Nanotime

by Bart Kosko

  “You are sure?”

  “Your excellency, we are dealing in compound probabilities. But yes. It is more likely than not that three of the six missiles will strike the target. There is a better than 90% chance that at least one missile will strike the desalination plant and that is all it takes.”

  “But the plant is on the Red Sea. What of the tourists there?”

  “They will live to tell quite a story.”

  King Fahd almost smiled but let his face go blank again. He pinched his trimmed black beard and still stared at Haddad with his watery eyes.

  “Commander Haddad, give me a good military reason why we should risk killing so many innocent civilians. Even the Israelis may be innocent of this attack.”

  Haddad paused once more. The king had with that remark just laid the blame on him for the counterattack. Fahd would claim credit for the strike if it worked and blame Haddad if it failed. The matawwa would have the king remove him if he now backed down from the pending violence. That was how power filtered the weak from the strong.

  “Deterrence,” Haddad said. “A fast counterstrike will deter these types of guerrilla attacks in the future. Killing innocents in such a matter will only show our enemies our resolve.”

  “I see,” Fahd said. “So why not cut off the hand of the shepherd after the thief has run off with one of his goats? Would that not deter other thieves?”

  “It would deter them if they believed the shepherd was a thief.”

  “So you think the world will believe that the Israeli Greens are guilty of this?”

  “Your excellency, I am a soldier. I do not presume to know the many political facets of such a question. But I believe the military answer to it is yes. The world will see that we swiftly respond to force with force against even a probable aggressor.”

  “Very well. Give the launch command. Now.”

  The screen and noise wall dissolved as Haddad nodded his assent. Fahd would watch the missile flight paths on his own war room screen with advisors that Haddad would never meet.

  Both Fahd and Haddad knew they had answered the most important question without having asked it: Should they first tell the Americans? The security bureaucracy of nations was a bureaucracy like any other. It was larger than most but it still acted like a bureaucracy.

  So it would grant forgiveness far more quickly than it would grant permission.

  Chapter 4

  Eilat

  Israel

  “Jesus. Look at this,” Alon said. “It looks nuclear.”

  Dr. Alon Gorenberg wore a green T-shirt and blue jeans and stood before a small old-style pocket TV that he had brought into the desalination plant and placed on his lab desk. Someone had once told him that there was a plant rule against bringing in TVs and radios and even cellular phones. No one seemed to obey the rule.

  Still Alon hid the pocket TV in his desk drawer before he went home at night. He was putting the TV away when he turned it on and saw the Dhahran news flash and then the satellite images of the blast. The lab post-docs had already left for the day. He and the new programmer, Jackie, were the only ones left in the crowded optics lab.

  “You can bet they will blame it on the Jews,” Jackie Zukor said. “I’m going home. I need some sleep. I don’t want to hear the bullshit Zionist spin the Saudis will put on this.”

  Alon pulled a folded plastic bag of black Moroccan hemp from his back pocket and waved it at Jackie. She understood and smiled. The plant would not conduct its blood and urine tests for almost a month and her off-and-on romance with Alon was now more on than off. She could wait an extra hour to get home.

  “Jackie. A lot of people just died. We should see what happened.”

  “Well I guess you’re right. If it is Dhahran then someone might have bombed the oil fields.”

  “Who knows? They just might think it was a couple of us Greens.”

  “I could think of a few of your friends. You think the Saudis have a file on us?”

  “Wake up,” Alon said. “Everyone has a file on us. I’ve told you that before. You think our bits are secure? Not in the banana grove on your old kibbutz and not here. Privacy died before you were born.”

  With that he pointed at the old video camera that hung from the ceiling and that faced the room’s largest optics table. Alon had left the wideband plastic lasers turned on. The camera moved back and forth to watch the slowly moving red and blue light beams that shined on a small spiny ball of green glass. The spiny ball itself was mostly hollow inside. It served more as the project’s logo than as a reaction housing. It had the same shape as the green rubber ball that John Grant had almost thrown into Lake Mead.

