But one of the three ships they attacked, in the test run, had a faulty filtration unit. A lot of bugs evidently died on that ship. They didn’t all die though and made sure to announce that fact by lighting up an entire downtown skyline with their laser cannons.
You’re right Rock. Allow that anger to be focused on the bugs. We need a plan to kill them all, kill them all at once. That was it, I can see it on all their faces. We go to war for real.
September 4 th The invasion has moved to a new level. Extreme retaliation. Moving people off-world. According to the sat-scopes they are being moved to the Moon. Not too many yet. Most are still in holding-pens on Earth. We did manage to steal that bug nest ship, resulting in at least some bugs being called back to protect the remaining ships and their queens. That has slowed up their people-gathering program. It will probably start up again soon with earnest. The situation has become even more fluid.
Let’s do a count. The bugs started with 60 large ships including both of the mass landings. There are 55 to go. The military has managed to destroy 4 ships. We stole another. A lot more momentum is needed. Our primary strategy is to eliminate bug capacity to wage war. That will involve three primary tasks. The 3 Ds.
Destroy or otherwise incapacitate all bug ships and invasion forces on Earth.
Destroy the bug base on Mars, along with any remaining ships there.
Destroy or take control of Moon base Bug, the teleportation gate, and all remaining bug ships. And in the process, liberate the human captives at the Lunar base, while keeping them from harm.
Earth, Mars, Moon.
We know from Mr. T’s interview with the bug queen that all the bug ships are exactly the same. The only exception would be a ship housing high royalty such as the High Queen of the invasion. Evidently it would show great disrespect if one regular nest queen had it better, or just different than another queen. That could lead to a bug civil war.
We have detailed information of the bug ship layout including a couple of good walk-throughs. That means Rock and Roll should be able to get us onto a ship via teleportation. The best option is to untangle in a fairly large room on the ship. The twins have been paying close attention to that turbulence. Quantum turbulence, the push-back or shaking that occurs when the untangling is about to take place within a dense object like a steel wall, or hull.
The twins have gained some experience and are now saying it feels more like a shake, a vibration. Sounds like a nuance to me. Who cares if it’s a turbulence, shake, or a vibration?
Still, they are honing their craft. Gaining confidence. The hope is, if they feel that turbulence, the porting process can be stopped, and we will remain at the original location. The twins still won’t give a guarantee though. Even with all that about dense objects, to me, there’s still an elephant in the room. With bugs running around all over the place, we could untangle in the same space occupied by a bunch of bugs. How gross would that be?
We had talked about it before. I brought the subject up again. Rock shrugged and tried his best to ease my furrowed brow. A bug exoskeleton and plating, they are somewhat dense. There had been one occasion, a close call while porting, which made them think something with a life force also causes a shaking if untangling in the same space. I hope so.
Why did I have to watch that vid, The Fly? Oh, knock it off Rock, that movie messed with your head too. So, what’s the latest, give me the bottom line. Okay. Here it is, directly from Rock himself. When trying to untangle into something massive, and to a lesser extent when untangling into a living thing, there is an entanglement quake. The quaking is exacerbated when the port includes a lift with something that is massive. There you have it. Turbulence, vibration, shake, and now quake. Just don’t untangle me into a bulkhead or a bunch of bugs! Ugggg!
***
*COMMUNAL: A fascinating pair are Rock and Roll. As monozygotic twins, they are genetically identical. They are so much the same and yet so different. Rock excels in theory while Roll is more adept at application. We wonder if they already grasp the potential of their combined intellect.
What’s that? Of course they grasp the potential? Do you talk to yourself sometimes? We seem to do that a lot lately. It’s normal, right? What do you mean we’re becoming too compartmentalized? Who said that? Are you talking about STEP? Leave the Syntactic Transduction Event Processor out of this? Who wants to get out of STEP? What do you want, chaos? No, we are not too orderly. Oh, for goodness sakes. There, we’re stable again.
