Stone glanced at the slip of paper.
Stone Forest 328 19.2 9.8179
Field Well 15 8.3 9.8827
Silvermine Mountain 169 15.9 9.8457
2 Trees 3 Trees 97 6.7 9.8837
Sitong 44 0.7 9.8249
It made no sense. Perhaps it wasn’t meant to. But Stone recognised the distinctive writing, and the fountain pen. It was written by Semyonov all right.
‘Why should I do it, Oyang?’ asked Stone. ‘If it’s too dangerous for you, with all your connections, your protection, your money. Why should I decipher it and go looking for the Machine?
Oyang paused, giving Stone another of his meaningful looks. ‘Let me show you something,’ he said eventually. He look a small device from his pocket, the kind of device he might use to open the doors of his car. He pointed the little grey fob at the stand of bamboo and pressed it with his thumb.
‘What are you doing?’ asked Stone.
‘Be patient,’ said Oyang. ‘You’ll find it interesting. It will explain a lot.’
Oyang stood for a few seconds looking at the bamboo, while one by one, the tiny green snakes began to uncoil from the bamboo and fall lifeless to the ground. Stone had already guessed what was happening. He stepped over and picked up one of the snakes, his thumb and forefinger behind its head for safety — but he needn't have bothered. It wasn't a real snake at all.
‘What is it?’ said Stone. ‘Metal and plastic?’
‘Yes, but the teeth are stainless steel,’ said Oyang.
Stone lay the snake along his palm and forearm. It was no more than twenty centimeters long, and barely thicker than a pencil. Another remarkable manufacture, with a slight iridescence in the green of its scales — light, and very life-like.
‘More amazing technology, Oyang,’ said Stone. ‘But you said it would explain something. About the Machine.’
‘No. I said you should be patient, Stone.’
Stone’s tongue almost froze. A stupid mistake, a crass error. Curiosity and over-confidence had undone him. For a split-second, his brain was shouting at his arm to shake, to cast the snake away. But Oyang had already hit the remote control. A tiny click with his thumb. The snake was alive again, and striking. Its tiny fangs sank like needle pricks into Stone’s forearm.
Stone’s arm shook, he pulled it loose, threw the snake into the bamboo. Too late. His vision was already blurred, his legs wobbling. He collapsed to his knees. He couldn’t see, and fell face first to the ground.
‘Patience,’ said Oyang once more.
Chapter 32 — 7:43pm 2 April — ShinComm Factory City, Shanghai, China
Stone came to inside the van. The van he’d arrived in a few hours before. He was hooded, but not handcuffed. A while later the door opened, and Stone smelled the warm, humid air of Shanghai again through the 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. An alien intelligence. Was this the Machine? The thing that had drawn Semyonov to China?
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.