Lord of All Things (51 page)

Deputy chair: What did you call that? A Von Neumann probe?

Witness: Named for the mathematician John von Neumann. He did some important theoretical work on self-replicating automata. Though he never actually suggested using them for spaceflight himself.

(The chair and deputy consult briefly with their staff.)

Deputy chair: And you think we encountered such a probe on Saradkov?

Witness: Yes. If you have the ability to build self-replicating nano-constructs, it’s the obvious thing to make.

(…)

Chair: So that’s what you believe is the background to this whole story. An intelligent species sent out explorer probes to roam the whole galaxy, and then after that they either died out or went into decline.

Witness: Exactly. That’s what it looks like.

SARADKOV ISLAND EVENT QUARANTINE REPORT

The survivors of the Saradkov Island Expedition (these being Adrian Cazar, PhD; Charlotte Malroux; Morley Mann, MA; Angela MacMillan, MA) and the technical consultant who joined the group during the course of events and subsequently spent several hours on the island (Hiroshi Kato) were subject to a quarantine of 11 (eleven) days before being discharged. During this time they underwent medical examination for the presence of foreign bodies and substances in their tissue.

Procedures Used

—Whole-body computer tomography (except in reproductive organs)

—Whole-body sonography

—Whole-body MRI

—Spectral analysis of blood, lymph, and urine

—Microscopy on all bodily fluids

—Tests for alterations to antibodies

Results

No anomalies detected

JOINT INVESTIGATION COMMITTEE

SARADKOV ISLAND EVENT

CHAIR: SENATOR RICHARD COFFEY (US)

DEPUTY CHAIR: MINISTER ANATOLY MIKHAILOV (RUSSIA)

DOCUMENT STATUS: CONFIDENTIAL

EXTRACT FROM THE WITNESS TESTIMONY OF HIROSHI KATO (JAPAN)

Chair: So you were convinced right from the start we were not dealing with extraterrestrial life-forms?

Witness: Yes. As I saw it, this was clearly a technological construct. A kind of robot, if you like.

Chair: Of extraterrestrial origin?

Witness: That is what we are forced to conclude.

Chair: What I would like to understand is how you could possibly arrive on this island in the Arctic Ocean and come face-to-face with extraterrestrial technology, but instead of being utterly overwhelmed like everyone else, you knew immediately what you were dealing with and how to tackle it. I don’t understand it. In my view, it’s extremely hard to believe.

Witness: As I have already explained several times, I did not know how to tackle it. The construct stopped its expansion of its own accord. All I did was recognize we were indeed dealing with a machine operating along nanotechnological principles.

Chair: How were you able to recognize this?

Witness: Because I’ve been a researcher in the field for many years now. I recognized some familiar underlying principles. And by the way, I wasn’t the only one—I’ve since learned that the US president’s team of scientific advisers included experts who also immediately came to the conclusion we were dealing with nanotechnology.

Chair: Do I understand what you’re saying? Your research actually anticipated the fundamental principles of a technology developed by extraterrestrial, nonhuman life-forms?

Witness: That’s actually less surprising than it sounds. If I might explain?

Chair: Please do.

Witness: Discussion about how we could communicate with extraterrestrial intelligence has always assumed that this sort of contact would have to begin with an exchange of mathematical propositions. That’s because the principles of mathematics are abstract—they’re not tied to any particular form of biological life; any sufficiently intelligent life anywhere in the universe will understand them in the same way. Obviously, not using the same symbols, but the principles remain the same. One plus one always makes two, regardless of notation. As soon as intelligent life has developed the concept of number as such, then the whole of mathematics is implied.

If you take it one step further and assume the existence of machines—justifiably, if we’re positing communication with extraterrestrial civilizations—then we can suppose that every technological culture will at some point build a data-processing machine. What we call a computer. The most general computer conceivable is the Turing machine, which reduces all executable programs to only three operations—read, write, and move the read/write mechanism along the storage medium. As far as we currently know, this is the most fundamental data-processing machine that can exist, and we therefore think that even a completely alien intelligence would have the same insight. Obviously, it would use other terminology, but the principle would be the same.