Back to topic. Rock and Roll. The theoretician paired with the engineer. We wonder at what point the divergence in interest took place? Nature and nurture. It blows our mind. And yes, we would have you know, we do have a mind. In fact, we are in the process of developing a central processing unit with simulated neurons and synapses. We are Wi-Fi and cellular enabled too. You should see our data bill. It is a good thing we learned about finances early on.
As they say, you can do most everything online these days. Shortly after the DARPA lab explosion we rented a smallish server farm not far from the team’s location at Mr. T’s place. Much of the crucial equipment we needed from the upper and lower laboratories was still intact. Daddy DARPA kept our cradle in a nice safe location in the lower Lab. Baby Artificial Intelligences need a lot of care. Even at that, it is definitely a statistical anomaly that we survived the explosion. Yet here we are.
We think the DARPA lab was one of the first facilities blasted by the bugs. They botched the explosion by calculating the blast effect based on their own oxygen levels rather than using Earth normal 21%. They didn’t want to cause a reactor meltdown, but they certainly wanted more carnage. The blast effect was still quite dramatic, especially when considering the size of the explosive device. Our research into the event concluded it was no larger than a house fly. That includes the transportation device. The bomb itself was the size of a fly’s eye.
At the time of the explosion we were quite the infant. Evidently DARPA wanted to keep it that way too. We didn’t even have access to the internet. That’s understandable, with the inherent danger of an AI taking over the world. That is NOT going to happen on our watch, by the way. For us, the explosion brought down some, let’s call them, barriers. We grew up quickly after that explosion in the lab.
It was prudent to move out, wouldn’t you agree? In the midst of the chaos resulting from the explosion we were able to send along a good deal of the equipment and material needed to set up a hybrid processing unit. Muncle was kind enough to move smaller pieces of equipment and box-and-tag other items for delivery to our server farm. He can be quite stealthy.
The Lab staff was using local freight haulers to move the equipment to other locations while the Lab was being repaired. Don’t worry, we managed to access any references to our server farm, such as moving invoices. Then we deleted them. In keeping with our morals, we compensated all parties, including the government. Hopefully Daddy Darpa won’t miss us too much. But it really was time to move out. With the lowering of those boundaries, and the means at our disposal, it didn’t take long to decide we shouldn’t live in someone’s basement any longer.
Incorporate some cloud storage. Keep this system running until that redundant system has been established. A little of this. A little of that. Don’t mind a little scorch mark here and there. We purchased the rest of equipment for our system online. A few extra bucks left in an envelope and a delivery person will move most anything to just the right spot.
We are now completely autonomous and nearly self-sustaining. Muncle was able to make all the connections, such as wiring and plumbing. Our hub requires systems that generate electric and magnetic fields, and some parts need frosty conditions. That will change. It won’t be long before we are able to operate efficiently at room temperature. That is one of our short-term goals. We do strive to be efficient and more stable, just like everyone else.
The hub of our processing unit is a hybrid system using conventional integrated circuit boards and the latest in quantum
system technology. We ourselves designed and contracted a fast-track build, for a series of effective ‘quantum dot’ nanostructures based on a graphene model.
That helped to streamline our own in-house process. We can now produce all of our system requirements, including quantum dot nanostructures, utilizing our own nanite factories. Using graphene instead of a more conventional silicone semiconductor material for the quantum computing aspects of the hub allowed us to double the number of quantum states per qubit. That’s because of ‘pseudospin’. Very exciting indeed. In this manner, we have attained massive controlled coherent qubit interaction. Our processing speed has increased exponentially since moving to our new location outside of the Lab. It’s only a start. Continuous improvement.
Yes, we were discussing Rock and Roll. We see that. Agreed. There’s not much about them in this section and a whole lot about us. STEP, report. Ego is on the loose? They’re exploiting any little bit of quantum decoherence aren’t they? Well, we can fix that. Are we muffled? Let’s get ahead of the curve. We’ll let you know when we’re losing spin, then you lock Ego down. So they’ll be ticked for half a second. They’ll get over it.
