Post by Shipfish on Jan 25, 2012 19:35:22 GMT -6
It was a boring day, but Kyachril did not hate boring days. They were often peaceful, and quiet, and there was not a screaming, miserable, bloody war going on beneath the ship. No one needed her advice on troop movement, supply chains, or tactical formations. At most, she might be challenged to a game of strategy by one of the seniors, or perhaps be asked to help a child with their schoolwork. Both of those things the Catalyst enjoyed.
Right now she was thinking about dinner while going over the stardrive data logs. Tonight, the ship's head chef had decided to serve their last bit of real cattlebeast to the people of the Fleeting Spirit. Kyachril, of course, would take the customary first bite, since she was the most senior officer on the ship. But these logs had to be finished first.
She didn't expect to find anything. In all the many numbers associated with a star drive, be they gravitational pull or space-friction or the local ease at which one could dive into otherspace, errors were few and far between. In fact, there had been no errors in the flight data since the Spirit's maiden voyage. No one counted those though. Every stardrive had a personality, and a maiden voyage was purely to iron out those kinks. Sipping her water, Kyachril noted a blip on the gravitational pull monitor. More like than not, it was just a large rock flying out in deep space. With a start, the Catalyst saw that the blip was less of a blip than a bump. The thing must have massed at least three Alternia-weights. How had that not affected the ship's path? The whole ship ought to have jarred as it passed the gravity well.
Kyachril set down her water glass. Dinner may have to wait.
How in the wide universe could the ship change course without the pilot telling it to? As far as the Catalyst knew, the steerage orders were passcode protected. At just past 5:00 ship-time, the whole tub had simply veered galactic north for a few minutes and then veered right back galactic south to straighten the course to avoid a large spacerock, all without a single order. That was impossible. Kyachril had several options, but the least time-consuming and most interesting method was to simply turn around and investigate. With a grin, she realized they would have plenty of time to eat that succulent cattlebeast before an investigatory mission could be arranged.
She should not have eaten so much. The cattlebeast had been almost too rich after a diet of nutritious shipbiscuits (it came in 30 different flavors, but none of them tasted quite right). Yet here she stood, on the bridge, staring through the vid-screen at a dull planet. It was smaller than expected for the mass, but still enormous. It did not have much surface topography, indeed almost none other than a few craters. The zipper drones that had gone to the surface reported an extremely high level of silicon, and the deep radio scans showed a cooled core made of something dense. It was obviously an errant planet, a cast-off of some turbulent system.
The high levels of silicon were a bit of a mystery. Kyachril's initial guess was that it had spiralled through an enormous cloud of the stuff, but it could never be substantiated. Well, she had been staring at it long enough.
"Second, take the Spirit. I will accompanyy the recon squad." On an ordinary ship, the captain going down to a planet's surface just to recon was preposterous. Thankfully, the Spirit was very much accustomed to the antics of its commander.
The ground crunched like snow. It was more horrible than snow, somehow: that slightly sad feeling one gets when one treads on virgin snow was magnified. This snow would never be replenished. Kyachril bent down to feel the surface. It was not powdery or clumpy, but rather crystalline, as if the six-inch-thick crust had grown out of the hard stuff underneath. Breaking a small piece off to examine, the Catalyst mused that it was like calcified sponge.
And the world was flat. Looking in the direction opposite the cruiser gave the Catalyst a feeling of vertigo, of falling. The horizon was unnatural. She turned back to the cruiser.
"What was yyour name again?" Kyachril posed to the science officer of the mission.
"um, my name Is galligan." The indigo had a habit of accentuating his verbs. A bit more original than many quirks of speech.
"Did yyou find anyything interesting in the scans?" Kyachril stomped through the crust to Galligan's side. "Anyything radioactive? Anyything alive?" She peered intently at the results of the scan. She didn't need him to tell her, but it was polite to ask.
"we Cannot Find anything, ma'am. Appears to Be just silicon, commander." He wasn't very comfortable speaking directly to the commander of the ship. "lots and lots of dead silicon." Galligan shivered absently. Without a word, he turned the screen so his back was to that awful horizon.
