Lord of All Things

by Andreas Eschbach

  They all knew that not even he believed that.

  His trick of turning the plane into a land vehicle didn’t fool the jet pilots for long. If they were even surprised, they didn’t stop to show it. They wheeled, turned, and flew straight for him again.

  Hiroshi thought about what they might do to him. As far as he could remember, F-15s were mostly designed for air combat and primarily equipped with air-to-air missiles that locked onto their targets with infrared sensors. Weapons like that could do nothing against a moving ground target.

  Meaning that they…

  He saw the impact lines headed toward him. These jets were also equipped with six-barrel 20 mm auto cannon that could fire up to six thousand rounds a minute. Hiroshi wrenched his vehicle to the side at the last moment as the line of explosions raced toward him in the dust, too damn close. The message was clear: Halt!

  It was high time he sent them a message in return. Hiroshi steered back to his original course and released a few nanites, which dug themselves into the ground behind him and then activated at top speed. It took a little while. The nanites needed a great many different materials for what they were going to build, some of which were not readily available. The two jets had ended their turn, miles away, and were already coming in to intercept him again when two thin, shimmering metal rods rose out of the ground behind him.

  “Come on…” Hiroshi muttered, his nerves taut. The pilots would undoubtedly try to hit him on their second pass.

  The jets roared toward him, growing larger by the second. It was a fearsome sight. At that moment the metal structure behind him unfurled like a flower in bloom to reveal an artillery piece that could have been designed by Salvador Dali. It began to fire just a fraction of a second before the two jets, shooting rounds that seemed to tear violet rips in the air. An F-15 took a round in one wing and went into a spin, recovered with difficulty, and flew away, trailing a thick cloud of black smoke. The other jet also turned and left.

  Hiroshi looked around, searching the sky without taking his foot off the gas. It looked good. All of a sudden there were no more jets in sight. Okay. Time to dismantle his field pieces. He looked into the rearview mirror, trying to judge the distance to the plumes of dust thrown up by the vehicles following him overland. They had no real chance of overtaking him, but while he was at it…

  Their jeeps jolted across the wasteland as fast as they could go and then a little faster. Astonishingly, only one had succumbed to a broken axle. The soldiers decided this was a good omen.

  They watched, awestruck, as the jets wheeled and turned above the pampas. They flew over the dust cloud again and again. The soldiers could hear their auto cannon from here, an ugly rattling sound like a hundred axes biting into hard wood in unison.

  “US Air Force,” the corporal announced, relaying the information from over his headphones. “Don’t ask me why. As if our planes couldn’t have done the same thing!”

  Then those curious violet plumes of smoke shot up. One of the jets flew off unsteadily, trailing smoke, and all of a sudden the others also took fright.

  “Chicken!” a voice called out, and the rest of the soldiers laughed. Yes, these norteamericanos were cowards.

  Nobody wanted to think too hard about what kind of gun that might have been. Who could think of such things when their brains were being rattled around in their skulls? They couldn’t even look dead ahead with any certainty; as they looked from the sky back down to the horizon, they got the strangest impression that it was rising before their eyes.

  “Is that the 143 already?” the corporal asked under his breath. “It can’t be.”

  It wasn’t. But there was something there. They strained their necks to see, then rubbed their eyes incredulously as the jeeps approached, slowed, and finally came to a halt.

  The corporal was the first one who recovered enough to speak. “What the devil…? What is that?”

  “A wall?” the driver suggested.

  The corporal slapped him upside the head in anger. “I can see that, you jackass! Yes, it’s a wall! But how did it get here all of a sudden?”

  He opened the door and climbed out onto the hood. Hands on his hips, he looked all around. “Incredible,” he murmured. It was a wall, large as life, as tall as a two-story building, running across the dry pampas from one end of the horizon to the other.

  The minister of defense was indignant. “Scramble the entire air force? Against one man? Have you all gone crazy?”

  “He may be one man, but he is no ordinary opponent.” The norteamericano put a laptop in front of him with an aerial photo on the screen. “That’s La Pampa,” he declared.

  “I can see that,” the minister snarled.

  “And that,” the man continued calmly, switching to the next picture, “is the same landscape ten minutes ago.”

  “What?” The minister ducked his head and peered closely at the screen. “What’s that?”

  “Not quite as long as the Great Wall of China, but just as wide.”

  “A wall?” There was a look of naked terror in his eyes now. “How is that even possible?”

  “As I said: just one man, but no ordinary opponent.”

  The minister blinked rapidly, visibly shaken. “Good,” he said, reaching for the telephone. “The air force, then. What do we have them for after all?”

  Half an hour later they were back in force, more dark dots against the pale sky than he could count. More attacks than he could deal with. He couldn’t turn back all the planes, or defuse all the bombs; he couldn’t ward off attack from every direction at once. The nanites were powerful but only when they were given the instructions they needed. And he had more important things to do than fight to no good end. Hiroshi stopped and looked around. Here then. It would happen here. He took a deep breath, then switched off the motor, and gave the order he had been holding back for so long.

