Von Neumann’s War

by John Ringo

  “No way, I’m that stupid…” He crawled under the folding table and noticed two coaxial cables lying on the floor. One was about six feet long and coiled up and not connected at either end. The other was the end of the cable that came from the other antenna hidden in the rocks outside on top of the mountain. Neither were connected so there was no antenna connected to the system. He slapped his forehead. “I guess I am.”

  Richard plugged the short cable into the back of the analyzer and the other to a two-port switch. He ran the test antenna into one port and the above-ground antenna into the other.

  “That should do it.” He pressed the reset button on the menu screen and presto! The computer processors in the room appeared on the screen as spikes around 2.4, 4.3, and 5.1 gigahertz. “Good, now let’s take a look up top, shall we?” He flipped the two-port switch to the B port that was connected to the antenna above ground. The screen filled with radio noise and several peaks across the spectrum.

  As he watched the radio noise spectral content, nine peaks that were just above the noise floor began to rise in amplitude. The peaks rose to only about ten percent above the noise floor and they also shifted in frequency from left to right in what appeared to be random order, all of them dancing around about 1.4 gigahertz or so.

  “Hunh? What the hell is that?” he muttered and adjusted the gain on the receiver. The peaks rose from the noise floor slightly. “Spread spectrum? Hmm… centered around 1.4 gigahertz… I wonder if that means anything… hmmm.” Richard rubbed his unruly and slightly graying beard thoughtfully. Then he nearly jumped out of his skin when his instant messenger alarm dinged at him.

  * * *

  RussianChick6300: Come to cabin now!

  Megiddo: Why?

  RussianChick6300: Alien robots here!

  Megiddo: B right there!

  RussianChick6300: Hury they r everyw

  * * *

  They must have cut the Internet connection to the cabin. Richard jumped into action and tripped over himself trying to get out of the computer desk chair he was sitting in. He nearly knocked himself out on the floor, but fortunately he was only dazed by the thwack his forehead made when it hit the decking. Rubbing between his eyes at the red mark forming there, he ran to the shaft main room and out the door to the four-wheeler. He started it up and motored up the shaft.

  The briefings that he had read on the Internet and the few eyewitness accounts that had made it out of Europe came to mind, so he stopped the vehicle a good hundred meters or more inside the shaft and ran the rest of the way. Fortunately, he was in good shape from all those trips up and down the mine. He reached the mine’s entrance and eased out into the pathway that led uphill to the cabin. There was no sign of alien robots that he could see, so he darted across the small clearing at the entrance where the logging road ran into the mine. He stayed near the edge of the road hoping that the trees would help cover him — but he didn’t count on it.

  One thing he couldn’t understand was, why now? Richard had been preparing for the bots and all the intel and briefings that had been released to the public had suggested that they were not any farther than Greenland and that they would not be to the States for some time. Worse than that was the fact that the bots typically attacked the big cities first. So why in the hell were they here in the northwestern mountains of South Carolina in the middle of nowhere? This was too soon. He hadn’t had time to bot-proof the cabin.

  About a hundred feet down the logging road he turned uphill on a footpath that they had worn as a shortcut up to the cabin. The path led him through the rocks and the oak trees that were typical of northwestern South Carolina woods along the Appalachian trail and wound its way to the rear of the small dovetail construction log cabin. As Richard turned the corner to the side of the cabin where the driveway ended there sat Helena. In front of her were pieces of four tires that looked like the steel belts had been ripped right out of the rubber — and the wheels were nowhere to be seen — and what appeared to be pieces of automobile carpet and upholstery, pieces of plastic, vinyl and rubber. The mess looked like a monster had eaten their pickup truck and vomited out anything that wasn’t metal. There was nothing left of the Ford F-250. Ford tough was apparently not tough enough to withstand alien robots.

  “Are you… harmed?” Richard touched Helena on the shoulder.

