Conceptually, you could look at it from a first-principles individualist perspective:  Almost everyone who rents land, even somebody who purchases a house in the distant woods with solar panels to run an automated hydroponics setup for vegetables and shrimp, would conceptually like to also rent a right over the surrounding ten kilometers of airspace which says, "I do not want enormous masses of metal and high-energy fuel going through this air near my house, unless a prediction market says with extremely high confidence that it won't crash on me."  If it was only one individual who thought that way, those air-rights might be pretty expensive to rent; but just about everyone thinks that way, so everyone on the planet can conceptually club up and rent the overlapping air-rights for kilometers around their houses.

Accordingly, you cannot just go to the Ill-Advised Consumer Goods Store, and buy an Ill-Advised Airplane that you can go fly yourself, because something like that doesn't just endanger yourself like buying a few kilograms of heroin.  All the cubic kilometers of air around you have had their air-rights rented from Civilization to say, "No amateur flyers here."

Or think of it from the perspective of a coastal city, looking out at kilometers and kilometers of ocean, wondering if some rogue aircraft was going to zip out and crash into a skyscraper.  It's not enough to say that it's legal to fly around however you like outside the city borders, but illegal to crash a plane into a skyscraper; because, if somebody does crash into a skyscraper, saying "That was illegal!" and fining them doesn't properly compensate for being true-dead.  A city would like the law to be such that you can't bring a plane close to the city, even across kilometers of ocean, unless it's insured against crashing into skyscrapers at really quite a very high disaster-price.

If there was only one city that wanted rules like that, maybe it'd have to buy its own radar equipment and surface-to-air missiles and put up its own surveillance satellite.  If there was only one city like that, it would be very expensive to live in a city which could guarantee you against planes crashing into your skyscraper.  But actually most cities, nearly all cities really, have a preference like that.  They'd like to club up and pay Governance to just keep uninsured aircraft out of all the land and all the ocean.

There's a region, Crashland, where mad inventors go to fly untested aircraft--logically, this is how any aircraft ends up 'tested' in the first place--but even Crashland is owned by a governing-city-state-corporation that laid the building-foundations to be rented, and contracted for an overhead airspace with exceptional rules, so it could resell space to mad inventors.  Crashland's regional authority has an interest in being able to sell testing-rights on a schedule where you know your aircraft, or your house, won't be wantonly crashed-into by another untested aircraft.

Unusually scrupulous, conscientious, nitpicky, obsessively rigorous dath ilani who identify as "Chaotic" sometimes worry about this state of affairs, and object to it as having ended up in a de-facto state of rigid inescapable tyranny:  Almost the whole planet ended up with one insurance requirement and insurance-requiring regime that's very difficult in practice to evade!

Ordinary dath ilani would mostly roll their eyes about that, though.  If you were going to complain about that for air travel, why not complain about it for the nuclear reactor insurance regime, since sufficiently bad nuclear meltdowns could raise background radioactivity around the whole planet?  Why not complain about the uniform regime over biotechnology labs?

There's an actual per-capita annual payment that gets made to planetary Governance for the air-rights on the planet, the same way as any other land-rights get rented by the collective population.  It's cheap, because nobody is putting counterbids on those rights.  In principle, some special interest group or faction could place an opposing bid if they wanted air-rights to work differently, and try to outbid everyone else, if that faction cared more than the rest of the planet collectively did.  No such faction has outbid the rest of Civilization on global air-rights.  You'd have to be pretty Chaotic to object to that sort of outcome--the sort of unsatisfiable-complainer who whines when a majority of the planetary population wins a bid on any collective feature of reality that can't go both ways.

Which is to say:

Every single aircraft on dath ilan, inside or outside of Crashland, is there on a schedule and a sublicensed right of passage.

It has a radio transponder that identifies its location to the planetary satellite network.  A tamper-proof one.  The guarantors who'd be on the hook for an insane amount of money if an airplane crashed into a skyscraper have put some effort into making that transponder hard to take off your plane and stick onto a rocket that flies off in a misleading direction.

If that transponder fails, you need to not get near any high-density residential areas or nuclear power plants.  A big city or nuclear plant might actually have surface-to-air missiles.  Like, they wouldn't tell you, it's not public knowledge, but probably there are surface-to-air missiles guarding all the really attractive targets for spoilers; operated by Law-Abiding Sociopaths who will shoot down a plane carrying 175 souls if that's what the cold equations say to do.

A regularly scheduled airplane flight is far over the water heading towards the Default Continent when several red lights go on in the cockpit simultaneously, accompanied by a chirp that means "look at the instrument panel, the plane isn't about to crash but at least one of those messages is important".

The Captain (personal name Pambar, but nobody who works on an airplane, with new passengers constantly boarding and departing, is going to make anybody remember their name) immediately looks at the brightest light.

"Exception!  Transponder failure!  And--satellite positioning failure, satellite comms failure, satellite Network access failure--we have lost all satellite systems simultaneously."

Oh, that's not good.  Satellite frequencies are 1.5GHz for the global positioning system, their transponder lock runs on 3.5GHz, and Network access is 70GHz.  They're not in the middle of a thunderstorm, just over clouds, there's no thunderstorm scheduled to be near them, there's no solar weather warnings, and the X-Ray/UV component of a sudden solar flare and subsequent ionospheric disturbance shouldn't wipe all of those bands simultaneously.  GPS and transponder systems are located at the head of the plane, Network access is in the rear.

That implies (1) the problem is on their plane, and spread across a wide volume of it; or (2) there was a problem with a lot of satellites simultaneously; or (3) something non-obvious is going on.  None of those possibilities are particularly fun.

That's one track of the First Officer's mind; the other is checking that the first emergency backup radio beacon has automatically switched on (it has) and broadcast that an exception is in progress, now five seconds old.  He flips the "Return to your seats nonurgently" light for the rest of the passengers on board the aircraft, which creates some optionality in case anything else is about to go wrong; leaving the reason blank will create some worry about what the pilots have to do that's more important than explaining the seat-return light, but it's not like that worry is unjustified, and the absence of an explanation for the Network outage will also be conspicuous.

Once he's done that he turns to look at the Captain.  "First-order-belief-formed about what we do next."  You form that opinion yourself before the other person speaks, to prevent opinion cascades.

"My memory doesn't have anything we do for this combination that we don't do for any other form of cockpit comms failure.  You turn on the shortwave emergency radio, I'll check all the instrument panels for anomalies."

"Arguendo:  Anything which just damaged all active comms might damage the shortwave radio if we naively switch it on right away."

"Not seeing any signs of other damage to onboard electronics on the panels."

"Arguendo:  Could wait 5 minutes to give an unknown comms-equipment-damaging phenomenon to potentially subside."

"Negative, if there's extraordinary circumstances not local to this airplane then land may have urgent instructions on emergency frequencies.  We can use the backup emergency radio if there's an ongoing damage source applying only to turned-on equipment."

He doesn't actually think aliens just wiped their satellite network... but there could be some other weird thing going on that's not local to the plane, sure.  He doesn't actually know what's supposed to cause simultaneous failure of all of those radio frequencies.  He reaches out to the shortwave radio switch, then pauses.  "Predict 2:1 that 14.3Mhz is unobstructed."

"I'm at 1:1.  Bet my 40 if it works vs your 60 if it fails."  It's not particularly about money or pride, in this case, it's about which of them is forming a better grasp of the general emergency.

"Ack."

He flips the switch that turns on the shortwave radio.

Shortwave radio cannot ultimately be reliable in the sense of 99.999% uptime.  Immediate, unannounced impacts of solar flares actually will knock it out.  So long as everything is working correctly, satellite communications are more reliable than shortwave.

What shortwave radio is, is simple.  Radio in the 3-30MHz range will bounce around between the ionosphere and the land, potentially for thousands of kilometers.  Shortwave does not require locking onto a satellite, nor frequency clocks that run at exactly 70.231 GHz.

You can, if you know what you're doing, build your own shortwave radio in a cave out of a box of scraps.

A shortwave radio in dath ilan is therefore built for exactly one purpose:  Exception handling.  A shortwave radio is a failover for when something less simple breaks.

And in dath ilan, when code crashes due to an unhandled exception inside an exception handler, the resulting code dump includes a standard message saying the programmer needs to be fired.  Shortwave radios are built to work very simply, for when somebody tries to use them during what's at least an exception and possibly some sort of very distracting emergency.

Shortwave radio bands in dath ilan are kept clear, except for regularly spaced audible ticks broadcast all around the planet, whose spacing tells you what frequency you're on and that your shortwave radio is working correctly.

Shortwave radios don't use clever computer-compressed transmission protocols.  That would require an inscrutable computer chip, instead of a circuit board all of whose connections you could potentially check by hand using a multimeter.  The standard protocol directly transduces voices to amplitude modulations, in a way you could send or receive in the aforementioned cave using your box of scraps.

There is often a computer chip on board a shortwave radio, if it's fancy expensive emergency equipment.  But it's not a required chip--you could yank the chip out of the circuit board if you decided you were suspicious of it, and the radio would still work.  The chip is designed not to have the physical capability to send outputs that prevent the radio from working.  What the chip does do is gently diagnose every part of the system using secondary wires; for regular self-tests, or to light a red indicator light if you've had the incredible bad luck to lose ordinary satellite comms during a solar flare.

"We have a green light on the shortwave.  I am not hearing any ticks."  He doesn't add, 'that's not good', because this would convey no additional information.

"First-order-belief-formed about next-actions."

"I have:  Bring in additional flight crew member in case we are somehow both missing something very obvious.  You check our backup papers for the timing of a switch to backup flight route and prepare to fly that route based on inertial guidance.  I go public."

"Same."  He gets out of his chair and goes to the cabinet with the spiral notebooks full of auxiliary info.

Their previously planned route will take them way too close to populated cities for this to be in any sense okay for an airplane that has lost all comms to do.  So before the plane set out, as a matter of routine, Air Traffic Control printed backup routes the flight could shift to in case of an exception that caused them to seem unsafe; a route that would take them to a failover emergency landing field on a flight path that did not scare any skittish major cities or nuclear power plants.

