“What the hell is that?” Dalton asked. They were outside in the parking lot, waiting for transportation. Dalton pointed to a strange bus lumbering down the road.

Marco and Emmanuel looked past the parking lot—through the few trees artificially landscaped in this desert town—toward the streetlight catty-corner from the building. There appeared to be a soft billow of white smoke coming from the bus.

“That can’t be our bus… can it?” Marco said.

Like that time your parents picked you up from school in their freshly rear-ended vehicle, but before insurance had sent the money, they watched in horror as this contraption pulled into their parking lot. It came to a stop and let out a large blast of steam that rose into the air. A whistle cut through the silence.

Out came a man dressed in a vest with a top-hat with goggles affixed to them.

“Velcome, My Lads, to Percival’s Party Bus.”

“You operate this steampunk party bus?” Dalton asked.

“Yes, Sir! Out of Reno.”

“Are you lost? Did they hire you to transport us?” Marco asked.

“Well, if I could take you by dirigible, I would be ta’ FAA and 'tis presidency’s Navy nixed tha’ idea,” the driver (presumably Percival), in some horrid cross between Victorian English and Modern English.

“I’m looking for Tory. Is she here?” asked the driver, who switched out of his fake pidgin.

At this, Dalton pointed to the front entrance, where Tory had just emerged. Marco and Emman walked to the rear of the bus where the steam engine was.

“Unhackable, huh?”

“Marco, I don’t think we’ll get Wi-Fi on this trip.” Emman added.

It was actually quite modern. Steam powered cars died out in the early 1900s, but modern hobbyists had reinvigorated the engineering with modern materials and better analog control systems. Every electric car was hackable in some regard because every battery broadcast its power level to its owner. Various ransomware attacks could dupe a user into thinking the battery was lower than it was and then stealing the power for the unneeded recharge. Owners just thought this was normal battery decline and rarely reported it.

Everyone queued up, and they loaded, with Tory constantly counting the crew. The bus (in present configuration) held almost fifty people. A few of the smaller women even tripled up the seats like kids on their way to elementary school. Everyone clutched their laptop and comments about the plan bounced back and forth like water on a hot plate jumping into steam. Dalton, Marco, and Emman sat near the back. Marco in his seat and Emman across the aisle.

It was ridiculous to leave, but everyone tolerated it. Billionaires have a way of making those under them to whatever. The young didn't worry. Others had spent more than a decade of their life committed to the probe. Even the mothers in the crowd felt drawn to know anything about the fate of the probe. To them, this was a nine-year maternity. They were committed to seeing these last days through. The water had already broken; they were in labor pangs. Now it was delivery time. One. More. Push. Then they will meet their intellectual baby. Their young biological children would live in a world that would be absolutely certain that life existed throughout the universe. They would not be intellectually orphaned from Truth.

The driver took a megaphone, a simple cone to project the sound, and yelled out. “One luxury not afforded to those in the glorious era of Queen Victoria twas air conditioning. But give ye old bus time. We will pick up steam and head out shortly.”

The bus jumped and lurched in low gear as it went along the turns and stop-signs of the corporate park.

That this was all some joke died a swift death as they exited. More chatter formed in the noisy bus and now someone asked the question. “Tory. WHY are we here?” She tried to answer, but all Dalton could hear were other people yelling from the back, “We can’t hear you!”

Tory took the analog megaphone and spoke again. “We believe our project is in danger from a Chinese incursion.”

“Why would they do that?” A young lady a few rows up asked.

“The international scientific community wouldn’t stand for that!” Another one said.

So naïve, Dalton thought, this is civilization-shaking stuff. Someone wants to stamp future history with their perspective. “Well, the Chinese for one.” Dalton mentioned to Marco.

What if in 1969 the Chinese could have co-opted the USA’s moon landing by broadcasting false images? If they could have intercepted the satellite signals and supplanted a red star. The year before Mars Landing, China launched three deep-space payloads with unknown purposes that dominated the Lagrange Points around Earth and a point between Mars and Earth orbit. Rumors of cyberattack then had been credible enough for the mission designers to have planned the landing during a window of direct line-of-sight from Mars to Goldstone. That was also why a fourth dish was installed in Chile, to double-up the southern hemisphere's coverage of deep space missions.