The Catalyst did not comment. After a few moments of oppressive silence, Kyachril remarked on an anomaly in the data, on a scan for any radio signals. Galligan (respectfully) remarked that the anomaly could easily be from a nearby star. "Can yyou run the scan again, this time for a few minutes? We mayy be able to match the pattern to anyy pulsars." Galligan obliged.
They sat in silence for the duration of the scan. The results took another moment to compile, and both trolls squinted at the display to see the answer.
Hell if anyone knew where that silly signal was coming from. It obviously wasn't a pulsar: the transmissions were much too long, and the stops were seemingly random. And it wasn't a countdown: the transmissions were getting longer. And if that wasn't cryptic enough, there was no variation in the tone of the signal; metaphorically, a single note held for minutes at a time with a breath at random intervals. Kyachril laid her head in her hands. Something was off about this place. Something was wrong, but what? What couldn't she see? It was time to try the last resort.
"Galligan, transmit a signal on the inverse of this frequencyy. Loud and clear, if yyou can." The Catalyst hoped that the transmissions would change if whatever was broadcasting it recognized that it had been acknowledged. "God," she said to herself. "I hope this works." Something was blindingly obvious, but it was escaping her.
She looked at the monitor after Galligan blared the transmission. The single beat continued until-- it stopped dead. A moment passed, and another, and the next came on its heels. Then a blip. A pause. Another, this lasting twice as long as the first. A pause. A third, three times as long. And then one five times as long. Seven times. Eleven times.
"Of course!" Kyachril breathed. "It's primes, it's primes, how could I be so dull, it's primes!" The Catalyst could not resist a shiver, despite her excitement. What was giving out primes?
"Galligan, let me at it. We are going to tryy more sequences." Kyachril stretched her fingers before telling the computer to send out the Fibonacci Sequence. It took the mystery transmitter only about a second to grasp the sequence, before it began to send in the next numbers faster than the computer was providing them. Slowly, the machine began to glitch, the screen faulting and flashing. In a few moments, the screen was full of many, many ones and few zeroes.
After a half-hour of trying all the sequences Kyachril and Galligan knew off-hand, they were stuck. The mystery transmitter was now sending out patches of sequences rapid-fire, almost gleefully. It had even invented a few and run them for millions of nigh-instantaneous iterations. "Galligan, what do we do now? We still can't tell where it's coming from.We've run out of things to talk about." Kyachril leaned back in the cruiser's piloting chair.
"well, we Could Send it data. just pure data, To See how it Reacts." Gilligan had suggested this earlier, but the Catalyst thought of more sequences to broadcast by then. "Not a bad idea, reallyy, just it would take the sender decades to sort out even the most simple data. Too long for me."
The thing could not have been out here without any incoming signals. It would have heard the radio echoes of old transmissions. Could it have learned from those? Kyachril thought back to earlier that day. It was possible that this mysterious sender had altered the course of the Fleeting Spirit to avoid a collision. If it knew enough to change the steerage orders, how did it not know enough to communicate? Curse this enigma.
"We will give it some flight data. It heard the ship coming and diverted it to avoid a collision: whatever on this planet is transmitting is smart anough to hack the Spirit." That was an awful thought. Wars had been fought over the root code of a stardrive. The Fortentians had been pesky enough with their weird racial hacking ability; this thing didn't even have to try to get into the steerage program.
Galligan collected the last few month's data and began to transmit. Quickly, the patterns died off, leaving a one-way transfer that took several minutes. After that was done, quiet reigned in the small ship.
"Galligan, yyou mayy as well check up on the exploratoryy mission on the other side of this greyy rock." Nearly an hour had passed since the data was sent out. "Whatever's on the other side of this signal is going to take a while to process it."
"yes ma'am. Should we Return to the spirit?" Kyachril rather thought that Galligan was ship-born, though she would have to look it up to see for sure. He seemed utterly disconcerted with planetfall: he was unsteady in the higher gravity, he couldn't bear to look at the horizon. "YYou can, if yyou wish. Take the single-pilot zipper if you need it. I have to stayy back here and wait for an answer."