The airplane will turn into that alternate corridor at a predictable exact clock time, based on a broad time window for when the emergency started; such that anyone who knew roughly when the airplane transponder failed would be able to predict exactly when they'd turn into the alternate corridor and exactly where they'd be, even without using satellite surveillance info.

She flips on the flight-crew-only intercom.  "Steward to cockpit, urgency 7."

An otherwise unoccupied steward will head over to the airlock system granting access to the cockpit.

The Captain pokes the First Officer to be attentive and ready to act, and then checks over the steward in the airlock over more carefully than usual through the peepholes.  They are very confused right now, possibly some Sophisticated Criminal is fucking with them, and maybe this guy is about to try to steal control of the aircraft.

"What's up?"

She gives him an abbreviated report of events, containing no inferences or explanations whatsoever, just what they observed, what they did, what they observed.

"Do solar flares do that?"

"According to me, the zero-warning first front of a solar flare does not block all of those radio frequencies simultaneously.  Furthermore if noise is blocking transmissions, the primary radios should show that in indicator lights and it should be directly audible as noise on the shortwave."

"I've got no mundane explanations.  Obvious non-mundane explanation, the criminal conspiracy hiding in the shadows of Civilization finally made their move and they simultaneously took out the satellites and the shortwave emergency stations as part of their opening play."

"But we're not obviously missing anything mundane or somehow thinking very unclearly in lockstep?"

"Not to me.  Point out the actual indicator lights you see as red so I can check your direct sensory perceptions."

A couple of minutes later, she sends out the Blue Steward with instructions.

A few minutes after that, once the Blue Steward's had time to pass it on the flight crew, she hits the planewide announcement button.

"Attention.  Attention.  This is the Flight Captain speaking."

"Exception in progress.  Not immediately fatal.  Tick 20."

"Thaaat's not a good sign about the causes of the mysterious Network failure," Keltham says, but quietly, because a lot of other people are probably saying the same thing and sudden noise-babble is not helpful during in-flight emergencies.

"We have simultaneously lost all satellite-based comms on frequencies 1.5GHz for global positioning, 3.5GHz transponder lock, Network uplink 70GHz.  That covers systems located at front and rear of plane.  Local diagnostics show equipment claims to be functioning but is reading only silence.  Failover shortwave on 14.3MHz shows green internal diagnostics but complete silence including of background ticks.  We weren't prior-warned of any expected solar weather which could do that.  Observation out the window confirms that we are not in a thunderstorm, no thunderstorms predicted nearby.  Radio noise from that or a solar flare would be directly audible on the simplified shortwave design.  Flight crew member Blue Steward has personally confirmed our direct sensory experiences on this."

"Standard protocol doesn't cover this exact situation.  Following general category protocol we will turn in 27 minutes and follow an alternate emergency flightpath to a coastal airfield where we can safely land without any functioning comms.  Default plan to meliorize against:  We are waiting 15 minutes to try to let any comms-equipment-destroying phenomena subside, then turning on the secondary shortwave to see if we can transmit between our backup shortwave and primary shortwave to confirm whether both radios are working and the apparent radio silence is probably real."

"Green Steward is trained in running emergency local prediction markets in case of comms failure.  Please don't set up new central markets unless you think you've got something important.  If you've got high-reliability direct-relevant information or what you're pretty sure is a critical insight, stake 100 unskilled-labor-hours against minimum bounty 10000 $ULH to pass to a crew member.  If there is a Keeper on board or a socially acknowledged supergenius or technical genius, please identify yourself to the crew."

"Okay," Thellim says quietly to her seatmate, everyone at this point is speaking very quietly, "I'm going to say it out loud, so I'm not just thinking it over and over, that really sounds like our plane just got isekaied."

"One hundred to one against up to my current life savings," Keltham says instantly.

"No bet.  Did I miss a mundane explanation?"

"Literally anything is more mundane than that.  Aliens are more mundane than that."

"Aliens take out our plane, too.  They saturation thermonuclear-bomb the entire planet, which produces a lot of radio noise even if they don't care enough to particularly target our plane."

"Aliens with Conveniently Outcome-Specific Overcomplicated Exotic Motives are more mundane than our plane suddenly appearing on another planet over an identical cloudbank."

"Who says identical?  I wasn't looking out the window, and might not have remarked on a sudden change of cloud luminosity if I had been."

"This does not, in my own opinion, repair the primary problem with your theory."

"Your next line will be... 'Of course in real life it's not conceptualmagic, it's not aliens, it's not even a giant criminal conspiracy, there is some completely mundane explanation we're all just failing to think of.'"

"Why yes, that is my next line.  However did you know?"

"It's what everyone always says in these stories right after something magical happens to them unless the author has skipped over that part on account of it being too repetitive on a metaliterary level and I know I ought to ignore that but I am just having a really, really hard time seeing past that point."

"I gently accuse you of jumping the start-bell on recognizing us as having a state of confusion that appears more in fictional characters than in previous real history.  If we'd seen something for which there was an obvious positive certainty of lack of possible mundane explanation, that's one thing.  In this case we have only the negative absence of a found-explanation; and the cumulative-search that's failed to turn up a mundane explanation sounds like it was maybe 5 minutes for flight-crew."

"I'd say, plus 1 minute for passengers, except that we wouldn't know if some passenger had found an explanation and were in the process of referring it upward."

"Slightly persuasive.  I just worry that if this kind of simultaneous comms failure had any mundane explanation in the sense of being prior-predicted by any imaginable state of reality considered previously probable, that prediction would appear in the flight handbook, and the crew wouldn't be telling us it was a mystery."

"So 5 minutes for the crew, 1 minute for us, and a couple of dozen expert-years before this plane ever took off."

"Slightly valid.  We get to look at our exact observations and the ground planners have to consider all the possibilities.  I agree your argument implies that whatever happened, it's not some simple cause that happens all the time and that we're just failing to think of.  Could be some complicated weird failure which was nonetheless mundane, and would be obvious if we had all the plane designers and engineers on board."

"Your postulating that a high-probability explanation exists without saying what it is, is not itself a high-probability explanation."

"Well, would you like to bet in full generality about whether our present experiences turn out to have a high-probability explanation or a low-probability explanation?"

"Low-probability, as in something that seemed less than 0.01% likely before the plane took off?"

(It's an obvious joke so Keltham doesn't get upset at the proposed unfair bet; if it was 1 in 10,000 it'd have happened already to some plane flight, and would be in the handbook.)

"Low-probability as in non-mundane, or it expands our view of the mundane.  Changes which sort of things we think can happen to us going forward.  Isekai would count, aliens would count, some weird side effect of a solar flare would not count."

"Where would you put... Civilization coming up with some weird reason to suddenly shut down all the satellites and shortwave radios, but ultimately a reason explicable inside all of the standard physics we know and motivated by understandable reasons and not involving any aliens?"

"Let's call that one non-mundane.  I'm not picking a definition of 'non-mundane' that's never been realized a la 'since the beginning, not one unusual thing has ever happened'.  Like, whoever first discovered radioactivity was dealing with something pretty non-mundane by their standards, if they wondered why purifying glowing rocks was making people sick."

"Also Civilization should've maybe sent a message telling us to shut up too, on most theories like that."

"Heavily implied but I check: whatever called for screening history would qualify as non-mundane by your standards, even though we're told that it's not about anything that violated physics nor was non-mundane in an ultimate sense."

"If anything with that level of drama is going on, nonmundanity will have been said to win."

"Secret hidden Negative Utilitarian faction is attacking, and destroyed the satellites and emergency transmitters as their opening move."

"Sure, I'll call that non-mundane.  Mostly because I don't think they can actually do that, by the way."

"Not betting my life savings, but I'll go my 10 $ULH against your 10,000 $ULH on something non-mundane having happened."

"....nnnoo.  I think at those betting odds and something very weird having just happened to us, I want to exclude the Negative Utilitarians shutting down satellites and emergency equipment as not being ultimately nonmundane."

"My 10 $ULH against your 1,000 $ULH, but the Negative Utilitarians still count as a win for me."

"Obviously I ought to check if there's odds about that in a general onboard prediction market--"

"Where's the fun in both of us going off and looking at the standard market odds before we bet?  Where's your sense of adventure, Keltham?  Of nonconformity?  I'd read you as more strongly male-gendertroped than that."

It's been ten minutes.

"Captain to crew.  Do we have anything interesting in the on-board prediction markets?"  The crew probably would've bipped in a nonurgent notification, if there was anything running high or that just seemed obviously correct.

She was kind of hoping that someone on board would have some clue about what was going on, would confess to having some kind of mad-experimental anti-radio equipment buried in their checked luggage... not exactly that, of course, but something.

As one starts, so does one often continue; Blue is staying on cockpit management.

"Seventy percent all other possibilities, is the bad news."

"Thirty percent something understandable is better than I expected."

"Yes, well, twenty-five of that is on a supercriminal having sabotaged all of this plane's comms equipment simultaneously."

"Wouldn't have expected that to get to twenty-five."  As the proverb goes in aviation and most other industries, it's never supercriminals.

"There's really not a lot of good explanations being floated besides criminal masterminds, is the thing, here.  Like, even the 'all other explanations' aren't that good.  Two of the remaining five is on sabotage of all land comms."

"I got myself a piece of 1000-to-1 about our plane not being in dath ilan anymore."

"I foresee settlement issues."

"Honor system."

"But what do you honorably do--nevermind.  Do we have any tests?  If it's cheap I'd do anything someone wants to pay a hundred for, at this point."

"No cheap active tests.  The market is holding some of its breath on you breaking out the backup shortwave equipment in 5 minutes, and wants to know the flight crew's independent estimate of a probability distribution of when we ought to see an escort flight of aircraft showing up.  If, you know, we're still in dath ilan, and Exception Handling is not incredibly busy."

"And then the market wants to know when we're predicted to see land, or any other clear landmark, if we are where we think we are and no escort flight shows up."

"Please don't tell me we've got half the passengers planning out an isekai-handling strategy Just In Case."

"All right, I won't tell you."

"Captain, if criminal sabotage is running at twenty-five we should not be trusting the Inertial Positioning System."

