Lord of All Things (31 page)

Hiroshi raised his brows. “That’s what I meant when I said it’s more of a geometrical problem. You have to construct the parts so that each of them has as many uses as possible.”

“And you did that.”

“I had an uneventful childhood and not much else to do.”

Charlotte thought about it. “I can’t really imagine what such a machine would look like. Only twenty-six parts and able to produce one of its own constituent pieces.”

“It’s just an example. In reality, once again it’s a little more complicated than that. You have to be able to make the parts from something, meaning raw materials have to be extracted somehow. Then you have to shape them, drill them, and so on. So what I did was to break down all the processes of machine-tool technology into the most basic possible steps, into their constituent parts, so to speak. And then I developed the simplest possible machines that could perform one or at most two of those functions.”

“What kind of functions should I be thinking of here?”

He ticked them off on his fingers. “They have to be able to saw, join, weld, quench, clamp, cut, turn, drill, press—”

Charlotte waved a hand. “Okay, okay, I understand.”

“Not all of those functions are equally important. Some of these functions have to be able to interact with the world around. So one such function is to be able to identify raw materials, and that’s done by a unit I call the prospector. But then the material is actually extracted by another unit, the miner. Then it’s taken away to be processed by the transporter. And so on. Then there are two absolutely central functions on top of all this. The first is power generation and transmission, which is the most fundamental of all, since nothing happens without energy. And the second is programming. There has to be some control system for how all the individual pieces work together. If a unit ends up in the wrong place or starts work at the wrong moment, then the whole thing falls apart.”

Charlotte tried to imagine how that would work. She looked down into her cup as she pondered, so that Hiroshi asked whether she wanted more coffee.

“No, thanks. I…” She tried to put into words the images that were going through her head. “So what you’ve done, almost, is build a flock of little robots that are all different but that can make more of themselves by working together. And they build the other robots one by one rather than all at once. Have I got that right?”

“Exactly!” He was enthusiastic now. “You’ve said it just right. That’s exactly it. A flock of robots under central control. And they reproduce by working together to build one part after another until there’s another flock. That’s the basic idea.”

Charlotte picked up her cup. “But once you’ve got a flock of robots, how does it make me a fresh cup of coffee?” She couldn’t imagine that, no matter how hard she tried. Had she argued him into a corner with her question? It certainly didn’t look like it.

Hiroshi’s eyes lit up. “Excellent question.” He was beaming all across his face. “And you’re quite right—at the moment they can’t. That has to do with the way coffee is produced—you have to plant the bushes, tend to them, water them, harvest the beans, and all of that, then you have to process your harvest until you eventually have roasted coffee beans to grind and brew. All that lies in the future for the time being. There have to be a great many more of our complexes—our flocks, as you say—before some of them can devote themselves full-time to coffee. In every case, a complex is a unit in its own right that can communicate with other complexes at a higher level—in this instance it would be a ‘coffee complex,’ a flock of flocks, all busy producing coffee. Later on we could have as many of these higher levels as you can imagine—flocks of flocks, and flocks of flocks of flocks. The higher the level, the less central control or programming these complexes would need. Rather, they’d increasingly be able to work together as a sort of swarm. That’s the way our brains work, more or less.”

“But there would have to be a ‘ship complex’ to transport the coffee, wouldn’t there?”

“Not necessarily. The complexes could do their work in totally different ways from humans. I can quite easily imagine that a sufficiently large number of functional units could make a sort of pipeline on the seabed and then pass the coffee on to its destination one bean at a time.”

It was a breathtaking image. “A pipeline on the seabed? You would need an incredible number of units for that.”

“So what? They make themselves, on their own, as many as I choose. All I have to do is write the program for it. As soon as it’s written, the whole thing just happens by itself. Programs don’t wear out.”

For a moment her thoughts were a blank. She tried to imagine the world Hiroshi saw in his mind’s eye, but she couldn’t. All she knew was it would be a very different world from the one she knew.