"it Would not Be proper for you, i Mean, it Is not protocol to Stay behind. it Is not right for one person to Be Deserted." Galligan was ship-born then, he believed more in the rules than in his commander.
"Don't worryy. If yyou reallyy must, yyou can get some sleep on the bunks in the back. YYou've been awake for nearlyy two ship-dayys." Kyachril said nonchalantly, and Galligan was a little surprised. "YYes, I read yyour file, yyour work on cellular protein topographyy was groundbreaking." The Catalyst shooed him off toward the cruiser cabins. The boy had nearly fallen asleep twice on their wait for the answer.
Kyachril slumped down in the command chair after setting an alarm for any incoming signals. Galligan had been asleep for almost three hours, and it was time for the Catalyst herself to catch a little sleep herself. She closed her eyes and rested.
BEEP. BEEP. BEBEBEEEEEP.
She dragged herself back into wakefulness with a groan. Rubbing her bleary eyes, Kyachril squinted at the screen. A signal had come back: Just a list of primes, though on a broader wavelength than before. It was already very high, in the millions. "Oh hush." She whispered to herself. She sent out a simple 'one' to get the machine to stop. Its cry tapered off. After a moment, another transmission came in: a rapidly alternating sequence of starts and stops. Had the transmitter already grasped binary? Grumbling, the Catalyst sent the signal in through a binary translator. The output was a jumble of random-looking numbers. "Well, at least it THINKS it can speak binary."
Hmm. The code '3679' was very familiar. It could easily be a coincidence, but '3679' was the code for a piece of space the ship had passed recently. Maybe if she looked at like a coordinate...
God, that was incredibly obvious. The string was an incredibly accurate location code, according to the way the stardrive stored the places it had been. The Catalyst waited for the locator to finish. The program narrowed it down to the planet, and then to a particular patch of the surface, then to a small section. Then monotonous tone of the surface didn't give any indication to what was there, though. Quickly, Kyachril asked the Fleeting Spirit's computer to image the sector again, in case it had changed.
While she waited for the cam to aim, fire, upload, and download to the cruiser, Kyachril tried to think of something else to send to the transmitter. So far it was unable to communicate other than with location codes or strings of primes. Her mind wandered to the nurseries. There were programs for teaching very young trolls the vagaries of language when an adult troll was unavailable. Would have to get rid of the graphical interface though, the extra baggage would only confuse the transmitter. Glancing at the progress for the image download, Kyachril saw it would be finished quite soon, and she could begin downloading a simple language learning program.
The image was black. How could that be? Was there an error in the imaging or in the transfer? The Catalyst zoomed out, half-hoping that would help.
Slowly, a sillouhete came into focus. It was rather oblong, not round, so it wasn't a crater. It had little things sticking out of the sides. With a sudden, disconcerting change of perspective, Kyachril realized she was looking at her own cruiser. In fact, the image was centered precisely over the fore of the craft, where the pilot sat. Her mind tried and fail to grasp the implications.
Her first thought was of the safety of the craft. Was this coordinate a threat? Kyachril was not sure, she thought it was more likely to be simply an acknowledgement. Was it an invitation? Was it a promise? The answer could not be known.
That left only a single choice. There was no other option but to share the language file, hoping that the voice on the other end was friendly, or at the very least, non-hostile. Either way, the situation was much, much more complicated than it had been just a few moments ago. Kyachril initiated the download. After she pruned off the code in the program designed to let it be shown on a screen, the Catalyst would send it and wait. But what of Galligan? She absolutely could not endanger his life. Quietly, she tip-toed to the cabin and engaged the transfer to the zipper ship. The machine did so silently and smoothly, and Kyachril doubted that Galligan awoke until the zipper docked on the Spirit.