  “Harmed, uh, nyet. Pissed to hell, da!” She was sitting down on the edge of the driveway fiddling with her jeans. The zipper and snaps had been torn away and the pants were basically ripped open at the crotch.

  “Where are they?”

  “Gone. Gone as quick as dey came. Goddamn tings took every pot and pan in de goddamn cabin. Even de sonovabitch bedsprings are gone. Look, my best goddamned jeans are ruined. Dey ate de televeesion, de forks and spoons, de couch springs, and even de goddamn truck. Dey ripped it to fuckin’ bits.” Helena sat shaking her head. “Tought you said no goddamn worries for long time?”

  “Yeah, I don’t understand that part. It doesn’t make sense to me. What did they look like?” Richard could tell Helena was shaken up. Not from her colorful use of the English language — that was her nature and Richard had long since gotten used to that — but the drained look on her face. She was pale and looked like she had spent every bit of energy in her body the way a marathoner looks at the end of the race. Or the way a soldier looks after a battle — afraid, exhausted, and just glad to still be alive.

  Richard sat down beside her looking at the pieces of the truck — so much useless plastic, vinyl, and rubber. Even the rubber insulating coatings of the sparkplug and other wires were left behind, but the metal wires themselves had been pulled right out.

  “Dey look like dat goddamned ting dere if you can put it back togedder. I tought you’d vant one so I beats the last one to fucking pieces with a stick of stove wood. Oh, dey took de goddamned stove too.” Helena pointed at what appeared to be a metal boomerang about a meter across. Then she pointed at the hole in the roof and wall where the wood-burning stove had been yanked out. “Dat’s gonna leak like hell.”

  “But you’re not hurt? You certain?” Richard put his hand on her shoulder and glanced back and forth between her, the truck remains, the hole in the cabin, and the smashed bot. There was a trickle of blood on her right earlobe where an earring had once been. The lobe wasn’t torn through but the hole had been treated roughly.

  “I’m okay.” She rubbed at her ears and looked at the blood on her thumb and forefinger. “Shit. Go look at de damned ting.” Helena pulled her hair back behind her head and tied it into a ponytail. Then she patted the stick of stove wood that she had used as a battle club, “I’m gonna keep you, da.”

  Richard had to look at the bot — he had to. It was smashed to hell and gone — Helena had made certain of that. After a bit of inspection, Richard was fairly certain that the alien thing had once been a metal boomerang about a meter or so from tip to tip. It had been about ten to twenty centimeters thick and all of the surfaces were smooth and rounded and seamless. But now it was bent up and dented and had a couple of pieces busted off of it. On its underside was a smaller similar boomerang about a third the size. The smaller boomerang appeared to be molded seamlessly directly to the larger one. There was a large crack through both of them and there were several peripheral pieces scattered about it. Nothing about it, other than the fact that it was an alien Von Neumann probe, seemed to be unearthly — at least not from a quick visual inspection. But Richard had every intent of taking a closer look, a much closer look.

  “This looks like common metals.” Richard kicked at it.

  “Da. Like a beer can. Oh, dey took dat too. And de refrigerator.” Helena stood wielding her stove wood battle club, and carefully stepped beside Richard and the bot.

  “You said they were eating anything metal, right?”

  “Da. Dey even pulled de laptop right out of my hands. Not much metal dere?” she asked.

  “Oh, plenty. The battery is most likely tasty to them if they eat me
tal.” Richard kicked a broken piece of the alien probe over closer to the rest of it.

  “I see. Den dey takes de faucets and the goddamned television, and de power wires from de walls all gone too.”

  “Then why didn’t they eat it too?” Richard pointed at the bashed probe.

  “Oh, dey had already gone. Dis one seemed fat or slow or something.”

  “Hmm… or pregnant,” he said. Richard knelt down and rolled the probe back over and looked at the twinning pieces. “If that’s what you want to call it.”

