Lord of All Things

by Andreas Eschbach

  The minister put his finger inside the collar of his shirt. “All that’s just a vague theoretical possibility, though, isn’t it?”

  The professor shook his head slowly and deliberately. “Unfortunately not.” He pointed up to the sky. “As you said, there is the space station. You’ve all seen the pictures. The nano-replicators exist, and they quite clearly work—and Mr. Kato is the only one they will obey. If he so chose, he could unleash them, and it would take only a few hours for them to blanket the whole Earth with copies of themselves. Copies that could then only attack one another. That would be the end of the world—so utterly and definitively the end that it would make nuclear war look like a mild cold. Up until now all this was just the nightmare of scientists who research nanotechnology—they call it the ‘gray-goo’ scenario. But ever since Mr. Kato’s space station arrived, it’s no longer a theory but a hideously real possibility. If he should happen to decide to do it this minute, nobody alive on Earth would see the dawn. And if you ask me, that is more power than any one man should have.”

  “Quite so.” The minister gulped. “Tell me what you plan to do and what you need.”

  It was a dream. Suddenly she was quite sure. Time had come to a stop, the rest of the world had vanished, and there was only her and Hiroshi’s voice.

  “Do you remember Seito-Jinjiya, the Island of the Saints? That obsidian knife you wanted to touch, no matter what?”

  What a question! “Do I remember? That’s what gave me the idea of looking for the first human race. It’s what ruined my academic career.”

  Hiroshi’s voice again, speaking as though all that was unimportant. “I held you, do you remember? You screamed when you touched the knife, and you fell into the water.”

  She had to smile. “It all seems a hundred years ago.”

  “I can’t prove it, but I suspect not only that the knife was created during the era of the first human race, but also that it must have had something to do with someone who was involved in creating the nanites. And then your strange ability to read objects…” He stopped. “As I say, I can’t prove any of this. Nobody will ever be able to prove it. It’s just a suspicion…or let’s say it’s how I explain all of this to myself. How I explain I knew so much about these nanites before I ever saw them for the first time. I already had the basic idea—robots that build robots, remember? When we were on the swings in your garden that day, I was already thinking about it. It would probably just have stayed an idea, the kind of naive idea you have when you’re a kid and then you quickly forget. But it must have been the soil upon which some seed fell. Something that reached me through you. From that object, from a past we know nothing about. Most of my inventions weren’t my inventions at all—they were rediscoveries, something mankind already knew once before.”

  “So the probe would have been launched from Earth hundreds of thousands of years ago—and then it came back, during our time?”

  “Not that probe as such. Since they were launching nanites, they must have planned for the probes to reproduce.”

  “I see. So they launched a probe that found an alien planet, landed on it, built more rockets and more probes, which flew off in turn and found other planets…and then eventually one of those rockets happened to find its way back to Earth?”

  “Exactly.”

  Charlotte had to think about that for a while. Perhaps she dozed off again as she did so; she couldn’t say. All she knew was a long time passed before she thought to ask, “The first human race…If they were able to invent something like that…these nanites…then they must have been very advanced, mustn’t they? Technologically, I mean.”

  “No doubt about it,” Hiroshi said.

  “But in that case…” She stopped. What Hiroshi had told her struck a chord somewhere in her mind. It could only have been as he suspected. “I would somehow expect such an advanced civilization to have left more traces behind. That there would be a…I don’t know…a vast machine buried somewhere. A stretch of freeway. Something like that.”

  “I remember taking a very long walk through Boston and surroundings, and someone telling me that a hundred thousand years is a long time. Long enough for all sorts of things to fall to dust,” Hiroshi said. “But it may simply be that there’s no record because of the nanites.”

  “How’s that?”

  “The first humans may have been just as warlike and aggressive as we are. I’m sure they were. Perhaps there was a war at some point, fought with nano-weapons. Or an accident and they got out of control. Remember, nanites can’t just build anything, they can also take anything apart. The one implies the other.”

  Charlotte tried to imagine it. “You mean the nanites could have destroyed the whole civilization, so that the survivors were left in the Stone Age?”

  “You could build nanomachines that swarm out and turn every scrap of ultrapure silicon they find into dust. In the blink of an eye, no computer could function. You could build nanomachines that destroy everything made of paper—that’s the end of books, libraries, all human knowledge. Nanomachines that destroy anything made of metal…the possibilities are endless.”

  “You could also build nanomachines that kill people.”

  “That, too.”

  “If that’s what happened, then why are there still people at all?”

