“Hey, you feel that?” I ask, climbing down from the bridge.

“Feel what?” Evan asks groggily, sitting up in his chair.

“Out that way,” I say, pointing through the main cabin toward the front of the ship. About ten klicks out. Something that feels like a bot cloud is talking.”

Evan shakes off his sleep, coming to instant alertness with a speed that I can only envy. He gets a look of concentration that turns into a worried expression after a couple of minutes. Andrea’s face looks serene, but my bots can feel that her heart rate is rising. She grabs the loose-fitting blouse that was resting on the back of her chair and throws it on over her bikini top, buttoning only the bottom couple of buttons.

“Yeah, that feels like bots. Like our bots. I’d recognize those signal frequencies anywhere after spending a couple of months elbows-deep in them to build our telepathy system. But they’re not using our standard beacons for their signaling. The messages are way too long, and the signaling changes are way too slow. But the hardware identifiers in the message headers are the same. It’s like someone is using our tech, but with a dumber version of software running on it.”

“Want to go see who they are?” I ask.

“We probably should,” he says. “I’m curious now.” Andrea nods in agreement.

We’re pulling up alongside the other boat. It’s significantly larger than ours with the word Esperança in large letters on the hull above its registration number. A quick look inside with my bots shows the interior of their ship has dozens of small cabins with stacked bunks, each filled with a person wearing what looks like a VR headset. Their hands wave around in front of them, covered in gloves that must be controllers of some kind given the slight electromagnetic fields that they’re emanating.

Outside their boat, I’m getting a much clearer picture of what’s going on. Swarms of nanobots near the boat are clustered around what looks like a large buoy. The construction they’re working on seems similar to what we were going to build, at least in principle. It’s tremendously less elegant though, if the early stages of its construction are any indication.

Several camera crews swarm around the decks of the ship, some pointing at the construction, others pointing at what look like the people running this show. Some of them bear the logos from big international news outlets. Whatever we do here could be viewed worldwide, so I need to keep whatever comes out of my mouth as civil as possible.

We’re close enough that I can see a few figures standing prominently on the main deck with my biological eyes now: a dark-haired man in a light-colored suit and two women, one in a blue pantsuit and one in jeans and one wearing some kind of uniform.

“Does she look familiar to either of you?” Evan asks. “I swear I’ve seen her before. The one in blue there.”

I shake my head, but my memory is junk and she’s not popping in my facial recognition system. Andrea nods slowly, but projects a question mark in the air. I guess she can’t place the lady’s face either.

“Ahoy!” I call out as we approach, feeling nautical as I say it. I use the bots as a megaphone, I’m not sure they’d hear me otherwise with the brisk wind. The woman in the uniform responds in kind. I can barely hear her, so I form a discrete mic near them.

“Permission to come aboard?” I shout.

Uniform looks at pantsuit, who returns a subtle nod.

“Granted,” Uniform shouts back.

The camera crew that had been trained on them retreats at a hand motion from the pantsuited woman. Evan takes the controls and drives us right near the side of their boat, which towers over ours. I form a set of stairs from our deck to theirs and we walk up. I figured the flight suits would be a little pretentious for such a short distance, and with the other camera crew still out on their deck, I wasn’t sure about the optics of us just floating up.

The blonde woman in the pantsuit steps forward while the others take a few steps back. She’s probably in her early fifties, and from her mass and resting heart rate she seems to be in very good shape, probably a distance runner. She extends a hand to shake as we step down onto the deck from over the railing. I grasp it firmly and Evan and Andrea shake hands with her as well.

“Hello! You must be Tom’s kids! I’m so sorry to hear about your father.” she says with a familiarity that I don’t like.

“Yes, I’m Noah,” I reply, trying to keep my discomfort off of my face. “This is Evan and Andrea. I’m afraid we don’t know who you are.”

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From Evan: Actually, I just recognized her. That’s Auntie Dorothy. She used to work for Father years ago.

“Dorothy James,” she says in a tone that implies we should know the name. I quickly check my index. Never heard of her. Whatever her relationship was with Father, he didn’t keep any notes that referred to her.

“Hello, Dorothy,” Evan says warily. His normal natural warmth is nowhere to be found. “It’s been a long time.”

“Yes, I was afraid you might not remember me, but I’m sure your father told you all about me. It must be wonderful for you to get to see me again.”

“Oh, I remember you,” Evan says. “You ran his research division at SynTech, right?”

To Evan: Auntie?Why haven’t I heard of her?