  * * *

  “Well, I don’t know what you would call it, but that performs like the womb, birthing canal, and whatever else these things need to replicate all in one.” Alice pointed out to Roger, Alan, and Tom who had all crowded around her computer in her lab. This lab actually looked like a laboratory fit for a science fiction movie. Major Gries would have been more satisfied with the various computer monitors, instrument panels with flashing multicolored lights, and digital readouts. Of course, there were plenty of wires running around as well. In fact, the same metal octopus convention that had taken place in Roger’s lab must have annexed part of Alice’s laboratory as well.

  “Do they actually have sexes?” Alan asked.

  “No, no. If we continue to use biological analogies I would say it’s more like cell division than anything. Somehow this thing here…” Alice highlighted a region of the electron microscope image on her computer screen. “Well, this is the region where I think the biological analog of the nucleus is and where it starts to fission.”

  “Fission — you mean it’s radioactive?” Alan asked.

  “Alan my boy, I think she means biological fission.” Tom grinned at his colleague.

  “Right, I would have never figured this out without examining the twinning bot that we have in the holding area downstairs. We were lucky Shane’s group got that one.” Alice continued to flip through images on her computer screen.

  “When the bot was first picked apart that small portion near its center was detected but its purpose was unclear to us,” Roger said.

  “Yeah, we saw that. It’s just a solid chunk of material as far as we could tell, ” Alan added, waving his arms around.

  “Well, it’s a solid chunk of material, but with some apparently random microscopic hollow ‘tubes’ running through it. I think this is the central location for their reproduction system.”

  “We had no clue what it was for. You mean you think you know what it is now… that’s a big improvement.” Roger was excited to have made some progress.

  “A big improvement indeed!” Tom agreed. “Do you know what the material is?”

  “Well, I’m not completely certain, but at the atomic level it’s common Earthly materials. The material was identified by the folks at NC State.” Alice explained. She pointed at a window on the computer screen, a graph from a vaporization mass spectral analysis. “They took a sample I sent them and put it through spectral analysis. It turned out to be common stuff: carbon, iron, aluminum, titanium, nickel, silicon, trace amounts of cesium, strontium, sodium, lead, and uranium, but mostly aluminum. But, from X rays and electron microscopy of the solid piece, it appears to be some very complex heterogonous material with a structure similar to how a crystal grows but much more compacted and complex. And there are regions within the crystalline structure that are filled with pure elements — heavy elements.”

  “By heavy, you mean like uranium, cesium, etc.? Unstable elements?” Tom asked as he peered at the computer monitor.

  “Right, most of them appear to be radioactive types, but none of them are decaying as far as I can tell. This is wild and amazingly detailed stuff.” Alice scratched her head.

  “So what do you think is going on, Alice?” Roger asked.

  “Well, I think that this is the machine’s processor. What we’re calling the brain tube is, I think, mislabeled. This is the core of the machine. The brain tube thing, I think is more like a command and data handling tube or a subprocessor. Somehow I think the brain tube is where external commands are received and stored. But this region here in the center of the bot, this is the real brain. This is what the bot uses to make decisions absent external commands and it’s here where they split.” Alice leaned back in her chair. “But…”

  “But what?” Roger didn’t like the uncertain tone of her voice.

  “It’s too much for me. I have no idea how the commands are implemented. This is more like DNA than logic gates. Only person I know that ever worked on anything even similar was Dr. Horton at Princeton back before they ran him off.” Alice shook her head. “I’m pushing the limits of what I can do. We could use more help.”

  “Well, then why don’t we find this Dr. Horton and bring him in?” Alan asked.

  “Why not?” Tom agreed.

  “Well, there is your problem,” Alice said with a grimace. “After Richard left Princeton, oh, that was seven or eight years ago, he dropped off the face of the Earth. The only place anybody ever hears from him is on his favorite late night talk radio show.”

  “Yeah, okay, what radio show? Maybe we can have them put out a call for him if they’re still broadcasting on the Internet.” Roger didn’t believe that finding somebody would be difficult with the resources available to them. If they had to, the entire FBI could be brought to the task.

