Chapter 45
HMS Agamemnon and her crew spent an hour very busy.
They worked on repairing their ship.
They worked on finishing off Machine Army, and making very sure of that.
And they worked on salvaging the other two battleships - the ones they had just fought and defeated.
It proved to be fairly straightforwards to make certain that the Machine Army was no more.
They showed up in a unique way on the Detect Mind Console.
And they showed up in a different way on the Detect Energy Console, scanning for certain electrical patterns.
And again they showed up in a unique way on the Detect Chemicals Console - the silicon wafers that had been used to make their microchips had been doped with Gallium, which stood out nicely.
On the first two, they showed up only until they had been destroyed.
So they scanned the bay in all three ways, looking for all units of the Machine Army.
When they found live ones, they destroyed them, but marked their positions so they could compare that with what the Detect Chemicals Console said, just to make sure they did not miss any.
Their destruction was quick - the defensive lasers were intended for rapid fire, and each hit was more than adequate to destroy a machine unit.
When they ran out of live Machine Army units to shoot, they counted, and compared numbers between early and late sensor recordings to make sure they had not missed any.
The count said they had destroyed a total of 8191 Machine Army units.
Looking at that number, Simon ordered a search for more, both nearby, and where the machines started at - Eagleton Tennessee, according to the newspapers they'd saved.
They didn't have to move the ship - the sensors easily reached as far as Eagleton, and further.
In practical terms, the sensors had shorter ranges than that, since humans can only pay attention to so much at once. They could not look at everything at once any more than an average person can look at a tree and note all the details on every leaf at once. But focusing on a certain place and looking it over was easy, whether it was near or far.
They did so and found the one more hidden Machine Army unit that Simon had predicted.
It was hidden, buried 2 feet under a sidewalk in Eagleton. Lasers from an orbiting shuttlecraft took a moment to burn through the sidewalk, the dirt, and then the machine, but they did burn it.
When asked how he knew to look for another one, Simon replied, "We like large round numbers, so I figured maybe they did too. So where we'd typically have built, say, 5000 of something, they built 8192, which makes sense to somebody based on binary, where it's is a large round number: two to the 13th power."
"I'm glad that made sense to you, because I'd never have guessed it." Ron laughed.
They'd been collecting all the wrecked bodies of Machine Army units, by sending Replicated repair robots out in a Replicated ferry boat and having them use their telekinesis to pick up all the pieces from the sea floor and deposit them in a pile on the ferry.
They added the melted 8192nd unit to that pile, by sending a repair robot through a teleport portal that went from the ferry to Eagleton.
They didn't let the ferry get within two hundred yards of HMS Agamemnon, in case what Lisa had heard about the machines being contagious was right.
Their remains stayed 'quarantined' on the ferry, in case Lisa wanted to inspect them.
Whether she did, or chose not to, they planned to disintegrate them afterwards, then dismiss the robots and anything else that had come near them.
While that was going on, other robots were finishing fighting fires aboard Tirpitz and Musashi, and working to keep them afloat.
That proved to be difficult, they tended to scoop in water and sink, since each one was missing the bow section.
Although in a way that was a boon - it lightened each ship enough so that it could be lifted by Agamemnon's Telekinesis Console.
They couldn't lift them all at once that way, due to the weight of the seawater which had flowed in.
But they could lift them a bit at once, maintaining an angle that would 'pour' the seawater back out as they lifted.
That lightened the ship, gradually, until it could be lifted in its entirety - it's remaining entirety - and flown over an empty beach near Brockton Bay, to be set down there.
That beach had only been empty for a short time. Until recently it had had a number of wrecked old ships beached on it and was part of what was known locally as 'the ship graveyard'.
But the ships from it that could be repaired, had been, and the rest had been scrapped.
So the beach was empty, at least until Tirpitz, and then Musashi settled there.
Boz wasn't planning to leave them there for long.
He wanted to take both back to Mars, to join what Ron was jokingly referring to as 'The Boz Collection'.
But he could only take one at a time - that was as much as his ship could lift.
So both ships would wait on the beach until Lisa could look at the materials that Agamemnon's robots were finding inside and collecting.
Then one would wait briefly while the other went to Mars.
They'd be back here quickly to take the second ship to Mars, since they didn't want to risk somebody else claiming it.
