The steam-bus lurched as the driver changed gears when the bus went up hills, a very different experience from an electric vehicle. They were heading north on some dusty stretch set between Sierra Pines, California, and God-Knows-Where Nevada.

The landscape was bone dry beautiful. August gave the trees a hue about as far from verdant but still 'green.' Small strands of gray twigs in a gulch on confluence gave a hint where green should appear one day.

“I’m not getting a signal,” someone said.

“You’re supposed to have your phone off.” Another replied.

“It's backcountry. No reception,” replied a third.

“Who's your carrier? We’re uphill, it should detect a sat,” said one of the satellite men asked. Attenuation and signal strength were their forte.

Someone from the back of the bus called out, “look there, the interstate’s all jammed up.” She pointed through the haze of steam towards an indefinite line in the distance.

“You can’t see shit through the steam,” someone said and then others argued back.

The steam powered bus languished up the last switchback and finally crested over a hill and back down towards the ranch. Outside their windows, they could see it, the Trillionaire’s hideout. The house itself was a gleaming white box on the rolling brown and tan landscape. An enormous white satellite dish—nearly the size of a three story building—was on a flat-topped hill opposite of the valley from them. There was a barn, maintenance shed, and assorted trucks, tractors, and other ranch equipment.

The vehicle turned and descended faster. Dalton could see out his window. There looked to be a newly finished wing just off from the main house with a large porch and repetitious sets of windows and doors—a dormitory for housing the ranch staff or visitors.

Tory got up and addressed them with the driver’s megaphone. “Our benefactor has invited us here because he believes war with China might destroy our deep space communications. You will have thirty-five minutes to go to your rooms, afterwards meet in the conservatory.”

Dalton, Emman, and Marco roomed together in a spartan 10x20 room with a window outside. It had two bunk beds, a chair, a closet and a bathroom adjoining into another room. Steel, cinderblock, and eggshell white paint—it must have been a room for the goatherds or whomever else monitored the various flocks the man owned.

“I heard he keeps ostriches.” Emman said.

“He keeps many animals here, whatever lessens his tax on this land.” Dalton replied. “It's listed as a farm, but the goats aren't only for meat, he rents them out to Nevada for fire control.” He chuckled a bit, “Then get this, one of his non-profits also brings disadvantages kids up here to learn ranching skills.”

“Double-dip the tax writeoffs?” Marco replied.

“Everything Mr. T does, does double duty. Even us.”

They many chuckled and left their rooms and the detached housing wing and walked under a covered porch into the main floor. This lobby area was extensive, and set up with many long, white, and rectangular plastic tables. Powerstrips and extension cords littered the floor.

The team had expected to reconnect with the others who hadn’t come. Probably twenty-five percent of the full-time staff were absent. Most of the true scientists were already remote at institutes such as the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. The plans were set, and there was little for those scientists to do but wait for data. A very slow trickle was expected, but even that would be delayed.

The landing and operations crew were staffed by accomplished engineers, which nearly all arrived. A small trickle of people came into the square room. The teams reserved haphazardly, and entire tables saved by the first member to arrive. Then, when enough mass for a quorum arrived, groups self-organized and reshuffled to a more logical arrangement.

During this time, the inevitable questions were asked as any group tries to tie itself back on the world-wide web. “What’s the Wi-Fi password?” / “Are these ethernet ports on?” / “I forgot my cables!” / “You brought a Cat-6?” / “Is that wall screen on the same Wi-Fi?” And even lonesome, “Is there a printer on this network?”

The intervening conversations revolved around reconnecting to the deep space network to the small data center in the basement. All unrehearsed, but the smartest people alive made quick work of the technicalities.

Eventually someone tried to remote into a machine at the office. “I can’t get into my box.”

“Did someone trip over the power cord on the way out?” Another replied. There was a laugh around the room. The mood was annoyed but tolerant of the sudden change now they were getting back online. But that's how the Tillionaire ran things, and how people responded—many changes were made and many made changes.

Tory stood on a chair and addressed everyone. “Thank you all for coming. Here’s the situation. It seems this region of Nevada has been affected, either by an EMP or a cyberattack. Fallon, Reno/Sparks, Fernley, maybe Carson City are out of power.”

Gasps came from the crowd then chatter of questions and conclusions: “Is the cloud up?” / “My new Tesla’s worthless!” / “Does solar work after an EMP?” / “It was the Chinese!” / “Was it the Russians?” / “Did Mr. T. know this was going to happen?”

