“Let’s just shoot them!” someone called.
“Won’t work, they are hardened. It would be like shooting a miniature tank. One that shoots back.”
“As soon as we would try, ELOPe would know.”
“What about some kind of electric shock to fry their circuits?”
“With something like a Taser, we could send a hundred thousand volts into them.”
“They’re probably hardened against that too. We need technical specifications to know what we’re up against.”
“We need an expert from iRobot, they’ve got to know what their own vulnerabilities are.”
“We can’t do that,” Sean cut in from where he stood near Jake. “We can’t risk communicating with iRobot, or we might alert ELOPe who could be monitoring communications there. Let’s switch gears for a minute. Does anyone have any ideas that doesn’t involve disabling the robots?”
“Let’s cut off communications. If we can kill communications, regardless of whether the computers are on or not, ELOPe won’t be able to do anything. It’ll be isolated on the ship.”
“What are the communication channels on the floating data centers?” Samantha asked. “I assume fiber optic hard lines, right?”
“Right,” Jake answered. “Primary communications is provided by 4 ten gigabit ports, giving us peak bandwidth of 40 gigabits per second. That’s handled by two separate communication racks, so that if one fails, we still have half our bandwidth. But that’s just the primary. We have ship-to-shore dual microwave transmission, that gives us 750 megabits per second, for another 1.5 gigabits per second backup capacity.”
“So we cut the fiber optic cables and kill the microwave towers on land that are receiving the backup channel,” one engineer shouted out.
“It’s not so simple,” Gene added, having joined the group when he overheard the conversation turning to communications capabilities. “Jake, you might not know this, but the purchase orders we found showed that contractors installed additional communication systems over the holiday shutdown.”
“The purchase orders included…” Gene trailed off as he pulled out a notebook, and flipped through looking for his notes. “Satellite transmitters. Twenty-five megabit per second capacity. I have the channel frequency data here, maybe you can track down which satellites they are communicating with. Oh, and long distance radio modems, two per platform. The bandwidth is just 150 kilobits per second, but they are good up to 100 kilometers.”
The engineers collectively groaned.
“Multiple bandwidths, multiple destinations, including satellites,” Samantha summarized. “Jamming all those frequencies simultaneously will be difficult. There’s no way we’re going to get permission to shut down satellites. We have no idea what the other endpoint is for those long range data modems. We can’t track down every radio within a hundred kilometers.”
“We’d never be able to shut down everything simultaneously,” another engineer grumbled.
The conversation continued for hours, as the temperature in the crowded house went up, and tempers flared. When food arrived courtesy of Sean, everyone tumbled over each other to get outside for fresh air. The cold January drizzle sent them in after a while, but everyone felt refreshed.
After they finished lunch, everyone passed through Sean’s kitchen and refilled from the six coffee pots now lined up in parallel on the counter. Then about half the people split off into subgroups, finding other rooms to work in, while the other half regrouped in the living room.
“Look, we’re just going to have to blow the data centers with explosives,” one grey-haired engineer said when they were assembled one more. “You’re trying to come up with a fancy solution, but we don’t need fancy. We need guaranteed results. If you blow them up, then boom, all the computers and all the hardware are toast. Total, immediate shutdown.”
“It’s not that simple though,” Jake explained again. “We still have to get the explosives on board, and to do that, you have to get past the robots.”
Sean shook his head. “It’s going to be damn costly too, if we completely destroy them. We’ll do it if we have to, but that’s a lot of hardware to lose.”
“So we hire some mercenaries, people who have experience with this thing,” the gray-haired engineer insisted, “and have them storm the defenses. I mean, sure the robots are tough, but they aren’t invincible. They’re light-duty bots, not even military grade. You could take them out with a high powered rifle and armor piercing bullets. Then once the mercenaries are onboard, they can kill the power to the computers.”
“If we do that,” Jake said, “we have to face the fact that we’re putting people in harms way. We’re asking them to go up against lethal armed robots, and some of them will die.” He looked at Sean. “Are we OK with that?”
Sean looked around awkwardly, clearly uncomfortable with the question. “I guess I’d rather explain losing the hardware to Rebecca than having to explain losing lives.”
Gene cleared his throat. “Just one more thing. If you have mercenaries approach the barge, attack the robots, and then kill the power, you’re looking at a couple of minutes elapsed time.”
“So?” The grey-haired engineer was growing defensive as everyone shot down his ideas.
“We’re talking about a massively parallel, high speed artificial intelligence,” Gene said. “ELOPe could do a lot in those few minutes.”
Mike and David nodded in agreement.
“How about an EMP?” Mike asked.
“Electromagnetic pulse weapon?” Sean asked. “Do those even exist?”
“I think so,” Mike said. “Wouldn’t it fry the electronic circuits? It would even leave the data intact, so we could recover it.
“Nice idea, Mike, but the metal cargo containers are perfect Faraday cages.” Jake shook his head. “We can’t even get a wireless signal through them. I think the cargo containers would protest the servers against even an EMP blast.”
“What the hell can we do?” David yelled in frustration.
“We’re going to have to blow them up,” the grey-haired yelled back, equally frustrated.
“How?” Sean asked calmly.
“We have a plane drop bombs,” Mike said.
Everyone looked up at him, where he sat on the back of a couch, against the wall.
“We hire mercenaries, but they drop bombs from high altitude, so the robots can’t fire back at them. They use a big bomb, something that can destroy the whole barge.”
“Can you hire mercenaries that can do that kind of stuff?” David asked.
“You said unlimited budget, didn’t you?” Mike looked at Sean.
Sean sighed. “Yes.”
“Well, didn’t the U.S. hire private military contractors in Afghanistan and Iraq?”
“Blackstone,” Sean said. “They have helicopters and planes. Even a remotely piloted drone.”
“There you go,” Mike said.
“Alright.” Sean paused. “So the basic plan is to hire a private military contractor to drop explosives on the ships. All in favor?”
“Sorry, but…” Jake looked sheepishly at the group. “There’s one problem with that. If you blow up the barge, but any of the containers remain intact, they’ll float away.”
“They float?” David said, mouth agape.
“Sure,” Gene answered, “they can float for weeks or months.”
David shot him a look. Where did people learn all this stuff?
“Ours will float indefinitely,” Jake said. “The extra weatherproofing we do make them watertight. Unless the structural integrity is compromised, it could float around the world. They don’t float very high, so they aren’t easy to track. What happens if we lose one of those containers? It’s bad enough that we might lose customer data at this point, but the real issue is that now ELOPe is on those servers. If the container washes ashore in China, and someone grabs a computer out of the container and plugs it in, then ELOPe is back.” Jake looked apologetically at Sean.