“Putting all that aside,” Hiroshi went on, “it’s early days yet. So far we’ve only been able to implement all the functions we would need for the units to replicate themselves. The first big hurdle is having the first complex create another. The hardest part there is what we call the cell division: creating a second control module that will accept the software from the first. It needs a lot of fine work to build such a module and particular parts. But as soon as it works, then off we go. Evolution can begin.”

“Evolution? Didn’t you say just now that we’re dealing with something very different from a life-form?”

“True enough. It’s a widespread fallacy, however, to think evolution applies exclusively to living beings. It doesn’t. Evolution has been at work in technological processes, too, from the year dot. If you want to have a chance of understanding industrial civilization today, then you must look at it as something that has evolved. There’s really no central control to speak of. We’ve had a history of centrally planned economies after all, and if we learned anything it’s that beyond a certain degree of complexity, central planning doesn’t work. Which is why these complexes have to develop on their own, in a quasi-evolutionary manner. New units will have to come along and perform further functions that hadn’t been needed before. Initially, that will happen under human guidance, but eventually the highest-level complexes will respond independently to human needs and do what we want them to do.”

Charlotte looked at the coffee cup in her hand and studied the pattern. “Maybe. But I still can’t imagine how your minirobots would make me a cup of coffee. How it gets onto the table in front of me.”

“We can run through that process. Ten years from now there’ll be a big multicomplex over in Brazil running the coffee plantations—”

“You can skip that bit. I don’t even have any idea how coffee plantations work right now. I only just know how to make coffee. Grind, brew, filter, pour, and so on.”

“All right then. The coffee beans come through the pipeline to the crusher units, whose function is—well, you can guess. Then the ground coffee falls into a container made up of form units, whose only function is to hold stuff. Heater units boil the water supplied by the pump units…”

“Next you’ll tell me that there’s a coffee-filter unit as well.”

“No, the coffee filter isn’t part of our flock; it’s another product. Just like the beans, it’s manufactured somewhere and brought to where you need it—”

“Through another pipeline? A coffee-filter pipeline?”

“I think it might make more sense to have a general-purpose transport pipeline to every house, bringing whatever is needed.”

“And then?”

“The transporter units carry the filter into place, the coffee percolates…”

Charlotte moved her cup forward. “Now I’m curious.”

Hiroshi raised his hands. “Maybe it’s just a perfectly ordinary coffee machine, and you have a humanoid household robot that picks up the coffee and brings it to you. Think about it—the functional units can reproduce as often as we like. Once there are enough of them, they can create whole factories building all sorts of things.”

Charlotte shut her eyes for a moment. She had to, even if it wasn’t good manners. She was overwhelmed by the world Hiroshi had envisaged. She opened her eyes again and said, “I want to see something now. I suppose you’ve built a flock of robots?”

“Yes, of course. That’s why we’re here. To test the first complex.”

“Show me,” Charlotte demanded.

They went into the tent Charlotte had already noticed that morning. Just as she had thought, it was a lab. Tables full of tools, computers, and precision machinery lined the walls; the middle of the tent was clear save for a gleaming, silver cube about the size of a small refrigerator, its skin shimmering like steel scales.

“We’ve tested all the subroutines one last time,” Hiroshi declared as though he expected Charlotte to know what that meant. “As soon as we give it the go-ahead, there will be constant video surveillance of the complex at work, from all angles. What it does is fairly complicated, so we can expect a few faults. That’s what we’re working on at the moment—fault tolerance.”

“But you do know that it basically works?”

Hiroshi stopped in his tracks. “Let’s just say that I’m fairly sure.”

“You must have tested something, you and your team.”

“As I mentioned, we’ve tested the individual functions. But now comes the integration test. We haven’t been able to test the replication process as a whole, not yet.”