  The vehicle dissolved under him, melting, then trickled away into the bitter, bare soil without a trace. Then he stood there all alone on the endless plain, under a sky that seemed higher and farther away than anywhere else on Earth. A sky that would keep silent for all eternity. It was utterly silent all around. The black dots racing toward him could have been just a trick of the light. Hiroshi shut his eyes. He knew it would not stay that way for long.

  He gave the next order.

  Onboard the AWAC was an expert in aerial photography collecting and collating shots sent over by the high-flying jets and a few unmanned drones that were also at work in the operational theater. And at that moment he couldn’t believe his eyes.

  “Goddamn!”

  He gazed at the screen as though he would never be able to tear his eyes away. The curse had been only a whisper, but his commanding officer had heard it nevertheless.

  “Officer,” he growled as he approached, “you know perfectly well I will not tolerate such language onboard my…oh my God!”

  Every head turned. The first crewmen stood up from their places, crowding behind the two of them, gradually forming a group of wondering faces around the screen. The picture showed La Pampa, the harshest and most desolate region in Argentina, and it showed the infamous dry pampas, so bare and dry that not even cattle could graze there. There was a set of crosshairs centered on the spot where a moment ago a lone man had stood.

  He had vanished. All around him something unbelievable was springing out of the soil so fast they could see it grow. A vast, baroque construction of domes and buttresses, towers, ramparts and ribs, turrets, chasms, spirals and filigree-fine antennae. It grew ever larger, hundreds of yards across by now, big enough to swallow most sports arenas. And yet it was still growing, bulging upward, looking sometimes like a mutant broccoli and sometimes like a skewed coliseum, sometimes like a coral reef on adrenaline and then, finally, like the head of some eyeless monster with millions upon millions of teeth, waiting for its prey.

&
nbsp; “I know what that is,” one of the radar operators whispered. He cleared his throat as the rest of them looked at him, aghast, and said, “It’s the Mandelbrot set. I know it. I’ve got a screen saver at home that builds it like that. The 3-D version.”

  Hiroshi had always been fascinated by the Mandelbrot set—infinite variety derived from a formula that was not just finite but breathtakingly simple. It took only a few lines in any of the classical programming languages to create the underlying code to draw a set. The command sequence to build this vast structure of arabesques and architectural follies had been one of the shortest he had ever used.

  He would have liked to have seen how it looked from the outside. The nanites had mostly built it from silicon and oxygen, two of the most common elements, which could easily be found in vast quantities even in the harsh desolation of La Pampa. Silicon and oxygen together yielded something much like quartz; he could well imagine that his fortress shone in the sunlight like an enormous gemstone.

  At any rate, there was enough light coming through to him, sparing him the need to create a light source; it would have seemed like an intrusion here. Hiroshi touched the fine incisions on the inside of his cave, the swellings, wreaths, and garlands all around. They felt cold and were razor-sharp. No surprise there. Mathematically speaking, the Mandelbrot set was infinite; you could focus in on even the smallest part of it and find an infinity of ever-smaller, ever-finer structures, self-similar and yet constantly unpredictable. Mathematically speaking, it could never end. Physically, however, it had to come to an end somewhere. Once the set was expressed at the scale of individual atoms, it had to stop. In other words, the spikes, edges, and ripples all around him were sharper than any scalpel. That ought to stop his pursuers for long enough to give him the time to do what he had to do.

  He went over it all in his mind once more, making sure he had missed nothing. The nanites in the asteroid belt: on the way down to Buenos Aires, he had stopped for the night somewhere in Guatemala, in a deserted valley off the Pan-American Highway, to put up a dish antenna and establish radio contact. It had been nerve-rackingly slow—it took a good hour for a radio signal to reach the asteroids from Earth—but the nanites had reported in and confirmed his kill signal. Doubtless, they had then instantly begun to take each other apart impassively, obediently, mechanically. By now he could assume that there was not a single nanite left in the asteroid belt. The second habitat they had been working on would remain unfinished, probably for the rest of time. As for what would become of the first habitat…well, that was no longer his problem. The nanites that had been around him all this time had also begun to dismantle each other. What they had built would endure, but nothing new would be created. Never again.

  He had deleted all his old programs and files. Including the backups. Including the ones in the data havens. The same was true of all the copies of the archive of blueprints, the nanites’ information matrix. And even if he had missed a copy, or the secret services had gotten hold of one without his knowledge, whoever got to work on it would run up against the same problem he had faced before he first encountered the nanites: they wouldn’t be able to build new nanites, because they were missing the first one to work with, the first cause. And he had never made any record of how to build one. He would take that with him to the grave.

  Hiroshi looked at the earth he stood upon, about ten square feet of untouched grass and soil. The nanites had let it be when they built his refuge around him. So this was the end of his journey and the end of his dream. In a little while the last of the nanites would be destroyed, and with them the future that might have been, the future of unlimited wealth for all. It had been a dream that hid a nightmare at its core.

  “In other words, he’s dug himself a foxhole,” the US president said, summing up the report the secretary of defense had given him. He had just been on the phone to the president of Argentina. She agreed with him that they wished to unite the forces of both nations to take control of the situation.

