John Ringo - Von Neumann’s War

Alice smiled. “I call it an IBot.”

“An IBot?” Roger took the device from Alan and looked closer at it.

“You mean like an IPod?” Traci asked, nudging up closer to Roger to get a better look at the thing and to be closer to Roger.

“Bingo, Hooters Girl.” Alice continued to be impressed by the former Hooters waitress. “Using the codekey and the bot handshaking protocol that Dr. Horton discovered and the frequency modulation your guys found, Roger, I constructed a little music box for the bots. Any bot that gets within ten or twenty meters of this thing, the range is depending on terrain of course, will try to handshake with it. The IBot will respond with the proper codekey for the handshaking protocol and send the ‘prepare to receive’ code that I isolated from the decrypted data Dr. Horton sent us.

“Ah, and then you play it a song?” Roger scratched his head.

“Yes. And since the little memory chip on board the IBot is only large enough to store about one song, I programmed it to continually loop.”

“Ha! So the damned things get a song stuck in their head?” Alan laughed. “That is freakin’ brilliant.”

“But what does that do for us?” Roger asked, pretty sure he understood but he wanted to be positive.

“Well, the data we have on the bots tells us that while they’re handshaking and downloading they stop other activities.” Alice explained. “It’s like getting in the elevator and hearing the elevator music. You are a captive audience so you stop what you are doing and listen to it.”

“Have you tried it on our bot yet?” Roger asked.

“Oh yes. Watch this.” Alice tapped a few keys on her laptop and pressed a button on the overhead projector. The projector displayed what her laptop monitor displayed on a blank wall of the lab. “See, this is the output from the spectrum analyzer box connected to my USB port. Here around 1.4 gigahertz you see the com signal from the bot hopping around. Now watch this.” Alice took the IBot from Roger and pressed the membrane on-switch of the IBot and a second signal appeared on the screen. Then the bot’s signal began to shift and change and the handshaking protocol appeared.

Alice tapped another window open that displayed the decrypted datalink between the bot and the IBot. Strings of ones and zeroes scrolled down the window.

“It’s working!” Alan said. “Look, this string here. That is the song right? And the bot is just humming along with it. Check out the mimicking signal.”

“Yeah, I haven’t figured that part out yet, but who cares. Maybe it really is getting stuck in the thing’s head. Who knows?” Alice shrugged and smiled. “The main thing is—”

“It works!” Roger rubbed his hands together.

“What song are you playing them, Alice?” Traci asked.

“ ‘Lola.’ You know, ‘We drank champagne and danced all night…’ That one.”

Alan laughed. “Goddamned hippie stuff. Why couldn’t y’all used some Skynyrd or some Guns’n’Roses or something?”

“Well, you could program it however you want—” Alice started.

“No! Leave it just the way it is and get the blueprints to every redoubt left. Alan, figure out a way to harden it. I want as many of these things as the human race can manufacture. Put everybody making them.” Roger went into deputy secretary of defense mode. “I have to call the President. Traci, go find Ronny and Danny and have them meet me in the red-phone conference room.”

“Sure.” She nodded and left.

“Alan, get Top and Gries down here and get them thinking of a plan.”

“Let’s get on this!”

“So why not broadcast it worldwide and shut them all down at once?” the President asked.

“The problem, Mr. President, is that this type of communication signal is not like standard radio. It’s more like a broadband wireless connection. You see, you can pump out a lot of data over the link, but due to the physics of how they work even higher power transceivers are limited to a few hundred meters or so.” Of course it was more complicated even than the most sophisticated human broadband technologies, but the principle and the physics were the same. This wasn’t the final answer to ridding humanity of the alien Von Neumann probes but it was a start and Roger wanted to get this information out to the President as soon as he could. Which was why they were using an Internet video call.

“So, could we set up safe zones the way the airports and cybercafés used to have wifi zones?” the NSA asked.

“Absolutely. And I’m even thinking we could mount them on vehicles and they might work,” Ronny Guerrero added. “We’re effectively spoofing the bots’ IFF capabilities.”

“That’s right, Ronny. I’ve got my team modifying some broadband wireless routers to transmit the signal. It should work. We have to hope the bots don’t get wise to our plan.”

Roger had finally done something that might help. Oh, he knew he didn’t do it himself. But his project had. He had put the right team together, found the right experts when they needed them, and acquired the right resources. It had worked at least enough to offer some hope. The first hope he had felt in the months since he saw the intel on what was left of Europe and how people were living — no, surviving — there.

“We should use this IBot thing and start a plan of action and go after these things,” General Mitchell suggested.

“Well, we can’t mass produce them fast enough for an all-out invasion. But we believe we can produce enough to set up a perimeter over four or five redoubt areas within the next month,” Roger said.

“A month! Those things will have eaten more than a hundred cities by then!” the secretary of defense shouted. “We found out where the major tube was headed; it dropped square on Oakland. Now they’re spreading on the west coast as well!”

“Actually, a hundred and twenty-five cities at the current rate of growth,” Roger replied. “But I’m sorry, sir, that is best we can do for now. We can choose the redoubts and start evacuating everybody to them now.”

“Then how long will it take to manufacture enough of these, uh, IBots did you call them? How long will it take to make enough of them to go after the invaders?”

“Current rate of growth versus our manufacturing capabilities suggest perhaps a few years, sir,” Roger admitted with a sigh. “We’re behind the eight ball. But it will help with local defense. Just getting the darn things to slow down is a miracle.”

“Don’t forget, Mr. President, that this is a defense mechanism and we just now learned how the bots communicate,” Ronnie added. “We might develop new technologies and strategies sooner. But right now, this is the best chance we’ve got to slow them down.”

“I guess this is something. So, Kevin, you and Jim and Vicki get the rest of the Joint Chiefs together and determine which are the most strategic redoubts and let’s get this move started now.” For so long he had been sitting idle with little hope and no plan of action. At least now they had something. It wasn’t much, but not-zero was entirely different from zero.

“Richard.” Jeff handed him the last of the strapping material. “I can’t tell you how grateful Sara Jo and I are to you and Helena. We… uh… we would…”

“You’d be dead, Jeff,” Richard said emotionlessly. “You’d be dead, your wife would be dead and your kids would be dead. Hand me the RoboGrips… uh, no the big ones.” Jeff handed him the grips, trying not to shake his head over Richard’s entire lack of tact. Richard tightened down the last of the lag bolts through the bot’s midsection to the waterwheel and then he tightened the strapping material down. “There. That should just about do it.” He crawled back down the ladder to the platform below the waterwheel. The cool mist of the waterfall soaked his skin refreshingly.