The only question she answered was the last. “Our sponsor suspected a Chinese cyberattack.” She said, “Which is why he outfitted this compound with servers and dishes.” The high-tech kinds of servers and dishes, but dining room varieties were also plentiful. “Let’s connect them to the DNS and get that data.”

The teams worked into the night resetting and establishing connection with the Deep Space Network based now in four locations around the globe. Two in the southern hemisphere were Parkes, Australia, and Atacama, Chile, which was also the newest. The two in the northern half of Earth were outside Madrid, Spain and Goldstone, California.

They could connect through the satellite constellation whirling around Earth and bouncing straight to the correct receiver station, which was also connected to the constellation. The traffic was entirely independent of the Internet.

Dalton assisted as best he could to get reconnected to the Internet. Then he got back to his business, which was reporting on what the AI copy on Earth would have done based on various imagined situations that the probe could have encountered on Europa. After losing contact, every scenario resulted in the submarine probe returning to the surface within two days’ time. The AI would search and after hitting a sufficient threshold of ‘science points’, it would reverse course and come back up to upload the data to the communications relay. The only scenario that would keep it submerged if it had found nothing interesting—if the seafloor was a featureless and lifeless plain. Everyone assumed that to be impossible. A single rock would be enough to report on.

The probe’s navigation was also very cautious. It would stay far away from fuzzy data, lest some strange life tangle and trap the probe. In fact, if it received any conflicting data, it would re-map the area with pulses of high-intensity sound. Exogeologist could conceive of no natural geologic phenomenon (even in low gravity) that would fool sonar and tangle a large heavy submarine. No instance of naturally occurring seafloor ‘fiberglass’ being spun in long threads, but all engineering was cautious.

Still, the data was not there yet. The surface relay and the sub-ice microphone were working and picking up some extraordinary sounds, but mostly this was ice cracking and strike-slip faults.

“We’re getting a feed from Parkes.” One controller said to Jim.

“I’m getting news about Reno.” someone else said.

The air in the room suddenly became electric, as if people were charged particles attracted toward whichever pole they were destined to. Some had family in Reno, and it was a hot Nevada August day. Power loss might be fatal. Maybe the water and sewer system was gravity fed. Maybe. They were specialists in a specialized world and had a cursory understanding of the mundane matters like municipal water.

An initial download of data had already been received by the Deep Space Network. It was waiting. Scripts in the data center had already silently combined it. Right now, the highest priority data was mission health. Where was the probe last, and what was it last thinking?

“Everyone! I know Reno is important. Let's look it over for a minute and then get back to business.” Jim conceded to the staff. It was not so much a concession since nothing could stop them from pulling up info on their many devices.

They brought up a foreign news service on screen. A digitized metahuman reporter with a British accent reported for the BBC. “... China has struck back at the United States, hitting Fallon Air Navy Station. My sources tell me Fallon was home of the US Navy’s swarm robotics command and control. We’re getting scattered reports that power is out in Northern Nevada. Just to give you some comparison, Nevada is about half the area of France, and majority desert ...”

The news ticker rolled by as she spoke.

“... At this time, there has been no response from either country.”

Jim muted the feed and resized that window to a small portion of the wall-sized screen.

“This was why we came here. We simplified the data logistics. Our ‘supply chain’ was vulnerable to attack.”

Everyone's attention was split, and anxieties doubled.

“FLUME data is in,” a controller called out. FLUME was the acronym for: Fluorescent Laser detector for Undersea MicrobEs on Europa. This was the second most important data. The device comprised a small nozzle that funneled cells in nearly single file. Then a laser hit the input stream and detectors acquired data. This was the initial data from the melt-through that had been relayed to the Europa Clipper, when it was in range.

Data preprocessing was done onboard the probe and its summary was uploaded to the relays, beamed back to earth, intercepted by the deep space network, and held at the dish. Previously it would have been uploaded to the cloud, unioned with data from the other dishes, held in a datacenter (somewhere), then waited in cloud to be downloaded by the office. And that wouldn’t even be the end location—the data would be fed back to the awaiting exobiologist and the team would get first crack at writing the paper.

Now it was simplified. The experiment to the probe, the probe to the relay, relay to 70 meter receiver (or to the Clipper), received and written to an immutable data ledger, fired back to a private satellite, and finally down to the ranch. All cloud processes bypassed, and any snoozing cyber-ambush would see an empty cloud storage container. Tenth-hand-data now had only five jumps.

They stood waiting as the team further analyze the data.

“And we have more video.” Another called out. There was a slight cheer or chuckle. Video was a generous term; 8k it was not.

“The descent clip?” Jim asked.

