The data trickled into the Europa Project headquarters. Too slow to counter the torrent the Chinese Mars Mission produced. Though some doubted the Chinese claim, the best thing to do for their own work was to accept it. Acknowledging life on Mars made their own claim of Europan life even more plausible. It seemed like every week, (periodically every day) the Chinese would release more details about the new Martian life. In fact, the complement of scientific instruments was oddly specific. Almost as if the mission was designed around life they were already knew existed. Being the second team to find life was not nearly as important to history, but the Western Establishment did not hold historical perspective to the same reverence (or they were banking on Stigler’s law of eponymy). Others in western science tried to claim the Europa Clipper's experiments, or even the Viking experiment from the 1970s, was sufficient proof-of-life and the international community should award to the United States status for it. But Europan downloads were slow, while the world attention span was short.

All of this bounced against the heavy wall of Chinese marketing and censorship. Visitation visas had already been granted, and Chinese scientists blanketed the globe, giving lectures in western universities.

Dalton had left the project by then. There wasn’t much use for him now. The primary mission was over. Even the protesters had left. Passions had been diverted to another cause, and a different Trillionaire had paid to protest.

The data returned from Europa showed some anomalies. Sonar seemed fried, with the submarine constantly resetting its systems because of unknown data. The reboots left the datastream fragmented and unreliable.

Pictures, now just blurry thumbnails, did show promising results of the seafloor. They saw rectilinear forms and strange colors, which were assumed to be bioluminescent bacterial, but no detail.

The exogeologists were the big winners. They were pleased, almost more happy that multicellular life hadn't yet been found. They could treat Europa as a sort of primordial Earth for their theorizing: more heat was needed, or more sulfites, carbon, organics, etc. Ideas for future papers kept jumping in their brains, and they offered proposals on how the colors might be chemical reactions instead of life.

The submarine probe itself floated near the sub-ice relay and had stayed there for the entire time. It had collected enough data to be sent back to Earth. Far more than the project could pipe back to Earth. It would dive soon and park under the ice, awaiting a future signal to dive again and map a different portion of Europa's seafloor. Then at the end of the mission life, still years from now, the top-most relay would launch a nano-satellite (little more than a stick of data and booster) that would journey back towards Earth to be retrieved. This decade-long journey would return the vast trove of mission data.

But Dalton wouldn't be around for any of that. Like some others on the project, work had lost much of the pizzazz. They’d been there, done that, and got the t-shirt, only to be scooped by the Chinese who ran basically the same experiment NASA did in the 1970s. Everyone’s balloon had deflated. Every day was like eating an unbaked pizza; all raw and doughy, with none of the flavors melding together. Careers had moved forward, pats on the back given, papers were being written, but the slow grind had fully set in. The continuous stream of error messages, statuses, and assumed bad data the probe had encountered made them fearful to trust it. None wanted to stake their scientific reputation on that thin ice. Data sensed by an instrument on an underwater probe, transmitted from probe to relay, then to another relay to a dish to the Internet to their machine. It would take years to be sure that data was clean.

Dalton was free. He had money in the bank and a stellar resume. He took much needed time off and laughed at the situation. Finally, he visited Lake Tahoe. He dug out the only pair of footwear with any bit of traction and put them by the door. “I’m not leaving without them,” he said to the cat. Mr. Waffles was completely uninterested. Cats always have excellent traction is what the cat would have thought… had the cat cared.

He looked up a few sites around Lake Tahoe. He had never seen the water. With a water bottle, a hat, and good shoes, he exited the door and drove towards his goal.

It was Sunday, and all the traffic from Tahoe’s visitors would be against him, so the winding drive experienced no abnormal delay. He thought about all the things artificial in his life. Even his social media credits as likes and karma. They were forms of falseness. This drive was to get him into contact with something real. No more experience by proxy.

He wasn’t sure why his mind was processing these thoughts. Dalton focused on the scenery instead. The drive was inspiring. For once, he could sense how small he was. A thin ribbon of vehicles on a large national forest with majestic peaks. The trees had the dark green and brown color of midsummer. The firs and pines were shielding their water from the coming August sun and had lost the verdant you’d see after the gush of spring snowmelt.