"Aw radioactive shit.  Blue, tell the market we're subsidizing an estimate on whether the Inertial Positioning System has also been sabotaged, and does anyone have a weird-personal-toy with independent IPS... and somebody has to have a compass... no we're buying all the compasses anybody has, in case a criminal planted one that's sabotaged... and see if anyone's got ideas about checking for a planted piece of onboard equipment that could drag a compass off-course."

"Time to break out solar-angle calculations?"

"And check them by hand in case somebody sabotaged the computer."

"Blue, we also want to borrow five randomly selected wristwatches so we can check the main computer's clock.  Group random number generation, not individual."

And then afterwards they should call in Green, to find out what Green thinks Blue said the cockpit said.  But this, of course, should not be said out loud right now.

"Tell the market we'll have an estimate on predicted land-sight conditional-on-everything-else-we-believe-being-true in 30.  Escort flight showing up conditional-on-everything-else-we-believe-being-true... very rough estimate, about an hour from when comms first went out.  Could be longer if they're not going supersonic to get a bead on us, but I predict they'll go supersonic.  If they're not here before we hit land then we're lost or Exception Handling is busy, so in non-mundane worlds that'll kill almost all the business-as-usual probability before we can sight land."

"Assuming we don't sight land early, of course."

"Uh huh.  Which side of the isekai bet did you bet on?"

"I bet on us having isekaied.  I need the resources more in worlds like that."

She flips the comm switch off.

"Not saying I buy the isekai theory yet, but I'm increasingly unhappy about all these clouds below us, blocking our vision of what could be below."

"Cost of deviating from our ground-predicted flight path seems very high."

"Yeah, I know, but--"

"Even if criminal masterminds shitted in our compasses and mind-controlled away our sense of where the Sun ought to be, I don't think there can be anything underneath us except a one hundred percent probability of water for at least an hour."

"If we've still got clouds below us in 90 minutes, after we're on the emergency path, and no Exception Handling flight escort, I think that's time to consider whether to look below them."

"If we've got no flight escort in 90 minutes and an endless, unchanging sea of mysterious clouds I start to feel nervous about trying to descend below them."

"Glad we don't live in that sort of universe."

"In three more minutes we're going to break out the backup shortwave radio and it'll just work fine.  Or we'll transmit on it and not get any reception on the primary radio and that'll confirm local equipment failure for sure."

"Leaving a line of retreat:  If our shortwave radios work fine with each other and there's still silence, not static, from land?  Then what?"

"Doesn't sound impossible for a supercriminal to arrange, if they set up a sideline transmitter and receiver between our emergency radios while sabotaging their ability to transmit on the intended band."

"It wouldn't mean something had happened to Civilization."

"It's never supercriminals."

"That's what supercriminals want you to think."

"The ass is their profit-motive?"

"Betting in the on-board prediction market on whether it was supercriminals."

"More seriously, but only after ten seconds' thought:  Buy our insurer after a flight with 175 passengers suddenly drops out of comms, sell after we land safely."

"Figuring out who bet more than they should've on that is Market Oversight's one job.  There'd be--some kind of market pause, some kind of standard extra oversight, you don't want to let people profit on arranging huge insurer payouts especially on true-deaths--"

"You know, never mind, this is a job for the on-board prediction market, I don't think the details interact with our job flying the plane, or even with our professional-paranoia about sabotage."

"I think we care about whether the criminal conspiracy ends with us dead at the end, or lost, or landing safely, in order for them to keep their profits."

"Yeah."

"It probably doesn't end with us dead.  Simpler ways to do that than cutting comms.  And--there's a difference between having Market Oversight after you and the entire superheated planet."

"Well let's hope it's an intelligently-planned criminal conspiracy, then, and not some grimdark natural phenomenon that's going to wreck all the components of this plane one after another."

"Time to tell the crew to unpack the backup shortwave radio," it's portable and even simpler than the built-in one and not inside the cockpit, "and see if the crew can talk to land, or failing that, can't talk to us in the cockpit on our own radio."

"Bets?"

"Bets?" Keltham says to his seatmate.

"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."

"On this theory the transponder wasn't disabled, the circuit to the cockpit was hacked to show it as disabled."

"I withdraw the limit order but only because I have other things to track besides my outstanding limit orders."

"Get started on the hand-built emergency radio, flight crew has the ball on that."

"Ack."

"Any else?"

"Nay."

"Cockpit out."  She flips off the cabin-radio switch.

"Hey, uh, 'Mad Investor Chaos', was it?  Nice handle, no trouble telling that apart from other passengers.  This is a quick first pass, I'll be back later, but I want to know your quick background, rough wealth level, any unusual skills."

"Programmer, self-training in mad investing on side, savings on the order of 20K, to my knowledge I have no socially interesting secrets or wealthy relatives."

He doesn't add that he'd have volunteered anything relevant much earlier, because Steward Orange is probably tired of hearing that from people.  This is self-evidently a check in case somebody was shy about being a Top-10 CEO whose death would have exploitable financial implications.

"Thellim?"

"Fiction matchmaker, savings approx 100K, almost certainly irrelevant to whatever's happening."

"Ack."  The Orange Steward finishes writing this down.

"If our Exception-Handling flight escort doesn't show up, I do want in on the isekai planning committee while everyone else is pretending they're too dignified to believe in the possibility long enough to plan for it."

"Ack.  Rules are that resources including people only get to go to isekai planning after all other reasonable planning gets done."  She does take a note, though.

"Wouldn't be volunteering for it if I had other uses."

"Don't worry, we're not taking anything apart to make the radio which we'd need to rebuild Civilization."  The Orange Steward passes on to the next row over, which proves to audibly contain a pair of experimental physicists returning from a conference on superconductivity located next to a giant-ass particle accelerator that doubles as an aspiring monopole detector.  They're only not helping on building a new shortwave radio because engineering-in-adversity isn't properly their hobby.

"Well, that would be refreshingly depressing if I was refreshed by depression."

"Don't mind me.  I was just recently struck by how, if we do land safely in dath ilan--which I still acknowledge to have over fifty percent probability--everyone here who's not a physicist, and most of the people who are, will never have anything more interesting happen to them for the rest of their lives.  And also won't have done anything interesting while it happened to them."

"Speak entirely for yourself, lady, and when you hear about a 'Keltham' in the news it's me."

The scheduled turn is coming up.  There's some halfhearted betting on the Prank Hypothesis which says that the comms will come back on just before the turn is made.

It doesn't.  The aircraft tilts.  They are officially off the planned course and onto the emergency diversion route.

A minute later, there's been no 'Just Kidding!' recording playing in the cabin and the Network is still down.

A thin market settles.  Nobody really believed it would play out that way.

The Captain has finished one round of solar-angle calculations, and then after some hesitation decided to delegate further checking to the most obsessive and scrupulous arithmetician they can find onboard, plus a random volunteer to redo their work more slowly in case the scrupulous arithmetician is a plant.  That kind of position-verification is meant mainly for contingencies where the computer is out, not where you think the computer is probably okay but might've been cleverly sabotaged by a criminal mastermind.  It doesn't make sense for the Captain to spend all her energy on grueling solar-angle checking, versus delegating the calculations and seeing if they say something different from the computer.

She's currently perusing the handbook to double-check her memory of standard checklists for landing on a flat area that isn't a runway, and the checklists for a water landing if you can't find a flat area.  If they do have to navigate by solar angles, following the rough general emergency course might keep them away from cities and nuclear plants, but it isn't likely to get them to the target runway.  And yes, somewhere in the back of her mind is the possibility that the target runway is now a glowing crater, or that they're on a different planet that lacks shortwave.  That probably also looks a lot like "flat field or water landing".

He's flying the plane, or to be more exact watching the autopilot fly the plane and checking the horizon to make sure the horizon angle and cloud height and angle of the sun all match what the instruments are claiming.  Some of those instruments are very simple and not connected to computers, because Civilization distrusts computers more than he does, but even that won't save you from a hypothetical criminal mastermind who got access to the cockpit.  By the same token it should be very hard for the autopilot to kill everyone, there's a checker on the outputs which is another of the more tamperproof pieces of the airplane, but again, hypothetical criminal mastermind.

The leader of the shortwave radio committee--it's actually more of a 'generally investigate the shortwave situation' committee rather than a 'build a shortwave radio' committee per se, because that is how science backs up and begins again after you become confused--regrets to inform the Market that if they were expecting a frantic effort to build a shortwave radio followed by a triumphant announcement that the plane is definitely no longer in dath ilan, that is not how this works.  That is not how any of this works.

They are improvising tools to replace the untrusted multimeter, more than one of each kind of tool so they can check them against each other, and then ruling out a succession of possibilities for how a criminal mastermind could've sabotaged their radio reception.

It starts with seeing if they can verify that the primary and backup shortwaves were transmitting on a frequency anywhere near 3-30MHz, for example.  And despite someone's bright idea about the criminal having changed the frequency spectrum on both radios, that is not how he would pull this off if he was a criminal mastermind because then he would get found out as soon as somebody like Mister Sparklord gets ten minutes to play with other onboard electronics.  He'd have messed with the external antenna that the backup shortwave radio plugs into.  Not as simple as unplugging it, then the backup radio wouldn't have transmitted to the primary radio or vice versa, but if he's allowed to hook up the antenna wire to complicated equipment it's not even slightly hard to--

Anyways, they're going to measure what look like properties of the external antenna, which isn't going to defeat a clever criminal mastermind who's arranged for the external antenna to look normal when anyone tries to use improvised equipment to measure it in the obvious way, and that'll detect or rule out the more casual possible criminal masterminds.

But mainly, the thing you've got to do at this point, is very carefully drill through some appropriate part of the aircraft interior until you reach metal, and then figure out how to use the external body of the aircraft as your shortwave antenna, as tapped at multiple points that the criminal mastermind can't predict in advance.

At that point the hypothetical criminal mastermind can still block you from receiving radio signals, for example by simply jamming your radio, but it'll be obvious and you'll know there is a criminal mastermind.

