Von Neumann’s War

by John Ringo

  “Yeah, but can it model an alien attack from space?” Roger looked up from the page, raising his left eyebrow.

  “Well, I didn’t exactly ask him that, but he did say if you wanted to give the enemy rayguns and teleporters you can — with some slight mods to the code that is.” Alan mixed sugar and cream into his cup and took a sip. “He did say it would be expensive.”

  “Oh yeah? How much?” Roger flipped the switch and the coffee maker started gurgling.

  “He said about two hundred thousand dollars for a month of modifying and simulation running.” Alan smiled as Roger’s concerned expression changed to humor.

  “Small businesses are great, ain’t they? Two hundred thousand, humph; I was expecting you to say something like a million dollars or more.” He grinned and opted for a Mountain Dew out of the vending machine instead of waiting for the coffee. “Wish we had Jolt Cola in this thing,” he muttered.

  “So what do you think?” Alan asked.

  “Future Combat Systems, huh? That suggests that they have at least a Secret clearance, right?” Roger popped the soft drink can top.

  “Yes. So, do I bring them in?”

  “Bring ’em in.” Roger nodded. “In the meantime, how many alien invasion movies have we watched thus far?”

  “Well, so far, we’ve seen thirteen of the eighty-seven movies and television shows we compiled.” Alan counted in his head for a second. “No, wait, make that fourteen.”

  “Well, let’s keep at it.”

  “At the six to seven movies a day that we’re taking in, it should take us about fourteen or so days to finish. That is, assuming we work weekends. Again.”

  “Good assumption,” Roger said taking a swig of the soft drink and swishing it around in his mouth.

  “Who’d ever have thought that the NRO would pay us to sit around and watch alien invasion movies?” Alan finished off his coffee.

  “Nice work if you can get it, right?” Roger said with a smile. “I’ll meet you in the conference room and we’ll get back at it. I’m gonna stop by the secretary’s office and have her order us some pizzas. Why don’t you get these CASTFOREM guys briefed and modifying their code? They should be ready to start simulating flying saucers and such in — How long did you say?”

  “Fourteen days.”

  “Right, fourteen days.” Roger finished off his Mountain Dew and threw the empty can at the wastebasket in the corner of the break room. He missed. “By then we should be done with the movies. Then we start cracking the books.”

  * * *

  Tina had spent the last few months staying with her friend Charlotte since her mom had been temporarily transferred to Florida. Her brother Carl had been staying with one of his buddies — he and his mother hadn’t really been that close since the divorce anyway, so the separation from their mother didn’t really impact him as much as it had Tina.

  Tina, on the other hand was close to her mother and although she liked Charlotte better than a sister, she really missed her mother and wanted to go home for a while. Her mother, Alice, was the quintessential soccer-mom (actually a cheerleader mom in Tina’s case) and for her to be away for so long a period of time was hard for both of them. But Tina understood, or she knew that Alice hoped she did, that only something really important could keep her away from her family for so long.

  Fortunately, Alice had gotten a two-week vacation and had planned to spend all of it in Denver with her kids. Of course, Tina’s sixteen-year-old brother Jason had more important plans than to be hanging around with his thirteen-year-old little sister and his mother on a Saturday night. So Tina and Alice were hanging out by themselves at home for the first Saturday evening in over four months. Oh, sure, Tina had visited her mother in Florida for the launch of the rocket her mother had worked on, but that wasn’t the same.

  “So, what did you want to do tonight?” Alice propped her feet up on the ottoman in front of the couch. “It feels so great to be home.”

  “Uh huh.” Tina looked up from the television and nodded. Tina tapped the view button on the remote so that the time was displayed on the upper left corner of the screen. “Well, if you don’t mind I’d like to watch my show in five minutes. But after that, I don’t care. Maybe we could rent a movie or something?”

  “Sure, what show is it that you want to watch?” Alice was almost afraid to ask.

  “Weeelll,” Tina hesitated. “You’re not gonna believe this but Charlotte got me hooked on it. It’s on the Cartoon Network and it’s called Justice League Unlimited.”

  “Oh yeah, what’s it about?” Alice had always thought that Charlotte was a good influence on her daughter, so this intrigued her.

  “It has all the superheroes in it. You know, Wonderwoman — she’s my favorite — Superman, Batman, Supergirl, the Martian Manhunter, Flash, and every superhero you can think of,” she replied sheepishly.

  “Oh yeah, does it have Spiderman in it?” Alice asked then misinterpreted her daughter’s expression. “I just like Spiderman, okay?”

  “Uh, no, Mom. Spiderman is Marvel and Wonderwoman is DC. Charlotte had to explain that to me, too, so don’t feel bad.”

  “I see. Well, let’s watch it then.”

  Tina flipped the television over to the Cartoon Network just in time for the animated series to begin. Alice was glad that her daughter’s “show” was on the Cartoon Network rather than on HBO, MTV, or some other programming that might have questionable content, because, as it stood Tina was thirteen, but she had all the signs of being a twenty-something girl gone wild sometime within the next week or so.

