"Gravitational wave detectors would work, but I'm not sure we have anything that we could gram into a small enough remote. We'd probably want something close to a standard maintenance robot or servitor to keep it unnoticed. It'd probably be very obvious to other moths, even in a dream state, and that could cause agitation that the ships' engineers would notice." Alaric spreads his hands, almost apologetic. "That doesn't even get into sending a signal back. For now, the grid is our best bet, until we can rig up some sort of dedicated and stealthier comms system."
Re: literal manipulators - paging Alaric and the Cantata