“What’s my role?” he asked. “What would I do here exactly?”
Bennett seemed to have been waiting for the question. “You’ll set up your own department. Outside the rest of the organization and answering only to me. You’d have a sufficiently large budget and the freedom to use it as you see fit. And, of course, I would expect you to be able to keep secrets. But above all, Mr. Coldwell…Jeff…I expect you to bring me whatever Hiroshi Kato’s working on. If you can, bring me him, too. I want to control everything he creates. Nothing more, nothing less. And let me put it like this: I would rather he were no longer working at all than that he were working for somebody else. If you understand what I mean.”
“I do indeed.” Coldwell nodded slowly and thought about what he’d just heard. Back in the old days it would have been on posters—“Dead or Alive.” “It may require, shall we say, unconventional methods to achieve that.”
Bennett twisted his face into a grin like a shark’s. “Officially, I don’t know anything about that. But I won’t be watching you too closely.” The grin widened. “As I understand it, you’ve built up some experience with unconventional methods over the course of your career.”
Coldwell raised his eyebrows. “I’m surprised you know about that.”
“I have my sources,” Bennett said. The way he said it sounded a little strange. Almost suggestive.
To hell with it. “I see,” Coldwell said and took the contract. Bennett passed him the platinum-plated pen to sign with, which he took as a good omen.
It took three weeks to put together a good team, gather all the information it needed, and work out a plan. It took another three weeks to practice and prepare, and then the first group took up position among the pines not far from Hiroshi Kato’s mansion and trained its binoculars on it.
“House used to belong to a country singer. Famous guy,” one of the men remarked as he swept the glasses over shuttered windows, closed French doors, and an unused pool.
“Really? Who?” asked the man next to him.
“Name escapes me.” He put down his binoculars. “Hey, Bob, who was the singer who did ‘He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands’? That version with the steel-guitar intro?” He started to imitate the sound of a steel guitar but thought better of it. “Huge hit about…huh, twenty years ago.”
“Johnny…Johnny someone. I know who you mean,” the man called Bob said. “He lived here?”
“Yep.”
“Cool.”
They watched the house until they knew the daily routines—when the gardener came, and when he left; when the patrol guards took their break (they had instructions never to take their break at the same time as the day before, but of course they ignored them); and when the shifts changed. They watched as a skinny little Japanese guy came out of the house once and talked to the gardener; he was the man from the photographs they had all studied. When they saw that the housekeeper, an older woman with a head of blond hair that could be seen from miles away, drove off and wasn’t coming back, they passed on the information to their backup team, who found out Patricia Steel was visiting her sister Barbara in Sacramento, where her brother-in-law ran a grocery business specializing in organically grown fruit and vegetables.
“Okay, that’s one less witness,” Coldwell said when they updated him on the situation. “Let’s do this thing.”
The next morning the night guards were in for an unpleasant surprise when the two vans arrived with the relief shift. Both vehicles had the black paintwork, tinted windows, and logo of J. Irons Security Inc. they had been expecting, and the men who climbed out were dressed in familiar uniforms, but they were also wearing silicone-rubber masks of the presidential candidates in the last election. They shot all the dogs straightaway and then pointed their weapons at the night watch, who less than ten minutes later were handcuffed, blindfolded, and locked in the garden shed. The fake guards marched up to the house. They knew where the alarms were and how to disarm them. While some of them spread out around the perimeter of the house, others broke through the front door with the tools they had brought. It only took a few seconds. Then it was their turn for an unpleasant surprise: the house was empty.
It was unnervingly empty. Most of the countless rooms had no furniture at all. They found one room with a mattress on the floor and a thin cover over it, and another with just a chair. The only rooms furnished anywhere near normally were the kitchen and the dining room next door. At last, in the farthest corner of the house from the front door, they found a big room with a spectacular view of the garden and the valley beyond. It held a few tables arranged in a U shape. In the middle of one tabletop lay a few small pieces of plastic that turned out, upon closer inspection, to be keys snapped off from a computer keyboard. They had been arranged to spell out two words: FUCK YO*.
Rodney Alvarez looked at the clock. It was past midnight. Again. When Allison wasn’t there—she was visiting a friend in Phoenix—he never managed to go to bed, no matter how firmly he resolved to do so. Just one more website, he had said to himself what seemed like ten minutes ago, but that had led to one more and then another after that.…Tomorrow he’d be yawning his head off again in the office.
Enough, already. He put his computer to sleep with a resolute flourish and stood up. He stretched and then realized with a guilty start that he had forgotten to unload the dishwasher. He wondered whether he could put it off till morning. Not a good idea: he was always rushed for time in the morning, and he would be half-asleep and good for nothing. On the other hand, Allison would be back by the time he came home from the office. Do it now then, quickly. He trotted off to the kitchen and opened the machine. There was a clean, cold smell. First step: grab all the spoons from the cutlery basket in one fistful, get them over to the drawer by the stove. Just as he picked up the knives, there was a ring at the door. At ten to one? Rodney tiptoed into the hall and peered through the peephole.
It was Hiroshi.
