John Ringo - Von Neumann’s War

“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 to 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.”