The video was a very crude summary. No one in the room had seen such low fidelity and called it `video`. Films of the 1910s had better resolution than this. It was a 320x240 time-lapse GIF image that returned from Jupiter. Of course this was thumbnail only, they could request higher definition video once the anchored into something interesting. An hour of ice sublimating in ultra high def wouldn’t get clicks. And of course, in this age, it was all about the likes.

The Trillionaire didn’t become rich by accident. Everything he did produced a result—not always the result the public expected, (nor even he intended). There was no true charity at that order of magnitude. A privately funded robotic mission to the outer planets, the first in fact, generated a media boon for him and quantifiable improvement to the bottom line of other industries he owned. The Europa Project was technically a non-profit—a tax write-off. So it was advantageous to fund it, but it did double duty.

The chance of detecting multicellular life. It was a chainsaw against the hedgerow of noise in front of everyone’s faces. A machete against the information thicket. The public was now focused on something more important than their own consumption. This simple public goodwill generated pliable representatives in the US Congress.

Meanwhile, the intelligentsia of the US also fell in line. Partnering with this project, scientists hoped to ride this tsunami of attention. Papers now with the working title of Effect of Europan pH on the lifecycle of Scyphozoa might have had in previous decades, ‘microplastics,’ ‘ocean acidification,’ or the ‘ozone hole’ instead of ‘Europa.’

Dalton had only pieces of this in his mind. He didn’t yet understand how far his mentors would bend their principles for attention. He had seen the power law distribution in scientific literature. How far the Saganites of Science would go to pump up their resume. Science actors; professional noise miners. A tiny fraction of papers had one hundred citations, meanwhile ninety-eight percent of researchers had fewer than ten citations.

Utterly lopsided.

But with this data, every other science paper being devised right now would look like a kid's science fair submission—a clunky triptych.

And now the data was within his grasp. With the right data, the analysis is simple—the paper writes itself. He thought.

It was one reason Dalton stopped pure scientific research and joined the expedition (beside it paying very well). There would be hard feedback. Long gone were the days when a simple experiment would prove or refute a fact of physics. It now took billions of dollars and years to gather one more fact. Science had become big business.

Inflation also took its toll. Everyone was expected to have a second gig, or a patron, by these days. Alternatively, have family or boom wealth. But to gain a patron, one had to market, be outgoing, to be flashy. This is hell for the introverts, the mildly autistic, those wanting to be left alone to study and really get into the nit-and-grit of detail.

It was a formulaic cycle for the Trillionaire. Slow erosion of purchasing power meant everyone was just a little more hungry. The masses hungry for bread and circuses, the elites for attention and the pursuit of riches. The intelligentsia for significance. And he played them off each other, yielded more power for himself.

He did not do this for malicious reasons. He honestly wanted to hack the system, change the world, force a new perspective. Show others that there were ideals better than war, strife, and self-consumption. There was something transcendental about discovery. That exploring and discovering took someone from the frozen shell of their own bubble of personalized attention and made them look out. Chin pointed up, instead of neck bent down. And do it together and wonder and work for what was out there. The Mars landing had done that last year. It had changed the perception of a generation. That was the legacy the Trillionaire wanted to be known for. It was going as he imagined. Except for this pesky cold war thawing. It was distracting everyone from the direction he imagined for society. And now he, Mr. T. was asking for updates.

Tory was technically Jim’s assistant, but she was foremost the primary contact with Mr. T, and paid directly from his business accounts.

Dalton could see her on the phone, collecting updates from controllers in the room. She'd methodically hit a line of people, then jump to another part of the room and pester another. The replies at this moment were mostly the same weasel statement, “Yes, we have no data... at the moment.”

The next stuff through was video of the breakthrough. The plunge through Europa’s ice sheet would be a tantalizing media tid-bit that the marketing teams in other of Mr. T's businesses had labeled as high-pri. There was also acoustic sonar data from immediately after the breakthrough. Both were important to Dalton, as the probe would use this data to decide on what to do next. They would feed this data to the AI-copies he maintained.

Dalton, Emman, and Marco were elbows-in working close. They had about as much room as flying the cheap seats on a discount regional airline.

Step one: fork the AI.

Dalton's UI showed parts of the progress. Vanilla-AI, the ground state after a successful landing, but before nose-in melt, was duplicated thousands of times. Each copied AI was an orange dot on his screen and gyrated until it hit blue when finished. A hundred dots across with fifty rows slowly turned blue as the cloud spun up thousands of copied AIs.