  The program began with a couple of climbers going up the side of a mesa somewhere in a desert in the States. When the couple crested to the top, there was an alien spacecraft there. Alice became more interested in the program.

  The spacecraft began producing little probes that would self-replicate and their numbers began to increase nonlinearly.

  “Wow! This is a full scale Mega Alert!” Tina said right before Superman made a similar statement in the program.

  “What does that mean?” Alice asked her.

  “Oh, that means they call all known superheroes to the trouble spot!” Tina said, her eyes glued to the television as the costumed superbeings began slugging it out with the alien self-replicating robot threat.

  The entire cast of DC superheroes — there must have been hundreds of them — and the military fought these things throughout the program. The extreme might of the comic book legends was no match for the strength of massive numbers and immediate self-replication of these alien bots.

  Then one of the superheroes had the presence of mind to send Superman off to find Dr. Ray Palmer, also known as the Atom. The Atom was a scientist who could control his size down to an atomic scale. He recognized very quickly that these alien bots were replicating themselves with nanotechnology and explained that they were most likely Von Neumann probes. He then explained that the scientist John Von Neumann suggested over fifty years ago that self-replicating bots would be the ideal way for interstellar space travel. He went into further details about how the nanotechnology might work. The fact that Tina was watching a show about such high-tech concepts thrilled her mother. It beat E!, MTV, or FUSE hands down. She would never say anything bad about the Cartoon Network again.

  In the end the Atom figured out a way to defeat the alien probes from deep within the probes’ control computer. Tina was edutained. Alice was excited that her daughter was watching such imaginative and educational programming — she had been right about Charlotte — and she needed to make a phone call to Huntsville, Alabama. Right now.

  * * *

  “The computer just finished running the latest battle scenario, Rog. You want to hear the results?” Alan flipped through a stack of papers, half reading the data.

  “Let’s hear it.” Roger turned away from his laptop for a moment and gave his undivided attention. Besides, checking the status of Percival one more time this hour wasn’t going to help get it t
o Mars any faster.

  “Well, in this case we made the aliens ten times harder to kill than human soldiers. We increased the armor coefficient by ten and we gave them rayguns that have an output intensity of a gigawatt per square meter. We gave them terabits per second communications capabilities and unlimited MASINT.” Alan continued to read off the list of unbelievable abilities they had given to the alien threat to be simulated as the red forces.

  “Yeah, what do we have?” Roger leaned forward in his office chair and tipped the little kinetic desk gadget on the corner of his desk. A little space shuttle attached to a metal rod at one end and a metal ball at the other end zinged around inside a little metal ring in all three dimensions. Roger stared at the motion for a second.

  “Well, we started out with just what we can deploy today.” Alan scanned the printouts of the simulation results. “Then we added nukes, tac-nukes, RF weapons, directed energy systems, experimental missiles and aircraft, chem-bio, and so on.”

  “And?” The little space shuttle slowed, then stopped. Roger tapped it with his right index finger and sent it whirling again.

  “Blue forces totally consumed by the red forces threat,” Alan read from the report.

  “No shit.”

  “No shit. What now?” Alan shrugged his shoulders, looking up from the report and noticing that Roger was only partly paying attention to him.

  “That was a two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand dollar obvious answer, huh?” Roger sat quiet for a moment longer, spinning the little desk gadget again. “Let’s have some fun with this and model in some other stuff. I mean magic stuff. Try something like in Independence Day, or The Puppet Masters or War of the Worlds or something.”

  “Well, we tried chem-bio agents like in those last two you mentioned and no luck,” Alan said with a frown. “To be realistic, we have no idea about their physiology so there is little way we can put in an agent with a high confidence. Oh sure, we could fudge it in the simulation if you want to win, but it wouldn’t be based on reality.”

  “Like any of this stuff is? We don’t have a clue what we’re up against here. Hell, there might just be some ten million year alien varmint hatching planet-wide there — who knows?” Roger shrugged.

  “Well then, since it’s all made up anyway, I’ll add some miracles to see what happens.” Alan scribbled on the printouts.

  “Do that just to see what happens if we were to find that, I dunno, toothpaste, or bad breath, or something as equally unlikely kills them. Who the hell knows? What about cyber?” Roger sat back in his chair now bored with the desk gadget.

  “We tried that and it had little impact. Again, I’ll fudge a run for you.” Alan scribbled some notes on the printouts again, then began tapping his head with the pen.

  “Hell, give us transporters and antigravity just to see what happens.” Roger sort of smiled while at the same time looking disappointed. “Hey, how about adding power armor like in Starship Troopers or the veritech fighters, hovertanks, and cyclones in Robotech.”

  “I’ll get right to it.”

  “Oh, by the way, Alice Pike called me Saturday night with an interesting bit of information. Apparently John Fisher’s daughter strikes again.”

  “Refresh my memory… John Fisher’s daughter?” Alan asked.

  “You know, she’s the thirteen year old amateur astronomer who captured the images of Mars with her eight-inch telescope — the ones that we’re putting in the final report to Ronny.”

  “I didn’t realize that was John’s daughter. How about that?” Alan said. “Apple didn’t fall too far, huh?”

