Lord of All Things

by Andreas Eschbach

  That gave Todd something to think about. It even seemed to impress him for some reason. He muttered, “Okay, okay,” as the two of them walked to the net and shook hands with the winning pair.

  “Next time we’ll wipe the floor with you,” Bennett promised, smiling grimly.

  The other two laughed back, as though he was joking. But he wasn’t. James Michael Bennett III truly believed that he and Todd would win in the end. After all, one of the other two players was black.

  The changing room was full of steam and smelled of cologne and shower gel, like the men’s perfume department at an expensive department store. While they stood under the shower, Todd asked if Bennett was planning to attend the Phi Beta Kappa inauguration on Saturday.

  “I’m not going to the same party as my girlfriend, man!” Bennett closed his eyes and stood faceup under the warm shower, trying not to think too hard about the party he would go to instead. That one would be in the Epsilon Omega frat house and wouldn’t be a big party at all. But it promised to be really wild. Above all, there would be a whole lot of fresh women there. If he came home without having hooked up at least twice, he was doing something wrong. So he’d better not think about it in too much detail, or he’d get a hard-on right then and there under the shower.

  He took his time getting dressed. He was in no hurry and spent a while rubbing himself down, stark-naked and well aware he looked great. He knew many of the guys were casting envious sideways glances at him, and he enjoyed that thought.

  There was a clash of metal as crazy Lester leapt up from the other side of the lockers, perched up above him, and called down, “Hey, JB, what are these rumors? You’re really gonna disappoint all those women?”

  Bennett looked up, amused. “What’s that?”

  Lester hollered out, “They say that the bridges of Boston are lined with desperate women ready to throw themselves in the river.” He was suddenly the center of attention, with all eyes upon him. “It must be serious,” Lester carried on. “Reliable sources are even using the dreaded word…” Loud enough for everyone to hear, he stage-whispered, “Engaged!”

  “Hey, not so fast.” Bennett leaned over for his towel and tied it around his waist in a leisurely fashion. “You know my motto. You can’t fuck every woman in the world…”

  Lester sat up straight on top of the lockers and drummed with the heels of his hands. “Everybody together now!” he crowed.

  And a chorus of male voices chimed in to finish James Michael Bennett’s sentence: “But that’s no reason not to try!”

  It was a hell of a sound. Once again Bennett was the hero of the day.

  “Is that true?” Todd asked as they crossed the parking lot. “You’re getting engaged?”

  Bennett stopped in front of his Jaguar. “Why not?” he said, grinning and throwing his kit bag onto the backseat. “She’ll just have to get used to the idea that when kings married, they always kept their mistresses.”

  Dorothy Golding was relieved when they had finally parked the car and were walking across the meadow filled with the scent of summer flowers, headed for a little wood. She was carrying the picnic basket, and Hiroshi had the blanket. Hiroshi, the city boy, who could hardly ever be persuaded to go anywhere near the great outdoors. But she had managed it.

  Dorothy had put a great deal of work into this little trip. It had not been easy to find this romantic little hideaway, nor to make it seem as though they had ended up there quite by chance. Using her best recipes, she had made sandwiches, a noodle salad, and a potato salad, and she had packed Hiroshi’s favorite mascarpone dessert in little plastic-lidded pots she had bought just for that purpose.

  “Do you like it?” she asked when they were finally sitting in the dappled shade with the vast meadow spread out before them and the branches of the tree sighing above.

  “I like it,” Hiroshi replied, smacking his lips. “It tastes great.”

  She looked at him dubiously. He had come along, but as was so often the case, she had the feeling he was not really there, that he was somewhere off in the world of his thoughts. And this was such a beautiful spot. It would have been a beautiful place to say romantic things to one another. Things like “I love you,” for instance. It would even be a pretty good place to propose…not that she was expecting anything like that. She would have to put a great deal more work into it before Hiroshi was ready for that. But if only he could keep his thoughts here, with her…

  After the picnic, they lay on the ground, lazy and sated, blinking up into the almost-cloudless sky without speaking. Dorothy waited, thinking of the hours she had spent in the kitchen. She wanted to spend the rest of her life looking after Hiroshi, raising his kids, keeping house. She wanted to be a good wife to him and his lover. Hiroshi would go far, anyone could see that; he would make good money, and they could have such a wonderful life together and all that went with it.