  Alon and Jackie stood on the other side of the room and well out of the camera’s field of view. They knew the camera’s control logic cared less about them than it did about the two platinum cubes that also sat on the optics table.

  The heavy cubes housed supercooled atoms of rubidium. The lab team could freeze the atoms at will and lock them into a Bose-Einstein condensate. BEC was a truly uniform state of matter where all the quantum matter waves flattened and merged into one wave. Then a clear atomic laser beam formed between the cubes. The plastic lasers fed fine light pulses to the atomic laser while the computer told the atomic laser how to take apart old atoms and sculpt new ones. The atomic laser was a prototype and the lab team had to share it with the Weizmann Institute. Plant security kept it in view at all times.

  “If they know so much then they should be smart enough to know we don’t have to blow up what we can replace.”

  “That’s the spirit,” Alon said as he packed some of the black hemp into a small smokeless pipe he had made from some plastic hose and a brass gas valve. “Put your faith in technology. First they made soft contact lenses with cross-linked polymers. Now we make smart molecules with lasers and math. We’ll remake the world even if we don’t make it better.”

  “Then what are we doing here?”

  “Better living through molecular engineering. Look at those satellite images. Who do you think did that? You can bet it was a bunch of engineers. Probably molecular engineers just like us.”

  Alon held the blue-yellow flame of a Bunsen burner to the pipe’s small bowl and sucked at the pipe to light the black hemp. It took him a moment to get a lungful of the thin smoke. Jackie sat on the desk edge next to him.

  “Well maybe they are just like you,” Jackie said and winked. “But if all this atomic-laser stuff really works, then the next nut will have a lot harder time trying to blow up the world’s water supply.”

  Alon nodded as he exhaled and handed the pipe to Jackie. She closed her eyes as she drew on it and hoped that this time the pot would not lead to an anxiety attack.

  “Better than that,” Alon said. “If this smart water really scales up, then we won’t have to waste time and blood trying to swap our Arab sisters more land for peace. We can swap them the Dead Sea.”

  An alarm turned on and off in loud shrieking pulses.

  “My God!” Jackie said. “Did we set off the smoke alarm?”

  “Oh shit. It’s an air raid. And we have to run all the way back to the main entrance to get to the staircase. This better not be another drill.”

  Alarms went off in many places in Eilat. The public alarms cleared the diners and sunset watchers on the Eilat beaches. The dive boats called in their divers and snorkelers and headed back to the hotel docks.

  Some of the night divers stayed underwater but turned off their dive lights. Their air could last for most of an hour if they stayed out of the deep water. But they risked facing the shock wave from a stray bomb that might fall in the water. And they risked facing a land blast if they did not make it out of the water in time and back to the hotel bomb shelters.

  The strike alarms came at the end of a long chain of sensor processing and number crunching. Israeli Air Defense had seen the six Saudi cruise missiles seconds after the missiles had launched and cleared the hills of El Haql and entered Israeli a
irspace.

  The Israelis’ “sight” came from fused sensor suites in low-earth orbit and in the air and on the ground. Each sensor suite computed a threat probability for each object it scanned. Then the Air Defense computers in Tel Aviv computed a final threat probability. They based these odds on their own measurements and on the threat probabilities of each sensor suite.

  The early warning system used tens of thousands of equations and nanochips. But its logic still rested on the gambling theorem that the Reverend Thomas Bayes first proved near the time of his death in 1761. Bayes showed the best way to change a gambling belief in the face of new facts about the game. Those facts now changed by the microsecond.

  But the Saudis also used the reverend’s theorem. And they knew how to confound it. Small turbojets fired in spurts on the sides of their missiles to give them a mildly chaotic path like a gnat jerking in the air up and down and from side to side. The Saudis knew the missiles would seek their targets but even they did not know which jittery path the gnats would take.

  Israel first launched 10 surface-to-air missiles from the outskirts of Eilat when the six Saudi cruise missiles crossed the border. Each SAM locked on to its own cruise missile. The 10 SAMs had to split into two groups of five when the Arab cruise missiles began their chaotic jiggle. Before this the 10 SAMs had a fighting chance of hitting most of the six cruise missiles. Now they had to do their best to swat just two of the gnats.