Next, he fed in the initial data from the landing. It included the strange sounds, the eight bloops, but little else. Each AI then reset to orange again as slowly faded to blue as the copies each had small perturbations. None were exactly alike. Over these were summarizers, shepherd-AIs which corralled the simulated data each copy produced into a legible format for humans. Every AI was like a single at-home movie-studio which produced custom content at home instead of streaming for mass customization of video. The crude video was upsampled via latent space exploration, then fed to the forked AIs, along with the sonar and audio data. Both had been uncompressed similarly. Next, the flow cytometer data, though Dalton wasn't familiar enough with the data to interpret the results.

He fed the AIs their diet of data, now came digestion.

As it recompiled, Marco communicated the progress to the room.

Heard some sounds, breached the ice, and ran experiments. Dalton thought. What will you do next?

Dalton watched the wall screen

“What’s a graphite bomb?” Someone asked.

“Think: conductive spider silk. The Chinese launched an infrastructure bomb.” Another replied. Many then went and searched for details, though the news did not clarify if it was from the Chinese.

Dalton ignored all this and ran the simulations on his new forked AIs.

He sat watching the progress bar, which was not-at-all riveting, so he tabbed over to the news, which had no additional news, and tabbed again to a new window of a cloud storage provider. There he saw the new file with a timestamp from the middle of the night while he was without his phone.

It was disconcerting but not alarming and sat in his mind like too much dairy sits in the stomach. Slowly gurgling and frothing. But immediately he tried to rationalize the odd timestamp. This must be on UTC, which is like 7 hours off.

“Weird, Emman, look at this.” Dalton pointed to the timestamp. “I was… um, sleeping.”

“You probably embedded your rights instead of the service account.”

Puzzled, Dalton looked back to the data pipelines. Here he was uncertain. Did one dish receive the signal and produce the file or did two and the cloud function stitch the files together and land it here? It wasn’t his primary job to handle the actual data pipeline, only to construct simulated data.

The AIs finished training and the earth-bound copies gave a crude text summary of the probe’s next goal: Search for Life. It would secure the sub-ice relay, test communications, run another life-detection experiment under the ice, and transmit the results. Then, the probe would begin the longest and most dangerous phase of the mission, the search for hydrothermal vents.

Someone from one of the experiment teams got up and announced the result of the FLUME experiments. “Early data from the flow cytometer shows no sign of microbial life. The data covers the first meltwater of the descent. We have relayed this to our partners for confirmation.” This wasn’t wholly unexpected, as they assumed it Jupiter’s radiation belt might sterilize the top layer of ice. Not much data had been transmitted, either. The highest bandwidth journey was from the relay to the Europa Clipper, which would swing out and retransmit the data back to Earth. But this would happen only every ten days. Inbetween, the team could only pick up low speed communications directly from the on-ice antenna, which was mostly system health data.

Dalton hadn’t been able to read the data, but inferred this from the behavior of the forked-AIs. The sub had a rudimentary ability to interpret the data (from quick approximations) if the data might be 'valuable' to the scientific community. The fact it continued down would have occurred whether it found life. A crude approximation of the sub's thought process was 'Find life? Find more life. Didn't find life? Find life.'

The room settled down for the long wait for more data.

Still, a strange situation nagged at Dalton’s mind. It was possible it was just a normal bit of error magnified by the AI process on Earth. He went back and looked at the results of the upsampled data. There were odd artifacts in the images. Unbiased bad data would show a Gaussian distribution, white or black noise (dropped bytes) on an otherwise clear image. These spots were too large and infrequent to be a suspension in the water. There were clumps of strange pixels. It just looked like murk hanging in only one area. Bad data being bad together? Almost like the automated process saw the frame of something but couldn’t put skin to it.

He sat back in his chair. It was suspicion and no more. A theory with no evidence. Anyone else who suspected it did what he did and waited for the deep-space dial-up to deliver. Even the old-timers thought it slow.

Most went out of the room. Some attempted to reconnect with Reno, or others to use the facilities. A few calls made it through, as some infrastructure buried in the ground was rendered immune from the graphite fibers, which only affected air-insulated electrical equipment.

Dalton stayed with his team and watched the breaking news text scroll by.

He could take no more and his colleagues mercifully allowed him to take the first shift to sleep. A warm breeze greeted him as he walked between buildings and his bed greeted him as he laid down still clothed the same way he came to work this morning.

His last thoughts were about the Galileo probe that visited Jupiter in the 1990s. Because of the failure of the high-gain antenna, they reprogrammed remotely it to allow for better data compression. This enabled the mission to be salvaged and more data to be delivered.

Reprogrammed remotely... for better compression… was his last thought.