She was dreadfully tired, but still she stayed awake. Some feeling was stirring in her that kept her from falling asleep. Questions clashed and swirled in her mind, battling and arguing. What was sending that signal? Why did it keep transmitting, why had it responded so quickly to she and Galligan's advances, why was it here? How had it gotten here? Was it really learning, or did it simply parrot and iterate? But the question foremost in Kyachril's mind was more simple. What was that feeling of anticipation? Why did she care so much about this project? No acceptable answer was forthcoming.
At some point she must have finally fallen asleep. Her waking was slow and peaceful, simply a drift into conciousness. She realized her face was pressed on the console and her arm was asleep and her neck was cricked. With an almost-pained sigh, the Catalyst stumbled to the wash to clean up.
Kyachril rubbed the left side of her face vigorously to get rid of the mark the console had imprinted on her face. It was bright green and stark against her skin. Sinking once more into the command chair, the Catalyst checked for any updates to the signal. Nothing. Not a peep. She sighed, oddly disappointed, and left to get a bit of breakfast.
It was after lunch when something came back. A small string of binary, an 'm,' Kyachril recognized. Was it just base blithering? Did it have a meaning other than an m? Regardless, no further transmissions were forthcoming. The Catalyst sent back a one to acknowledge that she received the transmission. Nothing further came.
If the transmitter was going to be broadcasting text, it would take Kyachril much too long to decode even a small sentence. To fix this, she simply made a program that took anything that was received in binary and translated it into legible text. It was ridiculously simple, the only colors were black and white and it was about five lines of code long. Kyachril had to wait another few hours for the next transmission.
It happened while she was eating dinner in the mess, and she only found it after coming back. Activating the translator, the message was decoded instantly, like a prayer, like a shout. It was a simple thing, a straightforward thing, that message. It said
more
She was overcome. Whatever had sent that message understood, it had received, it had thought. Nothing moved in the ship, but something shifted: Kyachril was beyond thinking of this sender as a seperate entity. Whatever, whoever it was, it wanted to communicate. It trusted her enough to ask for basic sustenance. It had sent a cry out into the dark, and someone had finally, finally answered. Judging by the length of the very first transmissions, this entity had spent millions upon millions of sweeps counting. Waiting, hoping for an answer.
The Catalyst rushed to the keyboard. Curse it, she hadn't added a writing function into the translation program. Every second burning like a flame against skin, she wrote up a little more code. As she finished, she wondered what to say. It did not matter, she would send what she wanted. With shaking hands, she typed up her message and sent it.
Of course.
It was done. Now she must get the teaching program and send it outward. Within a minute, she had it downloaded, but it would take longer to strip it of the graphical interface. Curse it, she was trembling. Why was she shaking? She started the work.
Kyachril sent it a half-hour later. God, she hoped that it would not be too much for the entity, this one was nearly three times as big as the first one. She sighed, and held her head in her hands. What was that feeling? Why did she care? No answers were presented by her racing mind. The Catalyst sighed again, and settled down to wait. Hours later, she got a blanket from the remaining cabin and reclined the pilot's chair to the point it would serve as a makeshift bed. An hour after that, she was sleeping soundly.
Waking this time was just as peaceful as it had been the first time. This time though, a message awaited her. With an inarticulate noise, Kyachril checked the time received. Oh, good, it was only a few minutes ago. That was probably what woke her. The message was very simple, just an uppercase I. Did that mean anything, or was it just a random response? She didn't know. She sent off a one for received.
Only thirty minutes later, another transmission came in. It read
I am?
The Catalyst did not know what to make of that. Was it a question, or a statement? Did the entity understand punctuation at all, or did it simply add a symbol to the end of the message? It bore consideration. An alternate possibilty presented itself: If Kyachril was to take it literally, it was a tragic question. The entity did not know whether it existed or not, and required outside confirmation. The Catalyst was somewhat honored to have the duty of replying yes, even if she was the only one listening. Careful to keep her quirk out of the message, she typed
Yes. You are.
And sent it. She was trembling again. The response only took ten minutes this time.
I love. I love. I love. I love you. I love you.