If the solar-angle checker matches where the computer says they are, so that they still seem on course to land safely on the runway along their emergency route, she is not particularly inclined to allow the risk of trying to drill through the cabin ceiling in order to use the external aircraft body as an antenna.  Pilots do not have sufficiently detailed mental models of the aircraft interior design to be sure that this is possible to do in a safe way.

Prediction markets are at 73% on there existing a criminal mastermind.  The information that a criminal mastermind exists, at all, is not very valuable compared to actually getting back in contact with Civilization.

Well if the criminal really wants to keep them out of contact with Civilization and doesn't mind throwing away the isekai conceit in order to do that, it's just not that complicated to detect the start of a successful shortwave transmission and turn on a high-powered jammer they previously attached to the underbelly of the aircraft.

Noted.  That being the case, her decision is that Sparklord is not to do anything that even slightly risks cabin integrity in order to, probably, merely obtain more definite information about whether a supercriminal exists.  Please continue trying to contact Civilization by means short of that, or as a distant second priority obtain definite confirmation that intelligent meddling was at work.

That's Mister Sparklord.  But understood.  He'll play this game the boring way, and notify the market as he slices off little chunks of probability for how casual the criminal mastermind could've been about setting up this apparently impossible situation.

Time passes.

Pretty soon they're coming up on the edge of the calculated time for when an Exception Handling escort might show up; assuming that EH uses supersonic but not hypersonic planes, that EH had a base reasonably close to the emergency landing field, that EH's plane scrambled in 10 minutes, and that they fly to where they expect Flight 43 to be based on accurate course-keeping and satellite data.  All optimistic but not crazy-optimistic guesses.

The window will last maybe 45 minutes before you have to start getting unnervingly pessimistic to explain why Exception Handling still is not there.

Mister Sparklord has ruled out some of the dumbest and easiest-to-catch ways that a master criminal could have set up the Distracting Surreal Element of the crime.  Mister Sparklord notes for completeness that he's got some suggestive signs of the antenna not being totally a normal antenna anymore once you attach the backup shortwave radio to it, but it's hovering around the edges of what he can detect with improvised instruments.  The probably-sabotaged multimeter doesn't show it.  They're pushing things hard enough that a false positive would be almost expected.  It's definitely not just that the backup shortwave was retuned to a different frequency along with the primary shortwave, that he's ruled out, but only a really lazy master criminal would've tried that in the first place.

(Somebody has now placed a bet that Mister Sparklord is actually the master criminal, here to watch his work play out, but it's only a small bet.)

"Well, I'm guessing that we don't get an Exception Handling escort flight, even if this plane eventually lands safely in dath ilan, entirely on grounds of it being such a classic way to slowly raise plot tension for the next hour.  You, I presume, should be eager to bet me about this."

"Yeah, I should be, but I'm not."

"Well now you're making me nervous.  Why not?  Exception Handling knows where we should be, given when we fell out of comms.  Master criminal or no master criminal, I'm not seeing the consistent story where we don't all breathe a sigh of relief after we spot our escort out the window grilles."

"Yeah, I'm trying to ask myself.  I know it's absolutely the reasonable guess, I'm just finding myself expecting to lose the bet.  Trying to figure out if my brain is reasoning on anything but the sheer momentum of past experience there."

"I am not actually sure my brain isn't just going on momentum of past experience.  But if I force a rationalization out anyways, it goes:  We are dealing with a master criminal who put a lot of work into our side of the Distracting Illusion and they will have spent a bunch of time thinking about if there was any possible way to prevent those Exception Handling flights from showing up."

"How?  Create a major distraction that routes the supersonic planes elsewhere?  I'm seeing the criminal doing it if it's cheap, but that is not cheap.  Even if the distraction itself is cheap, it raises their Wanted Status by three notches."

"And now here we are, matching 5 seconds of our own thinking against a master criminal who may have considered the question for days."

"It doesn't matter how cheaply they can cause the distraction, Civilization will know it's them because we right here know it's them and it drastically raises how much attention they get.  I'm not seeing how that logic gets evaded by somebody smarter than I am, at least after my first 5 seconds of thinking about it."

"There's some larger plot afoot that includes this plane.  Suppose they already expect to have Wanted Status 8 once they're done, and don't care about crimes that rate Wanted Status 5."

"Because the plot ends with killing everyone on the plane?"

"I really think there'd be faster ways to accomplish that, plus, that doesn't leave anyone alive who can report on the Possible Isekai Experience.  We're not going to die, we're the audience."

"But, yeah... if someone true-dies as part of this, the hypothetical Criminal Mastermind wouldn't particularly care about tacking on some cheap-to-cause distraction that pulled away Exception Handling's nearest supersonic aircraft."

"I'll register right now that the fun component and even the eternal post-experiential paranoia of my Overly Fictional Experience will be ruined if somebody true-dies in the process."

"Hopefully the Criminal Mastermind has taken this into account and not spoiled their carefully constructed experience for everyone."

"I'm not actually sure we need to extend our reasoning that far out in the first place.  Diverting a plane like this, with over a hundred people on board, could easily rate much higher in the first place on the Wanted Scale then a cheap distraction for a supersonic airplane.  Safety guardrails are getting trampled here, the amount by which it risks our lives and true-lives is not literally zero even if all reasonable extrapolation by the criminal has us landing safely."

"I doubt it's multiplying our risk factor by more than... I don't know, three.  Especially if they are on board the aircraft to watch everyone's reactions and could turn the comms back on in an actual emergency."

"No way.  That's the kind of master criminal who gets caught."

"Nothing is higher-status for a master criminal than getting caught in a dramatically satisfying way after completing the perfect crime!"

"That ad campaign is never going to work and I'm not participating in it."

"It is not an ad campaign!  If we all say it's true and write the books that way and raise our kids that way, it becomes true!"

"I am personally viscerally offended by this idea and I'm not going to bother trying to figure out why."

"Anyways, the upshot is that you're not going to bet with me on the flight escort showing up?  Even if I offer you 7-5 on what anyone would say is actually the reasonable guess?"

"No.  My brain just thinks I'll lose the money."

"Your 4 against my 7, so that even if you lose that bet you're still ahead on the flight, assuming it all had an ultimately mundane cause at the end."

"Sold!"

...no escort flight has shown up an hour later.

The cloud cover below turns partial, with sporadic gaps.  The pilots briefly tilt the plane to one side and then the other, while somebody with binoculars looks out through the screening grille at the gappy cloud-sea, to try to spot a coverage gap that goes all the way to whatever's below.

The plane is confirmed to still be over ocean... well, over water... well, over enough water in at least some places to appear in shafts through the cloud cover.  In principle they could be overflying a large lake.  But mostly, this is taken as, "We expected to be over the ocean and we're over the ocean."

People are trying to do napkinback estimates on whether they ought to be able to expect to see container ships crossing the ocean, if they overfly a bigger break in the cloud cover.  Container ships should definitely be visible from their height; those are large.  Calculations confidently imply that there's enough container ships traveling between those two continents that if they were distributed evenly or randomly across the waters, the plane would definitely expect to spot one if they flew out of the clouds.

Unfortunately, there is no reason why container ship routes should be distributed randomly; quite the opposite.  Those routes will be optimized, and nobody on board knows the details.  So even a total lack of container ships seen on the waters below, if the clouds clear up further on, would not be proof positive that something mysterious has happened.

There are now passenger committees planning for the following possibilities, among others:

- Something Happened To Civiliation, which disabled all the shortwave stations that are powerful enough to transmit to Flight 43 at a level that onboard radio could receive, and this means there's no support from Civilization after this plane lands either.

- The plane has been Mass-Isekaied to an Uninhabited World.

- Isekai to Inhabited World with Cultural Aliens / or Actual Aliens.

Thellim has joined the third of these committees.  She has read much fiction on this subject; and that does actually count for something, in a world where most primary fiction is written and critiqued by people smarter than her.

(Keltham has not joined any of these committees on account of still being pretty sure that this plane is going to land in an otherwise functional dath ilan, whatever criminal shenanigans were going on.  So even if he tried joining a committee like that, his money wouldn't really be on it, and that being the case he'll let other passengers go ahead of him.)

Anyways!  Somebody on board in fact does have an e-reader with all seven standard primary volumes of Self-Improvement for Isekai Self-Inserts!

Some background, in case the whole backstory there isn't obvious just from the title:

There is in dath ilan a literary custom that if you write an isekai protagonist, and you desire that isekai protagonist to be realistic in a certain sense, then you, the author, don't look up anything that your protagonist would need to just remember without any books or libraries or Network access or experts to consult.  Not all isekai protagonists are written to this rule, but some are.

This metaliterary trope is sufficiently established in dath ilan to have its own supporting literary industries.  For example, experts you can hire, so that, if you think your protagonist remembers how to synthesize sulfuric acid, the expert will tell you what would happen from the protagonist's perspective inside the story after trying what you write down.  Without you, the author, needing to look it up, and thereby contaminating your own memory.

Literally nobody remembers a time when this metaliterary trope has not existed; it's the sort of thing that was instantly reinvented after the second stage of the Great Screen.  It isn't named after anyone any more than the first hundred integers are said to have been discovered by somebody.  If there was a point in dath ilani history when this trope was coined, it's long since been forgotten.

It would of course be terrifically shameful to claim you were writing to this metaliterary trope and then steal a glance in an encyclopedia.  That's the sort of literary misconduct where, if proven to 90% credibility, it'll get you denied residence in the sort of cities that prefer to be only inhabited by people not previously proven to have been dishonest to over 90% credibility.  And excluded from a lot more friendship circles than that.

But of course, nobody really thinks of doing that, when they consider the question of how to make their metaliterary-trope-abiding literary protagonist more impressive.

If they want their protagonist to do realistically better, they'll just have to learn that knowledge themselves!

...and again, this metaliterary trope has existed for as long as dath ilan's short memory remembers; and in dath ilan, when people want something, they are willing to pay something for it; and if a lot of people want something, industries will spring up specialized in meeting that want.