Well then. She didn’t much care about the details. Charlotte put her hands on her hips and looked around. The lab tables were all cluttered with stuff. The men and women on Hiroshi’s team would be bored once their robots started doing all the work for them. They wouldn’t know what to do with their time.

“Where is everyone?” she asked.

“Probably swimming,” Hiroshi said.

“Swimming? I thought your people were all work and no play.”

Hiroshi smiled. “I sent them swimming so that we could have some time to ourselves. The test’s all ready; we just have to press the button. But I didn’t want to do that until you got here. I wanted you to see it with me.”

There it was again, that strange link between them, the mystery of their connection. It had nothing to do with love. They liked one another, no question, and perhaps they had been lovers once, but whatever connected them was something else. Something that gave Charlotte the shivers.

She took a deep breath. “Why? Why do I have to see it as well?”

“Because it has to do with you. Because you were the inspiration for it.”

“Am I supposed to be happy about that?” she murmured, and she shrugged as though she wanted to cast a weight from her shoulders. She looked at the gleaming metal block in the middle of the tent. “Is that it? The complex?”

“Yes.”

“Can you make it do something? So that I can see what it looks like.”

“No problem.” Hiroshi hunched over a keyboard, tapped in a command, and then picked up a dark gadget that looked like a pocket flashlight gone wrong. “This is an upgrade of my Wizard’s Wand, with integrated laser pointer and Bluetooth connection. Ninety-nine dollars in most DIY stores.”

He switched the thing on and pointed its thin red beam at a clear spot on the tent floor, about three meters from the metal block. It was fascinating. The block started to move, then fell apart into hundreds of individual parts. It looked as though thousands of steel-winged insects had clustered together to form a cube and were now going their separate ways. A few seconds later all the various parts were in motion, flowing like a stream of gleaming chrome-plated Lego bricks across the gray-brown floor, rustling and clattering as they threw themselves noisily into the task of moving from one place to another. Less than thirty seconds later the block was standing where Hiroshi had commanded it to go with the laser beam, and after the last unit had settled into place, the silence returned.

“Wow,” Charlotte said. “You really are a wizard.”

Hiroshi bent over the keyboard again and entered more commands. “We’ll do the whole thing again, but slower, so that you can see how it works.”

Another laser beam, and the block began to rattle and hum once more, making a scraping, scratchy sound. This time, though, she could see it was not one flowing movement but more like a tiny army striking camp. First, a series of little square units detached themselves from the rest and climbed down the other units’ backs like acrobats in a circus. Then they laid themselves down on the floor, unrolling like a long tongue, pointing toward the new position.

“These are the positioner units,” Hiroshi commented. “They make the map, so to speak, for all the other units to read.”

Now a whole crowd of other units followed. She could see at this speed that they were all different, and that most of them didn’t move on their own. They were carried along by units zooming back and forth like little flatbed trucks along the road that the positioners had marked out.

“Transporter units. The name says it all, doesn’t it?”

As the block took itself apart, she could see how a scaffold of positioner units gave the whole thing its shape. These, too, gradually left their places and threaded their way through between the transporters to re-create the structure in the new position. Eventually, all the units were there anew, all neatly in place. The last positioner units into the cube were those that had first rolled out onto the floor.

Charlotte hadn’t expected to be this excited. “That’s amazing! What else can it do? Show me something else.”

“I’ve programmed something in specially,” said Hiroshi, clearly pleased she liked his toy. He put down his Wand and typed in a few more commands. With its characteristic scurrying rustle, the block changed into…some other shape. A weird-looking machine with a hopper on the top and a tangle of rods and spines on one side.

“What’s that?” Charlotte asked.

“One moment.”

Hiroshi rooted through a drawer, then another, until finally he had found what he was looking for: a big ball of red wool. He walked over to the transformed machine and threw the wool into the hopper. The machine hummed into life, creaking and clattering, and began to knit.

“That’s unbelievable,” Charlotte exclaimed.