  Hiroshi propped himself up on one elbow and looked at her. He smiled. “It’s nice here,” he said, clearly happy.

  Dorothy smiled back but said nothing. Maybe he was getting ready to say something—something important.

  Hiroshi turned over onto his stomach and ran his fingers through the grass. “Take a look at this,” he said.

  She turned over, too, and came closer to him. He was pointing at a single ant that was trying to haul along a pine needle at least five times its own length.

  “Hey, look indeed,” she said. “Making a real go of it, isn’t he?”

  “It must have gotten lost.” Hiroshi lowered his head for a better view. “It’s incredible, don’t you think? Tiny little body. Mandible, antennae, legs. And it can shift a load like that.”

  “How about that,” Dorothy said. “Nature is full of wonders, if you only look at what’s right in front of you.” It could do no harm for him to learn that.

  Hiroshi sunk down farther, resting his chin on his folded hands. “One ant like this all on its own can’t do a thing,” he said thoughtfully. “What counts is working with the others. Swarm intelligence.”

  Dorothy listened to him on tenterhooks. Was he about to conclude that life was better lived together than all alone?

  “Basically, it’s a tiny mechanism,” Hiroshi went on. “A tiny, simple mechanism. Barely any brain to speak of. You could even build something like it. Not quite so small, but you could do it. What’s the difference between an ant and a robot? I can’t see any.”

  Dorothy turned away, disappointed. Robots! That was all Hiroshi ever thought about.

  “Hey!” she said, shoving her toes against his leg. “I’m here, too, you know. And I’m no robot!”

  He looked at her in surprise, then laughed like a big kid. “True, you’re not.” He forgot about the ant, turned round, and laid his head on her lap.

  “I want to ask you something,” he said, a serious tone in his voice.

  “Ask away.”

  “Have you ever had sex outside?”

  Dorothy gave a quiet sigh. Was that why he stayed with her? Sex? Probably.

  “No,” she admitted. “Never.”

  Hiroshi buried his face between her breasts for a moment, then kissed her, and said, “Wouldn’t you like to try it?” He looked around. “I figure nobody could see us. What do you think?”

  Dorothy’s plans had taken this eventuality into account. When picking the spot, she had made quite sure they couldn’t be seen from the road and that there were no hikers’ trails nearby, nothing that could cause a hasty interruption. And she had packed condoms just in case.

  Even so, she said, “I’m not sure about this.”

  She was playing coy so that he at least had to make the effort to talk her round. She had to be worth that much to him. If he persisted, she would go along with it—she had made up her mind about that before they had even left the car. It would probably be great. Hiroshi was not a bad lover, and if he was anyt
hing, he was persistent. He could practically have invented persistence.

  The seminar room where twenty-five students sat waiting for Prof. DeLouche was as white and clean as a laboratory and smelled of disinfectant. It was about as cozy as an operating theater. The only trace of character was the faint rattle from the air-conditioning unit, a constant background irritation.

  Hiroshi’s cell phone chimed softly. It was a text from Dorothy. “Just thinking about our trip yesterday. WOW!”

  Hiroshi smiled. Some kind of bug had bitten him on the backside, and on the way home they had to stop the car so he could pick two dozen ants out of Dorothy’s hair. Despite all that, making love under the tree had been sensational.

  “Yes,” he texted back. “We should do it again soon.”

  Just as he sent the message, one of his classmates leaned over. Red hair, pimples—Patrick or some name like that.

  “Hey,” he whispered, “I heard someone say you invented the Wizard’s Wand. You know, that doohickey that’s on sale in all the DIY stores. Is that true?”