  Hiroshi heaved a deep sigh. “I don’t know. I haven’t found any history books from back then after all, just blueprints. I’m still piecing it all together. But if there was a conflict, then the other side used nanotechnology as well. And if it was an accident…we could imagine all sorts of explanations. A last-minute rescue plan. A clash between nanomachine armies that fought each other. Or simply chance.” He hesitated. “It’s just a thought, but a lot of viruses look as though they might be remnants of nanomachines.”

  “Viruses?”

  “Yes. Viruses aren’t alive. They’re basically machines that attack living cells and hijack them into producing copy after copy of the virus until they’re burned out. It’s hard to imagine an evolutionary pathway that could have produced something like a virus. The idea they may have actually been built seems to me to fit quite well.”

  That reminded Charlotte of something, of a riddle she had spent a long time trying to solve years ago in another life. “The genetic bottleneck,” she said.

  “I’m sorry?” Hiroshi asked, caught off-guard.

  “We’ve been researching the human genome ever since the nineties. And we’ve learned that human beings the world over are far more closely related than we had expected. If you run a statistical analysis of mitochondrial DNA—the part of the genome that comes from the mother—then you find out every human being alive today has just a few thousand common ancestors who lived about seventy thousand years ago.”

  “And how have they explained that?”

  “There’s a theory about the explosion of a volcano called Toba on Sumatra about seventy-four thousand years ago. Supposedly, an unusually powerful eruption, strong enough to have influenced the planetary climate. The theory is it led to a long cold period, and that Homo sapiens almost died out during that time.” Charlotte took a deep breath. “But a war like you describe…that would explain things as well. It would fit the time frame.”

  “It would also fit the big picture,” Hiroshi said.

  “What do you mean?”

  He stopped, seemed to be considering something. “On Saradkov the nanites suddenly ceased all replication and expansion, and I always said I didn’t know why they did that. Do you remember?”

  “As if I could forget.”

  “Ever since I merged with them and gained access to all their programs, I know what stopped them. They did it themselves. They noticed they were back on Earth, and in that scenario their programming required they cease all activity and send radio signals offering to self-destruct.”

  “Self-destruct?” Charlotte
repeated, astonished.

  “A safety mechanism.”

  She thought about this. It made no sense to her. “Why would an explorer probe that happened to wind up back on Earth self-destruct? It would be enough to power down. Or it could carry out its exploration program here on Earth. That wouldn’t be such a tragedy.”

  “There’s one reason that would explain it. A horribly simple reason,” Hiroshi said. He exhaled, and it sounded like a sob. “The most horrible reason you could imagine.”

  Night blanketed Buenos Aires. Traffic had thinned after midnight, so it was no trouble to cordon off the streets where things were about to get underway. It wouldn’t be long now. Dawn would break soon. The morning rush hour would start. They would have trouble if things lasted that long.

  Commander José Guarneri sat in the passenger seat of his car with a clipboard on his lap and a map of Buenos Aires folded to show Belgrano and the surrounding area. He had a radio to his ear and was drawing in the roadblocks with a thick red pen as they were reported in.

  “Group four, Rodríguez,” he heard. “Commander, there’s a man here who’s going crazy about the roadblock. He’s a newspaper delivery man. He wants to deliver these newspapers no matter what.”

  Guarneri pressed the transmission button. “Tell him he should think about whether he wants to feature in tomorrow’s edition. Headline: Dead in a Hail of Bullets.”

  That seemed to do the trick. At least, there were no further reports from that direction.

  “Group one?” he asked. “Anything happening?”

  “Still light in the window, but otherwise nothing to report. No sign of movement.”

  “How about the directional mics?”

  “Occasional quiet conversation between a man and a woman. Sometimes in English, sometimes in what could be Japanese. Then silence again.”

  “Are they having sex?”

  “No idea. If they are, we can’t hear anything.” The captain cleared his throat. “We could start the operation while it’s quiet. Maybe that’s when they’re asleep.”

  “Negative,” Guarneri replied. “We’re not going in.” He thought for a moment and then switched to the general band. “Guarneri to all. A reminder: whatever we do, we’re waiting till he comes out. The daughter of a former French ambassador to Argentina lives in that house; you guys are not going to screw this up for me, you hear me?” That was something his men could understand.

  It wasn’t the whole truth, though. Guarneri had a strong feeling even he didn’t know all the ins and out of the story. “I don’t want anyone setting foot in that house,” the chief of police had told him in person and in no uncertain terms. “And if those norteamericanos try anyway, you stop them, understand? By whatever means necessary. Ambassador Malroux is a good friend of mine; I could never look him in the eye again if anything happened to his daughter.”

