Von Neumann’s War

by John Ringo

  Alice pushed the cart forward while Gries and Cady walked carefully along each side of the cart with both eyes on the alien boomerang-shaped menace and both eyes scanning the hallway for unforeseen events.

  “Surprise is in the mind of the combat commander,” Gries muttered to himself, thumbing the safety of his HE paintball machine gun.

  “Sir,” Cady nodded keeping one hand on his HE gun and one on his handmade war club.

  “I don’t know why you two are so edgy. We’re three stories underground. What could happen?” Alice shrugged, stopped the cart in front of the elevator door and pressed the down button.

  “Anything,” Cady grunted.

  “What?” Alice asked.

  “The sergeant major means that anything could happen at any time. If you fixate on specific likelihoods, you’re going to be surprised by the unlikelihood that actually happens. So be ready for anything. If you expect anything, Dr. Pike, then you are prepared for it. And if nothing happens, well, I’m prepared for that too. In fact would prefer it that way,” Shane said.

  “Elevator is clear, sir. But nothing is boring, sir,” Top said.

  Gries nodded at Alice to push the cart in and then he followed in behind her. Cady was standing with his back to the far wall of the elevator scanning for trouble.

  The doors to the elevator closed and elevator music began playing. The song was familiar to Alice and she started humming along with the tune. She seemed to recall it being an old sixties or seventies song about a transvestite. Gries seemed to relax and lean his left shoulder against the elevator wall, but he still kept a watchful eye. The sergeant major was lightly nodding his head up and down with the tune but other than the slight nodding he was solid as a rock. Alice relaxed a little more as the elevator came to a stop.

  The doors opened and immediately the major was standing alert and Top worked his way in front of the cart, the elevator music no longer even a memory to him. Then the idea hit Alice like a dam bursting and flooding a valley below it. Her eyes widened and she was caught up in the idea that flooded her mind.

  “Elevator music!”

  * * *

  “So what is it?” Alan Davis held the tiny circular shaped circuit board in his hand. The tiny printed circuit board was about the size of five pennies stacked on top of each other with several small chips and components soldered to it. There was a membrane switch on one side and what appeared to be a small watch battery on the other.

  Alice smiled. “I call it an IBot.”

  “An IBot?” Roger took the device from Alan and looked closer at it.

  “You mean like an IPod?” Traci asked, nudging up closer to Roger to get a better look at the thing and to be closer to Roger.

  “Bingo, Hooters Girl.” Alice continued to be impressed by the former Hooters waitress. “Using the codekey and the bot handshaking protocol that Dr. Horton discovered and the frequency modulation your guys found, Roger, I constructed a little music box for the bots. Any bot that gets within ten or twenty meters of this thing, the range is depending on terrain of course, will try to handshake with it. The IBot will respond with the proper codekey for the handshaking protocol and send the ‘prepare to receive’ code that I isolated from the decrypted data Dr. Horton sent us.

  “Ah, and then you play it a song?” Roger scratched his head.

  “Yes. And since the little memory chip on board the IBot is only large enough to store about one song, I programmed it to continually loop.”

  “Ha! So the damned things get a song stuck in their head?” Alan laughed. “That is freakin’ brilliant.”

  “But what does that do for us?” Roger asked, pretty sure he understood but he wanted to be positive.

  “Well, the data we have on the bots tells us that while they’re handshaking and downloading they stop other activities.” Alice explained. “It’s like getting in the elevator and hearing the elevator music. You are a captive audience so you stop what you are doing and listen to it.”

  “Have you tried it on our bot yet?” Roger asked.

  “Oh yes. Watch this.” Alice tapped a few keys on her laptop and pressed a button on the overhead projector. The projector displayed what her laptop monitor displayed on a blank wall of the lab. “See, this is the output from the spectrum analyzer box connected to my USB port. Here around 1.4 gigahertz you see the com signal from the bot hopping around. Now watch this.” Alice took the IBot from Roger and pressed the membrane on-switch of the IBot and a second signal appeared on the screen. Then the bot’s signal began to shift and change and the handshaking protocol appeared.

  Alice tapped another window open that displayed the decrypted datalink between the bot and the IBot. Strings of ones and zeroes scrolled down the window.

  “It’s working!” Alan said. “Look, this string here. That is the song right? And the bot is just humming along with it. Check out the mimicking signal.”

  “Yeah, I haven’t figured that part out yet, but who cares. Maybe it really is getting stuck in the thing’s head. Who knows?” Alice shrugged and smiled. “The main thing is—”

  “It works!” Roger rubbed his hands together.

  “What song are you playing them, Alice?” Traci asked.

  “ ‘Lola.’ You know, ‘We drank champagne and danced all night…’ That one.”

  Alan laughed. “Goddamned hippie stuff. Why couldn’t y’all used some Skynyrd or some Guns’n’Roses or something?”

  “Well, you could program it however you want—” Alice started.

  “No! Leave it just the way it is and get the blueprints to every redoubt left. Alan, figure out a way to harden it. I want as many of these things as the human race can manufacture. Put everybody making them.” Roger went into deputy secretary of defense mode. “I have to call the President. Traci, go find Ronny and Danny and have them meet me in the red-phone conference room.”

