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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.