Well out of sight from the Esperança now, I close my eyes and spend a few minutes doing a full-spectrum scan for anything transmitting. With those clouds of their nanobots floating around, it would have been easy for them to sneak something onto any of the boats in our little fleet. This isn’t a full solution, but it should get us some awareness about whether her crew planted something obvious.
An hour later, I find something. A device the size of a postage stamp is attached to the side of one of the cats. It’s kicking out a weak signal on a little-used low frequency band that’s usually reserved for hobbyists.
I send in my cloud to take a look. It’s a flat plastic package with what looks like a programmable integrated circuit inside. It could be anything, but it’s definitely sending info back to Dorothy. I’ll need to have the team back at SynTech take a look, this kind of reverse engineering is way beyond me.
What I can do is stop it from tattling on us right now. I build another faraday cage around it, tightly meshing aluminum wires that should block any signal. Dorothy will know that her spy was caught, but I don’t care. Better than having our location and info reported back to her. I check all of our boats again as my fleshy self sits down in the shaded part of the deck. Nothing this time. It could have been the only one, or there could be more that aren’t transmitting right now.
I build a larger faraday cage on the deck, this one big enough for me to fit inside. I pull in all of my cloud from the surrounding area and put most of them in sleep mode, forming thick piles of gray dust around me. It feels a little like turning off my legs, if I had an extra dozen legs that I could turn off. I enter the cage with a few thousand bots and my new golf ball and close it off with me inside. My bots peel off the outer casing and tear away the tiny wire cage, reforming the plastic into a dish with a small puddle of ocean water containing the tiny captives. They’re inactive. I form a magnifying eye to take a close up look.
I see the familiar soccer ball sphere with configurable ports. They look like they’re the same hardware as my SynTech bots. Might not be identical, but they’re close enough that I can’t tell the difference just by looking. I cycle through the control channel frequencies to see if they’ll respond to version queries. If they’re using our software and still active, that interface would be the only one not encrypted. No response. Same thing I’d expect from ours if they were abruptly disconnected from the mesh network without being put to sleep, probably using the same kind of automatic lobotomy code we use.
I rebuild the electromagnetically shielded golf ball. I slip it into my satchel, then tear down the big cage and reactivate all the bots on the deck.
Better. I’m whole again.
Some of my many eyes glance at the displays in the bridge deck. All steady on our course to the next build site, plenty of time before we get there. I feel the light hum of the electric motors and the gentle rock of the cat as it glides over the water.
I head into the catamaran’s main cabin. The build routine for these boats doesn’t do much beyond what’s absolutely necessary to get a working ship. I’ll need to talk to the dev team about that. For the Mekong River trip, we’ll want more comforts baked in. Andrea’s been at work here today though, since she and Evan are sitting on chairs that didn’t exist this morning at a table that wasn’t here when we set off. She even made a chair for me. That’s a promising sign. I take a seat in it.
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Both he and Andrea look as angry as I’ve ever seen them. I haven’t followed their discussions while I was searching the fleet, but they’ve obviously jumped ahead to the same conclusions I’ve found.
“What did you find out?” Evan demands.
“It’s exactly what you think. Dorothy totally pirated Father’s tech. They took the bots. What they’ve got are straight up clones of ours.”
Evan lets out a string of obscenities, some of which I didn’t think he knew. Andrea does some trick with her bots to make the skin of her face bright red and her hair explode into illusionary flames.
I’m a little surprised at their reactions. It’s the kind of response I’d expect from Chad. Both Evan and Andrea are usually more even-keel. But this is someone stealing the family’s most prized possession, so I relate.
“I couldn’t agree more. But there’s a bright spot. Did either of you take a look inside of their ship while we were there?”
They both shake their heads.
“They had sixty people jacked into VR headsets running their cloud. They didn’t manage to steal the implant tech. Their controls must suck compared to ours. For what they were getting done, any one of us could have done it by ourselves without breaking a sweat. At least we’ve got that going for us.”
Evan doesn’t look at all calmed by this, but Andrea lets her face and hair go back to normal.
“I mean, we knew the tech wouldn’t stay in the family forever. The patents expire in a couple of years anyway,” I say. “But I want to strangle her as much as you do.”
Neither of them responds, and we sit in silence for a long couple of minutes.
“Anyway,” I continue, “that Dorothy lady was super shady. I was watching her vitals while we talked to her. She had deception all over everything she said. I already found some kind of bug or data collector that they planted on us that was transmitting back to them. I still need to check for more to find any that I couldn’t find by radio waves.”
Andrea forms a glowing question mark in the air and looks my way.
“I don’t know what they’re after, Andrea. Maybe just keeping tabs on us, maybe more corporate spying, maybe something else.”
“Well, unless we want to go back and sink them, I guess there’s nothing we can do about it right now,” Evan grumbles, starting to regain his composure. “Do we want to go sink them? Maybe?”
Andrea snorts out a bitter laugh and shakes her head. I do the same, but without the snort.
“Too many innocent journalists on board,” I say. “Otherwise I might seriously consider it.”
“Well then. Off to the next build, I guess.” He gets up from the table. “We’ve got a while until we hit site number two. Plenty of time to think about it. I guess we’re ahead of schedule now if we want to just continue without doing that first build.”
“I can’t think of a better plan. I’m going to go check the whole fleet as we go. I wish I could just slag them all and rebuild them, but then we’d have to stop while we did it and I want to get as far from Dorothy as we can.”
“You want a hand with searching?”
“Nah, I got it.” I get to my feet. He’d need to turn his senses all the way on to be useful and I know how much he hates doing that. “You two grab the sat phone and call Louise. Tell her everything and have her tell Mr. Smith. We’ll want to see what we can do about this from the legal side. And we need to find out who’s feeding them our operational info. This trip wasn’t exactly secret, but to know exactly where we would be and have an operation of that size already there when we arrived? She’s still got people on the inside.”
Evan balls his fists and nods. Andrea scowls and makes a tiny stick figure wearing a blue pantsuit explode in front of her.
“Yeah. I feel the same. See you in a few hours.”
I head out to the shaded area of the deck and sit down cross-legged with my back against the cabin wall. I close my eyes, losing myself in the sensations of my cloud scrubbing over every tiny surface of each of the cats in our fleet. It’ll take a while to scour every micrometer of the hulls of all the cats to make sure she didn’t plant anything else on us.