Lord of All Things (55 page)

“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.” Hiroshi 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.

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 at 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.