Von Neumann Weapon

[Steel Mirage]

Yet another hare-brained idea from a dud modder:
To make a long story short John von Neumann was a theoretician, a genius really, who made many contributions to science. Significant here is his concept of a "self-replicating machine" AKA Von Neumann Machine. Now imagine this at a very small scale, along the lines of the latest remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still. Here's the question:
Could a weapon/unit be created that could transform other units into copies of itself, which would thereafter do the same to other units, ad nauseum. I imagine it happening like the Battle Fortress, but instead of being crushed, the unit is absorbed and transformed into another Von Neumann machine.
Would some variation of the slave miner code work? I haven't given up on exploring code and writing for myself, but life for me has backed up like a Soviet toilet beneath a fat sweating Texan. So I'm a throwing this out there, to see what ya'll think.