  The business with the American agents was all taken care of. They had staked themselves out in the house opposite. Guarneri had given them four of his trusted men as well, officially as protection. They would make sure that the agents didn’t do anything stupid.

  “And another thing, which is going to stay our little secret, Commander,” the chief had told him. “These Americans want to get their man, and they’re telling the craziest stories you ever heard to get him. I’m not impressed, but the minister has allowed them to send along more of their own people.” And then the chief’s face grew grim. “I would very much appreciate it, Commander Guarneri, if the Buenos Aires police proved to be fully up to the task. Bring me that man, and bring him in alive.”

  Which was exactly what Guarneri intended to do.

  “The truth is,” Hiroshi said, “they didn’t send those probes out to explore other planets.”

  “Then why did they do it?”

  “To destroy them.”

  Charlotte felt the cold creeping into her bones. “Destroy them? How…” She stopped. She knew how nanites could destroy a planet, of course. She had seen it with her own eyes on Saradkov. If the nanites hadn’t stopped, if they had simply kept on and on and on, they would have had no chance. None at all. “What a terrible notion.”

  “Basically, the probes are much like viruses themselves, but on a planetary scale. The program is as simple as can be: land on a life-bearing planet and convert the whole biosphere into rockets that will then carry copies farther out into space. And keep going until there’s nothing left of the world.”

  “They deliberately target life-bearing planets for destruction?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why would anybody do that?”

  Hiroshi took a deep breath. “I don’t know. I only know that’s the case. I know the basic programming for these probes, and it’s unmistakable. That’s how it was coded. As for the reasons, I can only speculate.”

  He took his hands off her head. Her skin felt cool where they had been—all night long, as it seemed to Charlotte. Cool and now forlorn.

  “I wondered whether perhaps they were at war with an alien power, with some galactic enemy, and at some point felt they had no other choice but to use this weapon. Or whether they were so desperate they didn’t care. Or whether it was an act of revenge by the last humans left alive after a devastating attack from space. Whatever the reason, the probes must have been developed in a hurry. Their designers didn’t even take the time to give them a new information matrix that would only contain those programs and blueprints the probes really need. They simply took what they had and slapped the killer program on top. Quick and dirty. The way I was building my own nanomachines, before I merged. When it didn’t matter whether it was elegant or efficient, just that it worked.”

  Charlotte rubbed her temples gently and tried to understand. “They launched their rockets with machines designed to destroy alien planets.…Where did they send them?”

  “Everywhere. In all directions.”

  “And then what? One of the rockets eventually reaches a solar system, finds a life-bearing planet, crash-lands, and begins its work of destruction…”

  “And within a few days all life on that planet is wiped out. Without a trace. The whole planetary crust is converted into new rockets, right up until the moment they run out of some important element. But by then they’ve built and launched millions of new probes, each looking for another new planet to destroy. And so on forever. Even if it took thousands of years for one probe to reach its target, there must be trillions of killer probes all over the galaxy by now. It’s a wave of destruction that has been spreading outward from Earth for the last hundred thousand years. These rockets can reach very high speeds as they travel, half light-speed or even more. No matter how I run the numbers, I’m forced to conclude that half the Milky Way has been wiped clean of life by now. That’s why we’ve never made contact with extraterrestrial intelligence; there’s none left. Our ancestors killed them all.”

  She sat up and turned to face him, fighting the giddiness she felt. “But surely not everywhere. Surely there must have been some form of life, somewhere, on some planet who—which—managed to react in time.”

  “I don’t know whether that’s something we should hope for,” Hiroshi said darkly. “But the chances are minimal.”

  He raised his hand and pointed out the window. “Just think of that walk we took. Three million years. Even if a species evolves on some planet that might one day develop a technology that could serve to stop the nanites, when the probe arrives it can arrive at any point in those three million years, and from that point the world’s fate will be decided within days. But the probes attack any life-bearing planet, even one where life has only just developed. That means there are actually billions of years during which a planet is defenseless. No, once one of these probes arrives, it inevitably means a living world will be turned into a desert and millions more probes will be launched on their way, onward and ever onward.” He added, “And th
ere will be no end to it. We have no chance of being able to catch every one of these probes, and we have no chance of being able to render them harmless. Even if we develop interstellar space flight one day, the universe will be dead wherever we go.”

  “And in the end only Earth will be left,” Charlotte said softly.

  “Assuming that there is anything left, given the way we’re treating it.”

  Quite so. And it didn’t look as though there would be. She felt as though dark clouds were pressing in on all sides, as though a black mist had swallowed her. “Have you cured me?”