Except for being encapsulated in his car, he was getting a dose of Nature from the scenery.

He went over to Kings Beach Recreation Area (public beaches becoming more rare at Tahoe) and sat on the shore. It was the first time he’d seen the lake. He had lived in the Sparks / Reno area for three years but had never gotten around to visiting it (though millions purposely traveled there every year and the many billionaires had nice castles around the lake shore). But he had ignored it.

Instead, he spent his hours surrounded by artificiality. From his climate controlled apartment, to his plastic and fake leather car with air conditioning, the blue lights of a screen, to the glass and cement office (also climate controlled) where he made synthetic data for an AI millions of miles away that itself was wholly artificial in a naturally formed sea. The pallor of his skin testified to his avoidance of the sun.

At the beach, he felt the wind, heard the waves, and smelled the air. The winds were whipping up whitecaps far away from shore, but nearby the water was calm. He took off his shoes and socks and got in fresh contact with the sand (he was standing on mostly imported sand, but Dalton didn’t know).

Now his feet were in direct contact with Earth. As he thought he couldn’t even remember the last time he’d even sat next to a body of water. Even his college was in the heart of an inland city... he hadn’t been to the beach since his early teens.

I was on a team trying to land something on an ice moon, and I can’t remember the last time I’ve been to the ocean. Dalton laughed at himself. He had studied ice and oceans on alien worlds, but his nearby body of water had been alien to him. There’s more water on Europa than all of Earth’s oceans combined, he thought. Yet I barely know the water.

He knew how to swim. His apartment had a pool, and it was great exercise, but he did not know when he last swam in a natural body of water. He had come prepared and was wearing quick-dry trunks and had an extra change of clothes in the car.

Dalton walked into the water, but only about ankle deep before realizing how cold it was. Nearby, a group of children were playing chest deep in the water—completely immune to the temperature. He kept walking in, still with no intention of swimming at the moment.

The water was now above his knees. How is this water so cold for late July? He thought, but did not acknowledge the entire basin was fed by snowmelt. His body was soaking up the high altitude sunlight that it had been deficient in from long exposure of low-power LED bulbs.

Invigorating! Dalton thought as his groin hit the cold water. He waited and descended again.

Now waist deep in the water, he picked up his feet and dunked himself in. He felt the sharp chill water envelope him and he wanted to gasp. Full immersed—a full physical experience instead of knowledge by intermediary. Experience instead of knowledge. Wallowed in a ground truth.

His mind quieted as he stood back up and filled his lungs.

What a relief to be in the world.

He listened to the trickle of water off his body back into the water, the waves, the wind and the lap-lap-lap of water and against the dock poles all greeted his ears.

“Ah”

Then he went back up to the beach and sat down in the high altitude sun.

If there’s a creature on Europa, they will always be immersed. They might never know air. But Dalton imagined that perhaps some bubbles escaped from the subsea vents.

The nearby children exited the water and went over to a line tied to an old stump. They pulled a black wire trap and let out shouts of glee. “Crawdads!”

Crayfish were an invasive species in Lake Tahoe, and no one cared how many you caught. The children tried to grab them far enough on their back to prevent their claws from reaching back and snapping them.

Dalton watched the children throw the captured crayfish at each other, hoping one of the witless tiny lobsters would pinch a sibling. Maybe there were intelligent crayfish. Ice Moon Lobsters. That would be a killer name for a band, or maybe a food truck.

But speculation was useless. One could imagine anything. He had been part of a team that had tried to blow away speculation with hard data. Though he was far removed from most of the scientific process, he had made the AI smarter and more generalized for the alien ocean by generating synthetic data. And it was a skill now becoming more valued by corporate purveyors of AI.

Plenty of companies will hire me, even if my paper isn’t a hit, Dalton thought as he laid back on the beach. Even if we don't find multicellular life and the Chinese claim to First Life stands. Let it stand! They're better propagandists than the West, anyway.

“Mommy!” A squeal came from one child and sounded like a half-squeal: 'maw-mee.'

