"Von Neumann’s War" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ringo John, Taylor Travis S.)

Chapter 22

Richard and Helena had spent the better part of the last two weeks moving everything they wanted to keep — and everything the Von Neumann probes hadn’t taken — into the mine. Richard patched the hole in the cabin where the stove had been but did not see the need to waste further time on fixing the interior. The cabin had been a convenience and a temporary location from the beginning, but Richard just could not see leaving a gaping hole in the side and roof for the weather to intrude through. It was still a decent shelter and had taken him months to find, fix up, and move into.

After her conflict with the alien machines, Helena had come around on the subject of leaving the cabin for more underground digs. The mine suited her just fine, although she did insist on carrying a large piece of stove wood around with her everywhere she went. She had even carved and sanded down one end of it for a handle and wrapped it with cloth and tape.

Richard at first had thought Helena would be a humorous sight wielding her oversized handmade billy club. But there was something about her slender five-nine Russian frame and accent, her long black hair, her insistence on wearing low cut worn-out jeans and skin-tight tank-tops, no bra, canvas sneakers, and toting around a mammoth war club that gave her a “warrior princess” quality that really got Richard going.

Other than science and solving problems, getting Richard excited was usually a hard thing to do. He even debated with himself at times whether he actually loved her — though he knew it was quite likely that she didn’t really love him. Mutual convenience best described their marriage. He had needed companionship and she needed to get out of Russia. But he found he liked it a lot when she wandered around with her club.

The mine was fully operational at least to within the limitations of the power available by the waterwheel. The little hydroelectric plant that Richard had put together would power the water heater, refrigerator, freezer, a few lights, a television, a computer, and maybe one piece of scientific equipment at a time. Using the backup battery systems at the same time enabled him to power a few more of his scientific instruments. The batteries had to recharge all night. He had hoped for a little more horsepower out of the underground stream, but the flow rate was just too low to create enough torque for instantaneous power needs.

“I wish I could have found enough fissile material to go nuclear,” he said to himself. As it was he didn’t have the power to drive the electron microscope. “Would be nice to do some X rays and some microscopy of your friend.” He nodded at the bot laid out across his workbench at the edge of the entrance into the lab shaft from the main chamber.

“You don’t tink dat you could’ve stolen plutonium and gotten away with it?” Helena peered over the book she was reading and glanced at Richard. He had been quietly working for some time now, but when he spoke out loud to himself Helena had a hard time ignoring him. He was her entertainment.

“Huh? Plutonium? Oh, no. If I did, we would have it, ” he said nonchalantly and smiled through his thick, unruly graying beard at her. “Maybe I’ll figure something else out.”

“Well, de goddamned robots fly. Dey must have batteries or someting in dem.” She popped a handful of shelled pecans in her mouth from the Ziploc bag on the folding end table near the couch. “Ought to use de goddamned ting for sometin,” she said through a mouthful, brushed her bangs from her forehead, yawned, slipped her shoes off letting one dangle from her left big toe, and went back to reading.

“Yes, yes, power. They must have power, but where and how…” Richard had been examining the bot that Helena had killed for him but was not progressing as fast as he had hoped. He needed X rays and electron microscopy and he didn’t have the power for those machines. So, he didn’t have that detailed of data. That is, until he heard the latest posts on the Ret Ball show.

Fortunately, most of the data he wanted had been measured and compiled by a government program and was posted on a website for everyone to see. And oddly enough, they particularly wanted him, Dr. Richard Horton, a.k.a. Megiddo, to look at it and get back to them. Irony.

But Richard didn’t trust the government. No sir, not as far as he could throw them. He knew that they had been covering up the knowledge of the alien probes for a long time. That was no different than the other conspiracies they had performed. There was the Kennedy assassination, the real reason behind Viet Nam and the Gulf Wars, Roswell, the giant floating black triangles, the secrets of the pyramids around the world, remote viewing, Watergate, alien stealth technologies discovered at Area 51, the real reason for double blind drug testing, and countless others.