  A foxhole? The secretary wondered whether that was the right term. The word reminded him of the stories his grandfather had told him about the World War, about the trench warfare he had seen. A foxhole was a miserable hole dug into the earth with miserable tools, offering miserable protection from enemy attack. Grandpa had left no doubt in his mind that it was a dirty, dangerous business.

  “Well maybe,” he said. “After a fashion. The luxury version, so to speak.”

  “So how do you intend to proceed? Do you want to shell it?” The president rubbed his jaw thoughtfully. “All else being equal, it would be good to keep it in one piece. It’s a Mandelbrot set, isn’t it? Half a mile across. How often do you get to see a thing like that?”

  “To be precise, it’s the three-dimensional variant. What the mathematicians call a Mandelbrot bulb.” The secretary wondered whether he should correct the president on the size of the thing—in fact, Hiroshi’s Fortress of Solitude was about sixteen hundred feet across, not even one third of a mile—but decided not to. “No, we won’t bring in the artillery for the moment. Too risky. We’re waiting for the marines. They’re going to try to get in. And they have orders only to shoot if they encounter defenses.”

  The nanites that had built his fortress had gone to work one last time. They had made him a tatami with white braid, a pot of ink, a calligraphy brush, and a few sheets of parchment. They had also converted his clothing into a white kimono.

  He had seen the originals for all these items in a Japanese store in Los Angeles. On his way south to visit Rodney for the last time, he had scanned them, just in case he needed them. They were probably still there; the store didn’t strike him as a place that sold much. Hiroshi felt contact with all the nanites around drop away as the complexes dismantled one another. Then at last there was silence. Now the only remaining nanites were the ones in his body.

  Not long now.

  Hiroshi sat down on the mat in the seiza position prescribed for seppuku: heels turned outward, toes crossed, back straight. His knees were one fist’s width apart. Chest and shoulders relaxed, all the weight of his body resting in his lower belly. He thought of his father, who had taught him to sit this way, and he felt sorrow for his father, and for himself.

  An honorable death is no bad thing, he chided himself.

  He reached for the parchment and the brush. Time for his jisei no ku, his death poem. He paused and collected his thoughts. The sum of his whole life in just a few words. Well, that was simple. He dipped the brush in the ink and wrote, first in Japanese, then the translation in English beneath. It felt like freedom. Most surprising. Suddenly, it seemed easy to shrug off the shackles of mere matter.

  One more thing. He reached for the second sheet and wrote his instructions—no, his request—to those who would find him. He could do no more than ask, and realistically there was not much hope that anyone would heed his wishes. But at least he had tried. Another phrase that could sum up his life.

  Then Hiroshi set this sheet aside, too, put his hands in his lap, relaxed his fingers, and breathed. Time for the last two commands. The very last command to the nanites would be to dismantle themselves down to the very last complex, to fall finally and irretrievably apart into pieces that could never again join together to make another nano-assembler. He almost regretted this. He had loved the aesthetics of these molecular machines, had spent hours on end studying the graphic representations of their structure, admiring them—the inescapable logic of the construction, once he had understood the basic principles. He had felt awe in the face of a universe that had contained these possibilities since the very beginning of time.

  Over and done. He must take his leave of that, too. Hiroshi bared his torso to a hand’s width below his navel, then placed his hand upon the tanden.

  Then he gave the command that would end it all.

  With his left hand upon the “scarlet field,” he stretched out his right hand and w
atched a dark dot form on his palm, quickly growing larger until a blade took shape…

  EPILOGUE

  He had never been to Buenos Aires and had never expected to go. Particularly not first class. Not to mention with such a curious item in his hand luggage.

  At the customs desk a grim-faced man pointed to his bag and gestured unmistakably that he should open it. This was when he got to use his brand-new diplomatic passport. The customs man raised his eyebrows and even managed to summon a smile as he waved him through. “Welcome! Enjoy your stay in Argentina.”

  He could get used to traveling this way.

  He crossed the concourse. Crowds of taxi drivers were waiting at the exit. “Do you speak English?” he asked the first driver.

  “Yes, yes,” the man assured him cheerfully, hurrying over to open the car door for him.

  That was probably all the English the driver knew, but it didn’t really matter. He climbed in and handed him the sheet of paper with the address. The ride took about half an hour and was mostly along broad avenues that could have been freeways. He saw a great many trees; Buenos Aires was a very green city. A lot of high-rises, too, but with exuberant palms in between them and luxurious green foliage.

  The taxi finally stopped on a street lined with small, old villas, half-hidden by their flourishing gardens.

  “There,” the driver said, pointing to a house.

  The passenger paid what the meter said and then added another banknote. He waited till the taxi drove out of sight, then crossed the road. A doorbell with the name R. + L. BLANCO. Underneath that a brass plate inscribed C. MALROUX, TRADUCTORA, with an arrow pointing to a low garden gate with a flagstone path beyond it.

  He followed the path. It took him around the house to the rear, to a dark, overgrown garden. A woman sat on the deck at a little wooden table, writing by hand. She was wearing an airy spring dress. She was slim, almost skinny, and her dark hair was the length of matchsticks. He could see she must have once been beautiful. She looked up calmly. She must have heard him coming.