Lord of All Things (53 page)

Which was precisely what sealed the fate of Burntwood Lake, Saskatchewan.

Hiroshi’s computer room was no longer a simulation lab: it had become a control room much like NASA mission control. Except that Hiroshi was all alone in front of his monitors. One of the screens showed Burntwood Lake. He was watching it anonymously via a far-flung network of various servers, most of which were not in the US; nobody would ever be able to find out later that at this particular moment he had been connected to the webcam of the lake-fishing fanatic who went by the name NorthernLight. That was important.

On another screen he was watching a graphic-interface depiction of what the nanites he had dispatched were up to. They were busy. They had reproduced their population by a factor of one hundred billion before they even set out, and now it was all happening rather fast. Watching them at work gave him some idea of what they must have done back on Saradkov Island. Based on all the reports, it had all happened very fast there as well. At first, he had taken that with a grain of salt; his calculations had shown that they would have to have been reproducing and building at positively dizzying speeds. But the reality of what he was watching now exceeded even those figures.

The most fascinating aspect was he didn’t even need to leave the house. At first, he had worked out all kinds of complicated plans for how he could travel and cover his tracks. But there was no need for any of that. All he had to do was dose a nanite metacomplex with the right commands, then put them down on the floor of his lab, and send them on their way to carry out his orders. Not that he’d even needed to do that; they could have set out directly from the glass beaker he kept them in. No material actually presented an obstacle to the nanites. These machines could dismantle armor, alarm systems, electric fences, and who knows what else atom by atom with no trouble at all. They could slip through the opening they had made and then put all the atoms right back into place. This was one of the basic routines written directly into the transporter units; there was no need even for a specific, separate command.

The only real problem was guiding them on their way through rock and soil, under rivers and roads, all the way to their goal. These nanites could do a great deal but they couldn’t read GPS signals—that would have been asking too much of a robotic complex that had arrived on Earth from the unknown depths of space. So Hiroshi had to steer them. To do this, he had needed to modify their programming somewhat. Which was good practice anyway, since some modification would be needed for the plan he had in mind.

How could he keep in touch with the complex while it was out in the world? He could have used radio, of course. That was the nanites’ standard operating procedure, so to speak. But then he would have run the risk of detection—he was sure the government still had him under surveillance. Hiroshi had finally hit upon a simple but astonishingly effective solution: the metacomplex simply built a microscopically thin telephone cable from copper and iron atoms as it went along. The cable was hooked up to a nanoscale transmitter back in Hiroshi’s lab. All he had to do was set his multiband to the very lowest signal strength and place it where the nanites had set out from. Then he could communicate with the complex as it went on its way, and nobody was any the wiser.

Hiroshi had tested all this out first, of course. And of course the first few attempts had gone wrong—drastically wrong, even. But he had eventually enjoyed his first success: he had ordered a nanite complex to set out for the farthest edge of his extensive estate and construct a cube of pure iron. Then Hiroshi had taken a stroll through the garden and, lo and behold, there was the cube, nestled at the foot of the fence.

None of what came next had been hard. The nanites may not have had a navigation system for planet Earth, but they were able to record distances and directions they traveled down to the micrometer. All Hiroshi needed to do was measure the distance between his lab and the target—the island in the middle of Burntwood Lake—as precisely as he could and then program the nanites with instructions along the lines of “First go 2,507 kilometers, 318 meters, and 12 centimeters north, then go 1,689 kilometers, 781 meters, and 3 centimeters east.” Once they reached their target, they had orders to build a long red pole from the ground up, which he duly spotted on the picture broadcast by the webcam right in the middle of the island. Bull’s-eye on his first attempt. It was almost unnerving.

