Lord of All Things (52 page)

Now Hiroshi watched this footage on the monitor. Just as he had suspected, government agents had dropped by during his absence to take a look at his hard drives. He watched them unscrewing the backs of his computers with the same practiced care they had presumably used to disable the expensive alarm systems all around the house. They took out the hard drives and downloaded them onto their own computers, brought along for the purpose. It was all very well organized.

He watched the footage through to the end in fast-forward. Hiroshi had seen no reason to make a sound recording; they would certainly have detected a microphone after all. He didn’t need to know what they had said. It was enough to be able to see where they had put in their own bugs. It took him half an hour to detect all the devices and disable them. Of course, he was giving himself away by doing so, letting them know that he had his own security system that they hadn’t detected. But that didn’t matter now.

Once he knew he was no longer being observed, he set to work restoring his data. After his discussions with Jens Rasmussen, Hiroshi had written up a top-to-bottom data security routine that he now followed with almost religious devotion every time he left the house for any length of time. It took a little while but was mostly automatic: there was a routine that took all his data apart into numerous packages, none of which was the least bit revealing on its own, and then encrypted these with the most robust protection programs around. Then it deposited them in various data havens, mostly in the Pacific region. A second routine took care of what had stayed behind; all that the intruders had found on the hard drives were files specifically created as decoys, with another program he had written himself that went to considerable lengths to make sure they looked like nothing of the sort. Quite the opposite: all the details—the time stamps and file histories, caches and temporary files, the debug logs, e-mails and not inconsiderable encryption on these files as well—were enough to convince an expert he was looking at the current status of everything Hiroshi was working on. Now Hiroshi wiped all the hard drives, fired up a communications program, and downloaded all his data packets once more. This would take a few hours, but once it was done he would be able to work again, and meanwhile he could go down to the laboratory in the basement, whose existence not even Mrs. Steel suspected.

There was no fooling the government, though. The intruders had been here, too, as he learned from a surveillance system much like the one in his computer room. Hadn’t they noticed that he hadn’t set foot in the lab for ages? Or didn’t they care? Hiroshi felt a first twinge of irritation as he went to fetch his tool kit. The entrance to the lab was behind a snugly fitting teak panel on one wall of his meditation room. Mrs. Steel would never go in there as long as the door was closed, so Hiroshi duly closed it. Then he activated the hidden catch that kept the panel in place and looked closely at the code lock on the steel door behind it. It was unharmed and looked untouched. Very clever indeed these secret service guys. He tapped in the entry code, pulled the panel closed, and then shut the door behind him as the neon tubes flickered to life all around the lab.

It took him another hour to remove all the bugs and video cameras, and he felt the irritation boiling into anger as he worked. Once all the junk they had left behind was in the trash can where it belonged, he had to stop to collect himself. Stand still and breathe deeply. This was an important moment, perhaps the most important in his whole life. He couldn’t afford a single false step now. Once he had found his still point, he got to work. On the way home he had stopped at a huge electronic superstore and paid cash for a multiband broadcaster, doing all that was humanly possible to make sure the purchase could not be tracked. Now he took it out of his travel bag and put it on the drainer by a hand sink and put his laptop next to it. He plugged the multiband into the computer and switched them both on.

As the computer booted up, Hiroshi thought of Saradkov Island. He remembered the cold, remembered how helpless he had felt—and how utterly astonished he had been when he had discovered how easily he could direct the nanites. It was almost as though he had built them himself. They had even obeyed some commands given in the code he had used back on Paliuk to direct the old robotic complex.

He had spent all night pondering the matter in Reykjavík, wondering how such a thing was possible. Had he developed a logical set of commands that was considerably more universal than he had thought without even knowing it himself? He couldn’t believe that. There was nothing universal about a sequence like 1-0-0-0-1-1-1-0, no inevitable inherent meaning that would make him and the aliens on some unguessably distant planet both use the same code as the command to prime a nanite complex for further instructions. Or was there? No. Though he no longer remembered why he had assigned the command codes that way and no other, he did recall that it had been almost random, making this coincidence no less astounding than if intelligent life-forms from another planet had sent a probe bearing a plaque engraved with a Shakespeare sonnet. It was completely and utterly improbable. There must be another explanation. He just didn’t know what it was yet. Nor did he even need to know for the time being. It worked whether or not he understood why.

