No, no … Steve was just stressing out, imagining things. Bo Pan was Bo Pan. Had to be. It was Steve who had changed. In all his years of work, pursuing whatever development he thought might add to the Platypus’s effectiveness, he’d felt invulnerable. He’d felt brilliant. None of that had been real. This, however, was reality: a boat that never sat still, an old man watching his every move, a machine that refused to respond, and a nation’s investment in him about to go bust.
He didn’t feel brilliant anymore. He felt incompetent.
Bo Pan pushed himself up on one arm.
“Steve, it seems you are telling me you don’t know where your creation is, but I know you cannot be telling me that.”
A coldness in that voice, and steel. No sorry, sorry this time. Steve shivered.
“The sensor algorithms determine where the Platypus goes, so it isn’t necessarily moving in a straight line,” he said. “If it has to go around or through anything, that causes delays, and if it sees any American UUVs or divers, it knows to swim away and come back later. Could be any minute now. Or it could be hours. The UUV is programmed to not be seen, Bo Pan. I can’t—”
A laptop let out a beep. Bo Pan sat up straighter. Steve put the chips aside, brushed his orange-dust-covered fingertips against his shirt, then pulled the laptop closer.
A tweet.
@TheMadPlatypus: Dizzy in the hizzy.
Steve sagged in his seat, felt the anxiety flood away in a crashing waterfall of relief.
“It’s the Platypus,” he said. “It’s signaling.”
He watched a string of tweets come pouring in. Seemingly normal language — mostly about “hot b.i.t.c.hes” and “keg stands” — told him the story.
Bo Pan leaned in. “Is it working?”
Steve smiled. “h.e.l.l yeah, it is.” The Platypus had found the location. Steve read the tweets, trying to figure out what had taken so long. There it was:
@TheMadPlatypus: Mean muggin’ AT-ATs all over the d.a.m.n place. f.u.c.k the Empire.
Navy ROVs.
Holy s.h.i.t, it was really happening.
@TheMadPlatypus: Stick in the mud is big like a pickle.
It wasn’t just the ROVs … the Platypus had found a big object on the bottom. Too big.
“Something is off,” he said. “When the alien object came down, there was enough observed data to calculate its size as roughly equivalent to a small refrigerator, like the kind I had in my dorm. But the Platypus found something exponentially larger.”
Bo Pan nodded slowly. His eyes seemed electric.
“Do you have pictures?”
Steve huffed. “Does a bear s.h.i.t in the woods?”
The old man’s forehead wrinkled with confusion. “What are you talking about?”
“Yes, I have pictures.”
“Show me,” Bo Pan said. “And prepare yourself. There is some other information I have not told you.”
Steve sighed. The old man was being cryptic. Whatever.
That feeling of failure faded away. Steve had done it — he felt strong once again, ready for the next step.
The Platypus couldn’t send straight video. That was too much bandwidth; even if his encryption held, the size of that signal and the location it came from could alert the navy ships to the Platypus’s presence. Instead, his machine took low-bandwidth snapshots — one frame every twenty seconds — and routed each one through a different secure server.
“Here we are,” Steve said, and called them up on the screen.
The first picture showed something green, blurry. That meant it was a pale color, brightly reflecting the low-light camera’s illumination.
“Can’t make that out,” Steve said. “Lemme get the next one.”
He called the image up, and froze: the face and torso of a corpse.
A sailor. A navy sailor.
Puffy face. Black sockets where the eyes had once been, eyes probably eaten by fish that had also picked at the skin, tearing holes and leaving strands of flesh dangling weightless in the water. Body bloated, so swollen it had burst the zipper at the belly and neck, leaving only a bit near the collar still fastened. Pale skin glowed an obscene white-green.
“Bo Pan, what is this?”
“More pictures. Let me see.”
The next image showed a long shape. Gray, perhaps? The one after that, yes, gray, large, maybe ten feet tall or even taller, rising up at an angle. Definitely artificial.
When Steve saw the next picture, he felt his heart drop into his stomach. He realized, finally, just how dangerous this game was.
The gray image rose up at an angle. Flat, with slightly curved sides. At the top, a white, three-digit number glowed a bright green.
The number: 688.
“A submarine sail,” Steve said. “Is that … is that a nuclear sub?”
Bo Pan leaned in closer, so close Steve could smell his unwashed odor. The old man seemed … gleeful.
“The Los Angeles,” Bo Pan said. “There was a battle. It sank.”
Steve hadn’t asked questions, hadn’t tried to understand the situation; when Bo Pan said the word location, Steve had jumped. How naive. How stupid.
The next picture came up. The Platypus was moving closer to the sub. Another corpse. Some kind of bulbous, sausage-shaped metal construct behind the sail, bent and torn, a man-size round door still sealed but the construct itself ripped open. And there, stuck on that jagged metal, a leg — just a leg, no body. Inside the ruined construct, Steve saw an inner hatch sitting open.