“So, what’s the news?”

“Nothing much. The ship with Bob Ritchie and Lori Walton’s bodies arrived on Earth, so they’ll be getting put to rest.”

“Ah hah! I had my fingers crossed this whole time. We’re saved then!”

“What are you talking about?”

“Well, you know I have the secret battle station plans, and I performed Bob and Lori’s autopsies…”

“So, what good is that? This may be the most advanced bio lab this side of Tau Ceti, but even you can’t grow a hypernode transmitter in a vat, and you can’t smuggle 100 exabytes of secret plans in a pair of corpses–”

“– I can and did.”

“What? They put those bodies through a full nanometer scan before letting them through. If there were a single molecule which didn’t belong in a human, or even the right molecules in the wrong place, that’d pick it up. And even if you get a few through, the holographic encoding of the plans means you have to smuggle all 100 exabytes or it’s useless as none of it.”

“But the scanners don’t check the DNA.”

“Sure they do. If the body’s cells don’t have the right amount of DNA in the right place, or if there’s extra DNA in the wrong place, that’ll cause a red light.”

“I meant they don’t check the DNA sequences.”

“Well, no. Everyone’s is different, and no one is going to smuggle DNA, it’s thousands of times cheaper to make it yourself, even if you have only the most rudimentary equipment.”

“The makers of the scanners weren’t thinking about smuggling information. After all, hypernode is going to be faster and cheaper than any ship. But when your enemy has control of all the hypernodes… Well, there are 3 billion base pairs in the human genome. Each cell has a copy of that genome. And there are 50 trillion cells in the body. And this equipment can replace each cell’s DNA with a unique sequence. Those plans are written into their nuclei, redundantly many many times over. And when Earth checks their DNA against the stored records for identity verification, they’ll discover sequences which aren’t human, and don’t even match any lifeform whatsoever.”

“So, we’re going to be rescued by a pair of corpses, which you turned into digital media…”

“Yes, we’re saved by the stateful dead.”