“Yes, yes! What a delightful boy you are, Evan,” she exclaims, smiling with very white teeth. “The last time I saw you, you were just a little thing. You’ve grown so big and strong! And Andrea, you were such a cute little chatterbox! Look at what a lovely young lady you’ve turned into. Now Noah, I don’t believe you were there back then, were you? You were the one that got away, as I recall.”

From Evan: She used to work for Father at SynTech. She was close enough with him that she came to the campus a couple of times. That almost never happened. She handed out candy and told us to call her Auntie. She left the company a few years later. It was a big deal. They accused her of corporate espionage. Looks like they were right.

“Yes, that was me,” I reply out loud to her, keeping my tone civil. “I rejoined the family at my father’s invitation a couple of years ago. Now that we're properly introduced, I have to say that we weren’t expecting to run into anyone out here, much less an old friend of the family.”

“Oh, yes, indeed.” Dorothy brushes a wind-blown wisp of hair back into place. “Quite a coincidence, isn’t it. But I guess those of us with expertise in our domain must certainly be drawn to these same problems.” Her blood pressure bumps up as she answers. Her heart rate too. She’s lying. She knew we were coming here today. There’s no way she could have put together something on this scale with just the short notice that the media coverage would have given her. I’ve got a leak that I need to patch when I get back home.

“I see that you’ve got your own nanotechnology operation going on. Can I assume you’re putting together an accumulator here to gather the plastics? Cleaning up the garbage patch?”

She gives me a condescending smile. “And I can see you take after your father, Noah. Bright as the rest of them. Yes, we’re solving the world’s problems, just as you have been. We couldn’t see your family working so hard in Africa without feeling like we needed to do our part. Would you care to join us for lunch?”

Deception and something stronger are clear from her vitals despite the smiling poker face she’s wearing. Anger? I can’t tell. I’d need a better baseline with her. Whatever her motives are, they’re not the altruism she’s claiming.

From Evan: I’d rather not. I’m getting all sorts of creepy vibes from these guys.

“No thanks,” I say, forcing what I hope looks like a friendly smile. Got to keep up appearances for all those cameras. “We were planning to get some work done here but I can see you have everything well in hand. We’ve got to be off soon if we’re going to get somewhere that needs our attention today. We’ll get out of your way and let you continue. Glad we’re all on the same side cleaning up the planet here. It was nice meeting you.” I hope I put enough ice in my voice. I don’t want her to misunderstand and think I’m being sincere.

“Yes, it was so nice to meet you too, Noah,” she says, her face and voice still a sharp mismatch from the tension her body is exhibiting. “I’m sure we’ll be seeing a lot of each other in the coming years. Not many players in this game of ours.”

The guy in the suit seems amused by the exchange and steps forward like he’s about to say something, but then stops as Dorothy catches his arm. I wonder who he is. Someone rich judging by the quality of his suit. I capture pictures of everyone on their boat as I form the stairs back down to the catamaran. Evan heads straight onto the bridge deck and pulls the cat away from the big boat. Once we’re far enough out for the automatic navigation to run, he sets our course up to the next site.

I’m pretty sure based on what Evan told me that Dorothy and her crew stole our nanotech rather than designing their own from scratch, but I need to get a sample to be sure. I reach out around us and choose one of the many small batches of their nanobots in the water away from the main construction area. Looks like they’re returning from collecting some plastic, probably following the same strategy we’ll be using of building their accumulator as much from the locally available materials as possible. I need something that will let me grab them and cut them off from their controllers. A faraday cage should do it. Enclosing them in a conductive metal mesh that should block any kind of signal going to or from them.

I grab a chunk of aluminum from the hull of the catamaran nearest to them and quickly build a small mesh cage around the group of bots. Hopefully, their operator will just assume the bots got pulled far enough underwater by an errant wave that the signal got blocked. I can’t imagine those VR headsets could give them detailed enough feedback that they’d be able to see what I was doing. I give the package a quick sensor sweep to make sure it’s not emitting any signals that would give it away. It’s clean. My cloud encases the cage in plastic so the bots don’t flush out with the water then drag the whole bundle near the surface in the same direction our cat is moving.

Dorothy stands near the railing of her ship, watching us as we go. Several of the cameras point our way. I give them a friendly wave goodbye as I maneuver my golf ball sized prize around the catamaran to the side where the cameras can’t see and up onto the deck. Hopefully without any of them noticing. Maybe they’ll think we’re stupid just because we’re young.

I open up a panel in my interface console and make sure I have the same number of bots in my cloud now as I did when we first spotted these guys.

To Andrea, Evan: Check your clouds. I don’t want to leave anything behind for her to play with. She’s stolen enough from us.