  “Well, he calls in to that Ret Ball show, the Truth Nationwide, all the time as Megiddo,” Alice said, smiling slightly. “He never realized that his students knew that was him, but it was always obvious to us.”

  “Oh my God. You mean that whacko is a real scientist?” Alan asked.

  “You’ve heard of him.”

  * * *

  “Mr. President, the Internet traffic across the country being monitored by the NSA project is turning up some interesting information.” General Mitchell sat down at the conference table in the War Room. He put a jumpdrive into the laptop connected to the flat screen monitors and brought up a map of the country.

  “The Internet is just fascinating isn’t it?” the President said.

  “What do you mean, sir?” Mitchell asked.

  “Well, more than two-thirds of the world has been eaten by alien machines, most all phones are out, all telecommunications is out, but the damned Internet is still clicking away. There’s probably still plenty of porn sites available.” The President shrugged. “That damned Al Gore was brilliant. All those algorithms.”

  “Uh, right,” Mitchell was, almost, sure that was the President’s attempt at a joke. “This is actually the type of disaster that Dr. Licklider had in mind when he started the ARPANET concept back in 1962.”

  “He expected alien invasion?” The President raised an eyebrow.

  “Uh, no sir, or at least not to my knowledge he didn’t. I meant a massive global scale war that would knock out comms around the world. The ARPANET was to enable communications between various shelters and redoubt locations in the event that the Cold War ever got hot.”

  The President considered the general for a moment and the Chairman realized that his leg had been pulled. At least, he thought it had. Sometimes the President’s sense of humor, and it could be quite black, was so dry that even his closest friends weren’t sure if he was joking.

  “What kind of interesting data has Dr. Licklider provided us, Kevin?” the President asked. He spent most of his time in the War Room nowadays. Planning, hoping, and praying that somebody would figure out a way to stop these damned menacing alien robots. So far, the Americas and Australia were about all that was left of the world, but nobody expected that to last much longer.

  “Well, as you see the red dots scattered across the country sir, these are bot sightings or incidents.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “In more than a thousand different locations, there have been boomerangs either sighted flying overhead, wandering through the terrain, or actually attacking and acquiring metal. One incident that was reported on the Internet to a radio show claims that
his pickup truck was devoured by a swarm of bots leaving nothing behind but the plastic, vinyl, and rubber parts. There are several other similar cases.”

  “How long has this been going on?”

  “From the report we just received from the NSA it appears that the first incident was reported about three days ago, and the sightings have picked up nonlinearly.” Mitchell flipped the screen to a graph of the bot sighting frequency versus date.

  “What does this mean, Kevin?” The President didn’t like the sound of this. A chill ran up and down his spine and his skin began to crawl.

  “They’re doing just like we would do before an attack sir. I think this is reconnaissance.”

  * * *

  “No shit it’s fricking recon,” Gries responded to Roger after he read the report to him. “I don’t need a brain the size of Chicago to figure that one out. We recon them, they recon us. The side with the big battalions still wins.”

  “Ronny agrees also. We’re getting close to an all-out attack from the bots… and—”

  “We’re not any closer to figuring out how to beat ’em!” Shane finished Roger’s sentence for him.

  “Goddamnit! Goddamnit! Goddamnit!” Roger pounded his fist on his desk and then kicked his trash can across the office.

  Chapter 21

  “How in the hell did you get these things here?” Colonel Matthew “Bull” Ridley ran his fingers across the empennage of the sleek composite aircraft in front of him and whistled. “Nice.”

  “Yeah, I thought the damned bots were taking out all air traffic globally now.” Sergeant Cady said looking at Alan and Dr. John Fisher, who were standing beside the squadron of sleek swept-wing and forward canard aircraft. Both Alan and John were looking like an opossum with a certified north Alabama shit-eating grin.