Then they'd probably be taking a third quick trip to Mars.
Jean Bart had been disintegrated, but all its atoms - mostly iron - still existed. They'd been stripped of electrons and had fallen apart. But the resulting dust had, being heavier than seawater, gradually sunk down to the sea floor, where it had piled up. Along the way it had collected some free electrons - there were a bunch available in that area at that time, due to the disintegration.
Having electrons again, the iron atoms could form molecular bonds again.
So there on the sea floor the iron atoms had been gradually forming into a big mass of iron - nearly 37000 tons of it congealing into a glob.
Agamemnon would grab that too, take it to Mars, and use it to help repair the two damaged ships, which had lost thousands of tons of metal from their bows.
The repaired ships would at least make awesome space stations above Mars - easily able to defend the place, as well as doing all of what space stations usually do, once they got some upgrades to be airtight, have airlocks, and things like that.
Boz had Duplicates already looking over Tirpitz and Musashi - 4 Duplicates each - when Lisa signaled that she was ready for a portal.
A moment later, a portal let Lisa, and an assistant, step through on to Agamemnon.
Lisa's assistant was an unkempt man, with wild unruly hair, a scraggly beard, and wearing an old, rumpled, worn, but apparently very comfortable set of sweats.
Lisa introduced him as Steve, an expert in computers who would help evaluate their Machine Army samples.
Steve had a pair of large cases, full of technical equipment, with him.
The first thing they did was to scan Steve's equipment into the Replicator, so that he would not have to use any of the real equipment in his evaluations, in case the Machine Army was able to infect it with copies of themselves somehow.
Next they Duplicated Lisa and Steve, twice.
When Lisa's 2 Duplicates appeared, each of them put a hand to her cheek and Lisa said, "Ow, I see what you mean about a toothache."
She fished in her purse and took out a bottle of Aspirin.
Boz said, "Don't bother. Painkillers of any type do not help. The pain isn't physical, though it sure feels like it is. We think it is some kind of feedback due to the mental link between you and your Duplicates."
"Interesting," Lisa said, dropping the unopened Aspirin bottle back into her purse. "I'll have to think about that. It sure would be useful to have a bunch of Duplicates all the time."
They proceeded to the cafeteria, where Ron had a portal waiting for them.
As they entered, they heard a multi-sided friendly debate going on among a group of Old Codgers gathered there.
"Marine Army - Hogwash!" exclaimed one, "They were serving as crew to battleships. Only the navy have ever operated battleships. That makes them the Machine Navy."
"But they got here by air, kinda like seaplanes, so they may be air force," replied another.
"Infantry delivered by air is paratroopers," offered a third.
"But," replied another, "Naval infantry, serving aboard ships, and - here's the point - attacking as infantry there at the end - That's Marines. And Machine Marines has a nice sound to it, too."
"You missed a step," laughed another, "Naval infantry who use ships, air drops, and finally swims to the target: Sea, Air, Land - that's what the acronym SEAL stands for in the Navy Seals. They're special forces. The Marine Spec Ops!"
Boz turned to Colonel Harry nearby and asked, "Is this going to be a problem?"
Harry laughed, "Nah, no problem at all. It's just a way they like to pass the time. I'm about to go over there and suggest the Machine Coast Guard, since the battle took place within a couple miles of the shore. Then I think I'll bring up the question of naming the battle - I'll suggest the Fourth Battle of Brockton Bay, but a lot depends on what you count. That could keep them busy for a long time." He grinned, waved, and walked across the room to join the rest of the Old Codgers.
Boz and his group chuckled.
Then Group 1, consisting of Lisa 2, Steve 2, and Bas-Oon - plus 3 repair robots to help out and 3 GP robots to guard them - all took a portal to the ferry boat where the remains of the Machine Army had been collected.
At the same time, Group 2: Lisa 3, Steve 3, and Bas-Teal, plus the same numbers of robots for the same reasons, took a portal to the shore next to the beached wrecks of Tirpitz and Musashi.
Both Group 1 and Group 2 were entirely made of Duplicates and Replicated gear, so all of it could be dismissed in case Machine Army infected them.
They both got to work, inspecting things to see what they could learn.
Group 2 started with a walk around each ship, then went to the captains cabin on Tirpitz, where GP robots had, as ordered, gathered any documents, manuals or portable computers.
