Would his pursuers track him down here? Possibly, but they would have a harder time of it. Here in Japan he was just another face in the crowd, and they were the strangers. To be on the safe side, Hiroshi had not visited anybody he knew when he landed, not even his mother—to keep her out of danger—and he hadn’t used his credit card since Tokyo. He had withdrawn a good-sized wad of cash at an ATM, right up to his card limit. Then he had ordered his nanites to analyze the atomic structure of the banknotes, and now he could have them create an exact replica of that cash whenever he needed more money. That should work for a while, at least until somebody noticed there were multiples of the same serial number in circulation.
That was the heart of the problem he was wrestling with right now. Obviously, the nanites would also have been capable of reordering the atoms of the ink in which the serial numbers were printed and creating any other number instead—if only he were able to give them the right commands. But he couldn’t. Moreover, he had no idea what such fine-tuned commands might even look like. He couldn’t decide where to place every single atom—that was beyond the reach of the human intellect and would take up far too much time. Creating even the smallest object that way would take centuries. No, the whole logic of atomic-scale construction demanded some way of organizing the work in which the command units at the very highest metalevel would trigger sequences of code in the subroutines, which would then trigger further sequences in the sub-subroutines, and so on, down to the level of the nanite, which did no more than take one atom from here and put it over there across a radius no larger than the wavelength of light.
He had modified one of his Wizard’s Wands to control the nanites. It was somewhat more elegant than lugging around a bulky multiband set wherever he went and typing in commands by hand, but even this had its limits. And he was nowhere near exhausting all the possibilities the nanites offered. The garage he had built for Rodney, for example: it had taken a minute or two to build, but actually inputting the individual commands had taken almost a month. After which time he had a program loaded onto the Wizard’s Wand, ready and waiting, that was missing only a few variables—the exact dimensions of the garage. Measuring dimensions and plugging them into other programs was exactly what he had built the Wand for in the first place. In other words, he could just as easily have built Rodney a garage that was ten yards across or a hundred; it wouldn’t even have taken much longer. But all that program could do was build garages. And only that particular type. And that particular shade of ivory.
He had just finished the program when he noticed the intruders on his surveillance system. He had considered sending his security detail after them, who would doubtless have been able to chase them away—but then what? If somebody was out to get him, they’d be back—and maybe next time he wouldn’t spot them first. No, the time had come to drop out of sight. He had sent Mrs. Steel off on a vacation that officially he owed her anyway. She would find some way to live with the discovery he wasn’t coming back but her salary continued to be paid. Then Hiroshi had ordered the nanites to take all his computers apart into their constituent molecules, and then he too had left, exiting via a tunnel the nanites dug for him and then sealed up behind them so seamlessly that it was as though it had never been.
That sort of thing was relatively easy once he had found functions ready in the memory that he only needed to call up. Atomic-level analysis of an object, for instance: he had even embedded this routine in a program he had written himself so that all he needed to do was sweep around the edges of the object with the laser on his Wizard’s Wand to trigger an analysis. Building a tunnel, taking something apart atom by atom—by now he could do all these things merely by pressing a couple of buttons and gesturing with his Wand. It was as though he really was a wizard.
Despite all that he was lagging far, far behind what was really possible. He hadn’t even scratched the surface of the immense library of finished constructions that every base complex carried in its command units the way a cell carries DNA. With one or two exceptions: building a launch site with its own rocket shaft, for instance, was a function anyone looking at the basic programming would stumble upon straightaway—logically enough, since this was the probe’s prime directive. Many of the building sequences Hiroshi had analyzed were for huge and technically elaborate machines whose purpose and function he didn’t understand. He would have had to build them first and then investigate—and run the risk of having to deal with a bomb.
One last area he had barely looked into was that of the new materials nanotechnology made possible. He had built Rodney’s garage from wood whose atomic structure was based on analysis of an oak beam in the ceiling of Hiroshi’s study. The garage door itself, with all its mechanisms, was the same as the door on the five-car bay in Hiroshi’s house. So far, so good, but this was essentially squandering the possibilities of the nanites. When you could place atoms in precisely defined positions, it became possible to create materials that did not occur in nature but had incredible properties. Hiroshi had spent years following all the latest developments in nanotech research, which, for instance, had developed carbon nanotubes that were light as a feather and stronger than diamond. And nobody in the field doubted this was just the beginning. Hiroshi could have built Rodney a garage with walls thinner than a human hair that would have shrugged off a rocket-propelled grenade. In fact, it would have been simpler, and quicker to build.
Though that would have made for a rather conspicuous garage.
When it wasn’t raining too hard, Hiroshi strolled along the beach for hours at a time. The sky was a featureless, pale blur, and the sea was a dull, metallic gray, roughly the shade of cast iron.
After a while he realized he was all alone on the floor where he’d taken an apartment. A huge saltwater aquarium stood in front of the elevator, where one ugly fish swam round and round, looking dreadfully bored. Every time the elevator doors opened, it would swim up to the front of the tank and gape at Hiroshi as though glad of the distraction. Unless it was just the harsh lighting from inside the cabin that fascinated it so.