There are, obviously, this really should go without saying, hundreds upon thousands of books promising to improve your realistic-self-inserts, by offering mnemonics and exercises meant to help you retain knowledge about things an isekai protagonist might need to know.  You can look at the statistics about whether authors' characters did in fact remember them right; and what the conditional probability markets said about the chance that the author would've done better with a different book, in case that's just a non-causal correlation in a way the market knows about.  If you really care you can even spin up a conditional probability market on yourself.

There are 10-active-day training-camps you can run yourself through, for learning the sort of hands-on knowledge you would need to be the best possible isekai protagonist--though most authors and future authors don't go that far.

But, that said, there is an obvious stumbling-block here to be wary of, when it comes to self-education in order to improve your isekai protagonists.

There is perhaps a certain sketchiness if you-the-author read an isekai-protagonist-self-improvement book about chemistry, and then, what do you know, your story protagonist encounters a chemistry-related problem in the novel you-the-author started writing one week after you virtuously put that chemistry book away and virtuously didn't peek.

To be clear, if for other reasons you've honestly lived your life researching industrial acid synthesis, and then you decide to write a novel about an isekai protagonist who luckily used to work in the chemical industry, using their expertise in an alien economicmagical world, that's universally agreed to be fine and cool.  That's the author's real strength that the isekai protagonist is showing off.

But since that's so cool, it would be shameful to try to look that cool, by a sleight-of-hand, when you're not actually that cool.  Shameful, and dishonest.  Most isekai protagonists, one assumes, would not get a chance to go back in time and read exactly the right book they needed, one week before getting isekaied.  So if you read exactly the right book, one week before you start writing the self-insert story, that's a way of making the character look better-read than you'd actually be in a realistically similar situation.

If your isekai protagonist gets unrealistically lucky that way, you declare it explicitly, by mentioning in-story how your protagonist read the same book you did, one week before getting isekaied.  To do otherwise would be dishonest and shameful.

One might say that the whole point of this metaliterary trope--once declared to be in force--is to have the isekai protagonist look only as well-prepared as the author actually is.  Any impressionable person of the appropriate gender who reads a novel with the blazon of this trope upon its cover, and gets all starry-eyed about how knowledgeable the protagonist seems to be, should not be disappointed when they attempt to date the actual author.

But of course everyone on dath ilan who reads self-insert isekai fiction at all, has heard of the seven-volume book series whose title is literally just "Self-Improvement for Isekai Self-Inserts", and it hardly stretches credulity even a tiny little bit if an isekai protagonist happens to have read it!

That is to say:  There's an obvious use for a focal point in this industry, so this facet of dath ilan has carefully put together that focal point, since there's not room for multiplicity.

One could go on about how this edited compendium is assembled, by verdict of fandom and verdict of prediction markets, to contain all the most successful bits of isekai protagonist self-improvement that has done well out of previous books on the subject--along of course with references, and thereby advertisements, to the isekai-protagonist-self-improvement books they were taken from--and what happens in terms of royalties if a later author devises a marginally improved version of a rhyming parable for how to make sulfuric acid, where most of the innovation was in the earlier version--but that's not the point right now.

The point is, declaring that a protagonist happens to have read all seven volumes of Self-Improvement for Isekai Self-Inserts is practically a free action in terms of the story's burden-of-improbability; tons and tons of people have read those volumes in real life!  Your protagonist doesn't even need to be an isekai fiction writer!  People will read those books just because they're interesting!  And because almost everyone in the world feels deep down like how well they would industrialize another world in an isekai scenario is a valid measure of their self-actualization and their worth as a human being!

The fact that somebody on board literally has a physical copy of Self-Improvement for Isekai Self-Inserts is evidence against this plane being in a trope-abiding isekai scenario, really.  Having your character take a physical copy of Self-Improvement for Isekai Self-Inserts with them on the isekai, and not need to remember any of it, would just be odd.

To be clear, there's plenty of stories in dath ilan that don't obey all the standard tropes, and are, on quite deliberate purpose, odd.  Thellim is just saying that, if they find themselves in another world with a physical copy of Self-Improvement for Isekai Self-Inserts and no need to remember any material it covers, they should keep watch for strange inversions of other tropes too.

The e-reader with those seven volumes, alas, is in the cargo compartment of the plane, not in the passenger cabin.  In the event that there's no sign of Civilization, or signs of primitive alien Civilization, where the landing pad was supposed to be, the Ad-Hoc Passenger Committee on Inhabited-Destination Mass Isekai Scenarios recommends that the e-reader with these books be retrieved from the cargo compartment even if it means risking somebody's true life to do it.  The pilots should be asked--if this scenario develops, or seems to be developing--not to crashland the plane in a way that risks damaging the cargo compartment; there's genuinely important stuff in there.

Some engineering care has already gone into not just completely abandoning the cargo compartment if the plane needs to do an unpaved-land or water landing!  Yes, the passengers' lives are more important, but dath ilan doesn't feel the need to show how virtuous they are when it comes to not caring about mere possessions.  Sometimes people put things they care about in their luggage.

If the plane made a water landing, it would not, of course, sink.  In many plausible scenarios, like "suddenly needing to land into rough waters in the middle of the ocean", you would want to keep everyone on the plane for a while rather than entrusting them to inflatable boats.  So the plane can float indefinitely, if you cut loose the engines and some of the wings; not literally through hurricanes, but in fairly rough waters.

It'd be possible to access the cargo compartment from the cabin, once water-landed, via opening an emergency hatch.  Keeping the cargo compartment watertight is part of how the plane stays afloat.

If there's really no sign of Civilization at what inertial positioning claims to be their destination, it will be a very hard choice between "find someplace that looks flat enough to land" and doing a water landing.  Some thought has been given toward giving a water-landed plane the ability to beach itself afterwards, or land such that it bleeds velocity at just the right rate given prevailing winds until the airplane slowly glides into what looks like an unobstructed beach... but that is iffy.  Alternatively, trying to get all the passengers onto inflatable life-rafts, and get them all to shore... you could lose somebody that way.  You could lose somebody, all available ways.

The onboard market says it doesn't particularly expect no sign of Civilization once they get to where inertial positioning would place their landing runway, but the Captain is thinking it through anyways.  You can't trust market prices denominated in assets that don't mean anything if Civilization has vanished; and there is not a known solidified exchange rate between Civilization-dependent asset prices and "unskilled labor after landing, conditional on Civilization being gone".

His own mind keeps going back to the question of what happens if they get to where the Air Traffic Exception station is supposed to be, with a runway facing the ocean; and the cloud cover is still solid, and their short-range emergency radio hears nothing from the station.

Their plane's emergency route will obviously have been planned in such a way that nobody crashes, even if all planes on dath ilan simultaneously lose comms and switch to their emergency routes... and yet, somehow he's still worried that there will somehow mysteriously be a plane blocking the runway, or, yes, that their inertial guidance has also been sabotaged and there won't be a runway there.

The planned emergency route says to just descend and land on that runway, as you come in from over the ocean.  Doing a preliminary pass and circling the Air Traffic Exception mini-airport is not in the plan.  Maybe that does crash into somebody or something, if all planes in Civilization are having the same problem simultaneously.  But just descending directly into the clouds with intent to land directly on where a runway should be, if there's no visual contact or radio contact, does not seem... very safe.

(Obviously, after today the emergency plans will be revised so that all emergency diversion routes offer an explicit option to circle the Exception airport once before landing.)

All of those decisions are ones she needs to make in the next thirty minutes; they're not that far out from where their landing strip ought to be, if inertial positioning isn't lying to her (and sun-position calculations are backing it up so far).  If this flight was any further from land than that, there'd be a relief pair of pilots on board.  Actually this flight was gently pushing the edges of that limit, on its original flight plan, and theoretically she and her fellow pilot should go off-shift 20 minutes from now.

(In the back of her mind, she takes a brief political moment to appreciate that Civilization is the sort of Chaos-tolerant place where in 20 minutes she can just declare 'Exception!' and go on flying the plane, rather than some well-intentioned regulator having installed aircraft control lockouts to prevent employees from staying on-shift longer than regulations say they're supposed to.  Of course, people in Civilization's Lawful factions all say that's not what they want and of course they would never; but she doesn't really trust them about that, Lawful people can't reliably self-predict what they'd get up to without any Chaotic political opposition to stop them.)

Or to be more exact, in 30 minutes they'll be at the outside range where their short-range air traffic radio ought to be able to reach the Exception-Handling station even through cloud cover.  If, at that point, the short-range radio doesn't seem to work... well, that would not be the correct time to make decisions.  Decisions should be made before then, conditional on that future event occurring.

In 15 minutes they'll start slowing down and descending.

Onboard markets think there's a high chance the air traffic radio will just work.  A hypothetical criminal who is somehow profiting from the airplane being temporarily out of touch with Civilization, but not destroyed, would have little to gain from sabotaging their ATC radio.  It buys only a few more no-contact minutes before the plane actually lands, at the cost of a noticeably greater chance of doing Real Actual Harm.

Time passes.

The clouds are as solid as before.  There is probably a rule somewhere that says to avoid emergency plane diversion routes that need to land through cloud cover, if that's cheap, and in this case it probably was not cheap.

She starts the plane slowing, a bit, and descending, a bit.

Time passes.

They're coming up on when short-range radio should work, when by the regs they should call into ground ATC.  (Neither of them really want to call over and over and update probabilities gradually and painfully until suddenly maybe it works or they hear small traces of sound; they have an untrusted plane to fly.)

"Bets?" he says aloud to the Flight Captain.  Not onboard-market bets; just between the two of them, this bet would be.

"Feels like it could go either way.  Don't want to put numbers on it.  Head full of other problems."

"If there were a third party present to bet with, I'd bet them 80-20 you feel the same way because you didn't name any numbers yourself.  Don't tell me you're gain-seeking by letting me name a price first, you wouldn't mess with that during an emergency."

"I could've already arrived at my odds, and not want to influence your own first-order opinion."

"But no, you're right, my head is also too full and I was waiting to see if you named numbers instead."

"Let's just do it."  This is not a timing-informative statement; they're calling in at the exact default time that procedure would suggest, in case somebody on the other end is expecting them and needs to make any kind of special effort related to getting radios to work.

"Yeah."  In a few more very exact precise seconds.

