Pandemic Page 43

Cooper had warned him that spending too much time belowdecks could lead to seasickness, but so far Steve had felt no ill effects. If anything, the constant rocking motion made him hungry. He chewed mouthfuls of Doritos, which he washed down with swigs of Diet c.o.ke. He felt Bo Pan staring at him. Steve kept typing, tried to ignore his bunkmate.

“Disgusting,” Bo Pan said. “I do not know how you eat such garbage. We have paid to rent this boat. They would let me use the little kitchen. I could cook you something.”

Steve tipped the bag of Doritos toward the old man. “Breakfast of champions, Bo Pan. Want some? Blazin’ Buffalo & Ranch, can’t go wrong.”

Bo Pan’s face wrinkled in disgust. He looked away.

Steve shrugged and reached in for more. Imagine the dichotomy: Bo “King of Phlegm” Pan calling someone else disgusting.

“Your machine,” Bo Pan said. “Do you have its t.w.a.t yet?”

Steve’s eyebrows rose. “Uh, its what?”

Bo Pan leaned back slightly, confused. “t.w.a.t. Is that not what you call it? The t.w.a.tter messages your machine sends?”

“Ah,” Steve said. “Twitter. It’s a tweet, not a t.w.a.t. Big difference.”

The old man waved a hand, a gesture that might as well have been sign language for get off my lawn. “Have you received any?”

“Not yet. I’m sure it will t.w.a.t at any moment.”

Using Twitter to send and receive messages from the Platypus had been an act of genius, if Steve did say so himself. Twitter boasted five hundred million accounts sending up to three hundred million tweets a day. It added up to an overwhelming amount of data flying across the Internet, 140 characters at a time. The typhoon of content was a perfect place for hiding messages, especially if they corresponded with a code held only by the receiver and the sender. Get in the kitchen and make me some pie might be an innocuous quote from a TV show, but if Steve sent it from his account, @MonstaMush, to @TheMadPlatypus, his lovely machine would know it was time to return to the launch point.

There were over a thousand such tweet-based commands stored in the Platypus’s memory. Steve had programmed his baby to surface periodically and log on to the Internet by using a communication method ubiquitous throughout the United States: cell-phone signals.

Even though the UUV’s sonar-dampening “fur” made it practically invisible to sonar, the U.S. naval a.s.sets in the area still made surfacing dangerous; Steve had to limit the number of surface trips the Platypus could make.

He called up a bathymetry map of Lake Michigan. Different bands of color represented different depths: reds and yellows for zero to 50 feet, greens into greenish-blue to 150 feet, blues through 300. There hadn’t been a color for depths beyond 300 feet, because Lake Michigan’s average depth was 279 feet. So Steve had programmed more: blue-purple to purple for 300 to 500 feet, purple to dark purple for 501 to 800 feet, dark purple to black for the deepest spots the lake had to offer.

The Platypus’s destination? The blackest spot on the map. Bo Pan’s coordinates were in a spot known as Chippewa Basin, the very bottom of which was 923 feet deep.

“How solid are these coordinates?” Steve asked. “I’ll program a search field. It would help to know how far out I have to plot for.”

The old man shrugged. He shrugged a lot.

“I only know what I have been told,” he said. “It is the same location the American navy has. That means ROVs and divers will be in the area. You had better hope your claims of near invisibility are accurate.”

Steve rocked slightly back and forth. He tried to control his excitement. Not just excitement, but also fear, stress and anxiety. He believed he’d constructed the most advanced UUV ever created. Manufacturers and fabricators in a dozen countries had provided parts, had unknowingly helped him build the Platypus. He’d had a huge budget to make his creation, but there was another organization with a far bigger checkbook: the U.S. Navy.

The navy had remotely operated vehicles. The navy had unmanned vehicles. The navy had some of the best minds in the world creating, designing, building. But the navy had one limitation that Steve did not — the navy itself. Proposals, funding, approvals, bidding, construction checks, supervised tests … dozens of administrative layers and miles of red tape that slowed down the creative process. Steve suffered through none of those things.

The Platypus incorporated the best components. Some were prototypes from other designers, things that had yet to enter beta testing, let alone hit the market. Others, Steve had designed himself. The biggest advantage, however, was that Steve had designed the Platypus for one purpose and one purpose only — military contractors had to make machines that could do multiple things in order to serve multiple masters.

If Steve’s creation went up against black-budget DARPA machines, which would come out on top? Could he really out-invent the world’s largest buyer of weapons?

Bo Pan hawked a loogie, spat it into his cup with a wet plop. He smiled. “You seem nervous.”

Steve felt instantly insulted. “Nervous? No. Just excited. Well, a little nervous. We don’t know what the navy has. If something goes wrong with the Platypus and it can’t surface to send a signal, we’d never hear from it again. We’d never know what went wrong.”

The old man’s smile faded. “Do you know how much money was spent on your machine?”

Steve shook his head.

“Guess,” Bo Pan said. “I am curious if you are even close.”