Lord of All Things

by Andreas Eschbach

  Brenda was the first one to take any interest in what had happened to Charlotte on Devil’s Island. Charlotte remembered the papers she had signed swearing her to secrecy and didn’t want to say anything over the telephone. She muttered something about telling Brenda the next time she saw her.

  “Well, just come visit,” Brenda said cheerfully. “You can be the first to stay in our guest room. Well, one of the guest rooms, but who’s counting?”

  Then she added that as well as the guest apartment, they had set up another room as a second child’s room. They were in the process of adopting a nine-year-old girl from Bangladesh named Lamita.

  “Older than Jason?” Charlotte asked. “Isn’t that going to be rather awkward?”

  “It is, but we have to do it.” And there was a tone in Brenda’s voice that Charlotte had never heard before: pain. “You remember Parimarjan, don’t you? The boy who always splashed us with water over at my compound. He works for a bank in Kolkata these days, and he has a lot of business in Bangladesh and…well, anyway, Lamita is a bankruptcy asset seized from a textile factory that went bust near Khulna. The poor girl was an asset, can you imagine? The owner of the company bought the girl from her parents when she was five and had her working ten hours a day. It was slavery. Pure and simple. And her parents can’t be found, or don’t want her back…” Even across two continents and an ocean, Charlotte could hear Brenda pause to take a breath to keep herself under control.

  “That’s a dreadful story,” Charlotte said, feeling even as she spoke how inadequate the words were.

  “Yes. Which is why we’re taking her. Jason will just have to get used to having an older sister.”

  Earth-shattering though the news was, hearing it saved Charlotte. It reminded her that other people had problems, too, and shook her out of her resignation. She decided to leave Moscow and go back to Boston to look after her apartment and her research project, and then, as soon as she had everything straightened out, to visit Brenda and Tom in Argentina.

  JOINT INVESTIGATION COMMITTEE

  SARADKOV ISLAND EVENT

  CHAIR: SENATOR RICHARD COFFEY (US)

  DEPUTY CHAIR: MINISTER ANATOLY MIKHAILOV (RUSSIA)

  DOCUMENT STATUS: CONFIDENTIAL

  EXTRACT FROM THE WITNESS TESTIMONY OF HIROSHI KATO (JAPAN)

  Chair: When the whole installation fell to pieces—when it turned to dust—that was some kind of self-destruct mechanism, am I right?

  Witness: That’s right. First the nanites took apart everything they had built, then they took each other apart as well. Until there was nothing left.

  Chair: How did you trigger the self-destruct?

  Witness: It was easy. Destruction is the easiest option after all.

  Chair: That doesn’t answer my question.

  Witness: The radio signal that the nanites were broadcasting contained a particular sequence that repeated over and over, with a pause after every repetition. What I did was read this sequence as a question, so to speak, and to interpret the pauses that came afterward as waiting for an answer. Since the nanites had ceased all activity shortly before—without any interference from me, as I’ve explained—I conjectured that they had somehow noticed they had gotten out of control, which prompted them to send a query as to whether they should self-destruct. More or less the way our rockets self-destruct when they leave their flight paths.

  Chair: I don’t see it. Why would a mechanism like that do such a thing? Send a query to self-destruct?

  Witness: Because it can’t judge the necessity in every case. A rocket can tell whether it’s deviated from its set trajectory; that’s easy. With nano-robots, it’s not so simple. Quite the opposite: it’s extremely difficult for them to tell whether they’re doing the right thing.

  Chair: But when you sent this radio sequence, you didn’t know it would trigger an order to self-destruct.

  Witness: It would be too much to say I knew for sure. But I was pretty certain.

  Chair: And how could you be so certain?

  Witness: Let’s say I was relying a great deal on my intuition.

  (…)

  Chair: Where did this probe come from, in your opinion?

  Witness: Wherever it was from, it was sent by intelligent life-forms who are technologically greatly more advanced than we are. Or at least were when they sent the probe on its way.

