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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 s.h.i.+vered.

“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 s.h.i.+rt, then pulled the laptop closer.

A tweet.

@TheMadPlatypus: Dizzy in the hizzy.

Steve sagged in his seat, felt the anxiety flood away in a cras.h.i.+ng 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?”