

  “Nor do I now.”

  Charlotte was still frowning in thought, her brow furrowed. She looked around the room at the computers on the table.

  “All right then, as far as I know the things we use in everyday life are made up of quite a lot of atoms. Is that why you have so little furniture? Because you have to build it all atom by atom, and it takes a hundred thousand years to make a couch?” She laughed. “I’m sorry I keep coming back to the subject, but you should really get a couch.”

  Hiroshi had to laugh as well. “No, that’s not the reason. And it wouldn’t take that long if you went about it the right way.”

  “It takes nine months to make a child. And they’re fairly small.”

  “True. But in living organisms, processes never run as fast as actually possible. Nowhere near. It’s rather like the information-processing capacity of the brain: the impulses only travel at about a hundred meters per second, tops. Computers can run much faster, since their impulses travel at the speed of light.”

  “Nature’s in no hurry, then.”

  “Why would she be? She has literally all the time in the world.”

  “Okay.” Charlotte looked at him appraisingly. “So assuming we went about it the right way and worked as fast as actually possible—how long would it take to build a couch?”

  Hiroshi thought for a moment, making a rough estimate of the number of atoms and the steps needed in that sort of replication. “Maybe a second.”

  “A second?”

  “Under optimal conditions,” Hiroshi put in. “The limiting factor is not the number of atoms we have to move, but the volume we have to work with. If we assume that it would take one half-second to produce a steel cube that measures one centimeter on each side, then it would hardly take any longer to coat the floor of an entire corridor with steel plating one centimeter thick, since the units can work everywhere at once.”

  “Wow!” Charlotte said. “That’s fast.”

  Hiroshi thought of something. “One moment,” he said, jumping to his feet and hurrying to the kitchen. There, he found Mrs. Steel already busy making lunch, dicing zucchini, tomatoes, and onions with rapid strokes of the knife.

  “Aren’t you going to offer the lady anything?” she scolded him. “I’d have done it myself, but I never go into the study, as you know.”

  “That’s why I’m here. What do we have?”

  Hiroshi had long given up thinking about what to eat. Early
on he had occasionally asked for a particular dish, for a hamburger or some such thing, whereupon she would launch into an indignant lecture about how unhealthy that sort of food was. Someone like him who spent the whole time buried in his work and took so little exercise couldn’t take chances on anything but the healthiest possible diet, she told him. Lots of organically grown vegetables, no sugar or white flour. In the end, Hiroshi had given her a free hand in choosing the food and cooking the meals, and ate whatever she put in front of him without protest. It hadn’t done him any harm—so far at least.

  Mrs. Steel opened the refrigerator. “I can press you some fresh fruit juice or make tea. Whatever you like.”

  “How about water?” From what he could remember, Charlotte didn’t care for juice and liked tea even less. And there was no point at all in asking Mrs. Steel for soda.

  The housekeeper pursed her lips, took a small green bottle from a drawer, and handed it to him. “How about this? Natural spring water from Lavish Valley.”

  This was crazy, thought Hiroshi. Here they were with their own spring on the estate, and they were buying bottled water that had to be trucked in hundreds of miles.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “Wait.” Mrs. Steel took a tray and placed two bottles, two glasses, and a bowl of fruit on it. “Do you want to take that with you, or shall I bring it?”

  “I’ll take it. You look after lunch.” Hiroshi picked up the tray. The fruit bowl was heavy. “What’s it going to be?”

  “Healthy, that’s what it’s going to be,” Mrs. Steel said. She shrugged. “It doesn’t have a name. I’m just using what we have on hand. It has to be enough for one more today, that’s all.”

  “Don’t we have enough?”

  “I make sure that everything’s fresh and that as little as possible goes to waste,” she informed him in a tone of voice that said, And now get out of my kitchen.

  Charlotte started in on the grapes with gusto. “To be honest, I still don’t understand what you’re doing with your time,” she said. She spat out a couple of seeds and then pointed around at the computers. “With all this.”