Von Neumann’s War

“Well, actually it’s one of the aircraft carriers that we’ve been missing from the Mediterranean. And if you look here in the background you’ll notice the Coliseum.” She paused to let that sink in.

“Rome! These things have picked up an aircraft carrier and set it in Rome!” SecDef Stensby was stunned. “What on Earth for?”

“I don’t know, sir. I’m a data collector and analyst not an exoroboticist. But this is just one image. Look at this one.” Carolyn tapped the touchpad button.

“Hundred of ships, airliners, trucks, and cars and God knows what. It looks like a junkyard,” the NSA said. “And from this image the landscape can’t be identified. I’ve tried.”

“Then where is it, Dr. Mayer?”

“It’s Cairo, sir. This is a webcam that used to have the Pyramids in view. They’re still there probably, just under a mountain of junk,” Dr. Mayer said.

“Jesus Christ!” the SecDef and the President chorused.

“Vicki, has the Neighborhood Watch seen this?”

“Not yet, Mr. President.”

“Get her down there. And I want a real-time feed of this map right here in this room. Hell, I want it in a similar room in every redoubt across the world.”

“Right.”

* * *

“They’ve spread too far to nuke now, Mr. President.” Jim Stensby sat back in his chair looking at a printout of the map. Technicians were hard at work putting together a real-time version of the analysis for a display console.

“You and I know that, Jim. And besides, we don’t know if the people are still alive there or not. Nuking was never, is never an option until we know where all the people are.” President Colby shook his head at the map. “What the hell do we do now? What about the plan developed by the Joint Chiefs to have a firewall of nukes set up on each side of the country?”

“The contingency is set in place, sir. If the probes cross the sixty-degree lat line moving west we’ll fill the sky with nuclear airburst. If they cross the one-hundred-fifty degree line moving east we’ll do the same.”

“Do you think that will work?”

“Perhaps the first time, Mr. President. It might be a good tactic to buy us time. Without destroying the majority of them around the globe though, I’m not sure what good it would do. And like you said, what about all the people there? Like in France, are they still there? Are they still alive? Have all of the survivors resorted to cannibalism like the recon team discovered?”

“Right. Those poor people…” the President muttered.

“Well, let’s pray the eggheads come up with something before the Chinese or the Russians or the Indians or whoever decide they’re threatened enough to start setting off nukes willy-nilly,” SecDef Stensby said.

“I’ve relayed my concerns to the UN Security Council on several occasions but I’m not certain they listened. I’ll resend a message across what is left of the world hot lines again with my concerns here.” The President felt somber and was not sure of the chances that even if the message went through to the remaining world leaders that it would get through to them. “I just wish we knew more about what is going on around the world.”

* * *

“Okay, Ronny, this should give us a better idea of what is going on around the world.” Roger Reynolds, wearing a clean suit and latex gloves, sat what appeared to be a miniature model of a satellite about the size of a coffee can with small solar panels wrapped around it on the clean room table — the culmination of about seven weeks of work.

“How so, Roger? This looks like it would be any other satellite when it’s built. Why won’t the probes eat it, too?” Ronny adjusted the paper bonnet on his forehead so it would be more comfortable.

“This is so cool,” Alan said as he rolled the device over and examined it closer.

“Uh, Ronny, you don’t understand. This is the actual satellite. It’s a picosat. We’ve minimized the metal content and made it mostly of composite and semiconductor materials. What metal it has is in the computer portions and only microns thick. Dr. Pike figured out a way to build a motherboard and bus with minimal amounts of metal. We used fiber optics to relay signals where possible. We’ve also shielded all radio emanations from the CPU so that it’s damned near undetectable from a meter or two away. There are no radio transmitters on it. It’s all optical. And our hope is that there isn’t enough metal in it to interest the probes.” Roger smiled at the little spacecraft.

“How did you shield it without metal for a Faraday cage?”

“Oh, that’s the neatest part,” Alan interrupted. “We used RAM.”