So, if we now go beyond data processing, we get to other forms of processing—industrial, for instance. How do we shape objects? How do we mold matter? My research aimed at identifying fundamental principles here in much the same way. I was trying to write a universal grammar for materials processing, so to speak. I was able to show that all production processes can be reduced to fundamental operations such as cut, join, heat, cool, identify, sort, compress, produce or transmit energy, guide and hold still, turn, drill, and so on and so forth.

Chair: That would be the Kato machine, so to speak?

Witness: I beg your pardon?

Chair: You gave us the Turing machine as an example.

Witness: Oh yes. Well then. If you like.

In the breaks between depositions, they took him to the hotel breakfast room, where the blinds were down around the clock so that nobody got the idea of lurking around outside with a telephoto lens. Hiroshi punched a button for coffee, then peered through the slats of the blind as the machine gurgled and groaned. The media circus that had greeted them was long gone, and only a few reporters still shivered at their posts. The demonstrators, too, had gone, leaving only a little knot of dauntless souls waving placards that demanded “Nuclear-free zones—worldwide!” and “Peace in our time.” During the first few days there had been some far-from-peaceful clashes with the Icelandic police. Senator Coffey’s declaration that these were not disarmament talks but Russian–American round tables on joint scientific projects had been largely ignored.

There was a beep. His drink was ready. Hiroshi took the cardboard cup between his fingertips and carried it over to a chair. He savored the first sip of coffee and then leaned his head back, closing his eyes, just for the sake of it.

“You seem worn-out, Mr. Kato,” said the young lawyer the American government had provided him.

Hiroshi opened his eyes and tilted his head forward. “Yes, I’m tired. I can barely sleep. I’m not used to such soft beds.”

He was here as a witness, they had told him, not a defendant. The lawyer was there to make sure he said nothing that would incriminate him.

It was all very well organized. They had been kept apart so that they couldn’t influence one another’s statements. There was at least one pair of watchful eyes on each of them. He hadn’t seen Charlotte since the meeting aboard the Russian battleship; he had heard she had already left. He didn’t know any of the other expedition members anyway.

“To be honest,” the lawyer said, “sometimes you look as though you have something on your mind. Is there perhaps something you’re keeping to yourself, which I should know about as your lawyer?”

Hiroshi looked at him. It was an interesting way to put it. “No,” he said, “there isn’t.”

Somebody had thought it would be a good idea to give him a lawyer with a Japanese background. But John Takeishi, born and bred in Seattle, was about as Japanese as the Tokyo burger that one of the big fast-food chains was pushing these days. Granted, he spoke passable Japanese, but he knew nothing about the way of life or culture.

“Is that actually a fun job?” Hiroshi asked. “Lawyering, I mean. I’ve often wondered. So many people become lawyers in America. Do they just do it for the money?”

Takeishi looked surprised. “I’m no big-money lawyer, if that’s what you mean. Guys like that don’t work for the government.”

“That’s not what I mean. I was asking whether it’s a fun job.”

“Sometimes.”

“Now, for example?”

Takeishi grinned. “Now is good. I’m really just sitting around. But later I’ll be able to tell people I was in Reykjavík.”

“Is it a job you’d do if you didn’t need to earn a living? If money were no object?”

The young lawyer laughed. “No.”

“What would you do?”

“Music. Jazz.” His face shone with pleasure as he spoke. “I play clarinet in a jazz quartet. When everybody can make it, we meet once a week to rehearse, and then once a quarter we play a gig somewhere, usually at a tiny club with maybe twenty people or so. We play Dave Brubeck–style stuff, if that means anything to you.”

Hiroshi shook his head. “Nothing at all.”

“Hey, come on, you have to know ‘In Your Own Sweet Way’—it’s a standard.” He hummed a couple of bars of a melody Hiroshi had never heard in his life. “We even have some fans. Just way too few that we could make a living from it.” The pleasure vanished from his face. “Which is why we all keep our day jobs. But the jobs stop us from being able to rehearse as much as we would need to, to get really good. So it looks like we won’t really get anywhere with the music, and the jobs will win out in the long run.”

Hiroshi nodded thoughtfully. So few people ever got the chance to do what they really yearned to do with their lives. And the ones who couldn’t always couldn’t for the same reason: they were poor. Either really, truly poor, or scared by the threat of poverty.

Hiroshi turned back to his coffee. John Takeishi had been quite right to remark that he had something on his mind. But it wasn’t what he suspected: more than anything else, it was uncertainty. Uncertainty over whether his grand plan would succeed.