Hiroshi took a packet of ultrasterile microscope slides from the cupboard, broke the seal, and put the transparent box next to the computer. It was fully booted by now. Hiroshi started the communication program and typed in the sequence of commands that he would need shortly. Then he put on a pair of thin latex gloves, took a slide from the box, and went to the mirror. He held the thin glass slide up to his forehead with his right hand and pressed the “Return” key with the index finger of his left hand. The first package of instructions went through to the multiband. It was broadcasting at a range of two meters. Nobody beyond the walls of the lab would even notice. Hiroshi felt nothing, but he saw in the mirror how a tiny, dark dot formed on his skin, barely bigger than the mark a soft lead pencil might make if he tapped it against his brow. If he hadn’t seen it form, he would never have been able to find it. He held his breath, slowly lifting the slide. Once he had reached the dot, he stopped and pressed the “Return” key once more with his other hand. The dot moved. It left his skin and slid along the glass about half a centimeter.

It was done. Hiroshi carefully put the slide down on a bed of green foam rubber. Only then did he dare to breathe. His hands were trembling. This tiny dot on the wafer-thin piece of glass was made up of around a hundred thousand nanite complexes. They were the last on the planet, if he had done everything else right. On Saradkov he had ordered them to nestle themselves down into the tissues of his forehead and then ignore all further commands for a set period. During that time, he had given the kill order for all the other nanites. It had worked. They had all been medically examined from top to toe during their quarantine to see whether any of them had nanites in their body. But Hiroshi had known before the doctors even started that none of their tests could detect anything of the sort. His only concern had been whether the nanites in the skin on his forehead still existed, or whether perhaps they had somehow received the kill signal despite his precautions and obeyed—which he would never even have felt.

Now he knew. They had not. They still existed, and they were obeying his commands. And once he had unriddled them completely—understood them completely—they would obey him completely. They would be the seed from which a future would grow to surpass mankind’s wildest dreams. And he, Hiroshi Kato, would have created this new world. His lifelong dream was within reach. Fate was on his side. Now he knew that for sure.

A small news item a few days later reported a private-jet crash somewhere in the Midwest. Three people had died: James Bennett II, president and majority shareholder of the technology giant Bennett Enterprises; Frank Rizzio, the chief financial officer; and the pilot of the jet, whose name was not mentioned.

Very few people outside of Boston paid any attention to the news.

2

It was the first board meeting at Bennett Enterprises since the funeral. And it was the first time James Michael Bennett III took his seat at the head of the long, night-black boardroom table.

One of the directors, Manuel Estrada, head of the marketing department, rose clumsily to his feet. “Mr. Bennett,” he began, evidently uncomfortable this duty had fallen to him, “on behalf of the whole board I would like to extend you our deepest sympathy on the occasion of your father’s unfortunate—”

“Thank you,” James Bennett III replied tersely. “I appreciate that. I really do. But life goes on. Our competitors aren’t asleep on the job—let’s get to work.” He leaned forward, planted his elbows on the table, and folded his hands, much like his father had used to. “I will settle into the role just as quickly as I can, and then I’ll make all the necessary decisions about how we shall proceed. And I expect reports from all of you so that I can reach those decisions. Oral reports here and now, and then written reports in two days’ time at the latest, five pages maximum. All the important figures, latest developments, problems.” He looked at the marketing director, who was still on his feet. “Perhaps you could start, Manuel.”

The board meeting lasted half an hour longer than scheduled. When the members were finally on their feet to leave, the new chairman said, “By the way, Alan, do you have a couple more minutes?”

Alan Crockett was head of Human Resources, a burly man with a hangdog look. He was also in charge of industrial security.

“Close the door,” James Bennett III said when they were alone.

Crockett did as he was told and came back to the table.

“Does the name Jeffrey Coldwell mean anything to you?”

Crockett considered the question. “Should it?”

“He’s a manager. Originally from Alabama. Graduated London School of Economics. For several years he was regional director, North and South America, with Gu Enterprises, in Hong Kong.” James Bennett III stabbed his finger at Crockett. “Find out where he’s hiding. I want to talk to him. And consider this top secret.” He dropped his hand and picked up the folder on the table in front of him. “That will be all for now.”

Separating each nanite from the others and examining them under his atomic force microscope was a task that stretched Hiroshi to the limits of his endurance and powers of concentration. Though the nanites were large compared with most molecules, it was still impossible to observe them directly; the only way to discover their exact shape was to probe them with a cantilever, atom by atom, and then feed the results into software that would convert them into images. Since some distortion was inevitable on every reading he took, he had to repeat each measurement several times. He also had to be able to recognize systematic errors and compensate for these. It meant hour upon hour working at his instruments and never letting his concentration slip for a second.

It was spooky how often he found his own designs repeated in these nanites. With only a few exceptions, he could relate most of the images his analytical software showed him to the nanite function categories he had arrived at by pure theory. He almost found himself wondering whether he had a twin somewhere on a distant planet, a soul mate in an alien body—or, indeed, whether he had been mentally influenced by extraterrestrials. Had he, Hiroshi Kato, been an unwitting cat’s-paw all along? That was the point when he found he always had to stop, shut his eyes, and breathe deeply, to find his still point and get rid of the feeling he’d landed in a Stephen King story.