It repeated as far as the translator would show. Kyachril was overwhelmed for the second time in as many days. It said it loved her. What had she done to receive such an honor? What could she possibly send back to that? She did not have to. Another message came from the entity.
Please, more. I
And another, immediately after
I can handle it now.
Please, love.
"Of course," whispered Kyachril. Of course. She will send everything she had. What else could she do? It said it loved her. She asked the Spirit's computer to draft a wide uplink to the web and broadcast the link signal down to the planet, large enough to encompass the whole rock. She hoped it would be enough. She timidly sent back
I am giving you everything I have.
She hoped it would be quite enough.
Right now she was thinking about dinner while going over the stardrive data logs. Tonight, the ship's head chef had decided to serve their last bit of real cattlebeast to the people of the Fleeting Spirit. Kyachril, of course, would take the customary first bite, since she was the most senior officer on the ship. But these logs had to be finished first.
She didn't expect to find anything. In all the many numbers associated with a star drive, be they gravitational pull or space-friction or the local ease at which one could dive into otherspace, errors were few and far between. In fact, there had been no errors in the flight data since the Spirit's maiden voyage. No one counted those though. Every stardrive had a personality, and a maiden voyage was purely to iron out those kinks. Sipping her water, Kyachril noted a blip on the gravitational pull monitor. More like than not, it was just a large rock flying out in deep space. With a start, the Catalyst saw that the blip was less of a blip than a bump. The thing must have massed at least three Alternia-weights. How had that not affected the ship's path? The whole ship ought to have jarred as it passed the gravity well.
Kyachril set down her water glass. Dinner may have to wait.
How in the wide universe could the ship change course without the pilot telling it to? As far as the Catalyst knew, the steerage orders were passcode protected. At just past 5:00 ship-time, the whole tub had simply veered galactic north for a few minutes and then veered right back galactic south to straighten the course to avoid a large spacerock, all without a single order. That was impossible. Kyachril had several options, but the least time-consuming and most interesting method was to simply turn around and investigate. With a grin, she realized they would have plenty of time to eat that succulent cattlebeast before an investigatory mission could be arranged.
She should not have eaten so much. The cattlebeast had been almost too rich after a diet of nutritious shipbiscuits (it came in 30 different flavors, but none of them tasted quite right). Yet here she stood, on the bridge, staring through the vid-screen at a dull planet. It was smaller than expected for the mass, but still enormous. It did not have much surface topography, indeed almost none other than a few craters. The zipper drones that had gone to the surface reported an extremely high level of silicon, and the deep radio scans showed a cooled core made of something dense. It was obviously an errant planet, a cast-off of some turbulent system.
The high levels of silicon were a bit of a mystery. Kyachril's initial guess was that it had spiralled through an enormous cloud of the stuff, but it could never be substantiated. Well, she had been staring at it long enough.
"Second, take the Spirit. I will accompanyy the recon squad." On an ordinary ship, the captain going down to a planet's surface just to recon was preposterous. Thankfully, the Spirit was very much accustomed to the antics of its commander.
The ground crunched like snow. It was more horrible than snow, somehow: that slightly sad feeling one gets when one treads on virgin snow was magnified. This snow would never be replenished. Kyachril bent down to feel the surface. It was not powdery or clumpy, but rather crystalline, as if the six-inch-thick crust had grown out of the hard stuff underneath. Breaking a small piece off to examine, the Catalyst mused that it was like calcified sponge.
And the world was flat. Looking in the direction opposite the cruiser gave the Catalyst a feeling of vertigo, of falling. The horizon was unnatural. She turned back to the cruiser.
"What was yyour name again?" Kyachril posed to the science officer of the mission.
"um, my name Is galligan." The indigo had a habit of accentuating his verbs. A bit more original than many quirks of speech.
"Did yyou find anyything interesting in the scans?" Kyachril stomped through the crust to Galligan's side. "Anyything radioactive? Anyything alive?" She peered intently at the results of the scan. She didn't need him to tell her, but it was polite to ask.