Hiroshi thought about many things out on his long walks—about himself, his life, why he did the things he did. What it was that drove him. For that was how he felt: like a driven man. For instance, why had he come to Minamata of all places? If all he had wanted to do was drop out of sight, then any other city in Japan would have done just as well, if not better. But no, he had chosen Minamata, the city of his grandparents, who had never particularly liked him and whom he had never particularly liked in return.
He could come up with a whole list of clear, convincing reasons, of course: First of all, Minamata wasn’t Tokyo, where he could have bumped into a number of people who knew him and who, unlike his grandparents, were not old and sick and only in the habit of setting foot outside their door to go see the doctor. Second, he more or less knew his way around here, thanks to all those dreary childhood visits. That made it easier to organize matters. For instance, he knew this resort, by sight at least—indeed, back when he was a kid he used to dream of going on vacation here one day. And third, nobody here knew him, seeing him as just another—rather eccentric—guest. But however clear and convincing these reasons sounded, Hiroshi felt very strongly they were only half the truth. Which was why he was sunk in thought as he tramped along the gray sand, one foot in front of the other, beneath a gray sky, while the wind blew salt onto his lips. He was looking for the other half of the truth.
Some days the beach was not enough. Then he would walk onward into the residential neighborhoods, where he tried and failed to lose his way among the unfamiliar, narrow streets. Once he found himself in a vast cemetery, where he strolled around for a long while, feeling curiously at ease as he drank in the silence emanating from the graves, the deep peace of the place. This, he told himself, was the final purpose of human existence: to cease all functions, to surrender all the atoms of our body to the greater whole. Here, too, he understood a
t last what had brought him to Minamata: it was the memory of Aunt Kumiko, who had frightened him so much as a child and for whom he felt so terribly sorry when he looked back. He thought of her now as a poor, suffering creature—deformed, tormented—who had spent all those long years in the same bed plagued by fears she could not share with others. Aunt Kumiko had started him on his path, had been the reason he had first become interested in atoms. It was only right that he had come here.
He also thought about Rodney and that last evening he had spent at his house. In retrospect, he was worried he might have put him and Allison at risk after all. But he hadn’t been able to resist telling him about Saradkov, about the nanites, about the envoys from the depths of space.…Rodney Alvarez, who had yearned to write his thesis about Starfleet’s Prime Directive, who had spent a lifetime with his eyes lifted longingly to the starry sky above; Rodney, all aflame with the question of where our fellow sentients were, our fellow races from far-off planets. If he didn’t have the right to know all that had happened, then who did?
They had sat up into the small hours of the morning. Rodney had a multitude of questions, hardly any of which Hiroshi had been able to answer. Where had the probe come from? No idea. If the nanite complexes had that information in their memory—which could very easily be the case—Hiroshi hadn’t been able to find it. And what kind of beings had built and launched the probe? What did they look like? Did they breathe oxygen or something else? Here, too, all Hiroshi knew was that many of the things that the stored blueprint programs could build seemed to be aircraft or other vehicles, and that the cabins and seating would be about the right size for human beings; it was safe to assume the aliens were not unlike us.
“That’s almost disappointing,” Rodney had said. “Not sea creatures the size of whales? Not an insect race with totally alien and incomprehensible social structures? Not beings of pure energy? You’re telling me they’re—Vulcans?”
“Maybe Klingons.”
“Even more disappointing. Those guys, we even know their language,” Rodney had said, and somehow it sounded as though he was only half joking. Who could say? Hiroshi had once read somewhere that ever since a linguistics prof had developed the Klingon language for the Star Trek III movie, there had been more academic papers written about it than about the languages of many real cultures.
“Perhaps there are far more restrictions on the evolution of intelligent life than we’ve ever thought,” Hiroshi had conjectured—the kind of thought they could have spent a long time debating, except Rodney had ignored it entirely and instead peppered him with more questions about Saradkov.
“The way you tell it, the probe was setting out to take over the whole planet. That would be technically possible, wouldn’t it? Nobody could actually stop these nanites?”
“Nobody who didn’t have access to the same technology at least.”
“We’d have looked pretty silly then.”
“Very silly indeed. But they stopped. Everything up until then may just have been some kind of defense mechanism to make sure they weren’t disturbed while they built and launched the rocket.”
Rodney had frowned in thought and fumbled about with those darn knives of his on the coffee table, then said, “Illogical. A Von Neumann probe would have to launch at least two probes of its own.”
“True,” Hiroshi had conceded.
And it was odd: every time he thought back to that moment when all activity on the island had so suddenly ceased, he remembered how it had seemed to him as though it had stopped in shock or surprise—though he knew perfectly well the nanites were capable of a great deal, but not of being surprised. Yes, and then in the same instant those radio signals had begun, more or less offering him the self-destruct code. He still didn’t understand that even now.