“Bud, don’t throw crawfish at your sister.” Said the seated father.

The mother got up and went to comfort the little girl.

Dalton couldn't help but laugh, he had been a bit like the young boy to his sibling sister. Then a pang of regret. He hadn't even texted his family in a week, even though they asked how he was doing.

Dalton went over and looked at the crustacean through shallow clear water and took a short video of it through the water.

Attached to the text was a simple clip showing the crayfish through the crystal water.

his sister texted back.

You could barely make out the image on the screen, of course, due to its natural camouflage.

He begged.

The video came back from the sister, though she didn't understand the implication. And there the video had small distortion effects where the lobster was supposed to be.

“Upsampled out.” He snatched his things and walked back to the car.

The AI filtered out the unexpected.

He picked up his speed, running barefoot to where the car was parked.

It had only been a few weeks since the Chinese Scoop (named both for the rivalrous nature and the method of soil collection). Dalton went to the car's console and called up the commits on this code manager. He searched for the video compression software. There was a simple commit that changed the default compression from their custom code to a commercially available one (available as it was from several years prior when the probe was launched).

CustomCompress_v14.5 was reverted to ClearSoft version 12

They did it. Those crazy assholes did it.

“Car, take me home.”

He searched during the drive and discovered the provenance of the algorithm: Made by ClearSoft. Dalton only vaguely remembered that company, as he was still in school and the esoterica of corporate mergers was lost on him.

He searched.

Then looked again.

It wasn't a 'compression' algorithm, it was an obfuscation AI! One that accidentally removed creatures from an image when compressed.

He looked at the user ID the code push. It was his ID, and from the time he didn’t have his phone.

Those bastards, they did it. And they pinned it on me.

He then smiled. The Chinese were resourceful. He had to give them that. He tried to casually reverted to the code, forgetting he was locked out of the project. But he emailed Marco to revert the change: Perhaps no one else would notice. Since the probe was back in contact and idle, the update would likely take. Soon image thumbnails would show coherent results.

Back at home, he was no longer content. Now he wanted to launch a counter-attack. At the beginning of the Chinese claims, comments suppressed and general criticisms were silent, but lurking around the dark webs were pins of suspicion. But there was no bomb yet, no strong claim to rally the skeptical around. The blood was in the water, but no shark had found the wounded creature. He researched all the contra threads for the Chinese claim and collected the text in a new folder: “ContraThreads.”

Bad data and long chains of knowledge transfer made it easy to place doubt in the public mind. That fruit was overripe. He just had to prick the skin for the rottenness to explode out. No one of authority would counter. None could say, 'yes there's bad data, and yes there're problems in data pipelines, but that doesn't affect our data, only yours.' No one could call his bluff because they couldn't navigate the complexity thicket of their own data pipeline.

That was what he was going to do tonight. He was going to wage a one man information war. An insurgency against the Chinese claim of First Life. A Jihad against this apostate of science. He just had to weave the threads to see how strong the fabric was. At his computer, he spun up a hundred AIs in the cloud. Each on a generative transformer pre-trained on all the text and images in ContraThreads. They would construct a hundred synthetic media articles, constructing sensible sounding articles with sensational headlines.

Dalton was a median American male, but he was not alone. Millions had the nagging thought in the back of their minds they could not manifest into a clear thought. That it was awfully convenient for the Chinese claimed First-Life after decades of ESA and NASA searches on Mars. After the Mars Colony had searched. Just too convenient…

At his computer he typed:

How the Chinese won the information world war against Western Science. An anonymous article by...

Dalton tried to think up a clever name, but put down 'Crayfish' instead. “But that title's not gonna fly in the misinformation age.”

9 Ways China Duped Western Science.

“Better...”

… You won’t believe number 8.

“Ah, much better!” He smiled under the light of LED bulbs. “What do you think, cat?”

Mr. Waffles agreed... if the cat had actually cared, but the cat was only a cat.

Right before publishing, he changed the byline to Dalton. H. Chatsworth.

“I didn’t go this far to stay anonymous.“