Steve 3 looked over the computers, using several pieces of specialized equipment to do so.
Boz looked at papers and manuals.
Lisa looked over everything quickly, then found a hidden safe in the back wall, and figured out the combination from subtle clues such as wear patterns on the dial. She opened it, then checked over its contents in detail.
Meanwhile, Group 1 was examining the bodies of Machine Army units.
Steve 2 and Lisa 2 had several units disassembled with the pieces arranged before them. They were meticulously checking over these, and calling out requests to Bas-Oon when they needed a better example of a part.
Bas-Oon was directing robots to sort remains by type of damage, as well as to disassemble likely candidates to look for certain parts.
They wanted all parts examined, which sometimes took some doing.
Every Machine Army unit there had been destroyed, so at least some of its parts had been rendered inoperable.
Luckily, they'd been destroyed by different means.
Lasers, particle beams, positron beams, and exploding hedgehogs had each destroyed some, and they did so by different means. So the damage was not all the same, and what was broken in one may not be broken in another.
So some units had melted CPU's, yet their power supplies were fine.
Some had had their memory chips cut in bits, yet the CPU was intact.
And some had fine cracks in everything rigid - like all their microchips - yet had everything flexible, like wiring and tentacles, intact.
So, between the various examples, all the various parts could be analyzed. And they made sure to analyze more than one of each part, in case there was much deviation among individuals.
Finally, after midnight, they considered their work complete and sat down in a break room on Agamemnon to discuss it.
Steve began, "We have nothing to worry about."
"Details, please," a tired Boz asked.
"The architecture is incompatible. The data bandwidth they require can't be achieved by our ram or CPU busses, not to mention the logic units themselves. It wouldn't even run with time-slice chunking. Their entire instruction set, as well as their code, would just be gibberish." Steve asserted.
Ron mumbled, "I thought I was a pretty bright guy, until just now."
Lisa stood, "Speaking of gibberish, let me interpret. I've been working with Steve on this and picking it up as I go, over time. What he is saying is this: our computers use what is called a 64 bit architecture. Among other things, that means our computers process data 64 bits at a time. So the data pathways are that wide, the ram stores things in 64 bit chunks, and the CPU is set to handle 64 bit chunks at a time. Older computer architecture used 32 bits at once, and software designed for 32 bit architecture can be made compatible with a 64 bit architecture by a couple different means, often by 'padding' the unused 32 bits with junk data, which is ignored."
Lisa could see that Ron's eyes had crossed, so she tried again, "Think of a highway 8 lanes wide. Eight cars can drive down it side by side. So can four cars, though that will leave half the highway capacity unused. But 16 cars cannot drive side by side down it - to be side by side, some would have to go off the road which will gradually break cars and is not possible with computers. There the metaphor breaks down. Of course highways handle lots more cars, by going sequentially. Computers do something similar, which is why they can work on, say, a 2 gigabyte photo, even though it is bigger than 64 bits. They break it into 64 bit chunks."
She shook her head, "Sorry, it's complicated, even in metaphor. The point is that the Machine Army run on a 256 bit architecture, which means that their code would be meaningless to any of our computers, even if you tried hard to make it fit."
"So," Boz mused thoughtfully, "I'd be like trying to drive a 20 foot wide truck on a 5 foot wide bridge?"
"Exactly!," Lisa congratulated. "And the architecture is just one aspect of it. They are also incompatible since their code is written in a new programming language which expects a certain instruction set in the CPU that just isn't there in ours. Think of that as a man who speak only French telling another man - one who speaks only Japanese - to flap his wings in a certain way if he wants to fly. He neither has any understanding of what he is being told, nor does he have the ability - lacking wings since he isn't a bird - to follow the instructions if he did understand them."
"OK, so how then did Machine Army assimilate computers to make more of themselves, as was reported?" Boz asked.
"Basically, they ran four 64 bit systems in parallel to approximate one 256 bit system, with several specialized chips they made themselves to make it all work together correctly. That is an oversimplification, but to say that it is complicated is a serious understatement. Suffice it to say that they can't run on our computers, yet they can build their style of computers out of our parts." Lisa said.
"OK," Boz nodded, "So it sounds like we can have confidence that they can't 'infect' anything, nor hide in our computers in any way."