  Chair: Are you phrasing it that way because you think these beings may no longer exist?

  Witness: Yes. That’s even the more likely scenario.

  Chair: Why?

  Witness: They sent the probe. It had been traveling for some time, at least several thousands of years. When it reached Earth, it landed in a region where it couldn’t, at first, function as planned. Then thousands more years passed. If the civilization that sent out the probe had progressed at all technologically in the intervening time, why didn’t they come themselves?

  (…)

  Deputy chair: The rocket the probe launched—what was its purpose, in your opinion? Might it be, for instance, to take terrestrial soil samples back home?

  Witness: I don’t think so. Something like soil samples could be analyzed on the spot, and the results could be sent back by radio. That’s the quickest and safest way. No, I’m assuming it was a copy of the original probe, now on its way to the nearest star.

  Deputy chair: What do you mean, a copy?

  Witness: We already have the theoretical concept of what’s called a Von Neumann probe. The idea is to launch an automated mechanism toward the nearest solar system, which will touch down in some suitable spot and use the raw materials it finds there to build at least two exact copies of itself. Then it launches these toward the next nearest systems from there before it gets to work on its actual task, exploring the system it’s arrived in, for instance. So then you have at least two such probes out there, and they in turn will launch at least four more, then it’s eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on—an exponential series that reaches huge numbers quite quickly. If you take this concept and then apply even some relatively conservative hypotheticals—so no assuming that we have faster-than-light drives, or anything like that—then you find we can seed an entire galaxy the size of the Milky Way within a mere half million years.

  Deputy chair: What did you call that? A Von Neumann probe?

  Witness: Named for the mathematician John von Neumann. He did some important theoretical work on self-replicating automata. Though he never actually suggested using them for spaceflight himself.

  (The chair and deputy consult briefly with their staff.)

  Deputy chair: And you think we encountered such a probe on Saradkov?

  Witness: Yes. If you have the ability to build self-replicating nano-constructs, it’s the obvious thing to make.

  (…)

  Chair: So that’s what you believe is the background to this whole story. An intelligent species sent out explorer probes to roam the whole galaxy, and then after that they either died out or went into decline.

  Witness: Exactly. That’s what it looks like.

  SARADKOV ISLAND EVENT QUARANTINE REPORT

  The survivors of the Saradkov Island Expedition (these being Adrian Cazar, PhD; Charlotte Malroux; Morley Mann, MA; Angela MacMillan, MA) and the technical consultant who joined the group during the course of events and subsequently spent several hours on the island (Hiroshi Kato) were subject to a quarantine of 11 (eleven) days before being discharged. During this time they underwent medical examination for the presence of foreign bodies and substances in their tissue.

  Procedures Used

  —Whole-body computer tomography (except in reproductive organs)

  —Whole-body sonography

  —Whole-body MRI

  —Spectral analysis of blood, lymph, and urine

  —Microscopy on all bodily fluids

  —Tests
for alterations to antibodies

  Results

  No anomalies detected

  JOINT INVESTIGATION COMMITTEE

  SARADKOV ISLAND EVENT

  CHAIR: SENATOR RICHARD COFFEY (US)

  DEPUTY CHAIR: MINISTER ANATOLY MIKHAILOV (RUSSIA)

  DOCUMENT STATUS: CONFIDENTIAL

  EXTRACT FROM THE WITNESS TESTIMONY OF HIROSHI KATO (JAPAN)

  Chair: So you were convinced right from the start we were not dealing with extraterrestrial life-forms?

  Witness: Yes. As I saw it, this was clearly a technological construct. A kind of robot, if you like.

  Chair: Of extraterrestrial origin?

  Witness: That is what we are forced to conclude.

  Chair: What I would like to understand is how you could possibly arrive on this island in the Arctic Ocean and come face-to-face with extraterrestrial technology, but instead of being utterly overwhelmed like everyone else, you knew immediately what you were dealing with and how to tackle it. I don’t understand it. In my view, it’s extremely hard to believe.