Their mishandling of these technologies and this knowledge now had humanity in a bind. It was their fault. And now they wanted Megiddo to bail them out. Why didn’t they want his help when he tried to operate within the confines of the system? Why had academia run him out of the community? It was their fault — a conspiracy to keep the truth from humanity! But Megiddo was a bigger man than that and he would save Helena and the rest of the world. Well, Helena probably didn’t need saving, but the rest of the world most certainly did.

So he had downloaded the information carefully, analyzing it for government imbedded spybots and other tracking software. Fortunately, he didn’t even have to use the government site. As soon as it was posted, it had been mirrored across multiple servers, including two in which he had inserted trojans that gave him full security control.

Once he had scrutinized it and was convinced that the data was real and bug free, he started studying it. He studied it intensely for several days, stopping only occasionally for a snack or a nap. Helena mostly ignored him and went about her business, but every now and then she would check on him or offer him a sandwich or tell him that he should come to bed.

Sleep was the last thing on Richard’s mind. Occasionally Helena would bait him to come to bed with the allure of sex, but even that — as exciting and enjoyable as it was — was merely a distraction from studying the bots. In fact, his mind was so hot with new ideas and sizzling from the new information he had gotten that the pleasure he got from studying the details of the bot was perhaps even more enticing than Helena. Perhaps. If only I had more power to drive my equipment.

The government report was actually really good science and reverse engineering, but there was nothing there that Richard saw as the shining tidbit of information that would save humanity. It was only the groundwork. But somebody had to do the groundwork and having it already done and wrapped up in a nice four-hundred-and-seventy-three page pdf file package made getting to the real part of the work happen a lot faster.

There was a significant portion of the government research that seemed… familiar… to him. For some reason it triggered a sense of déjà vu. He couldn’t really put his finger on it and he wasn’t a hundred percent sure why at first until he came across the proposed idea that the bots used a form of machine DNA encoded at the subatomic level. He remembered one of his students from years ago at Princeton really intrigued by his work on that subject and this report had that kind of flare.

Richard followed that line of reasoning for a few days and finally he began to understand a general idea of how the alien machines system hierarchy and architecture flowed. There was a central nucleus that was the real controlling mechanism of the individual bot. Like a single celled organism this nucleus was where the replication blueprints resided. It was also there that the “messenger RNA” — an analogy of course — delivered instructions throughout the rest of the bot to the subsystems.

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.

One thing he was not speculating on was the main reason for the transceiver tube. He knew what it was, or at least he thought he did. But he needed some live ones to find out for certain. So he decided to “acquire” some more of them. The government reports told him all he needed to know to lure them. The bots liked radio. Something about radio attracted them; he had been right all along about that. The government analysis of the alien spread spectrum signal emissions also showed that the frequency shifting pulses were not truly randomly shifting in frequency. There was a method to the transmissions. In fact, they followed a 256 bit encryption sequence. That told Richard plenty. Unfortunately, what it told him was that without the key it wouldn’t be likely they would decrypt the sequence by a simple hacker password dictionary attack. That is, continually insert all the passwords possible from a to z — not likely.

So, the government report suggested that they would attack the encryption algorithms themselves. Richard thought they might have luck there. After all they had the might of the CIA and the NSA with them, but a 256 bit encryption method was damned near impossible to break without the key. One note on one of the mirror sites said that hackers across the U.S. had combined forces to crack the code using a distributed system. They might even beat the government.

Richard had a different idea. He needed to watch the bots when they started “handshaking” and talking to each other. The handshaking was a simple process of passing binary code back and forth between the computer and the bot. Understanding an alien language was not necessary at this level of coding, only simple instructions would be needed. These instructions were to turn on or off certain functions and algorithms. It was simple ones and zeroes — math universal to all computers — that any code writer could understand. There was something about this handshaking that told the bots not to eat each other and therefore they must be passing the encryption key code. If he could watch them closely while they interacted with each other, he might be able to copy the encryption sequence without having to understand it. It was a long shot, perhaps. But he had used similar approaches to crack credit card company computers.