"Right. For them to run on our parts, they'd have to completely disassemble our stuff, then reassemble it in a very different way, with several additions. Back to the highway analogy: eight lanes each with one car in it looks completely different than eight lanes with one giant dump truck spanning all of them at once. So if, for example, the robots you sent here still look like your robots and none are missing, then you can be confident none are now Machine Army. But if you sent 8, and all go missing. Then you find 7 without their heads, and one grossly misshapen one trying to look normal yet failing - in that case you probably have a Machine Army unit on your hands."
"Surely they could make one of themselves look any way they want to?" Ron asked.
"Yes, Lisa replied, "Given enough time and the right parts and certain minimum size limits. But what I'm saying is that existing stuff, whether a laptop computer, or a GP robot, has its existing space crammed with existing capabilities. To take one of those and cram in 4 times the CPU's, RAM chips and support architecture, you need to free up some space to make that fit. You could do it by making a giant misshapen head on your robot, or by leaving out several existing functions, but either way, the change will be noticeable. More so, because this new Machine Army Unit has no idea how to act to appear to be a normal GP robot, so he is bound to give himself away."
Ron summarized to make sure he understood, "So a Machine Army unit, sitting in a workshop somewhere, with lots of parts and time, could make another Machine Army unit that looks like a GP robot, and train it to act like one. But a GP robot passing out of sight for a couple minutes, ambushed by Machine Army units, has zero chance to walk out as a new Machine Army unit and yet be believable as still being a GP Robot?"
"Exactly!" Lisa and Steve said at the same time.
"And that being the case," Lisa added, "We feel confident that the data we pulled from their storage systems is safe as well. Even if there were Machine Army code hidden in it - and we're confident there isn't - it could not run on any system it would ever encounter. So we got a bunch of interesting files we will be looking over, including the plans to the battleships they built, and whose wrecks you now own."
"Awesome!" Boz enthused, "I was hoping you'd say that."
"I know dear, you really want to add them to your collection. And so you shall." Lisa grinned, then added, "And it will be much easier to feed these digital schematics to your repair robots than to scan in the paper copies of the same that we found on the ships."
Lisa's attitude changed. She looked at Boz and said coyly, "Boz my dear, you've gotten under my skin." She batted her eyes, then added, "Now I want battleships too! They'll be great for protecting my shipping from pirates. And there are some available. All four Iowa class battleships are still afloat as museum ships. Or they were museum ships back when the economy could support things like museums. Those companies went out of business, and so now the ships are abandoned, tied up at the docks in ports that were also abandoned due to being idle. That will change."
Boz grinned, "What do you need from me?"
Lisa grinned back, "It turns out that I already own USS Wisconsin and USS Iowa - I got them as part of a package deal when I bought all the port facilities at Norfolk and Los Angeles respectively. But if I'm to buy the other two the same kind of way before somebody else gets the idea, then I'll need an infusion of cash."
"How much diesel fuel do you need" Boz queried.
"Oh, some of that will be nice too, thanks," Lisa smiled, "A dozen tanker cars would be good. But demand for that has shrunk a bit as supply has recently surged, so it's value is lower, for now, than I'd like to sell it at. So I'll hang on to it until after you leave and prices rebound."
Boz chuckled while Lisa continued, "For now, let me have twenty tanker cars of Av-Gas - aviation fuel. That currently sells at a very good price. I'll buy the port at Camden New Jersey to get the USS New Jersey, and the port at Honolulu, Hawaii, to get the USS Missouri. And I'll need all my ports hit with Reset missiles, so my new workers will be mentally well-adjusted too. But that reminds me..." she batted her eyes again.
"Go on," Boz prompted.
"Well, " Lisa purred, "Ports are for ships, which are sent abroad trading. But traveling on the Pacific Ocean is a lot harder now, because The Simurgh destroyed all our weather and communications satellites not long after arriving at this planet in the first place."
"So you want me to put up a system of satellites for you?"
"Oh thank you for offering. You are so thoughtful!" Lisa gushed playfully. "And you'll need to sweep a lot of debris out of orbit, while you're at it, or those satellites won't last long."
