Von Neumann’s War

The doors to the elevator closed and elevator music began playing. The song was familiar to Alice and she started humming along with the tune. She seemed to recall it being an old sixties or seventies song about a transvestite. Gries seemed to relax and lean his left shoulder against the elevator wall, but he still kept a watchful eye. The sergeant major was lightly nodding his head up and down with the tune but other than the slight nodding he was solid as a rock. Alice relaxed a little more as the elevator came to a stop.

The doors opened and immediately the major was standing alert and Top worked his way in front of the cart, the elevator music no longer even a memory to him. Then the idea hit Alice like a dam bursting and flooding a valley below it. Her eyes widened and she was caught up in the idea that flooded her mind.

“Elevator music!”

* * *

“So what is it?” Alan Davis held the tiny circular shaped circuit board in his hand. The tiny printed circuit board was about the size of five pennies stacked on top of each other with several small chips and components soldered to it. There was a membrane switch on one side and what appeared to be a small watch battery on the other.

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.