He hadn’t pushed the nanites anywhere near their limits in terms of how fast they could get there. There was no need, after all. He didn’t quite know how fast they could have gotten there if so instructed—within a couple of hours?—but it was fine by him that they had taken a week. It had given him time to prepare himself for what came next. Because the next order he gave the nanites was to carry out a program that was already stored in their memory, a program they had brought with them when they came to Earth. Hiroshi hadn’t altered a line of it; he wanted to see how it played out of its own accord.

He checked one more time that the camera was running, then gave the order to start. It started right away, breathtakingly fast. Rootlets sank down into the earth, probing for energy, just as they had done the whole way over—although never in such vast numbers. The nanites replicated, the metacomplex became a meta-metacomplex and then a metacomplex to the third power, the fourth, soon to the fifth power, and even higher. Positioning elements ran out for miles all around, branching out like the roots of a tree in their search for certain rare minerals. Transporter elements raced along the newly created tracks, carting along the prospector units, the diggers, the cutters, and finally the molecular structures that would capture the cargo atom by atom so that it could then be taken elsewhere and unloaded. They built up a stockpile of all the elements they would need.

Other digger units did nothing but dig a hole down into the ground, deeper and ever deeper. Other nanites collected the earth that had been moved and took it apart into individual molecules, which were either added to the stockpiles for later use or simply thrown away. The first building work began: swarms of nanites ferried a stream of iron and carbon atoms into the hole, where other nanites assembled them into huge steel rings with a very specific internal structure. Other nanites built conduits and cables, huge motors and generators, and curious circuitry.

And the hole that ran straight down into the earth from the middle of the island grew deeper and deeper. A hundred yards. Two hundred. Five hundred. A mile. Two. Three. When it was nearly three and a half miles deep, digging finally stopped and the machine built itself a bottom to the shaft, and then the stockpiles of material all around the site began to stream down to build a rocket atom by atom, which would take a probe full of nanites off to space. Meanwhile, the generator complexes loaded up the energy storage units, filling them to bursting point.

Hiroshi watched, fascinated, as the rocket was built, studying each component as it emerged, marveling at the care and design that had gone into all the details. The recording was still running—good. For this machine had more technological riddles in every cubic inch of its construction than any single human being would be able to unravel in a lifetime of work. The construction of the shaft itself, however, was no great riddle: it was a simple linear motor. The array of magnetic coils would grasp the rocket in their fields one after another in quick succession and hurl it upward at accelerations that no living being would have been able to survive. Since there were no living beings onboard, that was not a problem. The rocket would be traveling at three times the speed of sound by the time it left the mouth of the shaft, after which its own engines would kick in and accelerate it still further, taking it up into space in less than two minutes.

And it looked like it wasn’t long now until takeoff.

Just then the third screen blinked. It ran a simple message program connected to a small computer in the kitchen, which Mrs. Steel could use to get in touch if absolutely necessary.

“Mr. Kato, you have a visitor. A Miss Malroux has just arrived and asks whether she can speak to you.”

“In fact, I’m not supposed to disturb him at all,” said the housekeeper, a sturdy woman whose blond curls lay on her scalp as though cemented into place. “It’s only for emergencies, he said. Only if the house is on fire or someone’s injured, or if the police turn up, or the president calls. Those were his very words. Because right at this moment he’s at work on a very important project where any interruption could mean that the whole undertaking was in vain.” She was still leaning over the little white laptop, which lay on a folded tea towel on the kitchen counter next to an array of pepper grinders of various sizes. The cursor was blinking below the message she had just sent. “But you’ve already been here once. I don’t think he’d want me to just send you on your way again.”

I hope not
, Charlotte thought. She perched herself on a barstool by the kitchen counter with the cup of coffee that Mrs. Steel had set in front of her. She sat down with exaggerated care, as though it might all go wrong if she made any unnecessary noise up here or disturbed the stillness of the house. But probably Hiroshi wouldn’t want her sent on her way. She held fast to the thought.