What was going on now? Rodney opened the door. “Don’t you think this is a strange time of night to be calling on honest, hardworking citizens?”
Hiroshi gave a thin smile. “Don’t you think that’s a strange way to greet an old friend?” He pointed to the knives. Rodney was still clutching them in his hand like a bouquet of flowers.
“One last bit of housework,” Rodney said, opening the door wide. “I was just going to bed. Come on in. Long time no see.”
Hiroshi came in, stepping inside briskly and neatly in that typical way of his. Rodney always found himself thinking of old samurai movies when he saw Hiroshi walk. He had a small tote bag slung over his shoulder. And somehow, for some reason he looked like…like a refugee. Rodney had no other way to describe it, and he also had no idea what made him think so, but there it was.
“Yes,” Hiroshi said. “Long time no see. And we were kind of rudely interrupted last time.”
“So we were.” Rodney felt a pang of guilt. When Hiroshi had sent an e-mail announcing he was back home, he had written a quick reply but had never quite gotten around to making the phone call that he had promised. “Those guys from the government who seemed in such a hurry. Was it something serious?”
Hiroshi nodded. “It was.”
“Wow.” Rodney looked around. It was a good thing he had tidied the place up a little earlier so that Allison wouldn’t turn right around and leave again as soon as she got back. But of course it looked nothing like the home sweet home it was when she was here and in charge. “Come on into the living room. Can I fix you something? Coffee? Tea? Or do you want a beer?”
He switched on the light. All things considered, it didn’t look too bad in here.
“Nothing, thanks.” Hiroshi sat down on the sofa and put his bag beside him. “I’m not staying long.”
“Hey look, it’s no problem, I could pull the guest bed out in…” Rodney stopped when Hiroshi shook his head. “Okay. Just a suggestion
.” He sat down opposite Hiroshi and put the knives down on the coffee table. Somehow he couldn’t shake the crazy feeling that he was about to hear something he really didn’t want to. “Okay. So what was it? If you’re allowed to talk about it.”
“Actually, I’m not, but that makes no difference,” Hiroshi said. “Someone’s after me. I have no idea who. I thought it wiser to get away.”
“After you?” That didn’t sound good, but it also didn’t sound like the real reason Hiroshi had turned up. “What have you been up to?”
Hiroshi didn’t respond. Instead, he unbuckled his bag and took out a small plastic box. “Rodney. The aliens you’re looking for—they’re already here. They have been for thousands of years. Here on Earth.” He lifted the box and opened the lid. “Look.”
“The…?”
Rodney was speechless. He leaned forward and peered into the box. Nothing there. Or almost nothing. A dark spot like a speck of rust.
He looked at his old college buddy, worried. “Is everything okay?”
Hiroshi nodded impatiently. “I mean that little dark fleck. It’s not a fleck; it’s several million incredibly small, incredibly powerful robots. Robots that came here from outer space thousands of years ago.”
Then he went on to tell his story. It was heady stuff at this late hour of the night. It sounded like the digested version of a story already squeezed to bursting, a story of Arctic islands, Russian subs, and a steel fortress that fell to dust. Rodney strongly suspected he had fallen asleep at his computer and was in the middle of a really weird dream. He blinked rapidly. Maybe it would help if he pinched himself.
“Stop,” he said. “Wait. Give me the whole thing again from the top. Take it slowly. Some of us are sitting in the cheap seats here. Robots—okay. Incredibly small—I’ll swallow that. But what do you mean by powerful?”
“These are nanomachines, Rod. They can manipulate matter at the atomic level. They can take anything apart, and they can build anything you like. They could build the world anew if we ordered them to—or they could destroy it as well, of course.” He closed the box lid. “I’ve had a good look at them, as much as I could. There are about three hundred different types. The control units have a central memory bank, a kind of metals-based DNA, with an unimaginable number of blueprints and schematics all stored and ready to build. I’ve even managed to analyze some of them—some, out of millions. It’s unbelievable. They contain far, far more than even an interstellar probe would need to carry out its mission—it has all the inventions and discoveries of a technological civilization unimaginably more advanced than our own. As though they had deposited all their achievements there.”
“And that’s what whoever is after you wants.”
“That, and the robots themselves.”
“The robots that can build whatever you command.” Rodney frowned in thought. He still felt as though he was dreaming. “To tell you the truth, I can’t really imagine that. How it might work.”
Hiroshi nodded. He seemed amused. “Would you like to see?” he asked.
“What?”
“How they build? We could finish that garage of yours.”
Rodney had to laugh. Mostly because Hiroshi said that they could finish it, which suggested he had ever even started. Good old Japanese politeness. “Yes,” he said, grinning. “I’d really like to see that.”
Hiroshi took something else from his bag. It was a Wizard’s Wand, though he seemed to have modified it heavily. Maybe it was the new model.
“Come on then,” he said, getting up.
And he strode off with his Wand in one hand and the plastic box in the other. Rodney clambered to his feet and hurried after him, catching up at the front door. “Wait. What are you going to do?”
“Build your garage.”
“Now? In the middle of the night?”
