“You were misinformed,” she insisted.
“All I have to do is twist the top, and this one will transmit everything they say and do back to Joe.”
“A secret gadget from your government?”
“Actually, I picked this up from an electronics shop down the street while your dress was being altered. Two thousand yen. Less than twenty dollars, at the current exchange rate.”
Kurt twisted the top. “We’re on-site, amigo. You reading us?”
Joe’s reply came through the car speakers. “I have an unobstructed view,” he said. “I’ll keep an eye on the car while you two are inside. Try not to have too much fun without me.”
“Do our best,” Kurt said.
Kurt twisted the pen’s top and the link was broken. He and Akiko got out of the car, locked it and walked toward the front door. A security guard met them and led them into the building. Han met them on the factory floor.
“I’m so glad you could find the time to meet us,” Kurt said. “This is Akiko, NUMA’s Japanese liaison officer.”
Han bowed. His eyes lingered on her for a moment and then he introduced his assistant. “This is Mr. Gao, my chief engineer.”
Gao had a shaven head that reflected the lights in the ceiling. He wore plain slacks, a white button-down shirt and bulky glasses on which Kurt saw tiny green icons flickering and vanishing. A wire led from the frame of his glasses to an earbud and then to a power pack on his belt. The glasses were obviously a wearable computer. The flickering icons part of a heads-up display that only Gao could see and interpret.
Dangling on a cord around his neck was a heavy medallion-type badge. It had several small buttons on either side, two blinking LEDs and a meshed indentation that held a microphone and speaker. In his breast pocket were several pens, a flashlight and a laser pointer. Strapped to his upper arm was another electronic device, perhaps a fitness monitor, Kurt couldn’t be sure.
Akiko stared at him like he had the plague. “He’s almost an android,” she whispered.
“By the way he looked at you, he’d toss the electronics into a lake for a single kiss. Perhaps the lure of human touch is stronger than you think.”
With that said, Akiko’s demeanor changed. She feigned interest in Gao with such expertise that it almost convinced Kurt.
For the moment, they all made small talk. “Dinner is being prepared in our executive dining room,” Han said. “Perhaps you’d like a tour of the facility first?”
“I’d enjoy that very much,” Kurt said.
With Han leading the way, they walked across an expansive factory floor. Even though it was after normal working hours, dozens of machines were busy at work. Some were free to roam the factory floor, transporting parts from one section of the facility to another. Others were busy on a production line, welding and assembling components.
“What, exactly, do you build here?” Kurt asked.
“Robotics for other factories.”
“Machines building other machines,” Kurt said. “Automated procreation.”
“Not quite,” Han said. “The design and production work are done by human employees. But that will be automated one day, too.”
“Human employees?” Akiko asked. “Does that mean you consider the robots employees also?”
“It’s a figure of speech,” Han insisted. “The truth is, robots liberate humanity from the most mundane and dangerous professions. Most tasks performed by machines are ones you wouldn’t want to do. Turning the same five screws and making the same ten welds a hundred times a day, every day of your life; chiseling rock from the walls of dark tunnels in dangerous subterranean mines, where temperatures border on the limits of human tolerance and fatal accidents are common. I even have machines that will take a bullet instead of requiring a brave policeman or soldier to enter the line of fire.”
“Robotic soldiers?” Kurt asked.
“Of a sort,” Han replied.
“Show me.”
He took them across the factory floor to an even larger open space that spread out below them like the floor of a massive convention hall. Walking onto a bridge that crossed the entire length of the room, they observed mock-ups and testing areas.
The vast amount of high-tech equipment was staggering. There were flickering screens everywhere; machines, small and large, performing various tasks.
Stopping above one walled-in area, they looked down on the mock-up of an apartment building, sans roof. “Begin the demonstration,” Han said.