Von Neumann’s War

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.

Richard examined the “brain tube” of the alien bot that Helena had acquired for him. The twinning bot did not have a brain tube yet, but it did have a nucleus. Assuming that the biological analogy held, then a higher function organ would develop first in a fetus. This led him to the conclusion that the brain tube was not a first order function and that its “mother” was performing that function — whatever that was — for it.

He soon came to the realization that the government’s second guess was closer — communications. When does a fetus’s vocal cords develop? The electron microscopy and X ray data in the government report led him to the conclusion that there were pseudorandom semiconductor and unlike metal junctions. These junctions only appeared to be random. After several fractal pattern overlays Richard discovered that there was a methodology to the junctions. They were logic gates. In fact, the logic gates of the tube shaped device appeared much like the circuitry — but on a much smaller and more complex scale — of a transceiver system.

The tube was a solid-state software ultra-wideband transceiver — it had to be. That is where that spread spectrum signal must have come from. Without having a powered and operational bot to study there was no way to really be certain. But, it looked like the type of device that might have created those odd signals that he had detected with his spectrum analyzer the day the bots attacked the cabin.

Those signals were spread spectrum and centered about 1.420 gigahertz — the so-called famous 21 centimeter line from radio astronomy and SETI circles. Did that mean anything? Richard was formulating that in the back of his mind.

The government had been monitoring the bots’ signals for some time and a more detailed analysis of them was in their report. The fact that the center portion of their communications systems was around the band that hydrogen emitted and that astronomers thought would be the band that one day aliens would broadcast a message to us in could be just a coincidence. Horton thought it could be significant but none of the scientists and engineers from the government program had much to offer on that regard. He would think on that later. Right now he had more imminent and pressing matters; the bots were coming and he needed to find a way to stop them.

From the size of the microscopic conductor tube running from the power block of the bot’s interior to the transceiver tube it didn’t look like the bot was designed to transmit anything at large distances or at high bandwidths. At the same time there did not appear to be large receiver amplifiers within the thing’s systems either. That told Richard that the bots were not receiving direct detailed data downloads from these mechanized central city locations that were discussed in the government reports. Not unless the other pieces of the bot like the motivator ball, the power section and so on had some sort of magical communication system. But Richard did not believe that to be the case. His theory was that the bots communicated large data dumps through physical contact and/or short-range dissemination of instructions. There was also the possibility of the DNA including built-in hardwired instructions.

It was possible that operating instruction upgrades were installed each time these things flew to some central city location or since they were analogous to biological cells, perhaps when they reached a particular cellular density they would evolve. He was speculating there.