  Hiroshi nodded. “Yup.” He had invented it right around the end of his first year at MIT. It was nothing special; the whole gadget was nothing more than two digital cameras with fish-eye lenses fixed a certain distance apart. It took 3-D pictures with true perspective that could then be processed and manipulated. The only tricky feature had been the visual-recognition software. That had taken him a couple of weeks of all-night coding sessions. Once he’d cracked that, though, it worked just as he’d planned. All you had to do was hold it up, press the button two or three times, and then hook it up to your computer by USB—then, presto, you had a precision 3-D model of your surroundings, including any furniture, in its exact dimensions and positions. You could then load that model into any CAD program at all.

  “That’s crazy,” said Patrick or whatever his name was. “My pa’s company makes furniture and interiors. He has two dozen of those things and he says they’re the greatest thing since sliced bread.”

  “Sliced bread?” Hiroshi had to laugh. “That’s the first time I’ve ever heard that.”

  The university had helped him patent his invention and sell the license to a manufacturer. Ever since then, he could pay his own tuition fees and other expenses without any help from his father.

  “How did you get an idea like that?” asked Patrick-or-whatever.

  Hiroshi shrugged. “A simple application of existing robot technology—optical sensors and spatial recognition. Oh yeah, and I’d just done repapering my room, and I hated having to measure all the walls.” His phone chimed again. “Uh, excuse me.”

  “Sure.” Patrick-or-whatever ducked out of sight.

  It was Dorothy again. “Jane+Boris want us to come over Sat night.” Hiroshi made a wry face. Jane was a high school friend of Dorothy’s, and Boris, her boyfriend, was a total bore and an investment banker as well. On top of which, Rodney wanted to drag him along to that party on Saturday night.

  “No time Saturday,” he replied. Then he thought of their trip, and the way the sunlight and shadows had played across her breasts, and he added, “Sorry!”

  This time he switched the phone off after he had sent the message. Not a moment too soon, since Prof. DeLouche walked into the room right then and the seminar on “Cybernetics and Society” began. It fulfilled the interdisciplinary requirement for his course load, and Hiroshi had to grant that it had been a good idea to make it a requirement, since otherwise nobody in the room would have wasted their time on it.

  DeLouche didn’t look like a typical university professor. He was built like a lumberjack, had a gray goatee, and wore thin-rimmed glasses to give him the necessary intellectual flourish. He had long fingers and hair right down his knuckles, which Hiroshi thought was gross.

  Today’s seminar was going to be devoted to the assignment papers they had mailed in, and judging from the way DeLouche’s eyes lit up when he spotted Hiroshi, it was mostly going to be about his paper. DeLouche sat down on the edge of the desk as he always did, weighed the printouts of the assignments in his hand, glanced around the class once, and then said, “Let’s start with the really very interesting paper that Mr. Kato turned in. There’s a lot to talk about here, like the way he thinks it would be a good thing if robots put us all out of work.”

  He stared straight at Hiroshi with an acid gaze.

  “Sure I do,” Hiroshi replied. “It’s the declared purpose of all technological development.”

  There was an audible gasp from the other twenty-four students in the room. Nobody had ever challenged Prof. DeLouche like that.

  “That’s fascinating,” DeLouche said with a dangerous note of sarcasm in his voice. “Would you be so kind as to explain in a little more detail?”

  Hiroshi shrugged, unconcerned. “I think it’s obvious. Since the Industrial Revolution—at the very latest—the point has been to identify routines in the work we do, isolate these as processes, perfect them, and then hand them over to machines. When a machine can do a certain job as well as a human being or better, it’s not worth a human’s time. So humans shouldn’t have to do it.”

  “And what would you say to someone who lost his job because of such reasoning?”

  “I’d tell him to go find another job,” Hiroshi answered dryly.

  DeLouche smiled like a shark. “Oh yes? But by your logic, there will be fewer and fewer jobs as time goes on.”