  “Sure.” She nodded and left.

  “Alan, get Top and Gries down here and get them thinking of a plan.”

  “Let’s get on this!”

  * * *

  “So why not broadcast it worldwide and shut them all down at once?” the President asked.

  “The problem, Mr. President, is that this type of communication signal is not like standard radio. It’s more like a broadband wireless connection. You see, you can pump out a lot of data over the link, but due to the physics of how they work even higher power transceivers are limited to a few hundred meters or so.” Of course it was more complicated even than the most sophisticated human broadband technologies, but the principle and the physics were the same. This wasn’t the final answer to ridding humanity of the alien Von Neumann probes but it was a start and Roger wanted to get this information out to the President as soon as he could. Which was why they were using an Internet video call.

  “So, could we set up safe zones the way the airports and cybercafés used to have wifi zones?” the NSA asked.

  “Absolutely. And I’m even thinking we could mount them on vehicles and they might work,” Ronny Guerrero added. “We’re effectively spoofing the bots’ IFF capabilities.”

  “That’s right, Ronny. I’ve got my team modifying some broadband wireless routers to transmit the signal. It should work. We have to hope the bots don’t get wise to our plan.”

  Roger had finally done something that might help. Oh, he knew he didn’t do it himself. But his project had. He had put the right team together, found the right experts when they needed them, and acquired the right resources. It had worked at least enough to offer some hope. The first hope he had felt in the months since he saw the intel on what was left of Europe and how people were living — no, surviving — there.

  “We should use this IBot thing and start a plan of action and go after these things,” General Mitchell suggested.

  “Well, we can’t mass produce them fast enough for an all-out invasion. But we believe we can produce enough to set up a perimeter over four or five redoubt areas within the next month,” Roger s
aid.

  “A month! Those things will have eaten more than a hundred cities by then!” the secretary of defense shouted. “We found out where the major tube was headed; it dropped square on Oakland. Now they’re spreading on the west coast as well!”

  “Actually, a hundred and twenty-five cities at the current rate of growth,” Roger replied. “But I’m sorry, sir, that is best we can do for now. We can choose the redoubts and start evacuating everybody to them now.”

  “Then how long will it take to manufacture enough of these, uh, IBots did you call them? How long will it take to make enough of them to go after the invaders?”

  “Current rate of growth versus our manufacturing capabilities suggest perhaps a few years, sir,” Roger admitted with a sigh. “We’re behind the eight ball. But it will help with local defense. Just getting the darn things to slow down is a miracle.”

  “Don’t forget, Mr. President, that this is a defense mechanism and we just now learned how the bots communicate,” Ronnie added. “We might develop new technologies and strategies sooner. But right now, this is the best chance we’ve got to slow them down.”

  “I guess this is something. So, Kevin, you and Jim and Vicki get the rest of the Joint Chiefs together and determine which are the most strategic redoubts and let’s get this move started now.” For so long he had been sitting idle with little hope and no plan of action. At least now they had something. It wasn’t much, but not-zero was entirely different from zero.

  * * *

  “Richard.” Jeff handed him the last of the strapping material. “I can’t tell you how grateful Sara Jo and I are to you and Helena. We… uh… we would…”

  “You’d be dead, Jeff,” Richard said emotionlessly. “You’d be dead, your wife would be dead and your kids would be dead. Hand me the RoboGrips… uh, no the big ones.” Jeff handed him the grips, trying not to shake his head over Richard’s entire lack of tact. Richard tightened down the last of the lag bolts through the bot’s midsection to the waterwheel and then he tightened the strapping material down. “There. That should just about do it.” He crawled back down the ladder to the platform below the waterwheel. The cool mist of the waterfall soaked his skin refreshingly.

  “Well, we’re running out of baby formula for Precious. I know there is some canned milk here but I don’t know if that’s good enough for a baby.” Jeff backed down the steps off the platform looking at Richard, who was paying him little attention.

  “Okay let’s see if this works,” Richard said, ignoring the problem of Jeff’s baby. He tapped a few keys on his laptop and stopped the IBot transmission to the bot. The damaged bot stopped handshaking with the IBot and resumed its functions. Its damaged propulsion drive kicked on.

  The waterwheel that Richard and Jeff had strapped the bot to began to whirl forward as the bot propelled itself. Richard watched the torque encoders and rotation speed on his laptop to make sure the bot’s propulsion was not too much for the waterwheel. The wheel kicked up to several hundred revolutions per minute and then its speed topped out against the gear and bearing friction. The generator was now producing power at about an order of magnitude higher level than it did with just the underground river turning the wheel. Richard was pleased.

  “That was clever, Richard,” Jeff said watching the man in awe.

  “Yes, I know. I am very clever. I am not friendly, I am not a people-person. But I am very clever.”

  “So what do you think about Precious?” Jeff asked.

  “Precious? Oh, the infant. Yes, yes. I calculated weeks ago that you would be out of formula about a week ago. I’m surprised it lasted this long,” Richard said nonchalantly.

  “Uh, we’ve been mixing it weaker than normal.” Jeff said embarrassed and nervous.

