black cotton of the hood. There was a distant noise of a factory — whirring and grinding — but not loud. Stone felt it was cooler. No heat from the sun. It was already dark, or at least dusk, and Stone must have been out for hours in that van.
‘I am sorry for it, Stone,’ said Oyang’s voice. ‘But I couldn’t let you know where you were coming.’ Stone listened for the footsteps. Oyang was alone. Oyang had brought Stone here alone, and was leading him, tugging him by the sleeve toward the noise of whirring and humming.
‘This is the ShinComm Factory, Stone,’ said Oyang, ‘Or at least one of them. A half million people work for ShinComm, mainly at Dongguan and at Factory City next to this facility,’ he said as Stone heard himself led through a doorway. ‘But not a soul works in this facility. Even I was impressed when Semyonov first showed it to me.’ The humming and whirring and the occasional clanking and banging were louder. Stone could hear the echoes. They were inside a large shed or a hangar. Oyang removed the hood from Stone’s head.
It was not as Stone had expected. Electric motors whirred, machine tool robots hissed and whined. But entirely in darkness. The only light was the flash of welding sparks every few seconds. A hundred metres distant across the crowded shop floor, as the industrial robots, metres high, nodded, turned and clamped their beaks onto more metalwork. Welding and clamping, screwing and soldering. All happened in complete darkness. After a few seconds, Oyang flicked some switches, and a battery of arc lights buzzed and flickered into dazzling light. Robert Oyang had not been exaggerating. Stone was in a huge factory shed, but there was no human present.
There were no machine guards, no yellow lines, no warning signs or stop buttons. Stone looked on in wonderment at a large manufacturing shed, run entirely by robots.
There was an array of different robots. In that sense it was no different from many modern factories. There were high-standing robots in the concrete, nodding and twisting with staccato movements. There were small platforms gliding around carrying materials. These weren’t unusual. Then there were grey, cone-shaped things about a metre high, which seemed to glide slowly over the white painted floor, but had no arms or pincers. What were they? Above all there was the constant buzzing hiss of MAV’s. Micro Air Vehicles, the insect-like robots Stone had seen before. Except these were smaller, about three centimeters long and a shiny indigo in colour. They appeared harmless — they were workers, hovering on gossamer wings, cleaning, polishing, cutting and carrying. More interestingly they were working together, carrying components in groups of exactly ten or twenty. Stone looked around and calculated there must be a hundred thousand of them in this one factory shed.
Stone’s favourite was what appeared to be a troop of monkeys swinging and jumping around a kind of turbine-less jet engine. Twenty monkey-robots, each thirty centimeters high, with legs and arms but no head — their sensors and hydraulics being packed into the mid-chest area. They had tiny hands with three fingers and an opposable thumb, and climbed and swung like silver-alloy simians, their movements rapid, staccato and precise. Most astonishingly, they moved in complete co-ordination, only millimeters apart but never colliding, and always pulling or placing at exactly the same time, or jumping or walking in perfect rhythm, like a tiny dancing troupe.
Stone realised his heart was racing. This was staggering technology. Corporations had spent tens of millions on robots which could barely cross a room without falling over a chair, yet here were a hundred thousand of them, working in intelligent unison.
Another thing. A workplace designed by humans bears signs of human thinking, even if the work is left to robots. It has a linear production track running through it. In this place, it was all going on at once, like the random access mind of a computer. Stone was reminded of what people said about Semyonov.
It wasn’t easy see what it was being manufactured, such was the profusion of machinery and activity. One item was certainly a small jet engine without turbines — a ram-jet for use in a missile, Stone thought. Over towards the other side of the shed there was the chassis of some kind of vehicle where the welding sparks flashed every few seconds. Electric motors in each wheel. There were also some tubes that looked like gun barrels, three metres long and made from a weird, blue alloy of cobalt.
Stone’s mind raced. He was looking at the mind of a computer, with programs and data spread at random across its hard disk, capable of performing hundreds of tasks at once.
‘This is very impressive, Oyang,’ said Stone. ‘You didn’t mention you were an engineer.’
‘Indeed I am no engineer, Mr Stone,’ with a small laugh of self-deprecation. ‘I am an old-style Chinese intellectual, a Confucian,’ said Oyang. ‘I labour with my mind and not my hands.’
Oyang looked almost embarrassed to talk about it, but continued, ‘These developments are — incredible. Even more incredible than they look to you. The true value of Semyonov’s facility here is its flexibility. The ideas we create on computer design systems can be made reality by the robot workforce. Otherwise we would need thousands of highly skilled engineers just to design the process… But here, inspiration goes to idea, to design, to reality. All in record time.’
‘And the workforce builds you more workers if you need them,’ added Stone.
‘Up to a point, yes,’ nodded Oyang. ‘It’s a good system.’
A good system? That was an understatement. The implications would make an economist’s head spin.
‘ShinComm has five hundred thousand workers between Shanghai and our plant at Dongguan, yet the Development Center makes more money. That's because it creates high value goods.’
‘Tell me more, Oyang, I’m fascinated,’ said Stone to distract him. Oyang was so cultured, so image- conscious, almost a parody of himself. But intelligent nonetheless. ‘How many people know about this place?’
‘A few senior managers in ShinComm. Semyonov needed a few people to work with him, and he showed it to me only once. I didn’t see at first how important it was. The key to the system,’ explained Oyang. ‘Lies in massively parallel computing software. Each of the machines and robots is connected in a huge wireless system.’
Stone thought of Semyonov, with his intelligent search systems built from thousands of machines hooked together.
‘And all of the computing power — every chip in every robot and every flying bug — can be used at once,’ said Stone. He was beginning to get his head round it. The theory was one thing — but as a practical achievement, it was preternaturally impressive. Whole research labs, universities — whole industry sectors had worked on this kind of thing for years and made only baby steps forward. Yet here was the future — fully realised.
‘So this is the Machine, Oyang?’ asked Stone. ‘This is why Semyonov came to China?’
Oyang looked mystified. ‘No. This is not the Machine. Just a manufacturing facility. But I can tell you all the innovations you see here were Semyonov’s ideas. All his doing. He was a remarkable man, Professor Stone. We shall miss him a great deal.’ Oyang gave the impression that he missed Semyonov personally. Although anyone would miss a human money-tree, which was what Semyonov had been to him. ‘Everything here came from Semyonov
‘So now Semyonov is dead, all this technology just — stops?’ asked Stone.
‘Possibly. Where can you find a person to understand it all?’ said Oyang, looking to left and right. ‘You can’t. So perhaps it is finished.’
‘What about the Machine? Is that finished too?’
‘The Machine, I believe is different. Steven Semyonov told me they had discovered something very important, and that was why he wanted to invest in China. And the Chinese scientists needed Semyonov.’
‘They needed him? Or his money?’
‘Money?’ Oyang laughed. ‘The money was simply evidence of his good faith. Nothing more. No one needed money.’
‘Twenty-five billion. That’s a lot of good faith.’
‘One, five, twenty-five… The amount was not important. The important thing was that it was all he had. And he was forbidden to leave China. That was the second condition that China imposed.’
‘It must have been a hell of a discovery they’d made to tempt him here,’ said Stone. ‘So what is this thing — the Machine?’ asked Stone.
‘I do not know. Like you, I would like to know,’ he said. ‘But let me tell you something, Stone. Semyonov said none of this would be possible without the Machine. That is why it matters so much. Especially now Semyonov is dead. We have to find it.’
It was like Oyang wanted to unburden himself. He’d already said that the Machine was extraordinarily powerful, and that the Americans and Russians and Chinese would fight to get it. But the Machine was already here
