John Ringo - Von Neumann’s War

After her conflict with the alien machines, Helena had come around on the subject of leaving the cabin for more underground digs. The mine suited her just fine, although she did insist on carrying a large piece of stove wood around with her everywhere she went. She had even carved and sanded down one end of it for a handle and wrapped it with cloth and tape.

Richard at first had thought Helena would be a humorous sight wielding her oversized handmade billy club. But there was something about her slender five-nine Russian frame and accent, her long black hair, her insistence on wearing low cut worn-out jeans and skin-tight tank-tops, no bra, canvas sneakers, and toting around a mammoth war club that gave her a “warrior princess” quality that really got Richard going.

Other than science and solving problems, getting Richard excited was usually a hard thing to do. He even debated with himself at times whether he actually loved her — though he knew it was quite likely that she didn’t really love him. Mutual convenience best described their marriage. He had needed companionship and she needed to get out of Russia. But he found he liked it a lot when she wandered around with her club.

The mine was fully operational at least to within the limitations of the power available by the waterwheel. The little hydroelectric plant that Richard had put together would power the water heater, refrigerator, freezer, a few lights, a television, a computer, and maybe one piece of scientific equipment at a time. Using the backup battery systems at the same time enabled him to power a few more of his scientific instruments. The batteries had to recharge all night. He had hoped for a little more horsepower out of the underground stream, but the flow rate was just too low to create enough torque for instantaneous power needs.

“I wish I could have found enough fissile material to go nuclear,” he said to himself. As it was he didn’t have the power to drive the electron microscope. “Would be nice to do some X rays and some microscopy of your friend.” He nodded at the bot laid out across his workbench at the edge of the entrance into the lab shaft from the main chamber.

“You don’t tink dat you could’ve stolen plutonium and gotten away with it?” Helena peered over the book she was reading and glanced at Richard. He had been quietly working for some time now, but when he spoke out loud to himself Helena had a hard time ignoring him. He was her entertainment .

“Huh? Plutonium? Oh, no. If I did, we would have it, ” he said nonchalantly and smiled through his thick, unruly graying beard at her. “Maybe I’ll figure something else out.”

“Well, de goddamned robots fly. Dey must have batteries or someting in dem.” She popped a handful of shelled pecans in her mouth from the Ziploc bag on the folding end table near the couch. “Ought to use de goddamned ting for sometin,” she said through a mouthful, brushed her bangs from her forehead, yawned, slipped her shoes off letting one dangle from her left big toe, and went back to reading.

“Yes, yes, power. They must have power, but where and how…” Richard had been examining the bot that Helena had killed for him but was not progressing as fast as he had hoped. He needed X rays and electron microscopy and he didn’t have the power for those machines. So, he didn’t have that detailed of data. That is, until he heard the latest posts on the Ret Ball show.

Fortunately, most of the data he wanted had been measured and compiled by a government program and was posted on a website for everyone to see. And oddly enough, they particularly wanted him, Dr. Richard Horton, a.k.a. Megiddo, to look at it and get back to them . Irony.

But Richard didn’t trust the government. No sir, not as far as he could throw them. He knew that they had been covering up the knowledge of the alien probes for a long time. That was no different than the other conspiracies they had performed. There was the Kennedy assassination, the real reason behind Viet Nam and the Gulf Wars, Roswell, the giant floating black triangles, the secrets of the pyramids around the world, remote viewing, Watergate, alien stealth technologies discovered at Area 51, the real reason for double blind drug testing, and countless others.

Their mishandling of these technologies and this knowledge now had humanity in a bind. It was their fault. And now they wanted Megiddo to bail them out. Why didn’t they want his help when he tried to operate within the confines of the system? Why had academia run him out of the community? It was their fault — a conspiracy to keep the truth from humanity! But Megiddo was a bigger man than that and he would save Helena and the rest of the world. Well, Helena probably didn’t need saving, but the rest of the world most certainly did.

So he had downloaded the information carefully, analyzing it for government imbedded spybots and other tracking software. Fortunately, he didn’t even have to use the government site. As soon as it was posted, it had been mirrored across multiple servers, including two in which he had inserted trojans that gave him full security control.

Once he had scrutinized it and was convinced that the data was real and bug free, he started studying it. He studied it intensely for several days, stopping only occasionally for a snack or a nap. Helena mostly ignored him and went about her business, but every now and then she would check on him or offer him a sandwich or tell him that he should come to bed.

Sleep was the last thing on Richard’s mind. Occasionally Helena would bait him to come to bed with the allure of sex, but even that — as exciting and enjoyable as it was — was merely a distraction from studying the bots. In fact, his mind was so hot with new ideas and sizzling from the new information he had gotten that the pleasure he got from studying the details of the bot was perhaps even more enticing than Helena. Perhaps. If only I had more power to drive my equipment .

The government report was actually really good science and reverse engineering, but there was nothing there that Richard saw as the shining tidbit of information that would save humanity. It was only the groundwork. But somebody had to do the groundwork and having it already done and wrapped up in a nice four-hundred-and-seventy-three page pdf file package made getting to the real part of the work happen a lot faster.

There was a significant portion of the government research that seemed… familiar… to him. For some reason it triggered a sense of déjà vu. He couldn’t really put his finger on it and he wasn’t a hundred percent sure why at first until he came across the proposed idea that the bots used a form of machine DNA encoded at the subatomic level. He remembered one of his students from years ago at Princeton really intrigued by his work on that subject and this report had that kind of flare.

Richard followed that line of reasoning for a few days and finally he began to understand a general idea of how the alien machines system hierarchy and architecture flowed. There was a central nucleus that was the real controlling mechanism of the individual bot. Like a single celled organism this nucleus was where the replication blueprints resided. It was also there that the “messenger RNA” — an analogy of course — delivered instructions throughout the rest of the bot to the subsystems.

The actual messenger RNA were something rather amazing. Richard had a wild-ass-guess that the instructions were actually delivered via some sort of controlled nuclear decay process. How the bots kept the “pebbles” of unstable elements from decaying until they needed them to was a technology beyond anything humanity had discovered, but he was certain that was how the instruction packets were sent throughout the bot. His former student — what was her name? — was onto something there, but that was a harder problem. Then there was this tube the government had first wrongly labeled the “brain tube,” which wasn’t a brain tube at all. The government’s second guess was a communications device.