A cockpit timer makes a high-pitched fneep! sound that would be very difficult to confuse with any of the other sounds a cockpit can make.

He flips the switch at just about exactly the same speed he'd use usually, if anybody's trying to predict that.

"This is Flight 43 to Exception Handling ground control at Station 91, do you copy, please acknowledge."

"Acknowledged Flight 43, this is Exception Handling, you are expected, proceed to land per preplanned route."

"Good to hear, we had absolute comm loss on our side and our passengers were betting on whether we were still in dath ilan.  We are on course for runway per preplanned route, do you have any idea what happened?"

Somehow it's occurring to him that he had managed not to make any advance plans on what to say if this happened, which really goes to show something about where his brain was placing its own internal bets.

"Exception.  On my understanding of reality, Flight 43 has had comms difficulties and has been in only intermittent contact with Exception Handling, but reported they had no other mechanic difficulties and were on course to land safely with us along their preplanned emergency route."

"Our perceived reality is that we lost satellite GPS, transponder, and Network.  Our shortwave radio and emergency backup shortwave radio were able to communicate with each other, but not detect any of the band-identification ticks."

"They would've told me if your transponder went out."

"Do not land without further orders from Exception Handling, repeat do not land on runway, I notice I am confused, say again that Air Traffic Control at Station 91 has noticed its own confusion, I am declaring and escalating an exception inside of the emergency procedure."

There's an alarm going off in the background, audible over the radio but very gently and at a volume which wouldn't otherwise interfere with anyone talking on this frequency.

She thinks very quickly, then.

"Pass conversation."

"Ack.  Air Traffic I am passing this conversation to Captain."

"Air Traffic, nay, I say nay and declare exception, this flight has evidently been gaslit, say again gaslit, I infer this flight has been subjected to detailed control of its perceived reality.  I do not know that you are actually Air Traffic Control.  Proceeding along preplanned route and if I see an unblocked runway on arrival I intend to land on it."

Hooooo wow.  There are a few times in the recorded history of Very Serious predesigned Civilizational procedures where somebody has declared an exception to an exception from an exception.  To be specific, it has happened exactly eleven times, or at this point, twelve.  This is going in all the textbooks, not that they had any real hope of staying out of those anyways.

She considers blowing up the plane before it can land against orders.  Not for very long, but she does consider it.  It's rather the point of having a Law-Abiding Sociopath running air traffic control in the first place.

Then she considers what use an adversary could potentially make of this predictable decision of hers, not to blow up the plane.

"Exception acknowledged.  I presently state that landing will be physically possible for you.  Once landed, move off runway to field at left.  Stay on plane pending further orders.  Do you acknowledge new orders?"

"Captain to what is possibly Air Traffic Control, what is your reasoning for the stay-on-board order?"

"You are landing against Air Traffic orders and I am considering what use an unknown adversary may be attempting to make of that, such as allowing a criminal to escape from the aircraft after it lands.  In lieu of detailed consideration I am trying to minimize further causal consequences of your landing in general."

"The gaslighting of this plane included what must be tampering with our radio equipment, hence in generality tampering with our equipment, I do not trust this plane physically and I want everyone off it."

"Can we agree on a default-plan-pending-further-orders to immediately deplane your passengers, and move them around Station 91 to an indoor area at the rear of the station where everyone can stay quietly under lockdown until Exception Handling descends in force on this incident?"

"I don't have a lot of time to think but it sounds like a reasonable plan from both of our perspectives, on the first few seconds of thought."

"I want to see green and purple lights flashing in the left field before I turn into it.  This will not rule out interception attacks on this conversation, but it will slightly reassure me about whether I have causally interacted with Air Traffic Control at all during this conversation."

(There are, obviously, all sorts of encryption protocols that a plane and air traffic control could be using, if the plane's Network connection was functioning.  This conversation is occurring along a channel that is meant to just-work-robustly-instead-of-going-through-complicated-computer-chips.)

"Acknowledged, you will see green and purple on landing.  Assuming no other exceptions occur."

"My side needs to have internal conversations and with Exception Handling headquarters.  I ask you keep this radio channel open."

"Acknowledged.  We are all kinds of happy to stay in touch, if you're really Air Traffic Control."

A lot of Exception Handling had already been quite busy, or paying attention to other things, at this exact particular moment, for reasons which will become clear.

But it doesn't take a lot of brains to guess wildly what probably just happened.

Some people at Air Traffic Control, if in on this loop, must have already guessed what happened--or at least, massively updated probabilities based on a guess that two strange events are relevant to each other at all.

Exception Handling makes a blind guess, a snap decision, and orders Air Traffic Control that everyone who knows about a Flight 43 anomaly is to stay inside the same room and not communicate outside of it, except with Flight 43 itself or Exception Handling, for the next ten minutes.

Those ten minutes are putting safety margin along how long it should take to somehow verify that blind guess, bring the Chief Executive of Civilization and the rest of Civilization's C-level suite up to speed...

And then, order a general planetwide market trading halt, on all nonessential markets.

(Civilization does not do this every day.  Not even every decade.)

"Hello, customers!  Despite the recent spate of excitement, we are reminded once more that aviation is in fact remarkably safe all things considered, as we are now descending toward what is hopefully our runway, having successfully contacted what appears to be air traffic control, and apparently arranged to land.  I'm sure you're excited to update those market odds!  Well, you've got one more minute for any last-minute trades like that, but then return to your seats and fasten your seat's safety-apparatus about yourself to prepare for landing.  We have no specific reason to expect this landing to be in any way difficult, but you know as well as I do how many exceptions have been thrown on this flight already, so check those connections thrice!"

"After landing, we'll be taxiing into left field and then disembarking immediately and without retrieving cargo, after which we will walk to a holding area inside the Exception Handling station.  Please note that cellular towers around this area will have been shut down to prevent you from making or receiving any texts.  I'm told that everyone at Exception Handling is very confused, and concerned about possibly adversarial strategies in force, and it was an act of less than total caution that this plane is being allowed to just land and everyone is being allowed to depart it immediately."

"As always, do not detach your seat safety apparatus until the plane has rolled into its destination gate, or in this case field, and come to a complete halt.  Now, of course we all know, and you don't need to tell me, that Relativity prohibits there being any such thing as a privileged frame of reference in which to declare that something has halted.  What I mean, simply, is a halt relative to the ground, as seen through the windows, which should appear stationary relative to yourself, and you should also notice subjectively an absence of any apparent acceleration in any direction, except for a completely constant force pointing downward, corresponding to gravity.  If you're not sure, don't unbuckle yourself.  If you need to argue over the definition of what exactly constitutes a halt, it means the plane is not, for our purposes, at a halt, and you should continue sitting down... you know, actually, on this special occasion, let's just wait for the cockpit to announce that we're fully landed.  I know you're worried that they'll be too conservative in deciding whether or not we've landed, but please, for the sake of Coordination, trust them this once.  They don't want to stay on this plane any more than you do."

"After we've come to a complete halt, we will follow our usual efficient deboarding algorithm.  Left aisle seats where individuals are individually seated and ready to deplane with minimal effort, rise first and remove any carryons with local storage.  The governing principle is that at most one deboarding seat should be attempting to occupy any aisle space, and should then try to occupy that space only if it is ready to move forward in unison with all other persons in the aisle to deboard the plane once the exit has opened.  Do not attempt to recalculate clever individual strategies corresponding to this governing principle!  Just follow the rules already in place, which may not perhaps result in literally optimal deboarding results, but should result in good-enough results without any further coordination being required..."

...and the airplane descends through the clouds.

They were low clouds, but not so near ground-level that, having descended below, they cannot see the clear runway laid out before them.

And a bit ahead of that runway, a field with green and purple flashing lights set into a vehicle there.

They don't trust their instruments, even so.

They check by instrument and by vision whether the aircraft seems to be doing what they have told it to do.

And the plane lands safely.

Most planes do.

The passengers disembark.  There isn't any attempted nonsense about leaving carryons behind.  Somebody might have something important in there, and nobody wants to make a show of discipline by forcing them to abandon it.

(Even if people grab carryons, it's not that slow to disembark by Civilization's usual deboarding algorithm, which is actually quite fast; there is never any crowded aisle, and most passengers have disembarked through clear aisles walking forwards in unison before anybody with an even slightly complicated deboarding procedure tries to deboard.

If you showed them an airplane from a planet where people deboard much more slowly and with large empty spaces often appearing in the aisle, as those closest to exiting all try to exit first as soon as a not-completely-fully space appears in the aisle that they can lunge into, even at the cost of blocking all the other people behind them... pushing through crowded aisles to grab carryons from five spaces behind them, because carryon space was not efficiently allocated to carryons... they would not actually guess how bad things had gotten, on that planet.  But they would instantly and correctly guess that this planet's civilization was less well-coordinated than dath ilanis would imagine people would spontaneously organize among themselves.  It's how dath ilanis would imagine seven-year-old boys trying to get off a plane, if no boy among the seven-year-olds had any leadership aptitude.)

"So," Thellim says, from where they're now all waiting in a large indoor waiting area and, apparently, not using their cellular texters.

"So!"

"I figure you're gonna owe me one unskilled-labor-hour at the end of this.  But if you still think this didn't have a mundane cause, I'd consider tupling down on the bet."

"You're that confident it was mundane?  This sure seems like we're being kept in downright causal isolation."

"There's basically always a mundane explanation.  The causal isolation is because... one of us is a supercriminal, say.  Or they're uncertain if one of us is."

"You want to bet otherwise?"

"Oh, one always wants to bet.  The question is just, at what odds."

"Mm... I'll post my thousand against your hundred, that it's all still mundane.  Or maybe my thousand against your ten, if we talk first about how narrowly 'nonmundanity' is being defined."

"That's a shift from the odds you offered me earlier, back when this all started."

"It's been a very weird day, I'm in a causally isolated room instead of my nice apartment, and I want to know exactly what you mean by 'mundane' if I'm going to extreme odds about it..."

Keltham's voice trails off as he notices the number of faces turning to stare out the room's huge windows--no, it's not that causally isolated, but Exception Handling Station 91 was not really expecting to need much causal isolation--and his eyes follow where other people's gazes are looking.

