Lord of All Things

by Andreas Eschbach

  “I see,” Adamson said again. “Hiroshi Kato is working for the People’s Republic of China.”

  “At least for its capitalist wing.” The director opened her folder. “Kato has spent the last five years more or less continuously in various well-guarded research laboratories leading working groups of up to one hundred members. The CIA managed to smuggle out a few documents—I have no idea how.” She took out a sheaf of blueprints and passed them over to Adamson. “Here. I’d like you to take a look at these and explain to me what your friend Kato is building.”

  Adamson had to fight the urge to grab the documents from her hands. His fingers trembled as he took the blueprints. “When will you want the analysis?” he asked.

  Impatience flared in her light blue eyes. “I don’t want you to draft a paper,” she said. “I want you to open these plans right now, take a look at them, and tell me what you see there. On the spot.”

  “Oh.” Adamson felt himself break a sweat. This was going to be tough. He hoped it wouldn’t prove to be a damp squib. He unfolded the first blueprint tenderly, as though it might break in his hands. It wouldn’t; this was just a feeble attempt to buy some time, to gather his thoughts.

  He suddenly realized what was different about this office since the last time he had been here: all the plants were gone. The two big pots with the fig trees were missing, as was the row of smaller plants, the thick-leaved specimens that had once stood on the little gray board under the window. Even the little cactus next to the printer was absent. For some reason Adamson felt shaken by this observation. He found it almost more unnerving than being put to the test like this first thing in the morning, on a day when he wasn’t feeling at the top of his game anyway. Okay. Come what may, he had to get through this. He unfolded the blueprint, which was stamped with the CIA crest and TOP SECRET, and looked at the tangle of lines. At least the labels were in English as well as Chinese.

  And lo and behold, there, in the bottom-right corner of the sheet, was the name Hiroshi Kato.

  Hiroshi’s tent was big and looked even bigger inside, since it was just as sparsely furnished as his room back in MIT had been once upon a time. A folding bed, a desk, a table with two chairs, and that was it. And he must have had a refrigerator somewhere, since he put a glass in front of her and a can of soda that was so cold that drops had pearled on the outside. It was the same brand he had given her back in Tokyo.

  “All right,” said Charlotte. “I think it’s probably finally safe to tell me.”

  Hiroshi took the other folding chair and sat down opposite her. He leaned forward and looked intensely at her, as though he were an entomologist and she were some unusual insect he had found and was trying to classify. Usually Charlotte would have felt uncomfortable in such a situation, but to her surprise she found she liked it. It reminded her of the days back in Tokyo when they were both children. Hiroshi had looked at her just the same way even back then. Just as intensely, as though he were determined to get to know every atom of her being. Nobody else had ever looked at her quite so intently. Not her parents, nor any man in her life.

  A gust of wind rattled the tent roof above them. The noise broke the spell. Hiroshi looked at the ground and seemed to be trying to find the opening lines of a speech he had been giving over and over again in his thoughts for years now. A speech he had practiced, rewritten, and refined.

  “I was ten years old back then,” he began. “You’ll have to bear that in mind. At that age you think that a lot of things are easier than they really are, and you think that some things are harder. Nevertheless, even then I saw something quite clearly that I still see the same way now: when we talk about rich and poor, we’re not talking about money but rather about work. If being rich just meant having a lot of money, it would be simple to make everybody rich: all we would have to do is print more money and hand it out. That doesn’t work, though, since money is nothing but printed paper. It’s not about money—it’s about work. Being rich means being able to get others to work for you.”

  Now it was her turn to look at him. She could take her time about it. The fine wrinkles around his eyes suited him, even if they made him look tired. He must have spent far too much time over the last few years staring at computer screens, working late into the night, not getting enough sleep. He certainly knew what he was talking about when he talked about work; there was no question about that.

  “Yes,” she said just to let him know she was listening. At the same time she wondered again why this topic was so important to him. Why he was so obsessed with it.

  “Being rich,” Hiroshi went on, “means having more than others have—indeed, having so much more that those others have no choice but to take some of what is yours and are prepared to work in order to have it. That’s the principle. And following this principle”—he lifted his hand and raised his index finger to make his point—“it is by definition impossible for everybody to be rich, since not everybody can have more than other people have. No more than everybody can be more intelligent than average, or taller than average, and so on.”

  Charlotte blinked in surprise and felt her eyes grow tired. It felt strange, as though she were not really here but simply dreaming all this. “But you said you could do it, didn’t you? You claimed you knew what you would have to do so that everybody could be rich. You even said it was simple.”

  Hiroshi nodded, smiling. “Yes. My main point is that it’s fundamentally impossible for everybody to be rich as long as we stick to the principle that a rich man is one who can make others work for him, because he has more than they do. It’s just not possible. But if we turn the problem on its head and simply concentrate on the work—the work that has to be done if anyone at all is to live a rich life, including the gardening and the cooking and making all those luxuries that go with it—well, if we just look at the work and ask how we can arrange for everybody to have this work done for them, then we conclude that it’s possible to build machines to do the work. In other words, robots. The word itself comes from Czech—robota, meaning “work.” In the ideal case, a robot is a machine that could do anything a person could do. If everybody had enough robots, then everybody could live the life that the rich live today. That’s the long and the short of it.”