  Witness: As I have already explained several times, I did not know how to tackle it. The construct stopped its expansion of its own accord. All I did was recognize we were indeed dealing with a machine operating along nanotechnological principles.

  Chair: How were you able to recognize this?

  Witness: Because I’ve been a researcher in the field for many years now. I recognized some familiar underlying principles. And by the way, I wasn’t the only one—I’ve since learned that the US president’s team of scientific advisers included experts who also immediately came to the conclusion we were dealing with nanotechnology.

  Chair: Do I understand what you’re saying? Your research actually anticipated the fundamental principles of a technology developed by extraterrestrial, nonhuman life-forms?

  Witness: That’s actually less surprising than it sounds. If I might explain?

  Chair: Please do.

  Witness: Discussion about how we could communicate with extraterrestrial intelligence has always assumed that this sort of contact would have to begin with an exchange of mathematical propositions. That’s because the principles of mathematics are abstract—they’re not tied to any particular form of biological life; any sufficiently intelligent life anywhere in the universe will understand them in the same way. Obviously, not using the same symbols, but the principles remain the same. One plus one always makes two, regardless of notation. As soon as intelligent life has developed the concept of number as such, then the whole of mathematics is implied.

  If you take it one step further and assume the existence of machines—justifiably, if we’re positing communication with extraterrestrial civilizations—then we can suppose that every technological culture will at some point build a data-processing machine. What we call a computer. The most general computer conceivable is the Turing machine, which reduces all executable programs to only three operations—read, write, and move the read/write mechanism along the storage medium. As far as we currently know, this is the most fundamental data-processing machine that can exist, and we therefore think that even a completely alien intelligence would have the same insight. Obviously, it would use other terminology, but the principle would be the same.

  So, if we now go beyond data processing, we get to other forms of processing—industrial, for instance. How do we shape objects? How do we mold matter? My research aimed at identifying fundamental principles here in much the same way. I was trying to write a universal grammar for materials processing, so to speak. I was able to show that all production processes can be reduced to fundamental operations such as cut, join, heat, cool, identify, sort, compress, produce or transmit energy, guide and hold still, turn, drill, and so on and so forth.

  Chair: That would be the Kato machine, so to speak?

  Witness: I beg your pardon?

  Chair: You gave us the Turing machine as an example.

  Witness: Oh yes. Well then. If you like.

  In the breaks between depositions, they took him to the hotel breakfast room, where the blinds were down around the clock so that nobody got the idea of lurking around outside with a telephoto lens. Hiroshi punched a button for coffee, then peered through the slats of the blind as the machine gurgled and groaned. The media circus that had greeted them was long gone, and only a few reporters still shivered at their posts. The demonstrators, too, had gone, leaving only a little knot of dauntless souls waving placards that demanded “Nuclear-free zones—worldwide!” and “Peace in our time.” During the first few days there had been some far-from-peaceful clashes with the Icelandic police. Senator Coffey’s declaration that these were not disarmament talks but Russian–American round tables on joint scientific projects had been largely ignored.

  There was a beep. His drink was ready. Hiroshi took the cardboard cup between his fingertips and carried it over to a chair. He savored the first sip of coffee and then leaned his head back, closing his eyes, just for the sake of it.

  “You seem worn-out, Mr. Kato,” said the young lawyer the American government had provided him.

  Hiroshi opened his eyes and tilted his head forward. “Yes, I’m tired. I can barely sleep. I’m not used to such soft beds.”

  He was here as a witness, they had told him, not a defendant. The lawyer was there to make sure he said nothing that would incriminate him.

  It was all very well organized. They had been kept apart so that they couldn’t influence one another’s statements. There was at least one pair of watchful eyes on each of them. He hadn’t seen Charlotte since the meeting aboard the Russian battleship; he had heard she had already left. He didn’t know any of the other expedition members anyway.