"Thaaaat is a lot of Keeper aircraft for this having a totally mundane explanation."

"They're going to come in and read us to see if one of us is the criminal.  Just in case the criminal actually put theirself on board our aircraft."

"This hypothetical criminal would need to have done something much more concerning than diverting one plane, to rate that many Keepers showing up to pursue remote odds of catching them."

"Obviously this was never the whole plan."

"Oh hey, you know who's in there besides Keepers?  Because I am seeing aircraft in the colors of the Supervisors of Economic Conduct."

Thellim looks, and feels a brief twinge of instinctive fear despite knowing very well that she has not done anything wrong, that with Keepers around as a last resort it's probably a lot harder to frame innocent people for genuinely serious crimes than mystery-fiction authors and readers usually take on faith as an allowed plot premise, and that there really isn't any reason for any criminals to focus on her unless her mere awareness of her own existence indicates that she is the main character in some sort of generalized story where the more prominent characters get more consciousness.

The Supervisors of Economic Conduct have... a reputation, in dath ilan.

They don't very often ban anyone from trading in any asset markets for the rest of their life.  But the thing is, they can.

"Wow," Keltham says, after observing for slightly longer.  "They say there's shenanigans that get the SEC showing up at your house, and there's shenanigans that get the SEC showing up at your house in helicopters, but this is the first time I've heard about shenanigans that cause the SEC to show up in power armor."

"I hadn't actually heard either saying before."

"I said it, so now it's a saying," as a saying also goes.  Somebody has to invent proverbs, and few people in dath ilan think themselves unqualified to do so.

"Were we going to make a bet, at some point?"

"I don't really feel like betting... anything... possibly ever again.  Until the Supervisors of Economic Conduct tell me that it's allowed."

"See, this?  This right here?  This is why planets shouldn't have any civic institutions."

Soon enough, people's names are being called out by SEC personnel, and escorted one-by-one out of their sealed room for... presumably individual questioning, but possibly they're just being immediately launched into space.  It does, in fact, need to get pretty bad before the SEC shows up in power armor.

"Keltham," one of them calls after not too much time has passed.

Keltham promptly comes over.  "Hey.  Whatcha want from me and how much am I getting paid for it?"

Keltham does not fundamentally have a concept that any worse thing could happen to him than Civilization needing to be a place where he needs to act scared even though he's done nothing wrong.  It would, by his lights, in fact be a pretty bad thing; and if this is how begins the end of his story within Civilization, fine and so be it and he'll go down in flames and if possible take the Supervisors of Economic Conduct down with him.  People should not be scared of their paid employees, which is what any part of Governance is.

The voice of the person in power armor is modulated such that you would have a hard time telling who, if anyone, is really speaking from within there.

"We wish to have your reactions observed in close detail by a Keeper while you are informed of what has happened."

"We do not predict that you will ask payment of us once you are informed of the reason.  Is there a bond you'd wish posted?"

"Well, see, I mostly expect that I just got inconvenienced and had bystander-risk run upon me by a supercriminal, and that I'd help you catch them for free if there was otherwise no money in it for anyone; say by my reactions being observed, and used to help form a statistical distribution within which you could pay more attention to outliers, if that supercriminal was likely to be on board the aircraft.  If there was going to be a huge bounty on them, I'd want to be registered for any patentgratuities due that way, but I assume you're already tracking that sort of thing."

"But it's possible that some sort of very weird act was committed by protestors of Civilization, that I'd actually agree with, working as blind as I am--improbable, but it's a reason you'd try to blind me--and in that case, it wouldn't be in my interest to cooperate, would it?"

Keltham doesn't even think it's that probable, to be clear, he just has a severe personal distaste for being asked to do things by people in power armor who've turned off nearby cellular towers.  They probably have some sort of terribly good reason and Keltham will probably go along with it, but they need to be inconvenienced; the world needs to be a place where making people nervous is inconvenient rather than convenient for Governance.

"To inform you of reasons now would be prejudicial to data-gathering."

"You may, of course, bind the Keeper not to use the information she observes until you grant approval to her after the explanation.  Be it explicit however that refusing to permit the information, after explanation, will itself be a fact that we may use as a statistic.  And it would be disingenuous to deny that we are also considering the statistics of this very conversation, though not exposing it to Keeper scrutiny absent your consent."

"I'd like the Keeper informed of that stipulation, and for me to be informed of her agreement, before I come into visual range of her."

"Acknowledged.  I expect this will be done successfully.  Will those conditions serve?"

"Yes; lead on."

They've demonstrated that they consider themselves still bound to follow rules, and have been put slightly out of their way; Keltham isn't going to make more trouble than that without knowing what's going on.

...and then, duly told that his demands were met, Keltham is seated before an expressionless and very serious-looking Keeper.

Not his first time meeting one.

Definitely his first time meeting one over Rank 2.

"I was told that you had been informed, and agreed to permit, that I would read of your reactions on a level deep enough that it would ordinarily constitute an invasion of your privacy.  If this is not so, speak forth."

"I have been told of, and agreed to, what I was told were your conditions for that; namely nonrelease of information so derived until you've had matters explained, heard the justification, and agreed to it.  If this was not your intent, speak forth."

"Matches my understanding."

"We ask that you speak your thoughts out loud, to the extent you can, during this process."

"Understood," he says, which is not quite the same reply as acknowledged.  And then, because he was asked to speak aloud, "That sounds like you're trying to present some counterfactual versions of me with a harder problem."

"Low probability that you are our real target.  In most probability, we are gathering data for a baseline that will be used to make life harder for other possible people."

"Your record shows you as neuroatypical, aren't we all.  I want to gather some data for a baseline on you personally and will start with other questions.  Answer quickly if you can; you can speak more thoughts later to modify your first reply if you want."

"Understood."

"What is your name?"

"Keltham is what my friends call me and the name my parents gave me.  I go online by Mad Investor Chaos.  I've used no other aliases to a significant degree within the last year."

"What is your quest?"

"To become rich enough to afford 144 children."

"Please avoid trolling and reply seriously."

"I'm not trolling... and you knew that... and you said it to see if I would call you out on that."

"Correct.  Though it's not so much the binary choice of whether to contradict me, as all the side-channel information, like how long it takes you to decide and how your breathing changes."

"What is the average wing speed of a swallow?"

"Hold on, let me think about that one..."

"I ask that you reason out loud, to the extent you can."

Meanwhile and in another room.

"Got a baseline.  Thanks."

"So.  What, on your own best guess, happened today?  Not just on the plane, but the larger context."

"Wow.  I was sure that was just a fictional trope in detective stories, intended to let the audience make their own guesses and maybe bet in some prediction markets before the story ended.  I did not expect it to be a thing in real life."

"It's in fact a difficult problem to present a criminal mastermind, that they have to accurately guess how much all the innocents will guess; and if they fail to 'guess' what everyone else saw, or 'guess' a fact nobody else guessed, it stands out.  But you need a Keeper to read side-channel information or it's not really worth it, and it also works noticeably better when you've got a larger population to use as a baseline.  So it's done on a few serious cases, too serious for a criminal mastermind to train themselves on that part of the procedure by making themselves a suspect in something more innocent in order to observe law enforcement response afterwards.  Obviously, we ask you not to be too loud, afterwards, about what exactly happened during this part."

"If you manage to get things right that nobody else on the plane got right, we'll present you with a Keeper Certificate of Having Done Something Impressive You Can't Talk About accordingly."

"Not actually likely to be an issue."

"So.  Um.  What do I think happened... sorry, it's going to take a second to pry my brain loose from imagining my readers gathering in an online forum to argue about that while the story's online publication pauses for an hour."

"Take your time.  But also, think out loud while taking your time.  This isn't really a test of your reasoning abilities; it's a trap you're helping to establish a baseline for."

"Right, so."

"In real life, I think it was supercriminals, mainly because the onboard prediction market said it was supercriminals and it's hard to think past that.  Showing up with a lot of Keepers is making my brain suspicious that they were not entirely mundane criminals, but that is probably just story logic talking and there's also the Supervisors of Economic Conduct which is less likely if Aliens Did It.  I would not even usually be saying all this out loud in a Very Serious context, but you asked me to think out loud."

"What was the criminal motive?"

"Not just betting about the plane, I don't think, because that would just be rolled back.  Even trading on the airline, the plane manufacturer, or the insurer, seems like it could be mostly rolled back, and like there'd be only a few suspects for trades that diverted and ended up impossible to untangle.  Also, one of the last pieces of news we got from the cockpit was that Exception Handling thought our plane had not totally lost comms, which would have reduced market interest and liquidity by a lot, with few distracting-participants to present a crowd for the real criminal to lose themselves in... or mostly, there wouldn't have been much market movement at all, if our plane didn't vanish."

"So it wasn't about trading on direct alarm presented by a lost plane.  They didn't maximize that alarm, they minimized it, maybe so we wouldn't get the Exception Handling supersonic escort we were expecting to show up.  The part where that made us look like we'd been isekaied was a distractor."

"The main thing they wanted... was for our plane to not be in communication with Civilization, and for the rest of Civilization to not think this was all that suspicious."

"I am not instantly seeing where to take it from there... I can go on trying to talk faster than I can really think... a CEO on board our flight, and somebody steering a company to make a really bad decision that the CEO would have overruled if they'd been in contact.  The isekai thing could be about some sort of personal connection with that CEO, wanting to prank them personally.  Doesn't really fit, it feels like it'd be too obvious afterward what'd happened, and who'd done it.  There ought to be easier ways to take a CEO out of contact while their company makes a stupid decision."

"Okay, that was my brain's first stupid idea, if you want a second stupid idea it's not coming as easily but I can go on thinking."

(In another room.)

"What happened?"

"Supercriminals."

"Why?"

"I think the point at which I felt sure was when they told us that our short-range radio to Air Traffic Control had worked.  That's uniquely predicted by criminal masterminds.  There's no physical phenomenon that messes with all the radios except the ones you need to land.  That's the work of a mind that wants to mess with your comms for a few hours, but doesn't see a point in messing with your comms for an additional ten minutes at the price of maybe causing your plane to actually crash."