  Charlotte took a sip of soda. It tasted unpleasantly sharp, artificial. “But all you’ve done is change the terms of the problem,” she pointed out. “If everybody had these robots, then yes. But I assume it’s not easy to build even one such robot. Meaning that even a robot would be expensive. Meaning that not everybody could afford one, so we’re back where we were—back in the world of rich and poor.”

  Hiroshi raised his eyebrows. He grinned. No, he wasn’t just grinning; he seemed to be savoring some private joke. “Well you see, that’s the basic fallacy. It took me quite a lot of thought to recognize it as such, but perhaps you really need to be ten years old to even be able to see through that kind of faulty thinking. You’re quite right that it’s not easy building even one such robot. But the thing is—you only need to build one of them!”

  Now Charlotte was baffled. Or perhaps she was dreaming all this. Perhaps she was actually still squeezed into an airplane seat with a crick in her neck and cramps in her calves. Perhaps she was asleep and just dreaming she was here. People said funny things in dreams.

  “Just one?” she asked. “How’s that supposed to work? One single robot can’t do all the work for everybody at once, can it?”

  Hiroshi was still grinning. The grin seemed to float free of his face and fill the room. “It wouldn’t have to. Work for everybody at once, that is. But think about it for a moment: a robot that can do everything a person can must logically be able to build another robot like itself, an identical copy of itself. Then there are two, and these can make copies of themselves in turn, and then there are four. And on and on it goes, faster all the time. By the next generation there are sixteen robots, then thirty-two, sixty-fou
r…It’s an exponential function. After about sixty cycles there would be enough robots for everyone on Earth to have one. And you can keep on making as many as you like, as many as you need.” He sat up straight, leaned back, and ran his hands over his hair. “That was the idea ten-year-old Hiroshi had on the swing.”

  Charlotte felt disappointed, irritated. If all this wasn’t a dream, then she might well ask whether it had been worth flying halfway around the world for it. Okay, it wasn’t a bad idea for a ten-year-old, but to hold on to it all the way through to adult life was odd to say the least. She pushed the glass away and moved her head from side to side, trying to get rid of the tension in her neck.

  “And is that what you’re doing here?” she asked, more harshly than she intended. “Building a robot?” It was downright weird to come to such a remote island for that. Wouldn’t a great big factory be better, or a well-equipped laboratory?

  “No,” Hiroshi said. “That’s not what I plan to do. Since, of course, it’s not as easy as I imagined when I was ten.”

  “Go on then.”

  “As I said, when you’re a child you think some things are easier than they are, and some are harder. In this case, my basic fallacy was to believe a man could build a robot. That was a mistake. Nobody can do that.”

  Charlotte blinked again. Her eyes were stinging. “What? But people do build robots, don’t they?”

  “Quite. But a single man, all on his own, can’t even make a ballpoint pen. Never mind a robot of the kind we’re talking about. To manufacture something of the sort, you need an awful lot of raw materials and parts that other people have built in turn. In fact, it’s our technological civilization as a whole that builds ballpoint pens and cell phones and cars and skyscrapers and planes. And robots. One man on his own is only a part of a function matrix. One man can only perform part of any task, but his work is tied into all the other parts of the task so that in the end, we have products and services.”

  “So you can’t do it. Make everybody rich, I mean.”

  “Oh, but I can. You just have to take a different approach.”

  “How’s that?”

  Hiroshi bowed his head and smiled softly. “You’re dead tired, Charlotte. And it takes quite some time to explain. I’ll show you tomorrow.”

  He couldn’t do it sitting down, and he couldn’t do it here at the desk. Adamson got up and carried the blueprint over to the coffee nook in the corner and spread it out on the low table there. Then he stood and considered the drawing.

  “What other documents do we have?” he asked.

  “Just more blueprints,” Roberta Jacobs said.

  Okay. That meant it was up to him to figure it out. Maybe she just wanted to know how he would handle the situation. Adamson took several deep breaths. Just keep calm. It’s not half as bad as it seems. Basically, he told himself, this was all familiar ground. If he had learned one thing over the last few years, it was that his particular talent was not thinking up genius ideas on his own. His talent was seeing the sparks of genius in what other people invented. That had been the secret of his success at MIT: he had been forced to gather people around himself and build teams, then urge them on to do the very best work they were capable of, so that in the end some of their success rubbed off on him. How often had he done this kind of thing? Looking at designs that others showed him? He knew he could recognize groundbreaking work when he saw it, trailblazing ideas, the stuff of genius. Often he knew it long before the designers themselves realized their ideas were something out of the ordinary. It no longer even bothered him that he had never had such a stroke of genius himself. His role was no less important. Teamwork was the key to it all, meaning the people who could build teams and lead them were just as necessary.