  “Jesus Christ, you idiot,” Richard snapped. “This is the most important part of an infant’s development and you could be doing major harm by not feeding it properly! It would have made more sense to use it all up at full strength! You’re making the sort of mistake I’d expect out of some third world moron!”

  Richard looked at his laptop one last time and checked the parameters of the generator and the waterwheel. He looked up at the wheel that was now just a blur. The water from the fall was spraying forward off the top of it each time the bot or the counterweight on the other side of the wheel splashed through it.

  “Good.”

  “What?” Jeff could never tell if Richard was talking to himself or addressing him.

  “Come on.” He led Jeff back up the mine shaft to the edge of the corridor where most of the long duration dry goods and foodstuffs were stored. “Here, take these. And grow up.”

  He handed Jeff a large storage box with a printout taped to the top of it. The printout was a list of the nutritional information from the back of one of the destroyed baby formula canisters with an arrow from each to an ingredient in the box. At the bottom of the page was the recipe and cooking instructions for the homemade baby formula.

  Jeff looked in the box, shaking his head at the ingredients. There was a twenty pound bag of long grain dried rice, a quart bottle of sunflower cooking oil, about a hundred single-serving containers of pancake syrup from several different restaurants and hotels, two large Ziploc bags full of sun-dried persimmons, two Ziploc bags of shelled pecans, a restaurant salt shaker full of salt, and a ceramic bowl and stick thing that Jeff assumed must be the mortar and pestle described in the cooking instructions.

  “This will work?” Jeff looked from the box back to Richard several times.

  “Of course it will. It’s just simple cooking and no chemistry. Even you should be able to understand it. I started to add a yeast culture but you’d screw it up and poison that poor baby.” Richard looked annoyed. “She’ll do fine with what you have there.”

  “Amazing,” Jeff whispered to himself and hefted the box with both arms. “Thank you.”

  “You should ask for things when you need them or learn to do things for yourself. Now leave me alone I have work to do.”

  * * *

  “Richard, you gonna be up all de goddamn night again?” Helena startled him as she put her hand on his shoulder and looked over it at the computer screen. Since he had gotten the generator going at bot power, the X ray and electron microscope machines were up and running and Richard hadn’t slept much in at least a week. Helena was glad though about the better power situation because it also meant they could turn the electric heaters up. The mine stayed a constant sixty-five degrees, which she thought was way too cold for the babies. But having grown up in St. Petersburg it was short-sleeve weather for her, so she was typically wearing nothing but shorts and a tank top around the mine.

  “Probably. I think I’m on to something here,” he said, continuing to stare at the X-ray image on the monitor. He had been saying that for the last five days.

  “What is dat?”

  “I think it’s the replication code of the alien bot.” He stroked his beard and yawned.

  “Here, drink dis.” Helena handed him a cup of hot coffee.

  “Thanks, dear.” Richard paused and sipped the coffee.

  “You did a good ting with de baby’s milk, you know,” she said, sitting down beside him. “Little Precious, she took right to it.”

  “Uh,” Richard just grunted.

  “You tink you gonna save de world with dis? What are you gonna do with dis replication code thing?” She watched him for a moment silently.

  “I dunno,” he said. “But it looks like these things can build almost anything. They can manipulate this invisible force field of theirs down to a molecular level and build, well, anything from the molecule up.”

  “What, you mean if dey had a bunch of wood dey could build a goddamn house or something?” Helena asked. “Dat’d be nice.”

  “Well, yes I guess so. They would need the blueprints though. The only blueprint the one we caught has is for building a copy of itself.” Richard took another sip of the coffee.

  “Well, why don
you make de goddamn ting make copies of itself and tell it to go eat all its fuckin’ buddies?” Helena said, angry at the bots.

  “Well, the government thought of that, but they don’t know how to reprogram the… Hey that’s it!” Richard finished his coffee. “I think we could do that! Helena you are a genius.”

  “Da. And pretty goddamn goodlookin’ too.” She kissed him on the cheek, wrinkling her nose as his beard tickled it, and stood up. “You come to de goddamn bed every now and a fuckin’ den an’ I’ll show you. But take a shower first. You stink.”

  Richard took the subtle hint, took a shower and then joined her in bed. But he didn’t sleep. Helena made love to him passionately and like a woman who doesn’t see the man she loves as often as she would like. They lay silently in their bed for a few moments after and Helena drifted happily off to sleep. Once Richard was certain she was sleeping soundly, he eased himself out of bed, pulled up his shorts, and slipped out of their bedchamber, through the main shaft living room, and back to his laboratory. He tapped the computer on and booted up the work he had been looking at before.

  “Now let me see. How would you wipe the mind of the bot and change its programming… hmmm? You will be mine, little robots, for I am very clever and you are not.”

  * * *

  “We just got word from Atlanta,” General Riggs said as Roger walked into the command center. “Last word, that is. Tech’s redoubt put in a last call and then went off the air. The laser station on Stone Mountain was still in operation, but they expected to get overwhelmed shortly. And lidar reports that the swarm is already twinning. One group seems to be headed our way.”