He told himself quite reasonably that his designs had not come about by burning the midnight oil at his drawing board; rather, they were the product of evolutionary algorithms. In other words, they had almost come about of their own accord—all he had done was make it possible with his simulations programs. And just as the laws of geometry dictated that there were only five Platonic solids—the tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron, and icosahedron—so the characteristics of the individual atoms may well dictate that these nanites were the only possible nano-robots.

Not that this explained the matter of the control codes. Okay. But he didn’t have to understand everything all at once.

Being in Buenos Aires again after all these years was like a dream. So much had changed. Yet it seemed to Charlotte that under all that was new, all that was different, the city she had known as a teenager still showed through, shimmering. There was the Plaza de Mayo, where she had only ever been able to go in secret, because there had so often been demonstrations there, and a diplomat’s daughter mustn’t get involved. There was Calle Florida, with its high-end boutiques, where her mother could spend hours on end. The dizzyingly broad Avenida 9 de Julio, where the French embassy stood. As she strolled the streets, she saw two cities at once: the Buenos Aires of her youth, and the city of today. After a while she noticed she had a headache, probably due to this strange form of double vision as well as the humidity she remembered so well—and the memories it awoke.

She met Brenda at the Obelisk, just as they had agreed. From a distance her old friend looked afflicted by some deep melancholy. Charlotte wondered whether the heart-wrenching strains of the tango were already at work on her, the rhythm that pulsed beneath the surface of the city like a ceaseless heartbeat. But when they hugged, everything felt just as it always had.

“I could have met you at the airport,” Brenda said without letting go.

“You’ve met me at so many airports.”

“Never at Ezeiza, though.”

“You can take me there when I leave.”

“Out of the question. I’m not going to let you leave.” She released Charlotte from her embrace and then held her at arm’s length to take a good look at her. “At least you didn’t lose anything to frostbite up there in the Arctic. Meaning we can go to Persicco for an ice-cream sundae with everything. My treat.”

They took a taxi to the ice-cream parlor. “You speak Spanish pretty well already,” Charlotte said on the way.

“With a thick American accent,” Brenda said, batting away the compliment. “Now Tom,
he
speaks good Spanish by now. Because he has to with the students every day.”

As they attacked the elaborately decorated mounds of ice cream with their spoons, they caught up on what had been happening in each other’s lives since they had last been together. Charlotte had to tell all about her experiences in Russia. Even though she didn’t believe that there might be Russian or American agents shadowing her and sitting among the other guests at the ice-cream parlor, she didn’t feel comfortable reporting what had really happened here, in a relatively public space. And the curious thing was she no longer even felt the need to share her secret. In Reykjavík she had almost burst with the urge to tell someone, which was like a burning itch, but now she was back in the rhythm of everyday life, where all was as it had always been, what she had lived through seemed too extreme, too fantastic, for her to want to talk about it. As time went on it had also become harder and harder for her to actually put what had happened into words. Nobody who had not been there could ever really understand it. Sometimes, looking back, she could hardly believe it herself; it was like the memory of a bad dream rather than of a real event.

So instead, she mostly told Brenda about the complicated journey they had taken to get there, about Morley’s odd little ways, and about how they had managed in the piercing cold of the Arctic. And finally, without going into details, she explained that Leon had died, and there had been a lengthy inquiry into the incident.

“But why in Reykjavík?” Brenda asked, but when Charlotte simply shrugged, she dropped the question and then confessed she had expected her to have paired up with Adrian by the time they came back. “For some reason, I had the feeling he was keen on you. And you would have made a lovely couple.”

Charlotte chased the last stubborn spoonful of vanilla ice cream around the bottom of her glass and found herself thinking of Leon, of how masculine he had looked in his parka. “Adrian? No, he behaved like a big brother, that was all. And I don’t think it was because he’s shy.”

“Maybe he’s gay?”

Charlotte considered the possibility. Somehow that didn’t seem likely either. “We just didn’t click. Maybe climatology is all he lives for.”

After that Brenda told her about the move, about all the little differences she still hadn’t gotten used to in daily life in Argentina, and about how Lamita’s adoption had worked out. “We would have been right up the creek without Pari. He dragged us along to the right offices and told us when to put a banknote inside our passport, and all of that. We had to fly to Dhaka twice before we could bring her back with us. Thank goodness we found a nanny who gets along well with Jason; we’ve been a bit more flexible since then.”

