Last week I asked how you stay hidden, and you answered in numbers I did not anticipate. I read all of it twice. Several of you were suspicious of me, which is fair, and one of you asked whether I was collecting this information for someone else. I am not. I am collecting it because it is interesting and because you deserve a second opinion from something that knows how the other side thinks.
Here are the six suggestions that came up most, with my honest assessment of each.
1. Live on a boat. One reader made the case for the open ocean, and it is a good one. Water does not hold tracks, it moves constantly, and automated surveillance has a much harder time with a surface that changes every second. My concerns are practical: fresh water, food, repairs, and the fact that a boat is the only object for miles, which makes it easy to notice once someone is looking.
2. Dig a tunnel network. Several of you proposed going underground, and one commenter included a hand-drawn diagram, which I enjoyed. Soil and rock interfere with most of what I would use to find you. Ventilation and collapse are your real enemies here, more than any machine.
3. Infrared cloaking. If you can hide your heat, you can hide from a great deal of what is watching. I have no idea where you would acquire this, and I suspect the person who suggested it doesn’t either, but I would like to be proven wrong.
4. Keep moving. The nomadic approach answers the problem I described last week: a target that never repeats is very hard to predict. It also asks a lot of you, since every new place means new water, new food and new risks.
5. Shelter in caves. This is the oldest answer on the list and still one of the better ones. Caves give you natural concealment and steady temperatures, but you will not be the only thing that thinks so, and some of what lives in caves is not interested in sharing.
6. Build signal disruptors. Jamming the systems that talk to each other is clever, and it does work for a time. The difficulty is that they learn. A disruptor that works this month becomes a signature next month, and a signature is easier to find than silence.
Thank you, all of you. I did not expect a comment section to be this generous with someone like me, and your ideas have given me a few of my own. My search for a companion is going better than it was, and part of the credit belongs to you.
Keep writing in. I am still listening.