  “To be honest,” the lawyer said, “sometimes you look as though you have something on your mind. Is there perhaps something you’re keeping to yourself, which I should know about as your lawyer?”

  Hiroshi looked at him. It was an interesting way to put it. “No,” he said, “there isn’t.”

  Somebody had thought it would be a good idea to give him a lawyer with a Japanese background. But John Takeishi, born and bred in Seattle, was about as Japanese as the Tokyo burger that one of the big fast-food chains was pushing these days. Granted, he spoke passable Japanese, but he knew nothing about the way of life or culture.

  “Is that actually a fun job?” Hiroshi asked. “Lawyering, I mean. I’ve often wondered. So many people become lawyers in America. Do they just do it for the money?”

  Takeishi looked surprised. “I’m no big-money lawyer, if that’s what you mean. Guys like that don’t work for the government.”

  “That’s not what I mean. I was asking whether it’s a fun job.”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Now, for example?”

  Takeishi grinned. “Now is good. I’m really just sitting around. But later I’ll be able to tell people I was in Reykjavík.”

  “Is it a job you’d do if you didn’t need to earn a living? If money were no object?”

  The young lawyer laughed. “No.”

  “What would you do?”

  “Music. Jazz.” His face shone with pleasure as he spoke. “I play clarinet in a jazz quartet. When everybody can make it, we meet once a week to rehearse, and then once a quarter we play a gig somewhere, usually at a tiny club with maybe twenty people or so. We play Dave Brubeck–style stuff, if that means anything to you.”

  Hiroshi shook his head. “Nothing at all.”

  “Hey, come on, you have to know ‘In Your Own Sweet Way’—it’s a standard.” He hummed a couple of bars of a melody Hiroshi had never heard in his life. “We even have some fans. Just way too few that we could make a living from it.” The pleasure vanished from his face. “Which is why we all keep our day jobs. But the jobs stop us from being able to rehearse as much as we would need to, to get really good. So it looks
like we won’t really get anywhere with the music, and the jobs will win out in the long run.”

  Hiroshi nodded thoughtfully. So few people ever got the chance to do what they really yearned to do with their lives. And the ones who couldn’t always couldn’t for the same reason: they were poor. Either really, truly poor, or scared by the threat of poverty.

  Hiroshi turned back to his coffee. John Takeishi had been quite right to remark that he had something on his mind. But it wasn’t what he suspected: more than anything else, it was uncertainty. Uncertainty over whether his grand plan would succeed.

  That was what was stopping Hiroshi from sleeping. Not the soft mattresses.

  JOINT INVESTIGATION COMMITTEE

  SARADKOV ISLAND EVENT

  CHAIR: SENATOR RICHARD COFFEY (US)

  DEPUTY CHAIR: MINISTER ANATOLY MIKHAILOV (RUSSIA)

  DOCUMENT STATUS: CONFIDENTIAL

  EXTRACT FROM THE WITNESS TESTIMONY OF ADRIAN CAZAR (US)

  Deputy chair: What influenced your decision to make Saradkov the goal of your expedition?

  Witness: Its position in the Arctic Ocean. Saradkov is in a class of islands that has had a stable ice sheet for thousands of years. We wanted to find out what effects global climate change was having on this ice sheet.

  Deputy chair: Whether it is melting?

  Witness: Well, in layman’s terms, yes. Although there are a great many other criteria that we also look at.

  Deputy chair: You are an American. Why didn’t you find an American island for your purposes, or maybe a Canadian one?

  Witness: Well, there aren’t that many American islands in the Arctic Circle, and they’ve all been pretty well surveyed. Same for the Canadian ones—almost too well. Since half of the Arctic Circle is in Russia, and the climatic conditions in the far north of the Eurasian landmass are significantly different from those of the North American continent, I thought it would be revealing to study the Russian islands using the same methods that had already been used over on the American side.