  “Well, like I said, she’s made another unwitting contribution to the Neighborhood Watch.” Roger said.

  “How so?”

  “I didn’t realize this, but John and Alice have known each other for years and their daughters go to the same school together. It appears that John’s daughter has gotten Alice’s daughter watching sci-fi and cartoons. Anyway, Alice and her daughter watched an episode of the cartoon called Justice League Unlimited this weekend. Alice said that we needed to see that episode.”

  “Really? JLU? I’ve seen commercials for that, but I haven’t had time to watch it,” Alan said. “Did she say what the episode was about?”

  “Yeah, she did.”

  “Well?”

  “Von Neumann probes attacking Earth.”

  * * *

  “What’d ya mean that nothing helps?” Alan Davis just could not believe that the combination of powered armor suits, supercyber weapons, SuperCrest (as they had called the alien chem-bio agent as a joke on Roger), ultrahigh bandwidth communications, and even through-the-Earth transporters were not enough to beat the simulated alien red forces. After a month of modeling, no blue force winning scenario had been modeled.

  “Well, watch the big screen and you can see the results for yourself,” the programmer from the CASTFOREM simulation group explained. “We used D.C., Atlanta, L.A., New York City, and Seattle as the central points of attack and had the red forces spread radially outward from there as blue forces were depleted. Now, we did have to assume a continuous supply of red forces from space.” The software engineer tapped a few keys and nodded to the screen.

  The big screen on the wall of the War Room displayed a map of the United States with multiple blue forces gathered at scenario battle theaters scattered across the country. A tiny red dot appeared at each of the cities mentioned and they began growing into red blotches that oozed outward. As more and more red began to spread across the map, engulfing the blue forces, a window on the side displayed a tally of casualties and capabilities losses. The numbers were staggering: in the tens of millions and growing each second.

  “This even uses the transporters, right?” Alan asked.

  “Right. You see here that just about a year after the initial attacks begin, the war is over. Red forces win and spread to the rest of the world, pretty much no matter what miracles we use.”

  “There has got to be a way to win this thing.” Alan scratched his head while he stared at the big screen.

  “Sure there is,” the engineer said, shrugging. “It was obvious. You didn’t ask for the scenario, but I ran it anyway.”

  “Don’t keep me hanging,” Alan replied.

  “You have to cut off their infinite resupply of troops from space.”

  “Now how the hell are we gonna do that?” Alan asked with a frown. “Where is Superman when you need him?”

  “Doing it with Lois Lane?”

  * * *

  “Mr. President, every war game we’ve run so far says that we cannot win an all-out invasion,” Ronny Guerrero explained to the President and his senior staff.

  “You mean your boys down in Alabama have come up with no brilliant ways to beat this thing?” the NSA asked.

  “Yes, ma’am, and as I understand it, nobody at the Pentagon has come up with anything either. The suggestions of the Neighborhood Watch team is that we need a larger all-out defense development effort to determine if there are possible solutions available.” Dr. Guerrero paused to measure the President’s reaction.

  “You mean something big, like the Manhattan Project, don’t you?” he asked.

  “Well, sir, I think it would have to be bigger than that and Star Wars and Neighborhood Watch combined,” Ronny said trying to make no facial expression, but it was hard for him to hide the grimace.

  “Well, keep moving ahead at the level of efforts you have now and add a little to have your team figure out how to set a program like that up. But we’ll wait until we get the recon from Mars before we embark on such a mammoth economic drain. Who knows how that would affect the economy right now?” the President replied.

  Ronny held his expression blank, but thought that the President should be more concerned about Earth’s survival than the economy. He’s not equipped to understand what we are facing. I’m not sure I am.

  * * *

  The Neighborhood Watch team leaders and data reduction staff gathered around t
heir respective consoles at the Huntsville Operations Support Center at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center. There were others riding consoles at DSN locations around the world and at various relay satellite ground stations. Of course, only people who knew all about Neighborhood Watch were aware that any signal was being received from Mars. In fact, the stations being used were all “shut down for repairs.”

  Roger Reynolds sat quietly at the HOSC trying to make heads or tails out of the previous image that had just completed downloading. The image was taken minus two hours from Percival’s closest approach to the planet’s surface. The telemetry data received to that point suggested that Percival should get as close as about fifty-four kilometers from the surface. At that altitude an image from the high resolution point camera would have a resolution of about ten centimeters — small enough to see a license plate but not read it. The probe was approaching Mars fast and would go from 50,000 km away, through the closest approach, and to 50,000 km past Mars in a period of less than two hours.

  Data from spectral analysis taken at further distances from the planet had already been downloaded. There were gases and metals but no signs of organic substances such as methane or ammonia. As the spacecraft approached closer to the planet the high resolution camera took priority on the download list.

  Mission timeline approached fifteen minutes from minimum distance as the latest image dinged complete. The image had been taken sixty minutes to closest approach and had taken about forty-five minutes to download. As soon as the image download was complete, download of the next image in the sequence began.

  Roger pulled the approach-minus-sixty-minutes image up and ran the post-processing software. The image sharpened on the screen in front of him and on several monitors simultaneously throughout the HOSC.