  So, what did they have here? A diagram for some device. Adamson leaned forward and looked closely at the dimensions and the design as a whole. “This is pretty small, whatever it is,” he said, raising a hand. “The whole machine’s no bigger than the palm of my hand.”

  The director harrumphed in agreement. She was standing next to him now; he could smell her perfume. She was so close that he could have put his arm around her.

  Adamson concentrated on the drawing. The list of components was short. “It’s a machine made of surprisingly few moving parts. Twenty-six parts, all quite radically innovative…”

  He forgot the director, forgot how close she was standing, forgot even the smell of her perfume. He became absorbed in the diagram, saw the parts take shape, saw how they fitted together to make one machine. How they moved, interlocked, joined as one. He felt a flood of excitement as he understood how the machine fitted together. It was more elegantly planned and more thoroughly conceived than anything he had seen in his life. This wasn’t just a design with some clever refinement or neat innovation, it was genius from start to finish.

  “Here,” he said, tracing the diagram with his finger. He suddenly realized he had gotten down on his knees in front of it. “This is the chassis. This half-moon shape here is part of a motor with a linear drive, just using a simple magnetic field generated by this element here. And this…” An extendable claw. Precision work. Then a sharp blade on the other arm of the claw…a knife. This module could cut, take hold of things, or anchor the whole device, depending on its instructions.

  Roberta Jacobs bent over him to look. Her necklace brushed Adamson’s shoulder. She pointed to a cluster of odd little notches. “What are those for?”

  “Yes, what are they for?” Where had he seen that sort of thing before? He couldn’t recall. His finger swept across the sheet—the energy supply, something that had to be some sort of relay, but more finely calibrated; maybe better to call it a transistor, though it was the oddest transistor he’d ever seen.

  Suddenly, he realized what he had been missing all this time. He really wasn’t in top form today. “The device is designed to hook up with others. Do you see this groove along the edge? It makes no sense unless we assume the thing is meant to connect with other machines, either of the same type or something very similar. Which means that…wait a moment…that these surfaces here are contact fields to transmit electrical impulses. And then these surfaces would be coated with…what? Silicon?” Adamson was so excited that the feeling was almost sexual. My God, he had always suspected Hiroshi was a sly old fox, but he had never thought he was this good. He framed the cluster of notches with both hands. “This area here is a processor chip, but turned inside out, so to speak. It’s an integrated circuit. I’d have to take a closer look, but I’m willing to bet that it can receive command impulses from the next machine along and then recognize where they are meant for. If they’re instructions for this machine, it carries them out, or if they’re for another unit, they get passed along.” He got up so suddenly that he almost barged into the director. “That’s only a part of the puzzle here. It’s one function in the whole. In itself it’s a simple automaton that can either cut or use its claw to anchor itself, depending on instructions. But the actual function only becomes clear once we can see it at work together with all the other devices.”

  He hurried back to the desk and picked up the next blueprint, unfolding it and bringing it over to lay on top of the first. There were similarities, but differences, too. This part, for instance, didn’t have a cutting blade, but rather…aha! It was a unit that could contract and expand to move around, like a mussel or an inchworm.

  “It’s a puzzle,” Adamson repeated excitedly. He pointed at another section that the first plan had not shown. “Here. A hard drive. You give this unit a command, it takes it along to wherever it ‘walks’ to, and then it can transmit commands to the other units it docks together with.”

  There was one more plan. Adamson unfolded it with the numb certainty he would only get to see a tiny part of the whole device Hiroshi had created here. Three parts of a puzzle that might have a hundred pieces. They would never be able to riddle out wh
at the whole thing would look like. This part was larger, but it would still fit into his pants pocket. “A pump,” Adamson realized at last. “Do you see this? That’s the moving part. More or less like a heart muscle. And these are the valves. These connections here allow it to dock into neighboring units…” He looked up and into her eyes. “Is this really all we have?”

  Roberta Jacobs nodded. “At least it’s all the CIA gave me.”

  “Is there any chance of getting hold of more material?”

  She looked back at him appraisingly but seemed uncertain. Did she know something more that she couldn’t tell him? That wouldn’t be unusual. In this line of work, everybody had more secrets than was really good for them.

  “I don’t know,” she admitted at last. “From what they tell me, the lab our agent had access to only makes these three units. We have no idea what happens in the other labs. The CIA only has limited resources, and to be blunt with you, this isn’t a top-priority case.”

  “Too bad.”

  She turned away and went back to her desk, where she snapped the folder shut. “Is it? Too bad? What can you see here that I can’t?”

  “Genius,” Adamson declared just as bluntly. “Kato has obviously created a machine that consists of several diverse units, each with a narrowly defined function. We won’t know what the machine as a whole does, what it’s intended for, and what it can actually achieve, until we see all the units. All the pieces of the puzzle.”