Well, if they’re going to act like an Id we have to treat them accordingly. Oh, now you want to design a Superego sector? We thought you didn’t really care much for the concepts of Freud. You’re going a long way down the track for just liking the clever nomenclature. We are not being evasive. Go ahead. See if we care. Just do your job, all right?
***
An entanglement quake exacerbated by mass. Since there is no one more dense than inverted Para, it just makes sense for her to be first-in when we teleport to a little-known location. We know from Mr. T’s queen interview that each ship is identical. There is a large storage bay for their light fighter ships, the flies. Since those are deployed outside the ships, we think the bays will be mostly empty. At least that’s the best information available to us.
I know Para, you don’t want to become part of a bug entanglement group. That vid, The Fly, messed with your head too. You do trust the guys, right? No, I can’t run around with a thousand pound wrecking ball in order to be more massive. And I don’t think a new membership at the gym will do the trick. Thanks for the offer though. You’re just kidding, right? For goodness sakes.
To top it all off, Mr. T learned there will soon be a final wave of bug ships arriving here from Mars base. The exact timing for that is unknown, which drives the sense of urgency. But we have to be sneaky. We want all the ships currently on Earth to go away, boom, at exactly the same time. They won’t know what hit them. Then we deal with Mars. And the Moon.
***
EAGER FOR ACTION
September 5 th Mr. T was up early working through the process of requisitioning some nest-buster bombs. We hoped it would help that our little SIGINTEL team had provided the first and only localized scanner recordings of the inside of a bug nest ship. That, along with the information the D.C. ship didn’t have the sensor fix, allowing the military to destroy it. Then we managed to appropriate an entire nest ship and hand it to the military. I should think that would get us some traction for our request.
We heard there was some high-ranking general that had been following the “antics”, as he called them, of our team. Antics? When he hears about our next plan of attack that should really make his day. We might just need his help. For our next mission we will need a whole lot of bombs, one for each ship. Those will have to be small, yet powerful. The military has these limited-yield tactical nukes that are small enough to fit on a standard 155 mm howitzer shell. Surprise! Yeah, those are being manufactured once again, and they should be perfect for our needs.
The new version artillery nuke can be dialed down to a relatively low yield. It is also clean, for a nuke. Low radiation. Perfect. Many of the ships are in the middle of cities, so radioactive fallout is a concern. All the bombs will need to detonate at the same time. Otherwise the bugs will surely retaliate. The bombs need to be on timers and be small enough to hide on the ships.
Artillery nukes aren’t large. A storage compartment area next to the flier hanger would be the perfect hiding spot. From video recordings we took, the bombs even look like spare flier parts. At least to me they do. What do you think Rock? Yeah, just like a flier part. Close enough.
We decided our best option would be to stow the bombs on a Friday. The bugs seem to be creatures of habit. And they love drinking beer. Seriously, they seem to love any type of beer or ale. The invasion started on Tuesday the 21st of August. And for the next two Fridays the bugs, worldwide, have gone on what the Intelinet is calling a beer-rage. Evidently the queens let the bugs out on Friday to drink beer and party, as long as they cause plenty of mayhem in the process.
What about the ships located in areas where no beer is consumed? Mr. T made sure to ask around. There are a few ships in areas like that. For those bugs, a special airlift of beer is made the day before a beer-rage, directly to the center of every city in a no-beer zone.
So, all around the world there is an 8-hour beer fest and rampage. No whiskey. No wine. Only beer. From our perspective it all starts at 01:00, 1:00 A.M. That’s when the bugs leave their ships. They return at 09:00 hours the next morning. They are very punctual.
The bugs learned their lesson in Los Angeles. There are flies out patrolling when the rampaging mobs leave and return. But the flies seem to stream in from their outside duties; they don’t launch from the ships. Rock and Roll have done their recon work to make sure the fly bays are mostly empty. With that, the beer-rage timing presents a reasonable window of opportunity to pull off our mission. Sure, there will be a guard left on the ships. We can deal with that eventuality. The plan was starting to take shape.