A satellite in line-of-sight to Mars wouldn’t stay there forever (the geometry just wouldn’t hold up). It was enough to plant doubt. Poisoning the landing's signal, which might just have been a duplicate signal, was enough to cast doubt in an information society. Those fertile to misinformation were led astray by the slightest puff of vapid data. Social media algorithms rewarded the loudest.

The thing about human exploration—actual boots on the Moon or Mars—is that when they come back, they land with such firm determination of what they experienced they will whack the wing-nuts to the ground. Fist to the face of crazy. The hard fact of personal experience would lay low the spineless noodles of men with ‘undeniable proof.’ The twelve men who originally landed on the moon did double-duty as powerful counter-memetic seeds planted before the information-age that would hit back against the faked moon landing babble.

The comments fermented in the bus. Some didn't see the need to evacuate; others that they were being jerked around by the Trillionaire, others just silently held it was further proof they shouldn't have taken the job.

This is just a precaution. Chill out everyone and enjoy the ride. Dalton thought to himself. We’re on the cusp of something big.

Chatter about the mission bounced around the bus, but no one wanted to touch on the topic. The Topic.

“So what’s the chance of multicellular life?” Dalton asked loudly. He directed it to Emman in the next seat, but with a volume enough to broadcast that any eavesdroppers were welcome.

“One Hundred Percent!” A woman two rows up said.

“How can you be sure right now?” Another asked. “We just need more time.”

“You saw the video.” One man half-way up the bus said.

The single highly compressed 240x320 video sent back showed slushy water, floating particles, and something else. But in that short clip, something swam away—or appeared to—a pixilated something. There was a wake that kicked up the suspension, like one would expect if a large multicellular sea creature swam away suddenly.

“It was a sudden loss of pressure from the weak ice and sucked the water up.” Another retorted.

“It looked exactly like a startled fish!” Countered another.

“—And what about the eight pings? Eight,” someone else interjected, as if the number eight has some special weight of evidence.

Jim came down the aisle and approached the conversation. “Yup it’s weird, but we’re all wired up for conclusions. We will have months to examine and question the data.”

“Yeah, but what if the Chinese planted that data?” Dalton asked. It was quiet and more to his immediate row. After it left his mouth, he regretted it.

But Jim caught it and said. “That's impossible. We can see the difference between a signal from the moon vs Jupiter.” Jim replied firmly.

“They could relay through the probe.” Another bus rider added.

Dalton wanted to literally put his shoe into his mouth. He had unleashed doubt—self-doubt—the worst adversary. Mission members were all cut from nearly the same analytical cloth. Analyze, re-analyze, interpret, re-interpret, peer review, etc. Those who hadn’t put their hard feet on the virgin rock needed conviction and cultivated a hardness of mind. Otherwise, their own good sense of self-questioning, could erode any discovery.

Or someone else in their midst, as smart and technical, and accomplished as they all were, might undermine their discovery. A graduate student might do it—inadvertently even. Some young smuck just trying to get published. Once the idea balloon was pierced, of a Chinese plant, minds moved to defend the data or process instead of new discoveries.

Some high functioning rationalist on this very bus might be on a podcast and the host might ask, ‘Well, Pete, what about the Chinese connection?’ Then the interviewee might state something innocuous—‘Gee Bob, here are the limits of what we know about such an such technology.’ Then some hungry journalist trying to make a name for themselves would bang out a stupid article with the tune of ‘Researchers might not be confident about the discovery of life.’ And used the pre-canned synthetic media algorithm to write the article. That journalist would skim the text and slap their name on it. Next, a moronic editor would post a headline even more dumb: ‘Did we really find life? Key Researcher challenges the narrative.’That’s when the crazies come out. A tweet, a retweet, then another article auto-generated from a like-hungry AI which would marginally summarize the synthetic article, and essentially say only ‘news outlet X says Y’ and add in no further evidence but would again distort the entire truth chain. Info-Age Citizen Jane Doe would not have to go find X’s article, to then find Podcast P->episode->#timestamp to verify the claim. Chance of someone doing that was high, but the aggregate count of those that would could be counted on one hand of a very careless chef.