Then Rodney had started chuckling about how Hiroshi had ordered the nanites to build him a garage. “I mean, based on what you’re telling me, you could have built a damn rocket in my garden.”
“And what would you have done with that?”
“Hey, maybe a weekend trip to the moon. I know Ally would have liked that…or maybe we could drop in on the ISS.…”
Hiroshi hadn’t wanted to rant about the risks that kind of fun might present for Rodney and Allison. “Strange as it may sound, having them build a garage was more of a challenge for me. Just calling up one of the preset programs wouldn’t have taught me anything.”
“Okay. On top of which, a garage is a whole lot less suspicious.”
“Though your neighbors may scratch their heads when they see it in the morning.”
Rodney had just given a hollow laugh. “Neighbors, what neighbors? Around here everyone just minds their own business.”
They had talked until around—what?—half past three? Then Rodney had made him coffee after all, good and strong, and he had set off again, headed north. On the way he had slept in the car, until he reached Seattle and booked himself a flight to Japan. He had been pretty woozy at the ticket desk and had simply showed his Japanese passport without stopping to think someone might still be after him or how they could be looking for him. All the same he had the idea of asking the woman at the desk to make sure the name on the ticket read “Gato Hirushi,” which she had finally done after he gave her a long and deliberately rambling lecture about Japanese scripts and the problem of Latinizing Japanese names.
And now here he was, with his laptop and all the important programs and files, along with his modified Wizard’s Wand and the nanites. And if he were honest with himself, he had no idea what to do next. Money wasn’t the problem. If this whole business with the duplicate banknotes ever became too risky, he could simply have the nanites make diamonds; it was one of the simplest exercises he could set for the assemblers, so to speak. And he could find someone to sell them to easily enough. No, the question was what exactly he should do with all the knowledge, all the possibilities the nanites gave him. He was closer than he had ever been to making his lifelong dream come true, but somehow his certainty that he was guided by the hand of fate had left him. He felt abandoned, left to his own devices. And he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life on the run.
A few days later he came back from one of his walks along the beach, stepped out of the elevator, and looked into the eyes of the lonely fish in its aquarium, and suddenly knew what he would do.
That was the end of the endless hours on the beach. From then on he stayed in his room and had his meals delivered; all it took was a call through to management, and he was happy to pay their extra charges. His computer worked ceaselessly, and Hiroshi only slept when the machine was running a memory-hungry simulation analysis in parallel. He had set himself the task of searching through the nanites’ metallic DNA systems—their “library” as he called it—more systematically to look for usable procedures. Hiroshi had decided to build a methyl mercury collector—nano-robots that would reproduce and spread through the world’s oceans in search of molecules of methyl mercury, which they would then collect and bring to a few specified depots. And they would stay on task until the seas were free of the poison that caused Minamata disease.
Not that this was even remotely the most pressing of mankind’s problems. Not at all. That was clear. Hiroshi had chosen this project in part because if it worked, it would have an impressive result—a whole planet would be cleansed of one particular poison—and in part because it set him a challenge that would help him learn a great deal about the nanites. And finally, he was doing it in memory of poor Aunt Kumiko.
After a few days he had what looked like a viable design. For the first time, he planned to actually rebuild some of the nanites themselves—using other nanites to do so, of course. He would build a prospector unit that specialized in finding methyl mercury. Methyl mercury has a very high affinity for sulfur, and being a positively charged ion, forms bonds with anions such as hydroxide or chloride—meaning that when the prospector had
found the methyl-mercury molecules, an accompanying cutter would have to break their ionic bonds. Then a transporter would have to take the methyl mercury away to a collector—and after that? That was when things got difficult.
His biggest problem was how to get the collector units over to the depots once they were full. He needed a motor that could steer a nanoscale construct through the waters and currents of the seas to a specified destination—a navigation system that could find the depots—and he also had to find the best place to put them. Lastly, he needed nanites waiting in the depots for the collector units to unload them, separate the mercury from the methyl group, and create the space where the gradual accumulation of mercury could be safely stored. Another problem, as so often the case in technologies of this kind, was the energy supply. The nanite complexes would have to sink down to the seabed from time to time to send miles of feelers down toward the earth’s core. After loading up on energy, they could get back to their task. All this was hard work. And there were many moments when Hiroshi simply didn’t know what to do next, when he despaired at the thought he had the most powerful tools in the planet at his disposal and couldn’t use them.
As he searched frantically through the library that had come to him as a legacy of an inconceivably technologically advanced civilization, Hiroshi found himself confronted again and again by a blueprint program that left him utterly baffled. When he fed the construction sequences into his simulator, the result was something that looked like a sponge, or like a network of bizarre blood vessels; what was it supposed to be, or do? He had no idea. Whatever it was, its growth patterns called up all sorts of associations, but none that took him any further forward. At that point, he would ordinarily have just shrugged and gone on to look at the next program, but for some reason this one nagged at him. And somehow it gave him the idea of using his downtime, when there were smaller simulations running, to search the Internet for the latest research on Minamata disease.
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