John Ringo - Von Neumann’s War

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 metal.” 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.”