Chuck and Marcus fill one of the wide screens on my desk, their weekly report fills the other.
“Well boss, let’s get the bad news out of the way first,” Chuck says, his grumbling tone out of sorts from the affable way that my index says he usually talks. “We couldn’t get much out of the chip you sent us. The antenna on it and the way it was planted makes us think it’s some kind of signal collector, but it doesn’t have any storage hooked to it, so it’s not like it was going to be able to record your comms with your bots or anything. We powered it up inside our RF shielded room and fuzzed it six ways from Sunday, but it doesn’t seem to do much.”
Marcus nods along as Chuck explains, then jumps in.
“Yes. It doesn’t seem to matter what kind of signals we send to it, the response is always the same—it just does what looks like some kind of wireless ping. It might only activate its real functions if it can get a signal to some kind of home station and back. The trouble is that the ping isn’t anything standard, so you need whatever custom receiver knows how to talk to it. Chuck looked up one of our old buddies from back in our DARPA days. He said he can come take a look at it if we don’t mind paying his consulting fee. He’s not cheap, but he’s about the best in the world for reverse engineering, so hopefully he’ll be able to figure it out.”
I glance at the consultancy figures in the report. It’s a big enough number that it’s going to hurt, but I think this is worth it. The more we know about Dorothy’s operation, the better shot we have of protecting our tech.
“OK, go ahead and bring him in,” I tell them. “If he’s as good as you say, I’d like to see what he can do.”
“On to the better news then,” Marcus says, his eyes blinking rapidly, “For the security update, I think we’re just about there. Our penetration testing group hasn’t found a single new vulnerability in a week and we’ve got fixes for all the vulnerabilities we found ready to ship in the next update.”
“Great, we’ll take a look too and make sure we can’t find any backdoors either,” I tell him. “How are things going with the implementation on the water filter construction routines?”
“Moving along beautifully,” Chuck declares, getting back to his usual happy self. “Your designs for those are fantastic, by the way. All the milestones are right on track, some of them even ahead of schedule. Those are going to be some sweet pieces of hardware once we’re done.”
“Nice, good job.”
They both nod appreciatively.
“Anything else I should be aware of?” I ask.
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“Not on our end.” Chuck says. “How did the catamarans do out on the open ocean?”
“Very nicely,” I tell him. “Fast, with a really smooth ride. That was good work.”
“Glad to hear it! We modelled it after the top end of the market and used their custom control boards.”
“Yeah, everything worked perfectly: autopilot, alerts, everything.” I don’t mention that the man overboard alarm worked. “We’re definitely going to use the bigger version on our Southeast Asia trip. Did you get the list of upgrade requests that Evan sent you? We’re going to want a better kitchen and some default furniture built into the designs for those, at least.”
“Got the list and can do, boss.” Chuck replies. “We’ll just need a complete inventory of what you want to see magically appear in the boat kitchen after a build and we’ll make it happen. As long as it’s stuff that’s already in the build libraries, that’s pretty light lift. Anything else new that we should start planning for?”
“Yeah, if you could look at some ways to get the bots to work underwater that would be great.”
“Hmm, yeah, that’s a tough nut to crack.” Chuck’s smile gets a half-twist as his eyes look off to the side. “We actually did some investigations on that a while back. The current hardware can actually work pretty well in freshwater, depending on the level of the dissolved electrolytes. But I’m guessing that since your last project was on the Pacific, you want something that’ll work in the ocean, right?”
“Yeah. Or a very polluted river.”
He scratches his bearded chin, but Marcus jumps in and answers. “That kind of water is conductive enough that you really need big, high power antennas at either end of the connection and a really low frequency to get any kind of radio signaling across,” he explains. “None of that is compatible with what we can do now with the bots.”
I nod.
“You can just keep the cloud density really high and mesh across with bots basically touching each other. I know that’s not ideal, and it’s not how the default motion algorithms are set up, so it would take a lot of manual control,” he continues. “We can try to look into acoustical signaling, using soundwaves instead of electromagnetic waves for the comms, but that’s going to be complicated enough that we’ll probably need to set the brain-in-a-box working on it. How high of a priority is it for you?”
“Not critical,” I tell him “But it would be helpful. There’s still a lot of work to do that’s going to be out on the water.”
“Well, we’ll get it on the docket then,” Chuck says. “If that’s all, then we’ll talk to you next week.”
I give him a nod. “Thanks, guys.”
I close down the chat, skim through their software development report, and commit its contents to my index. Time to turn back to the Mekong plans. We still need to figure out all the press events and lodging logistics in the major cities. For the rest of the trip, we’ll live in the catamarans. We’ve got guides set up and there are plenty of places they can get food as we go. We’ll have to disassemble and rebuild the boats at the big dams, but that shouldn’t be bad. Things are coming together really well, but I still can’t believe how much work goes into making a trip like this happen.
I push my chair back from the desk, spin it around, and look at the ceiling. I let myself think of a pair of beautiful dark eyes and a kiss.
Maybe I can figure out some way to see her again while we’re in China.