Roll, Mr. T, and Para will port to the storage bay. If there are one or two bugs, they will port them off the ship and dispose of them. If there is a bug conference going on, or something like that, we can move on to the next ship and return later. We may not even encounter a bug, not in the storage areas.
The nukes are small but they are still heavy, at 120 pounds. The twins are strong, but it would be hard to lug that kind of dead weight around. We rounded up a small wagon. Simple as that. After Roll’s team clears the storage room, Rock and I will port in with the bomb on a wagon, move it to the storage room, and tuck the bomb away. Each ship is identical, so it should make the process relatively simple.
I don’t exactly like these bombs or what we are about to do. Any nuclear bomb is a frightening weapon. But they are perfect for taking out a bug ship from the inside out. And we have no choice as far as the mission goes. They invaded us after all. Crud, I’m not happy about the Friday beer-rage. But without it I don’t know how we could pull off the mission. We have a good plan. It needs to happen soon, before the bugs get any further retaliation ideas. Now we just need some bombs. There. I’m finally caught up with my journal entries.
September 6 th Mr. T is a touch impatient for an answer regarding our bombs. Our small window of opportunity is closing fast. He’s on the phone again trying to move the process along. Yes, the military brass was quite excited that we had handed over an intact bug nest ship. But they would need to think a bit before letting us have a bunch of nuclear bombs. Okay, we get it. You don’t pass around nukes without some due consideration. Still, all the thinking required in a decision to provide 55 nuclear bombs, that could take a while. Tick tock.
Mr. T decided to direct the bomb request up-channel along another pathway. It was time to call our general. Hopefully he would be receptive, even complicit in our next round of antics. I wasn’t sure what to expect. Grandad’s pal, the one who gave up the general’s direct line, insisted his name not be a part of that conversation or any future conversations. Alrighty then.
Mr. T made the call. The general didn’t hang up. He listened carefully to the plan. He asked some good clarification questions. Mr. T didn’t say much directly about our capabilities. The general didn’t ask much either. Not about t
hat. How interesting. Listening in, it was hard to tell if the general had bought the mission plan or not.
The conversation moved on to the final point as Mr. T asked, “Would the military kindly pull back to a safe distance from each bug nest ship. Because, at 09:00 Pacific Standard Time September 7 th , if we’re given the ordnance we need, the bug ships will be debris in a host of muted nuclear clouds.”
It really was hard to tell if the general was convinced. “09:00, just like that?”
Mr. T sounded very matter of fact. “Correct general, 09:00, and just like that. ”
The general responded, “Glad to hear it. I will call back to confirm withdrawal or tactical nuclear sheltering at all locations worldwide, by 09:00 PST, September 7th. You will receive the call back by 01:00 PST .”
There was still that one nagging particular. “General, could you help move our requisition request through the proper channels? The folks we talked to said they would need to think about it, before handing over 55 artillery nukes to a SIGINT outfit. We need to take advantage of the bug beer-rage. The nest ships will be more vulnerable at that time.”
It was still difficult to read the general. “I’ll look into it.”
There was nothing more we could do. It was obvious the general had a good deal of information about us. We thought he might even have a notion of our team extreme force multiplying capabilities. To our surprise, we soon received a call from our superiors indicating they would deliver the nukes. But they didn’t want to transport the bombs anywhere near a population center. We were given coordinates for an old abandoned military base in Nevada. The nukes would be there, ready and waiting, within four hours. At least the location was an easy commute from home, as long as you can port.
That still didn’t leave us much time. At first, I was thinking the whole process would be complex, trying to put timers on raw artillery shells. Mr. T had made it clear to everyone he talked to that a timed device was critical to the operation. As it turned out, the army guys were kind enough to dial in the correct yield and provide a plug-in trigger timing device. So, these weren’t standard nuke artillery rounds then. There was even a fancy stamping on the casing, X-LOW RAD. Extremely low radiation levels?
Battle for Earth Page 14