She smiled again, "It'll be easy for you, though - just make a bunch of rapid polar orbits using your star drive well above the atmosphere in the most popular orbits satellites use. Do it with your forcefield on in offensive mode in case you hit anything. And have your biggest gravity field below you, set to give everything a ten G shove towards Earth. Aim to hit any orbital junk with the gravity field, and it will all get shoved into decaying orbits and clear itself out in short order. In half an hour you can clear the most popular orbits. Then a few minutes more to clear the equatorial orbits the same way, and we'll be in great shape!"
"Is that all?" Boz snarked, then instantly regretted it.
"Thank you SO much for asking!," Lisa squealed. "I'll need more repair robots too, for all the usual reasons, plus a couple new things. First there is a lot of old damaged concrete around town - some of it little better than gravel. I can set workers to haul it away, but it's far better if we have repair robots reshape it into a stone wharf, docks, and stone piers. That will put to good use something that'd otherwise just be garbage. And the stone piers etc - effectively brand new - will last a lot longer than wooden ones, and cost a lot less to maintain as well. Second, we'll make a unique corporate headquarters."
She smiled and waited.
Boz played along, "And how will it be unique, Lisa?"
"Because," she batted her eyes at him again, "It will show the world that nobody has wood for you like I have wood for you! Specifically, I have scrub oak - several dozen acres of it, which we collected as we cleared some railroad tracks recently. It isn't any use as it is, being too thin, scraggly, and twisty to be good for anything but firewood. But your robots can re-shape it easily. And then it will become This!" She brought out some sketches with a flourish.
They all looked them over.
Then Boz declared, "So it will be a wooden building 152' high, all one piece with no joinery or fasteners, in the shape of a tree, though with only a few short stubby branches?"
"And solid, seamless, wooden walls four feet thick." Ron added.
"Right!" Lisa agreed with both of them. "Small branches and leaves would have been too difficult to engineer. And we didn't have a lot of time to explore that - we needed our new corporate symbol right away!"
"A bare-branched tree will be your corporate symbol?" Ron asked.
"It sounds bad when you say it that way," Lisa pouted. " But it's a lot better than a simple curved line, like some corporations use, for example. Look," she pulled out a sample sheet of corporate letterhead with the symbol.
"It's very nice," Boz said in a perfunctory manner, "Now can we get started on all this? It's after midnight and I'd like to get to sleep eventually."
"No!" Lisa stated flatly. "You are not allowed to build my magnificent headquarters and manifestation of our corporate symbol until you apologize for being so dismissive. It is a good symbol - admit it."
Boz sighed, "Sorry, I just don't deal well with loss of sleep. It is a unique idea for a building and will be a tourist attraction, I'm sure. As a corporate logo, it is as good as any and better than most."
"Aw," Lisa smiled, "Thanks Boz my love. And what you didn't know is that if you take the logo, and draw in hair here and pom-poms here and here, then it's me cheering for you!" She blew him a kiss, then added, "Later we'll make a second one in Chicago out of glass, by reshaping the vast amounts of tempered automobile glass lying around shattered in their junkyards."
-0-0-0-
Soon thereafter, Lisa and her helper left - with all the things Lisa had asked for - plus ten Duplicates each of her and Steve, to help Steve with his research and help Lisa get caught up. Each had been instructed that, to dismiss a Duplicate, all they had to do was decide to do so.
As a thank-you for the Duplicates, and for everything else, Lisa had given Boz a gift - a small factory of a type called a fab, short for microchip fabricator.
She'd explained that it had been there, in one of the ports she'd bought, mothballed and unused.
She'd thought it would make a perfect gift for Boz, since his dimension was behind hers in electronics.
And she had a bigger fab for her own organization's use.
She'd had some experts look it over to make sure it had everything it needed to function. Then she'd had folks gather several microchip designs that it could make, and she included those with the gift, along with the rest of the instructions they would need.
The factory's contents - mostly the highly specialized machines - were already packed up and ready for transport.
So it only took a few minutes to open a portal, send through repair robots to lift the packages two tons at a time, shrink them and store them on Agamemnon's deck.
Then HMS Agamemnon lifted off, using telekinesis to carry Musashi with her.
They moved slowly and carefully, due to the vast weight involved and not wanting to break things.
While they moved, the remains of Machine Army got disintegrated by a few combat robots. Then all robots that had worked on the Machine Army cleanup got dismissed, as well as the Replicated ferry boat and the other equipment used.