She had considered calling on her way here. Asking if it would be all right for her to come. But she hadn’t called out of a sudden fear that he might say no, and then what? So she had arrived unannounced in the hope he would find it more difficult to say no if she were standing right in front of him. In the end, it hadn’t helped at all. Now she was even less than a voice on the phone. She was a message sent from the kitchen to his study.

Mrs. Steel was tapping her fingers restlessly on the marble worktop. She was waiting for an answer, but Charlotte suddenly realized she also had no idea what to do now. She had probably just been busy with some housework, and now there was an unexpected visitor in her kitchen, and she couldn’t get on with her day.

“What is this very important project he’s working on?” Charlotte asked despite knowing perfectly well the housekeeper wouldn’t tell her. Not that she even needed to ask: she could imagine it quite well for herself. On Saradkov, Hiroshi had seen the nano-robots in action that only a little while before he had told her couldn’t be built. It was only logical he would want to find out how they had been.

“I don’t know,” Mrs. Steel said. “All I know is he works at it day and night. It’s never been as bad as this. Nobody’s allowed in to see him. All the shutters are down. I’m not allowed to open the doors or even clean up around the place.” She pulled a cloth from her apron and wiped down the counter, quite superfluously. “And then there’s the security detail that patrols the grounds these days. Over there, you see them? Those two with their guns and the dog? They’re part of the arrangement. Oh of course you must have seen them as you arrived. It’s dreadful, isn’t it?”

Charlotte shrugged. She had become more or less used to such security arrangements as a child. “They’re doing their job.”

“Oh they are. But carrying those guns—I tell you, it gives me a funny turn every time I look at them. And they don’t just let me through when I come back from doing the shopping. They check my car every time. Supposedly, somebody could have planted a bomb in it or a bug or I don’t know what. Ever since he got back, Mr. Kato has been most concerned that he might be being bugged.” She sighed. “He turns up at the most impossible times of day and night, and when he does he’s hungry as a wolf—well, no wonder! I throw something together for him, he bolts it down—pardon my saying so, but there’s really no other way to describe it—and then he’s off again. And it’s been like that ever since he came back. I mean, I’m happy, of course, that he even remembers to eat, but as for what it’s doing to his health…this lifestyle can’t be good for him.”

“He’s always had a tendency to go to extremes,” Charlotte said, thinking of their childhood in Tokyo, and how she had visited him at home once. His tiny little corner of the room, everything neatly in its place but tools everywhere. And the dorm room in Boston. Almost monastic in its stark simplicity. She had often found herself thinking of that room recently. That and his stubbornness in wooing her. And the extraordinary way he had gone about it. No, Hiroshi was definitely not like other men.

Mrs. Steel trotted back over to the little white laptop that sat there like a toy. Obviously, there was still no answer. “Perhaps he’s asleep,” she said. “He has to sleep eventually after all.”

Charlotte just nodded and took a sip of her coffee. She had never taken him seriously when he had insisted it was fate their paths should always cross. When he had claimed they were meant for one another. She had always supposed words like that were merely talk, the kind of thing men said because they thought it would make it easier to get her into bed. Although in Hiroshi’s case she hadn’t even thought that. In the end it had been
her
dragging him into bed. And then
him
saying he wanted more than that.

Oh, she didn’t know what to think now. For the first time in all these years, she wondered whether Hiroshi might have been right. Whether they really were meant for each other in some way, perhaps not in any very romantic way. Whether they could ever be anything more than childhood friends. She had never seriously considered a relationship with Hiroshi; whenever he had started talking about it, it had always struck her as a crazy idea, not worth thinking about. But now, for the first time, she tried to imagine it. Wondered what such a relationship might look like. How they would live. Whether they would have children
…c
hildren! The fact that children even crossed her mind surprised her most of all. What was it like to live with an inventor? That was the question. That, and whether she wanted that kind of life. Whether she could stand it. She didn’t know.

“There,” Mrs. Steel exclaimed. “An answer.”

It was only two words: “Not now.”