John Scalzi - The Last Colony

"Is that a bad thing?" Trujillo asked.

"Got me," Bennett said. 'What I know about soil management I read as I was processing these samples. My wife did a little gardening back on Phoenix and seemed to be of the opinion that having a bunch of bugs was good because they aerated the soil. Who knows, maybe she's right."

"She's right," I said. "Having a healthy amount of biomass is usually a good thing." Trujillo looked at me skeptically. "Hey, I farmed," I said. "But we also don't know how these creatures will react to our plants. We're introducing new species into a biosphere."

"You're officially beyond anything I know about the subject, so I'll move on," Bennett said. "You asked if there was any way for me to adapt the technology we have to switch off the wireless components. Do you want the long or short answer?"

"Let's start with the short answer," I said.

"Not really," Bennett said.

"Okay," I said. "Now I need the long answer."

Bennett reached over and grabbed a PDA that he had earlier pried apart, lifted the top off it and handed it to me. "This PDA is a fairly standard piece of Colonial Union technology. Here you see all the components; the processor, the monitor, the data storage, the wireless transmitter that lets it talk to other PDAs and computers. Not a single one of them is physically connected to any of the other parts. Every part of this PDA connects wirelessly to every other part."

"Why do they do it that way?" I asked, turning the PDA over in my hands.

"Because it's cheap," Bennett said. "You can make tiny data transmitters for next to nothing. It costs less than using physical materials. They don't cost much either, but in aggregate there's a real cost differential. So nearly every manufacturer goes that way. It's design by accountant. The only physical connections in the PDA are from the power cell to the individual components, and again that's because it's cheaper to do it that way."

"Can you use those connections to send data?" Zane said.

"I don't see how," Bennett said. "I mean, sending data over a physical connection is no problem. But getting into each of these components and flashing their command core to do it that way is beyond my talents. Aside from the programming skills, there's the fact each manufacturer locks out access to the command core. It's proprietary data. And even if I could do all that, there's no guarantee it would work. Among everything else, you'd be routing everything through the power cell. I'm not sure how you get that to work."

"So even if we turn off all the wireless transmitters, every one of these is still leaking wireless signals," I said.

"Yeah," Bennett said. "Across very short distances—no more than a few centimeters—but, yeah. If you're really looking for this sort of thing, you could detect it."

"There's a certain point at which this all becomes futile," Trujillo said. "If someone's listening for radio signals this weak, there's a pretty good chance they're scanning the planet optically as well. They're just going to see us."

"Hiding ourselves from sight is a difficult fix," I said to Trujillo. "This is an easy fix. Let's work on the easy fixes." I turned to Bennett, and handed back his PDA. "Let me ask you something else," I said. "Could you make wired PDAs? Ones without wireless parts or transmitters?"

"I'm sure I could find a design for one," Bennett said. "There are public domain blueprints. But I'm not exactly set up for manufacturing. I could go through everything we have and cobble up something. Wireless parts are the rule but there are some things that are still wired up. But we're never going to get to a place where everyone's walking around with a computer, much less being able to replace the onboard computers on most of the equipment we have. Honestly, outside this black box, we're not getting out of the early twentieth century any time soon."

All of us digested that for a moment. "Can we at least expand this?" Zane finally asked, motioning around him.

"I think we should," Bennett said. "In particular I think we need to build a black box medical bay, because Dr. Tsao keeps distracting me when I'm trying to get work done."

"She's hogging your equipment," I said.

"No, she's just really cute," Bennett said. "And that's going to get me in trouble with the wife. But also, I've only got a couple of her diagnostic machines :n here, and if we ever have a real medical problem, we're going to want more available."

I nodded. We'd already had one broken arm, from a teenager climbing up on the barrier and then slipping off. He was lucky not to have broken his neck. "Do we have enough mesh?" I asked.

"This is pretty much our entire stock," Bennett said. "But I can program it to make some more of itself. I'd need some more raw material."

"I'll have Ferro get on that," Zane said, referring to the cargo chief. "We'll see what we have in inventory."

"Every time I see him, he seems really pissed," Bennett said.

"Maybe it's because he's supposed to be at home and not here," Zane snapped. "Maybe he doesn't much like being kidnapped by the Colonial Union." Two weeks had not served to make the captain any more mellow about the destruction of his ship or the stranding of his crew.

"Sorry," Bennett said.

"I'm ready to go," Zane said.

"Two quick things," Bennett said to me. "I'm almost done printing most of the data files you were given when we came here, so you can have those in hard copy. I can't print the video and audio files, but I'll run them through a processor to get you transcripts."

"Okay, good," I said. "What was the second thing?"

"I went around the camp with a monitor like you asked and looked for wireless signals," Bennett said. Trujillo raised an eyebrow at this. "The monitor is solid state," Bennett said to him. "Doesn't send, only receives. Anyway, I think you should know there are three wireless devices still out there. And they're still transmitting."

"I haven't the slightest idea what you're talking about," Jann Kranjic said.

For not the first time, I restrained the urge to punch Kranjic in the temple. "Do we really need to do this the hard way, Jann?" I said. "I'd like to pretend we're not twelve years old and that we're not having an 'am to, am not' sort of conversation."

"I turned over my PDA just like everyone else did," Kranjic said, and then motioned back to Beata, who was lying on her cot, a washcloth over her eyes. Beata was apparently prone to migraines. "And Beata turned in her PDA and her camera cap. You have everything we have."

I glanced over at Beata. "Well, Beata?" I said.

Beata raised the edge of her washcloth and looked over, wincing. Then she sighed and reapplied her washcloth. "Check his underwear," she said.

"Excuse me?" I said.

"Beata," Kranjic said.

"His underwear," Beata said. "At least one pair has a pouch in the elastic that hides a small recorder. He's got a pin of the Umbrian flag that's an audio,"video input. He's probably got it on right now."

"You bitch," Kranjic said, subconsciously covering his pin. "You're fired."

"That's funny," Beata said, pressing the washcloth against her eyes. "We're a thousand light-years from anywhere, we have no chance of ever getting back to Umbria, you spend your days reciting overblown notes into your underwear for a book you'll never write, and I'm fired. Get a grip, Jann."

Kranjic stood to make a dramatic exit. "Jann," I said, and held out my hand. Jann snatched off his pin and pressed it into my palm.

"Want my underwear now?" He sneered.

"Keep the underwear," I said. "Just give me the recorder."

"Years from now, people are going to want to know the story of this colony," Kranjic said, as he fumbled with his underwear from inside his trousers. "They're going to want to know the story, and when they go looking for it, they're not going to find anything. And they're not going to find anything because its leaders spent their time censoring the only member of the press in the entire colony."