It got dismissed mainly because it wasn't needed anymore, but also just in case of the very slim possibility that one or more of the Machine Army units had not yet been completely dead before a robot got exposed to it. Not that they could think of anything such a unit could have done, but they figured it was better o be safe than sorry.
Once Agamemnon and Musashi were well off the ground, they went through a dimensional portal to Dimension 439, flew on star drive to where Mars would be in Dimension 1, then moved to Dimension 1 through another portal.
There, in a stable orbit above Mars Colony, where it could serve as a space station, they left Musashi, swarming with repair robots, and oriented with the ship's keel towards the surface of Mars.
They used a teleport portal to visit the Martians briefly.
There, they explained what they were doing, picked up some spare parts needed for their ongoing repairs, and commissioned the prototyping factory to make several other spare parts for them.
They also set up the microchip fabricator factory Lisa had given them, putting it in a new dome, and arranging for staff to run it.
Last, they recovered one of the Landkreuser Monsters, now mostly repaired, shrunk it, and temporarily stored it on their deck.
Then they headed back to Earth Bet's dimension.
Arriving there, they placed the Landkreuser on the moon, near the moon base. They left it with a crew of GP robots, some at 3/4 scale to fit better, plus dozens of repair robots to finish fixing it.
Then they returned to Brockton Bay, down on Earth Bet.
With another trip like the first, they soon had Tirpitz in orbit above Mars Colony as well, also swarming with repair robots.
They returned from that trip with two Landkreuser Ratte Model E, also shrunken on deck. These, they temporarily left on the beach at Brockton Bay, where the battleships had been.
They were crewed as the Monster had been, and still under repair the same way too.
Lisa needed the Rattes for taking the shipyard in Venezuela, and Boz thought it more efficient to bring them back now, while he was making the trip anyway.
And he wanted the Monster on the moon, where every shot from it's big gun could be a Project Thor type of strike on Earth, if needed. He imagined Lisa would need it from time to time.
They took a third such trip to bring back the huge chunk of iron which formerly had been Jean Bart.
And, while on the way from Earth-Bet to Mars Colony, they stopped briefly at Dimension 437 to take care of some cleanup.
It was time to detonate the black hole the Simurgh had become, and start the process of turning her into a galaxy.
They did it more or less the same way they'd done it for Leviathan.
But first they set up some sensors as suggested by scientists who had been consulted.
Then they also set up four Replicated shuttlecraft inside Dimension 437, with each one just peeking past each corner of the Dimensional portal to Dimension 439 where Agamemnon would be receiving their continuous transmissions.
It was hoped to record more of the event that way - with shuttlecraft full of sensors, transmitting continuously, at faster-than-light speeds. Having the sensors within the 'blast zone' and the transmitters under cover behind the portal, they hoped to get an extra few crucial microseconds of data.
Time would tell.
The procedure went as before.
And HMS Agamemnon took the recordings of the 'white-hole' event to Mars One Colony, for the scientists to analyze.
While on the way, they updated their procedures for using Dimensional Shunt, since Dimension 437 would no longer be safe for that for a while.
And they had repair robots check to make sure the event had not overloaded anything.
The chunk of iron they'd been transporting got cut in two parts, with one left adjacent to each orbiting ship, so the robots could use it as raw materials to rebuild the missing bow on each ship.
Some of the colonists on Mars had relevant experience, and agreed to look at the schematics for each ship, to see what needed to be done to adapt it to its new role as a combination space station and defensive satellite.
Then Agamemnon, with their own repairs proceeding well too, went back to Earth Bet again, and began to clean junk and debris from orbit there, much as Lisa had described, though with some changes.
Sand from The Simurgh, and other valueless junk would get shoved into a decaying orbit as described by Lisa.
But dead satellites and other such things containing useful rare minerals would be collected. Some would be turned into spare parts, of which they still needed a few. Others would be used to help repair Mars' new space stations, or would just be donated to Mars as raw materials.
They started up high, at the geosynchronous orbits, then proceeded lower and lower, cleaning the other high orbits on down towards the lowest orbits, which they'd clean last.
They emplaced a few satellites as they went.
As they got to low-Earth orbit, where they'd left two shuttlecraft which had been helping zarch bad guys from orbit, those shuttlecraft were fired upon.
Lasers came up from below, and began cooking the shuttles, which fled to Agamemnon for safety.