“Don’t worry, we’ll be quiet.” Hiroshi opened the door and walked outside. The moon was near full and shining brightly. Rodney followed him to the spot where he and Allison parked their cars and where he swore he would build a garage every time New Year resolutions came around. So far, all he had managed to do was buy a bit of the lumber that he imagined might serve for the frame. It had been lying on the ground for years now, however, and it probably was no longer in the best condition.
“All right then—where to where?” Hiroshi asked.
What was happening here? Rodney no longer felt like he was dreaming, but this was still an absurd bit of playacting, wasn’t it? Perhaps the best thing would be to just play along. He paced out the width of their driveway.
“Back wall should go here,” he said, sweeping his hand across. “Then the side wall. Front end over there, with the door.”
Hiroshi took the Wizard’s Wand and held it in the middle so that the cameras at each end could take their shots. A little green light glowed. Then he lowered the wand and pressed a button that produced a faint, red laser beam. He traced the beam along the ground, following the contours Rodney had given him, a rectangle that surrounded his old Honda and the other spot where Allison usually parked her car. Then he sketched an outline on the wall of the house where the garage would adjoin it. Something about the way he did it made him look like a Jedi knight with his light saber.
“Like this?” Hiroshi asked. He lifted the Wand again and pressed another button, making the laser beam split apart into a fan of light, disco-style, which drew the contours of the long-planned garage on the night air.
A garage made of light. Absurd. “Yes, roughly,” Rodney said.
“Okay.” Hiroshi switched off the laser and put the plastic box down on the ground, then pressed another button.
And then—nothing happened.
Playacting, then. Or maybe Hiroshi really had gone mad. Which would have been no surprise given the way he worked the whole time, never taking a vacation, never taking a break.
“Isn’t it kind of chilly out here?” Rodney said cautiously. “We could go back inside.”
“We could,” Hiroshi said affably. “But you wanted to watch.”
“Watch what?”
“This.” He pointed to the edge of the driveway. Only then did Rodney see that a sort of dark stripe had formed there. And not only that, it was getting wider as he watched. And higher. As true as he was standing there, something was growing up out of the ground. Walls, gleaming pale in the moonlight, blooming from the earth in ghostly silence, taking shape as though from thin air. It looked like CGI—if he’d seen it in a movie theater, he wouldn’t have batted an eyelid. But this was no special-effects sequence.
“Nano-robots at work,” he heard Hiroshi say. “I told them to analyze building materials—wood, nails, plastic, all the usual stuff. So they have those molecular structures stored already. Now they’re just grabbing hold of the atoms they need and putting them together: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, iron, sulfur, a few more elements you find all over the place. They’re not working anywhere near maximum speed, though. I haven’t figured out how to optimize that yet.”
Rodney simply stared, unable to believe what he was seeing. “This is incredible. Tell me it isn’t a dream.”
In less than three minutes the walls were standing. Without a pause, the roof took shape—first the frame, then the battens in between, and finally the tiles over them. All neatly in place. Last of all a garage door appeared in front and sank down like a curtain.
“Done,” said Hiroshi. “Now you can say that you’re the only SETI researcher who’s had his garage built by alien robots.”
He picked up two little gizmos from the ground and passed them to Rodney, who recognized them as remote controls as soon as he took them. He pressed the “Open” button and the door rose smoothly and quietly. It was like one of those superexpensive high-end installations only millionaires could afford. “Alien robots?”
“It was a probe. Von Neumann probe.” H
iroshi squatted down, peered into his plastic box, and waited for something. “Somewhere out there is a civilization of intelligent life-forms who are unbelievably far ahead of us technologically and have been for thousands of years. They sent out rockets that can reach half the speed of light, more even, and once these arrived at their destination they built more rockets to fly off to more solar systems.”
“And then what? If they built the rockets, what are they doing now?”
“I don’t know yet,” Hiroshi said. By now his incredibly small, incredibly powerful robots all seemed to be back home, for he shut the lid, picked up the box, and stood up. “I’m still poking around in the programming there.”
“That’s the first time I’ve ever heard you admit to having trouble with other people’s code.”
“First off, these ‘other people’ are extraterrestrial, and second, these are no normal procedural programs. They’re not object-oriented. They’re control programs, agent-based, quasi neuronal, extremely multilayered. With programs like that, you can’t just read the code and understand them right away; you have to simulate it if you want to know what they even do.” Hiroshi coughed. “And that’s been my hobby ever since I got back.”
Rodney blinked and gazed at the garage. It looked just like what he had planned. Then he looked at the two remote controls in his hand. Better leave the door open for now so that Ally can drive straight in tomorrow. Won’t she be surprised!
“I’m beginning to understand why they’re after you,” he said.
4
Hiroshi found an apartment in Minamata in one of the huge vacation resorts at Yunoko, right by the sea. It was off-season, and most of the windows were shuttered. When he peered through the slats of his own blinds, he felt he had been transported into a postapocalyptic film, one of those stories where a global plague had swept away most of mankind, and he was one of the few survivors. It wasn’t especially lovely, but nobody knew him here, and he was left in peace. Which was exactly what he needed. He was also a long way from the part of town where his grandparents lived. There was little danger of bumping into them on the street.
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