"I predict that the backup radio seems to work fine for transmitting to the primary radio, all still silent, no contact with Civilization."

"That's entirely on the grounds that literary reasoning has done fine at predicting this situation so far.  The literary hypothesis then further predicts that tension will slowly rise as the absence of an Exception Handling escort flight becomes harder and harder to explain, and that even if the story has a surprising twist it will only start to be revealed when our plane approaches where land and the emergency landing field should be."

"If we land safely and there's supposedly some entirely mundane explanation for why we didn't get an escort flight, let me just say right now, I'm going to go the rest of my life not believing it."

"You're a pretty suspicious person, you know that?  That's like the level of paranoia that makes it hard to coordinate with other people."

"I... think my actual felt prediction is unfortunately based on the piece of info they insisted on giving us from the main on-board prediction market, that there were a lot of bets on it being the work of a criminal mastermind.  If there's a criminal mastermind they've put the backup shortwave radio and the main shortwave radio onto the same frequency that isn't actually an emergency band, to maintain the illusion of us having being isekaied, which is the Distractor Hypothesis meant to divert our attention and prevent us from immediately knowing that we've been sabotaged."

They've been trying to form all their own hypotheses and do all their own bets, partially because Someone Ought To and mostly because Thellim doesn't think she has a lot to contribute to the main prediction market and Keltham wanted to take his own stab at the most interesting thing to happen to him recently, or really at all.  Alas, that darned flight crew insisted on telling everyone on board about the high prices of the 'criminal mastermind' and 'rogue pilots' hypotheses in the onboard prediction market; which, to be fair, is the sort of thing that everyone needs to be told.

"So no bet, because your theory is explicitly stealing all of my theory's predictions in that it's the work of a criminal mastermind trying to make us believe we've been isekaied?"

"My 5 against your 20 if the backup shortwave just works.  I think it's improbable, but you seem to think it's more improbable."

"Where you're only betting 5, because you expect to win 10 off me from our first bet, and you want to make sure you come off the flight having won net money off me."

"A man's got his pride."

"They're ready."

She checks and double-checks that the cockpit emergency radio shows as being set to the same frequency as the onboard backup emergency radio; they are not by default on exactly the same band.  "Go."

There's no clicks on the emergency radio.

"Flight 43 to Exception Handling, Flight 43 to Exception Handling, is anyone out there, we have lost comms."

They can hear it clearly in the cockpit.

"Also Flight 43 to Exception Handling, is anyone out there."

She hears the captain's voice and her stomach sinks a bit.

She waits.  There's no clicks, so she's pretty sure there's not going to be any other reply, but she waits anyways.

She flips over to the cabin-crew frequency.  "Let me know when you've got an update on how the market reacted to that," she says, and gets back to flying the plane.

On the plus side, 'It was all a conspiracy by the pilots' just lost most of their money, she figures.  Though it won't be down to zero.

"We've got a market update," he says, a bit later.

"Tick 30," she says, and finishes up the last few steps of her solar-navigation reasoning.

"Go."

"Main news is we're up to 70 on criminal conspiracy" and it no longer takes as much mental work for him to normalize out the 'pilot conspiracy' part of the probabilities, but that part of the market is not being communicated to the pilots.

"I'm gonna need to hear the attempt-at-divining-market-reasoning on that.  It's never supercriminals."

"Green says major bettors with prediction market experience all independently concluded there is no self-consistent scenario where all of Civilization's emergency radios stop working except ours.  We weren't told to shut ours off.  We are broadcasting.  If aliens hunted down every last active transmitter they would have gotten ours.  If Negative Utilitarians blew up the Exception Handling transmitters we'd be hearing non-EH emergency transmitters."

"The emergency radios visibly appear to work with respect to each other.   So somebody maybe, for example, separately retuned their oscillators to a different, but matched radio range that is not the standard emergency range.  That's more likely than an off-model phenomenon silently absorbing a broad range of nonlocal radio frequencies but not visible light."

"How are we on building a shortwave radio from scratch?"

"Flight crew has started assembling the process for it, we have five volunteers with relevant practice but they were told to wait for your sign-off before proceeding.  They say it's a classic clever-engineering problem but not one that they're going to solve in the next 5 minutes, especially given that they have to assume the multimeter in the onboard repair kit was also sabotaged, and they intend to work on the assumption that any one of the five might be a Conspiracy confederate.  Also if the Conspiracy is really trying hard, which they clearly are, they might have, for example, concealed a transmitter on emergency bands which broadcasts the antipattern for the standard targeting clicks, so we won't be able to hear those on the hand-built radio either.  That case wouldn't stop us broadcasting to Exception Handling, but it would make it harder for us to find the right frequency to broadcast on."

"Unactionable good news:  There's some recent market probability on this being a prank."

"A shitting prank?  Are they shitting serious?"

"Somebody on board thinks they remember that the top-of-the-line models in the next generation of handheld digital devices are going to have satellite location.  In other words, starting in about two and a half months, it will no longer be possible to make a group of plane passengers believe they've been isekaied without a lot more work."

"From this theory it follows that our comms will come back on before we divert flight paths.  Or at least before flight paths have diverged too far, I guess.  It's a lot more cruel as a prank if they actually end up diverting us from our target airport."

"That sounds profoundly unlikely.  What's the market probability?"

"It was just raised as a possibility, or rather the rationale from the next generation of personal devices was just raised as a possibility, so it was 1% but moving quickly when I got the update."

"Limit order of 1000 at 3% ceiling.  Disabling our transponder is a huge shitting deal."