  “There’ll be new jobs. One hundred years ago, one-third of the population was employed in agriculture; today it’s only three percent. That doesn’t mean we have hordes of unemployed farmers.”

  “That’s a good argument,” DeLouche said with a note of triumph in his voice, just like always when he figured he was about to deliver the knockout blow. “But how does it help a worker who has been replaced by a robot and is out on the street looking for work now?”

  It was so quiet in the room that they could hear the humming of the clinical white light fittings up on the ceiling. And of course the air-con with its interminable tak-a-tak-tak-a.

  “To be precise,” Hiroshi said thoughtfully, “he doesn’t need a job. He needs money. Or speaking more generally, he needs some way to acquire the necessities of living. That’s where the real problem lies.”

  “Which brings us to the social security system,” DeLouche responded, peering at Hiroshi over the rim of his glasses. “Can you actually believe that some people like to work? That they see their job as part of who they are? Not just as a way to earn a living?”

  “Sure, I would believe that you do,” replied Hiroshi, his face impassive, “but my mother was a laundress. She spent years washing, drying, and ironing towels and tablecloths and acres of clothes, day in and day out. She didn’t see that work as being any part of who she is. And as soon as she had the chance, she quit.”

  DeLouche blinked in exasperation. He was losing ground and he knew it. And he clearly disliked it. “Your mother had the choice. A factory worker doesn’t have that choice. Don’t you think that’s a decisive difference?”

  Hiroshi took a deep breath. “No, I don’t,” he replied, not budging one inch. “Here’s an example. Before the computer was an invention, it was actually the name of a job that people did. A computer was a kind of clerk, and there were whole halls full of them in the banks and insurance companies, sitting there all day long doing nothing but add up columns of figures by hand. Then after that their sums would be checked all over again by another department to be sure there were no mistakes. By your reasoning, we would actually be better off if those jobs still existed. Which is where I disagree. If we define work as whatever we wouldn’t do if we didn’t have to, then a work-free society is actually the great goal and vision of all technological development. We’re aiming for a world where everybody only has to do what they want.”

  The others were impressed. Some of them even nodded imperceptibly. DeLouche kn
ew he wasn’t going to win this one and would do better to bring the discussion to an end.

  “An interesting viewpoint,” he conceded between gritted teeth, “but I’m afraid we’ll have to leave it at that so that we can give all the other papers the time they deserve.”

  For the rest of the seminar, he didn’t once invite Hiroshi to speak. There was no question, however, that when grades were assigned he would make sure Hiroshi remembered this discussion.

  The three of them sat in the venerable Loker Reading Room of the venerable Widener Library, leafing listlessly through their books. Not for the first time, Bennett reflected that it may not have been such a great idea to major in anthropology. For some reason he had imagined it would be exciting, but in fact it was dry as dust, and their prof was a dried-up old biddy. Not only was she utterly unresponsive to his charms, she also seemed entirely unimpressed by the fact that his father was one of the richest men in Boston and a major donor to Harvard. In other words, if he wanted good grades he would have to work for them. And “work” was such an ugly word.

  Today he just wasn’t in the mood. On top of which their third study buddy, Lawrence Kelly, was still new to the group, so he had to be taught an object lesson to give him the right idea.

  “You know what?” Bennett whispered to him. “I just picked up this book the other day, The 100 Most Influential Figures in World History, and I couldn’t believe my eyes. Most of the guys on the list were Brits.” He was endlessly fascinated by this, since, with the exception of a couple of aberrations back in the early days, his family was almost entirely of British descent.

  “The book must have been written by a Brit,” Lawrence whispered back. He didn’t seem too absorbed in his reading either.

  “That’s the thing, though; it was by an American historian. Muhammad was at the top of his list, then Isaac Newton at number two, and Jesus Christ only came after that.”

  “Muhammad was the most influential figure in the history of the world?” Lawrence said thoughtfully. “I don’t know.”