Even though the UUV’s sonar-dampening “fur” made it practically invisible to sonar, the U.S. naval assets 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.”
Steve didn’t really want to think about how much money he’d wasted if his machine had failed and was lying on the lake bottom, but he closed his eyes and mentally walked through what he knew about the components and the materials used to make them.
“Um… eighteen million?”
Bo Pan laughed. The sound made Steve more nervous. Something about that laugh made his stomach pinch, made him afraid.
“Eighteen million,” Bo Pan said, shaking his head. “You have no idea. The cost is one hundred and ten million. Rounded down.”
A staggering sum. It didn’t seem real. It seemed like Monopoly money.
“One hundred and ten million,” Bo Pan repeated. “If your machine does not return, Steve, then you have wasted not only our investment in you, but also all that money.”
Steve turned back to his computer. Still no tweet from the Platypus.
One hundred and ten million dollars…
“I’ll write some more code,” he said. “I’ll make sure we are not discovered.”
Bo Pan nodded. “That is good. You do that while I make some calls.”
The old man pulled out his cell phone. He lay back in his bunk and let Steve get to work.
CLEAR YOUR MIND
Margaret tried not to hold her breath as she watched Tim Feely slice into Candice Walker’s brain. She was right, she had to be right; it was the only thing that fit the observed data.
Tim separated the left and right hemispheres, then made horizontal slices across each. When he was done, the thing that had made up Walker’s personality, stored her memories, comprised everything that she was, lay on the dissection tray like a pair of strange, gray loaves of sliced bread.
Tim looked up. “I don’t know what to make of this. In the other infection victims, including Petrovsky, the crawlers create fibrous structures in the brain. I found hydras in Walker’s brain, but none of those structures. She didn’t have any crawlers in there, either — melted or otherwise. Petrovsky’s brain was packed with the things. Aside from the presence of the hydras, Walker’s brain looks perfectly normal.”
Margaret felt an electric surge of possibility, powerful enough to make her fingers and toes tingle. She leaned in and eye-tracked through her HUD controls, calling up magnification, labeling and enhancement. The visor showed Candice’s brain in far greater detail than Margaret could have seen with the naked eye.
She looked for the visible, telltale signs of brain infection: a latticework of crawler threads, each thinner than a human hair, spreading through the obifrontal cortex, amygdala, and hippocampus.
There weren’t any.
Tim seemed dumbfounded. “Walker tested positive for cellulose. I found hundreds of crawlers in her spinal column alone. Why didn’t her crawlers make it to her brain?”
Margaret didn’t know, but one hypothesis loomed large. Her heart hammered, her face felt flushed. She heard herself breathing rapidly.
“Tim, is there any evidence of the black rot in Walker’s brain?”
He shook his head. “No, none.” He looked at Walker’s body. “In fact, I haven’t observed any apoptosis on her at all — according to the normal timeline, we should be seeing that by now. She’s just not rotting like Petrovsky and the other infected victims.”
Melted crawlers… no rot… no growths in the brain…
The observations pointed to one obvious conclusion, a glorious conclusion.
“Candice was infected by crawlers, but not under their control,” Margaret said. “The hydras are clearly different, and we have to assume they stopped the crawlers from colonizing her brain.”
“Calm down, Red Hot Momma,” Tim said. “You look like you might pass out. Take it easy.”
She turned on him, so fast she almost stumbled.
“I can’t calm down, Tim. Don’t you see what this means?”
Margaret drew in a sharp breath, held it, tried to stop her body from shaking. For years she had dealt with the hard truth that there was no known method of preventing the alien infection from penetrating new hosts, from hijacking stem cells to make whatever bioparts it needed. If her new hypothesis about Candice Walker was right, there might finally be a way.