  Israeli Air Defense Command launched two more swarms of 10 SAMs each. They were for backup and to hunt down strays and cripples.

  The first pack of five SAMs missed the lead Saudi missile. The SAMs had to turn now and regroup. That cost too much time. So now they too would fly on as backup and prepare to attack the next volley that the Saudis would never launch. Soon they would run out of fuel and skid to a shearing stop on the Negev Desert floor.

  The second pack of five SAMs converged on the lead Saudi missile as it jittered low over the surface of the Red Sea. The first two Israeli missiles missed the gnat and skidded across the Red Sea before they sank. The third SAM blew up when it neared the gnat. The orange and white blast wiped out some of the gnat’s skin sensors but did not stop the missile. Then the Saudi missile itself blew up when the last two SAMs closed in on it.

  The blast crippled the closest SAM and it spun and crashed into the Red Sea. Israeli command could not reach the missile underwater before it blew up in a frothing white hill that rose up out of the dark sea. The Israeli command net did reach the second missile. It slid safely underwater and shut down and slammed to a stop in a mound of brain coral and tube sponges. The Israelis would winch it out before sunrise.

  The Saudis had just traded one attack missile for five Israeli defense missiles. This type of low-kill ratio was unique to the 21st century and due to its cheap smart cruise missiles. They had overturned one of the oldest principles of war.

  It now cost less to attack than it cost to defend.

  That did not hold for the Greeks who had had to launch a thousand ships to sack Troy. It did not hold for the 20th-century Afghan mountain rebels who had used handheld Stinger missiles and RPGs to shoot down helicopters. The reason was that the circuit density of chips had doubled every two years or so for decades. More and more machine IQ could fit into the nose cone and even the tail fins and skin of cruise missiles.

  The cost of cruise missiles fell as their machine IQs rose.

  Cruise missiles had cost over $1 million in the early 1990s. The cost had fallen in two decades to just over $10,000, or less than the cost of a new car. The new cruise missiles stored vast databases of terrain and tactics. They retuned one another’s mission goals in flight with math schemes that had once filled book stacks in science libraries. Now all countries could buy large stockpiles of cruise missiles. Even a few large firms kept defense SAMs at some of their branches in Africa and Indonesia and Siberia.

  And no one could be sure they could shoot down the smart missiles.

  The lead Saudi missile jerked in a last spurt of fuel and acceleration. Then it opened into a cloud of hundreds of small bomblets. The carrier missile had just optimized the trajectories for each cluster of 10 guided bomblets. It had made sure they would hit the long boxlike buildings of the desalination plant and its green lawns and hit them in a uniform pattern of blast ellipses.

  Most of the bomblets had sensor fuses to let them first wreak kinetic havoc. They ripped through the plant’s walls before they came to a full stop. Then they burst into superhot clouds of chemical energy and metal and plastic shrapnel.

  The next three Saudi missiles watched the bomblets explode. The missile eyes watched them explode through almost all frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum. Their chip minds worked fast at the nanolevel and let them estimate the bomblet damage and discuss it among themselves. Then the missiles jointly picked the optimal point of impact for their own massive payloads of chemical superexplosives.

  The joint blasts leveled the main building of the desalination plant and left three smoking blast craters.

  The sixth and last Saudi cruise missile watched these three explosions in its tiny arrays of dead smart eyes. The Saudis had launched this missile for backup but there was no need to waste it. Now the missile flew up and over in a complete eight-g spiral to evade the distant five Israeli SAMs. Then it too jerked and opened into a cloud of smart bomblets and fiery plasma.

  The smart attack had pierced the Israeli shield. It had set the entire Israeli defense system on full alert and had cost lives and weapons and honor. The smart attack had not changed the real Israeli defense portfolio. The secret arsenal of 300 Jericho nuclear ballistic missiles stayed hidden and silent in the Judean Hills at Kefra Zekhariya.