Then the conspiracy theories became recursive in Dalton's mind. What if the Russians did it, but made it look like the Chinese? Data, data, everywhere, not any byte to trust. Two hackable points of failure were also the hardest to diagnose: Europa Clipper and the subsurface relay sitting on Europa’s surface.

Since the Clipper was an old NASA probe, its technical designs, software, and location were all known to the public. If the Ruskies hit the relay satellite (Europa Clipper) orbiting near Europa, and got it to download a small program to generate believable (or unbelievable) synthetic data and substitute that in lieu of the relayed signal, then that fake data from Europa would be downloaded by the Deep Space Network, and none would be the wiser.

Meanwhile, the conversation on the bus died down. No one wanted to admit the reason behind leaving the office: cybersecurity—was also enough reason for the conspiracy theorist (earnest believers or foreign intelligence fakes) to doubt any of their work.

The Russians have a Jupiter probe... Dalton continued with the thought. But an even more subtle method would be to the relay sitting on the surface of Europa. There was no backup link to an underwater submarine. Even when (or if) it breaches the ice again and disgorge a seafloor sample, it doesn’t have an antenna that can communicate back to Earth. The sub-ice relay had processing power and data storage. Perfect for a little program to generate antagonistic synthetic data. The only saving grace was since the Trillionaire funded them, they didn’t have to release their data or designs to the public.

Dalton banished such thinking from his mind. A hack would be difficult, and too crazy. “Information Warfare slowly erodes the past.” Dalton remembered a quote. Even if they fought off the naysayers now, the continuous tide of doubt over a decade would erase it, asterisks*, strike-through, or censor it.

But scientists and mechanical engineers of this project are a stubborn bunch. They have to be to make such strides towards the stars. Like landing on Europa. Everything had to go perfectly in the hardware.

Not so for the data engineers, they were a different breed, and had a lifetime of counter-examples that failed the general rule. In Dalton’s first job with a startup, it felt like every column of data had a caveat. The app changed so fast they had to write software for an AI to discover the evolving data schema. But automatically consuming the new data had problems. They incentivized the AI to run by minimizing quantitative counts, such as 'error', instead of running to maximize qualitative measures such as readability, sensemaking, ease-of-use, or even beauty. So the field you really wanted might be spread out over three mutated columns Data.X, Data.XY, Data.XYY, which inherited different genetics from all the small mutations in code.

And all the less so for a synthetic data engineer. All his data was faked. Dalton expanded that line of thought. If I wanted to hack the probe, what would I do?

The most stubborn of scientists were the academics. Those least in contact with reality. That the artifice they built on top of the flimsy data must stand because so much work had been spent above the shaky foundation. But most scientists imagine (i.e. hope) they’re like Newton and his theory of gravity: works in 99% plus of the situations you encounter in what’s called ‘real life.’ With GPS being the only everyday thing in people's lives that needed Einstein’s Theory of Relativity (both special and general).

Everyone at all times consumes bad data. Malicious, sloppy, sporadic, all data had bad data. The pure academics refused to acknowledge this.

“Hey Marco,” Dalton said, “When we get in, can we look at the code on the relay? I want to check something.”

“Sure, but we haven’t pushed up any code recently. You can just examine the copy in the cloud.”

“Yeah, but can we get the relay to send its code back to us?”

“Good luck getting that. For the next few days, we’re sending back the compressed thumbnails.” Marco replied. The thumbnails would let the science team prioritize which sections of the video they’d want uploaded in higher definition. There would be video on the probe that would never be viewed. The pipeline between Earth and Jupiter was not high enough for 8k video.

Dalton kept any other concerns to himself. The team drove on up into the Sierra Nevada mountains on the Nevada-Cali line. The destination was a bugout ranch which the Trillionaire had set up in case the world crashed.