"Why supercriminals, plural?"

"Bit of work for just one person, especially taking into account whatever they had to do on the other end of this to take advantage."

"You don't think it was a prank to make you believe you'd been isekaied?"

"Maybe I was just Kelthamomorphizing the rest of Civilization, in my reasoning, there.  But I didn't believe in pranksters that determined to altruistically provide the rest of us with a fun life experience, at that price."

"Somebody planned to make a very large profit.  I believed that even before the SEC showed up in power armor."

"Why try to fake the rest of Civilization having fallen silent, like there was no one out there?"

"I don't think I would have done that part if I were a supercriminal.  In some sense, that part does need to be a prank, unless I'm missing something, because the way we felt on the plane had no way of influencing the rest of Civilization where the events were happening that the criminal planned to actually profit from."

"My guess is they had to do most of the work that would need to be involved, for other reasons, and then they saw the chance to pull a full-scale isekai prank, and took it.  And the partner who fell in love with this idea, sold it to their other criminal partner by arguing that, if the people on plane deduced exactly what was happening and had no distractors to make them want to put aside the whole confusion to focus on safety, they might pierce the plan."

"There were things we could have done to try to signal Civilization, like drilling a wire through to try to use the airplane's exterior shell as an antenna.  We'd have been more likely to do those things, if we'd been sure that our comms had been cut by adversaries, and that there was a supercriminal plan to make a massive profit, and that this plan had a key turning point which was to cut our plane's comms with Civilization."

"At least, that's what one criminal partner said to the other one, and then they promised to do all the marginal extra work themselves for faking the isekai scenario, and their criminal partner sighed and let them get away with it.  Call it a 3:2 likelihood ratio that they were romantic partners and not just criminal partners, this is exactly the sort of thing that one partner lets another partner get away with because their birthday is coming up."

"That's a lot of helpful detail you're coming up with very quickly," the Keeper does not say, because Keltham was explicitly asked to do that in order to make life harder for supercriminals who need to come up with plausible details quickly and not correct details and also not details that sound too obviously incorrect while a Keeper watches them breathe.

"This entire event is occurring on the mastermind's birthday!"

"No, actually, I take that back, that would be too much of a giveaway against serious info-theoretic opponents and they are absolutely facing those, they have Keepers after them."

"If it actually is on somebody's birthday, they're being framed.  Not a double fakeout either, serious criminals just wouldn't do it even taking into account that we'd conclude they just wouldn't do it..."

"There's an obvious equilibrium for that.  Back to main topic.  What was the plan to profit?"

"I legit don't expect that we had enough information on the plane to guess that, or somebody would have guessed."

"Narrow it down, if you can."

"To unravel the purpose behind a mysterious plot, look what would have happened without all details of that plot in place, and ask why those trajectories needed to be forbidden.  This case will contain some extras, in the shape of a fake silence from Civilization, but then we ask what happens without the extras."

"We didn't get an escort, because Civilization didn't realize our plane had a total comms loss.  Civilization thought we were in contact.  So it's not about concern over our plane, directly, having a big impact on Civilization, like, there wasn't massive movement around the concern for over a hundred true lives being at stake.  Other things Civilization could have misbelieved about our plane, that would've been big deals, are also unlikely.  Anything that gets this amount of SEC attention is worth dispatching a supersonic escort for us.  Civilization did not, at the time, realize that our plane was important."

"It's not about how it felt from our side of the plane, because we weren't in contact with Civilization so the exact details of how we thought on the plane are not powerful.  It may have mattered that we didn't make a desperate effort to contact Civilization."

"So their key desideratum is something that would have originated on our plane, and impacted Civilization, if our plane had stayed in contact.  That needed to go silent, and Civilization needed to not notice it going silent.  Civilization needed to believe that we were in sporadic contact, so they wouldn't go to great lengths to restore contact, and we needed to not actually be in contact at all."

"There was some sort of causal interaction between our plane, and Civilization, that the criminal wanted to have not happen, and they didn't want Civilization to notice it not happening.  On our own side, they allowed us to notice an anomaly, but maybe not figure things out to the point where we would have risked breaching the plane interior to use the plane exterior as an improvised antenna..."

(In another room, at a similar moment in causal trajectories if not linear time per se.)

"How did they make a profit?"

"I expect we didn't have enough information on the plane to guess that, or we would've guessed."

"...my brain's literary processor is suggesting that the only way the readers of my story could have guessed is if the uniquely applicable information was something only I heard, or singled out by how I heard it without it being buried under all the rest of the information generated all over the airplane.  Which would require that... what have I heard like that which was remotely interesting.  It would need to have something to do with the two physicists seated in the row behind me, who were coming back from a conference on superconductivity."

"I have some bad news about how much anthropic paranoia you're likely to have in the future."

(In another room.)

"Roughly just as your plane's comms went out, news broke, and not in a very orderly fashion, that a team of physicists had allegedly discovered a room-temperature, atmospheric-pressure superconductor."

"Try to reconstruct as much of their plan as you can, from there."

"That was cruel."

"It would have changed the face of dath ilan.  Space travel, power generation, every industry."

"The markets--?"

"Suspended, once we realized."

"Not realistically possible to fully roll back.  The market event was just--too large."

"And they timed it for--when the physicists who could have debunked it were all on a plane back from a superconductivity conference?  No, silly idea, not all of the planetary experts would be on the same plane and the markets would have noticed an anomaly like that..."

"The physicists who'd supposedly verified and attested the breakthrough as third parties were all on our plane."

"But the markets would have noticed, if nobody could reach--"

"In reality they were on our plane.  But their Network accounts and cellular texters had been corrupted, as in, video cameras to intercept their passwords, attackers with screwdrivers and microscopes going over their hardware, the cellular texters they have with them on board the plane are custom-built proxies to their real texters being hidden elsewhere.  The kind of attack that's basically not possible to defend against in real life.  Their accounts were sending emails, attesting to the superconductivity, and they were verifiably on a plane back from a conference when the news supposedly broke, so nobody thought it was odd that they couldn't give in-person interviews right away.  That's what journalists and chroniclers and other scientists saw; their personal friends saw, 'Sorry I'm on a plane very busy right now' and didn't think to ask deep personal questions for identity verification."

"And nobody thought to check that against the weird little item, probably not even in the news feeds, about how some random flight had partially lost comms and was diverting along an emergency route.  It looked like the physicists were in contact."

"How do you infer the superconductivity conference, versus all the other ways for multiple scientists to be on one plane in a way an adversary could have predicted in advance?"

"Sorry, not inference, that was overhearing a conversation from physicists seated in the row behind me."

"Sigh."

"I genuinely would not do that, you know."  He's not even sure why he says it, wouldn't have said it if not for earlier instructions and momentum about thinking out loud.  It just feels a little wounding, somehow, to have that thought of him.

"I know, or think I know, but it pushes the rest of this conversation off the statistical pathway where we can use it to the fullest as a comparison baseline."

"The scientists who announced the breakthrough--they're not--the criminals.  I can--sort of guess, here, what must have happened, but it feels painful even to say it.  If we're off the statistical baseline anyways, can you--"

"Asking after that information is just another path this conversation can go down."

"They were young.  Smart.  They thought they'd engaged top verifiers to look at their findings and double-check them."

"Then somebody told them that the news they were keeping carefully secret pending airtight verification had been leaked in advance of their planned publication timeline.  In a way that pointed to what they thought was their official contact in Market Oversight having done the leaking."

"Their advice from the person they thought was their lawyer was that, with others already profiting on the leaked information, and Market Oversight possibly not trustworthy, they should just go straight to the journalists in person, at that point.  Not an optimal course, but a simple one, facing possible smarter adversaries with possible government taps and obvious huge financial incentives.  It would obviously cause a mess, but they trusted to their third-party verified data and that truth would win out in the end."

Keltham becomes aware that his fists have clenched shut, in sheer sympathetic horror for imagining himself in their shoes.

"You can use the information from this conversation however it may be helpful for tracking down the criminals," he says.

"Though I do still expect an entirely standard gratuity on any reward bounties obtained thereby."

"We will be putting a lot of effort into tracking the responsible parties down.  The sort of effort where fifty mid-rank Keepers get flown into this site just in case there are any causal traces we can follow from here."

"It's not the damage they did.  It's not the trust they burned.  It's not the new costly security measures that airlines will put in place.  It's not the hearts they broke."

"There were inferrably too many of them, and they were too competent.  A criminal conspiracy that potent is a threat to human existence beyond what the Keepers will permit to exist."

"I don't--actually understand--how a threat like that--scales.  Why nobody betrayed anybody, so long as they were already betraying Civilization to begin with."

"Supercriminals are also always pondering that question themselves.  There are predictable tricks they tend to develop, for not exposing their real identities to each other, for placing prenegotiated deterrents against betrayal.  We try to make it hard for them to coordinate, but they do not want it to be hard for them to coordinate, and ultimately they are allowed to think about it too."

"From that level of perspective, what you saw here today was a criminal innovation in distributed payment.  Their ability to individually profit from the market disruption is capped by the need to have the visible portion of any wealth gains, or power exercises, not stand out statistically in the light of other disruptions.  This means that dozens of coordinated supercriminals can all take a profit of the maximum unremarkable size, from the predictable market disruption, so long as they do so separately and individually."

"It may, possibly, have represented something of a balance-of-payments reconciliation exercise among their kind."

"And while they were attacking Civilization on that level of abstract intelligence, one of them took a few extra moments to make us all believe that our airplane wasn't in dath ilan anymore?"

"They wouldn't be going down that whole career path, if they weren't having fun."

"Find them and toss their heads in a vat of liquid nitrogen, please."

"They did go slightly out of their way to make sure nobody died, even temporarily.  We will return the favor.  There are courtesies still, in conflicts like these."

And eventually another plane takes off from Exception Handling Station 91, bringing the passengers on toward Default Airport, the original planned destination.

It takes off fine, flies normally, and lands without problems.  Most planes do, even in dath ilan.

Aviation is really remarkably safe.