  And there had been little time to run.

  Jackie had run ahead of Alon into the crowd of plant workers who jumped and pushed their way downstairs to the bomb shelters. Alon had stopped at the top of the stairs when he looked down and saw the brass hemp pipe still in his right hand. Jackie had handed it to him when they ran out of the optics lab.

  Now Alon walked over to a square green trash can. He stood between the hall video camera and the trash can and then dropped the pipe into the black plastic liner.

  That last green act of recycling and a Saudi bomblet cost Alon Gorenberg his life.

  Jackie made it down the stairs and lost only her hearing.

  Chapter 5

  Cyberspace

  The Saudi bombing and missile attack filled hundreds of channels on the Wireless News Network.

  The WNN signals were compressed bit streams of 1s and 0s that circled the globe and passed through the labyrinths of cyberspace. The signals moved through both the wired and wireless links of the global internet and of thousands of local and wide area networks. The signals passed through optical cables and between the thin air and bounced off satellites in both high-earth and low-earth orbits.

  The WNN signals themselves looked like dim white noise to those who did not pay the WNN code fee and tried to intercept them. They saw only the tangle of randomized signals “spread” out over much of the electromagnetic spectrum. Teams of WNN scientists worked to find the new random codes that made it all possible.

  The emblem of WNN was not its bits but some of its atoms. The emblem was the pattern of its thin blue credit cards. Even many children in the Congo and ice climbers in Antarctica had the blue cards. They could slide the cards into a palm panel or desk screen and see who was now killing whom anywhere in the world.

  WNN sold new base-level cards each year and sold new deluxe cards each month. Students had to crack old cards to pass some college courses on secure communications and on quantum algorithms that factored whole numbers into primes. Hackers opened encrypted news groups on the internet to debate ways to crack each new WNN card.

  WNN’s encryption schemes relied on the computer search for new and ever larger prime numbers. This code search drew on the math fact that there are infinitely many prime numbers. Euclid had proved
that about 2,300 years before. The trouble was the Prime Number Theorem that humans first proved in 1896 and that machines later reproved many times. This math fact said that the prime numbers thin out and grow rarer as the numbers grow larger. So each day the code search grew a little harder and secure WNN cards grew a little dearer. And quantum computers worked harder to crack them.

  *

  WNN Channel 5: An Israeli drone patrols the skies near Eilat. The unmanned aerial vehicle looks like a silver kite studded with infrared sensors and other machine eyes. The drone watches the first Saudi cruise missile burst into bomblet clouds. The clouds move forward in a type of slow-motion shotgun blast. The first bomblet clouds pelt the desalination plant and those who run from it. The later bomblet clouds explode just after impact. Three bright flashes of light throw the drone view into snow as it climbs in altitude. The view returns to show three dark smoldering craters.…

  *

  WNN Channel 12: A panel of eight NATO experts debate whether Israel will launch its own smart tit-for-tat strike against Saudi Arabia. Most of the experts do not believe that Israeli Greens bombed the Dhahran oil fields. They say that Israel will not strike because of new reports of Saudi casualties and Dhahran damage. Israel will not respond for fear that its radical Shiite neighbor Egypt would join the Saudi counterattack and maybe even attack Israel at the first sign of an Israeli launch.…

  *

  WNN Channel 23: Split screen. The first screen shows a young WNN reporter who stands in front of the Knesset building. She speaks in English and holds her black leather bag to the side to show where she had just held the hidden microcamera. The second screen shows a Knesset debate that turns into a fistfight and then into a pile of Labor and Likud leaders.…

  *

  WNN Channel 41: The White House. Green Democrat President Vance Jackson holds a press conference on the conflict between the Saudis and Israelis. He denounces nuclear terrorism and says he has sent Secretary of State Gloria Rosen to Tel Aviv to help mediate the conflict. A young reporter with a shaved head asks the President if he will suspend Intel’s contract for smart-weapon support to the Saudis. Jackson says he may.…