Von Neumann’s War

“Wow! This is a full scale Mega Alert!” Tina said right before Superman made a similar statement in the program.

“What does that mean?” Alice asked her.

“Oh, that means they call all known superheroes to the trouble spot!” Tina said, her eyes glued to the television as the costumed superbeings began slugging it out with the alien self-replicating robot threat.

The entire cast of DC superheroes — there must have been hundreds of them — and the military fought these things throughout the program. The extreme might of the comic book legends was no match for the strength of massive numbers and immediate self-replication of these alien bots.

Then one of the superheroes had the presence of mind to send Superman off to find Dr. Ray Palmer, also known as the Atom. The Atom was a scientist who could control his size down to an atomic scale. He recognized very quickly that these alien bots were replicating themselves with nanotechnology and explained that they were most likely Von Neumann probes. He then explained that the scientist John Von Neumann suggested over fifty years ago that self-replicating bots would be the ideal way for interstellar space travel. He went into further details about how the nanotechnology might work. The fact that Tina was watching a show about such high-tech concepts thrilled her mother. It beat E!, MTV, or FUSE hands down. She would never say anything bad about the Cartoon Network again.

In the end the Atom figured out a way to defeat the alien probes from deep within the probes’ control computer. Tina was edutained. Alice was excited that her daughter was watching such imaginative and educational programming — she had been right about Charlotte — and she needed to make a phone call to Huntsville, Alabama. Right now.

* * *

“The computer just finished running the latest battle scenario, Rog. You want to hear the results?” Alan flipped through a stack of papers, half reading the data.

“Let’s hear it.” Roger turned away from his laptop for a moment and gave his undivided attention. Besides, checking the status of Percival one more time this hour wasn’t going to help get it to Mars any faster.

“Well, in this case we made the aliens ten times harder to kill than human soldiers. We increased the armor coefficient by ten and we gave them rayguns that have an output intensity of a gigawatt per square meter. We gave them terabits per second communications capabilities and unlimited MASINT.” Alan continued to read off the list of unbelievable abilities they had given to the alien threat to be simulated as the red forces.

“Yeah, what do we have?” Roger leaned forward in his office chair and tipped the little kinetic desk gadget on the corner of his desk. A little space shuttle attached to a metal rod at one end and a metal ball at the other end zinged around inside a little metal ring in all three dimensions. Roger stared at the motion for a second.

“Well, we started out with just what we can deploy today.” Alan scanned the printouts of the simulation results. “Then we added nukes, tac-nukes, RF weapons, directed energy systems, experimental missiles and aircraft, chem-bio, and so on.”

“And?” The little space shuttle slowed, then stopped. Roger tapped it with his right index finger and sent it whirling again.

“Blue forces totally consumed by the red forces threat,” Alan read from the report.

“No shit.”

“No shit. What now?” Alan shrugged his shoulders, looking up from the report and noticing that Roger was only partly paying attention to him.

“That was a two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand dollar obvious answer, huh?” Roger sat quiet for a moment longer, spinning the little desk gadget again. “Let’s have some fun with this and model in some other stuff. I mean magic stuff. Try something like in Independence Day, or The Puppet Masters or War of the Worlds or something.”

“Well, we tried chem-bio agents like in those last two you mentioned and no luck,” Alan said with a frown. “To be realistic, we have no idea about their physiology so there is little way we can put in an agent with a high confidence. Oh sure, we could fudge it in the simulation if you want to win, but it wouldn’t be based on reality.”

“Like any of this stuff is? We don’t have a clue what we’re up against here. Hell, there might just be some ten million year alien varmint hatching planet-wide there — who knows?” Roger shrugged.

“Well then, since it’s all made up anyway, I’ll add some miracles to see what happens.” Alan scribbled on the printouts.

“Do that just to see what happens if we were to find that, I dunno, toothpaste, or bad breath, or something as equally unlikely kills them. Who the hell knows? What about cyber?” Roger sat back in his chair now bored with the desk gadget.

“We tried that and it had little impact. Again, I’ll fudge a run for you.” Alan scribbled some notes on the printouts again, then began tapping his head with the pen.