Gray Ayers shakes his head. “Never liked the design myself. The ray shape worked well in smaller, shallow-water subs, but structural inefficiencies compromised its weight at greater depths.”
“True, Mr. Secretary,” Rocky says, “but by placing the Goliath’s ballast system within her unpressurized wings and allowing the computer to oversee the entire process, we were able to achieve degrees of maneuverability not possible in the standard teardrop-shaped pressure hull. It’s the same principle as in flying. A bird can maneuver far better than any plane because its brain makes minuscule adjustments in flight. Goliath’s biochemical brain was designed to achieve the same results. And like a bird, it was programmed to learn, getting better with experience. The sub’s one Achilles’ heel would be a relative instability while running along the surface, but in deeper water, she’ll move like a fish.”
“How big is this thing?”
“Big and flat. Six hundred and ten feet from bow to stern, which is even longer than a Typhoon, with dimensions rivaling that of a baseball field. But don’t let her size fool you. She’s fast—in fact, she can achieve speeds beyond that of our fastest ADCAP torpedoes.”
“How’s that possible?” the president asks.
“In addition to her flat hydrodynamic shape and her advanced boundary-layer control, we replaced the standard seven-blade propeller with pump-jet propulsors.”
“The same propulsion system used aboard the Seawolf?”
“Yes, Mr. Nunziata, except Seawolf has one pump-jet propulsor. Goliath has five. Each assembly is powered by a brand-new ultraquiet S6W nuclear reactor. With all five jets running, Goliath can reach sixty-five to seventy knots, which means—”
“—which means even our fastest boats can’t begin to stay with her,” the Secretary of the Navy finishes.
“Even if they could catch her, they’d still have to find her,” Rocky adds. “Pump-jet propulsors are far quieter than screws, and Goliath’s shape was designed for both speed and stealth. When she lies flat along the bottom, she’s absolutely invisible to sonar, her hull reflections the same as sand. Even when she’s moving, her HY-150 metallic skin and sound-absorbent plates make her as difficult to detect as a B-2 bomber flying at high altitudes. Goliath’s inner hull is lined with layers of antidetection tiles, and each deck compartment rests on rubber housings to prevent rattling. The latest low-observable designs and turbulence suppressors help keep her presence cloaked, even to our most sophisticated towed sonar arrays. She’s the equivalent of an underwater Stealth bomber—big, fast, and near impossible to detect.”
Rocky adjusts the 3-D image, magnifying the forward section of the hull. “As you can see, Goliath has no periscope. Using the Virginia’s design, we replaced the optical periscope with an electromagnetic and electro-optics suite, providing visual images to her skeleton crew via large-screen displays in the ship’s control room. The photonics mast is positioned just above the control room.” She points to the raised section of the bow representing the stingray’s head.
“Are those windows?” Gray Ayers asks, pointing to the stingray’s eyes.
Rocky nods. “It’s a structural engineer’s nightmare, but some of the old Russian subs had them, and the new crystalline-based materials have held up in depths. Our research showed foreign populations have instinctive reactions to certain shapes and images. The eyes add a psychological effect to the submarine’s looks. I can tell you firsthand that I was terrified watching it after it attacked the Ronald Reagan”
“Finish up,” the Bear instructs his daughter.
She nods. “Infrared and low-level-light image-enhancement features provide Goliath’s electronic eye with superior reconnaissance capabilities at night and in foul weather. Her bow-mounted and towed sonar arrays and Light Wide-Aperture Arrays dramatically enhance the sub’s ability to detect threats in shallow waters, and Goliath’s Acoustic Rapid COTS Insertion system gives her the best hull-mounted mine detection and avoidance capability on the ocean.”
Secretary Nunziata beckons her to stop. “You said skeleton crew. What did you mean by that?”
Rocky sits back. “Goliath was designed big because she’s a prototype, Mr. Secretary, the first of what was to be a new generation of unmanned submersibles. The ship was designed to be operated by Sorceress, a supercomputer called a CAEN system, a Chemically Assembled Electronic Nanocomputer. Sorceress was designed by Covah and Dr. Elizabeth Goode, to be built in a joint venture between American Microsystems Corporation and DARPA’s Distributed Robotics Program, funded entirely by the DoD. The science is called nanotechnology, first proposed by Nobel physicist Richard Feynman back in the 1950s. The name is derived from the word ‘nanometer,’ a unit of measure equaling a billionth of a meter. In fact, a nanocomputer’s fundamental components measure only dozens of atoms. The smaller size of the computer circuitry allows for a tremendous increase in memory capacity, while breakthroughs in biomolecular-silicon interfacing dramatically improve computing speed.”
“How dramatic?”
“Potentially billions of times faster than a silicon chip.”
“Billions?”
“Yes, sir. Imagine packing the power of today’s supercomputers into packages the size of pinheads. The technology is housed in Sorceress. Essentially, we’re talking about a miracle of engineering—an artificial computerized brain constructed from both silicon and carbon-based molecular components. Information is harnessed using bioengineered bacteria, which coat themselves with a thin layer of silicon.”
Rocky pauses, wondering if she’s getting too technical.
“Go on,” the president urges, “we’re with you. You say this bacterium is coated with silicon?”
“Yes, sir. The bacteria represent what had been the missing link between traditional silicon hardware and the new bioware. With Simon Covah’s help, Dr. Goode successfully developed genetically altered clones of an original bacterium, each species capable of performing distinct computational tasks. These programmable critters, as she called them, evolved independently, allowing them to search a solution space for answers, performing evolutionary algorithms at unprecedented speeds. What’s more, they interface perfectly with silicon components. Silicon chips incorporate a binary code of zeros and ones. DNA code is digital, utilizing four symbols: A, T, C, and G, which correspond to the four nucleic acids which make up DNA.”
Rocky stops, realizing from their looks that she has gone too “high-tech” on her superiors.
“Commander, in a nutshell, what can Sorceress do?”
“The question is what can’t she do. The system’s DNA strands enable its biochemical brain to process and store far more information—approximately ten to the tenth power greater—than even the most massive electronic supercomputer made.”
“Incredible …”
“Sorceress is a prototype, sir. The system was to represent the birth of a new generation of computers, designed to reproduce, evolve, and improve itself every moment it was running.”
“Evolve?” The president looks concerned. “Evolve in what way?”
“Dr. Goode designed Sorceress to be self-repairing, its components engineered to self-improve in accuracy and efficiency with each new generation of bacteria processed. The bacteria themselves were engineered as facultative anaerobes, which thrive in a variety of environments and can efficiently metabolize nutrients, which are constantly generated by Sorceress’s internal recycling system.”