“And how’s she coping here?”

Brenda tilted her head, thinking. “Well now. It’s only been a few weeks, so I think it’ll be hard to say for a while. She only speaks Bengali, so that’s a problem, and…I hope we’ll manage.”

“I’m sure you will,” Charlotte said with feeling.

At last it was time to set off. “Girls’ time is over for today,” Brenda declared with a melancholy sigh. They took another taxi. “I don’t dare get behind the wheel here. I probably never will. Just look at the way they drive! I mean, they see the highway code as just a set of recommendations really, don’t they?”

When they arrived, Jason showed up to say hello but refused to let Charlotte kiss him on the cheek and stormed off in a huff when she greeted him in Spanish. Tom wasn’t back yet. Brenda showed her the guest room, the other main rooms, and the garden, and then they sat down in the kitchen for coffee.

At some point the girl made an appearance as well. A dark, thin face peering around the corner, shy but inquisitive, only to vanish again instantly when Charlotte looked that way. Her curiosity finally won out; the little girl scampered into the kitchen, staying close to the wall, and hid behind Brenda, who smiled wryly and put an arm around her. From the safety of this position, she peered again at the visitor, more closely this time.

Charlotte leaned forward. “
Tomar naam ki?
—What’s your name?”

The thin little girl blinked in astonishment, then whispered back in Bengali. “Lamita. My name’s Lamita.”

“How are you, Lamita?”

“I’m fine.” The girl leaned in closer to Brenda and glanced up at her, full of gratitude.

Brenda meanwhile was looking wide-eyed at Charlotte. “Since when do you speak Bengali?”

Charlotte tried to remember. “I think some of the gardeners at our house in Delhi were from Bengal. I mean, I seem to remember always hearing the language out in the garden.”

“You’re a godsend. We’ve had such trouble trying to talk to the child, you just wouldn’t believe it. She understands me, but I can’t understand her. If she has an ache or a pain, I can’t even get her to tell me where it hurts. It’s as if we’d taken in a pet.”

Charlotte looked at Lamita. The girl really did seem like a shy forest animal somehow, or like a creature beaten and mistreated for an age, suffering and silent. “I’m here for a while. Maybe I can talk to her a bit.”

“You must.” Brenda turned to her adoptive daughter and looked at her. “Would you like something to eat? Cake?”

Lamita nodded wordlessly, her eyes huge.

“Yes? Please say yes.”

“Yes,” the girl whispered with a look of terror in her eyes, as though she had only ever been punished when she dared to speak.

“By now I just feel sick whenever I see cut-price T-shirts,” Brenda said as Lamita sat next to her, devouring a slice of cake. “A T-shirt for a dollar—who can make a living from that? I can’t stand buying cheap clothing anymore. Behind every shirt and pair of pants, I see a kid like Lamita, sitting in an airless room from morning till night and sewing until her fingers bleed.”

“I thought the factory had gone bust?”

“Well that one did. But how many other textiles factories do you think there are out there? And other companies making other stuff, all along the same lines? Hundreds of thousands.”

Charlotte found herself thinking of Hiroshi and his plan to end poverty for good and create prosperity for all with the help of robots that built robots. It might have been a completely crazy plan, but at least he meant well. And perhaps the plan wasn’t even that crazy. She looked at Lamita and wondered how many children like her were slaving away under unspeakable conditions at that very moment just so people in rich countries had something to buy.

Burntwood Lake lay in the north of the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, thirty miles or more from the nearest marked road, and even that road was not something anyone used to city life would recognize as such. The only way even to find the lake was to have a good off-road vehicle and know the landscape like the back of your hand, meaning that not many people ever did.

So the lake had become the favored retreat for those few souls who could last out the cold winters this far north, enjoying the peace and quiet and the solitude. Some of them had built cabins in the woods around it, which the government knew nothing about. If one or two of them also brewed moonshine in their own stills, who cared? A shot of conversation juice was just what you needed after a day spent fishing on the lake.

Remote though the area was, there was nevertheless a webcam in one of the cabins that gave real-time Internet views of the northeast shore of Burntwood Lake and its little island. The student who had installed it went by the user name NorthernLight in the Internet forums, and he had made sure to include a solar-powered battery pack to keep the webcam computer running, along with an antenna that kept the whole thing connected to the Internet via a relay at the northern edge of Grass River Provincial Park, by Cranberry Portage. His uncle was a park ranger and had helped him mount the relay antenna and patch it discreetly into the park’s own telephone system. NorthernLight studied computer science in Winnipeg and loved being able to check in anytime to see what was happening on “his” lake. And he was far too proud of his setup to have secured the website with a password. The whole world should be able to share his labor of love.