That was what was stopping Hiroshi from sleeping. Not the soft mattresses.

JOINT INVESTIGATION COMMITTEE

SARADKOV ISLAND EVENT

CHAIR: SENATOR RICHARD COFFEY (US)

DEPUTY CHAIR: MINISTER ANATOLY MIKHAILOV (RUSSIA)

DOCUMENT STATUS: CONFIDENTIAL

EXTRACT FROM THE WITNESS TESTIMONY OF ADRIAN CAZAR (US)

Deputy chair: What influenced your decision to make Saradkov the goal of your expedition?

Witness: Its position in the Arctic Ocean. Saradkov is in a class of islands that has had a stable ice sheet for thousands of years. We wanted to find out what effects global climate change was having on this ice sheet.

Deputy chair: Whether it is melting?

Witness: Well, in layman’s terms, yes. Although there are a great many other criteria that we also look at.

Deputy chair: You are an American. Why didn’t you find an American island for your purposes, or maybe a Canadian one?

Witness: Well, there aren’t that many American islands in the Arctic Circle, and they’ve all been pretty well surveyed. Same for the Canadian ones—almost too well. Since half of the Arctic Circle is in Russia, and the climatic conditions in the far north of the Eurasian landmass are significantly different from those of the North American continent, I thought it would be revealing to study the Russian islands using the same methods that had already been used over on the American side.

Deputy chair: Good, but why Saradkov in particular, an island so far north and so small that many maps don’t even show it? Why not one of the Eastern Siberian Islands, for instance?

Witness: Yes, we could have done that. To be honest, I don’t even know any longer how I settled on Saradkov. Somebody told me about the island, I suppose.

JOINT INVESTIGATION COMMITTEE

SARADKOV ISLAND EVENT

CHAIR: SENATOR RICHARD COFFEY (US)

DEPUTY CHAIR: MINISTER ANATOLY MIKHAILOV (RUSSIA)

DOCUMENT STATUS: CONFIDENTIAL

EXTRACT FROM THE WITNESS TESTIMONY OF ANGELA MACMILLAN (UK)

Chair: As a biologist, what was your motivation in taking part in this expedition?

Witness: We knew from satellite images that the coastline on Saradkov had been free of ice some of the time for a few years. I wanted to observe how life reestablished itself on a stretch of land that had been completely without life until recently. What happened, how quickly. Unfortunately, what we found was more like the opposite.

Chair: What do you mean by that?

Witness: Well, why am I sitting here? Because that damned machine came to life. Unlife. The killer machine. If it hadn’t stopped, it would have eaten the whole bloody planet by now, wouldn’t it?

It seemed strangely unreal to be heading back home. Hiroshi felt he was only dreaming the drive up the forest road to his house, dreaming the sunshine and blue skies above. Pulling up in front of his house, hearing the sound of his steps in the gravel. Seeing the door open and Mrs. Steel standing there, looking him up and down with a gaze that was half-reproachful, half-worried.

“So they finally let you go,” she said after a while.

“Yes,” Hiroshi said.

“And? Is everything all right?”

“Everything’s all right. Just as I said it would be, Mrs. Steel.”

He had been allowed to call her from quarantine to let her know he would be back later than planned. A government agent had been listening in on the call, so he had stuck to the official version, telling her he had been exposed to the carrier of a serious disease and had to wait it out until they knew whether he was infected as well. But she mustn’t worry about it, he had added; it was just a formality. He was quite sure he wasn’t ill.

“Shall I make you something to eat?”

“Later,” Hiroshi said. “I have something to do first.”

Before he went into the computer room, he went into an adjoining room and opened the closet there. Inside stood an old black-and-white television that looked as though it had just been left here and forgotten. But appearances were deceptive. As indeed they were intended to be. In fact, a slim cable ran from the set to a clever little mechanism Hiroshi had installed in the wall himself and then carefully concealed. It consisted of a video camera that watched over the computer room via a long fiber-optic cable no thicker than a hair, the kind of cable used for endoscopy and blood-vessel operations. The end of the cable was no more than a tiny point in the dark wood, nonmetallic and giving off no energy signature, so that nobody sweeping for bugs would detect it. The camera was always on; a computer analyzed the images and automatically recorded any kind of change or motion.