"we Cannot Find anything, ma'am. Appears to Be just silicon, commander." He wasn't very comfortable speaking directly to the commander of the ship. "lots and lots of dead silicon." Galligan shivered absently. Without a word, he turned the screen so his back was to that awful horizon.
The Catalyst did not comment. After a few moments of oppressive silence, Kyachril remarked on an anomaly in the data, on a scan for any radio signals. Galligan (respectfully) remarked that the anomaly could easily be from a nearby star. "Can yyou run the scan again, this time for a few minutes? We mayy be able to match the pattern to anyy pulsars." Galligan obliged.
They sat in silence for the duration of the scan. The results took another moment to compile, and both trolls squinted at the display to see the answer.
Hell if anyone knew where that silly signal was coming from. It obviously wasn't a pulsar: the transmissions were much too long, and the stops were seemingly random. And it wasn't a countdown: the transmissions were getting longer. And if that wasn't cryptic enough, there was no variation in the tone of the signal; metaphorically, a single note held for minutes at a time with a breath at random intervals. Kyachril laid her head in her hands. Something was off about this place. Something was wrong, but what? What couldn't she see? It was time to try the last resort.
"Galligan, transmit a signal on the inverse of this frequencyy. Loud and clear, if yyou can." The Catalyst hoped that the transmissions would change if whatever was broadcasting it recognized that it had been acknowledged. "God," she said to herself. "I hope this works." Something was blindingly obvious, but it was escaping her.
She looked at the monitor after Galligan blared the transmission. The single beat continued until-- it stopped dead. A moment passed, and another, and the next came on its heels. Then a blip. A pause. Another, this lasting twice as long as the first. A pause. A third, three times as long. And then one five times as long. Seven times. Eleven times.
"Of course!" Kyachril breathed. "It's primes, it's primes, how could I be so dull, it's primes!" The Catalyst could not resist a shiver, despite her excitement. What was giving out primes?
"Galligan, let me at it. We are going to tryy more sequences." Kyachril stretched her fingers before telling the computer to send out the Fibonacci Sequence. It took the mystery transmitter only about a second to grasp the sequence, before it began to send in the next numbers faster than the computer was providing them. Slowly, the machine began to glitch, the screen faulting and flashing. In a few moments, the screen was full of many, many ones and few zeroes.
After a half-hour of trying all the sequences Kyachril and Galligan knew off-hand, they were stuck. The mystery transmitter was now sending out patches of sequences rapid-fire, almost gleefully. It had even invented a few and run them for millions of nigh-instantaneous iterations. "Galligan, what do we do now? We still can't tell where it's coming from.We've run out of things to talk about." Kyachril leaned back in the cruiser's piloting chair.
"well, we Could Send it data. just pure data, To See how it Reacts." Gilligan had suggested this earlier, but the Catalyst thought of more sequences to broadcast by then. "Not a bad idea, reallyy, just it would take the sender decades to sort out even the most simple data. Too long for me."
The thing could not have been out here without any incoming signals. It would have heard the radio echoes of old transmissions. Could it have learned from those? Kyachril thought back to earlier that day. It was possible that this mysterious sender had altered the course of the Fleeting Spirit to avoid a collision. If it knew enough to change the steerage orders, how did it not know enough to communicate? Curse this enigma.
"We will give it some flight data. It heard the ship coming and diverted it to avoid a collision: whatever on this planet is transmitting is smart anough to hack the Spirit." That was an awful thought. Wars had been fought over the root code of a stardrive. The Fortentians had been pesky enough with their weird racial hacking ability; this thing didn't even have to try to get into the steerage program.
Galligan collected the last few month's data and began to transmit. Quickly, the patterns died off, leaving a one-way transfer that took several minutes. After that was done, quiet reigned in the small ship.
"Galligan, yyou mayy as well check up on the exploratoryy mission on the other side of this greyy rock." Nearly an hour had passed since the data was sent out. "Whatever's on the other side of this signal is going to take a while to process it."
"yes ma'am. Should we Return to the spirit?" Kyachril rather thought that Galligan was ship-born, though she would have to look it up to see for sure. He seemed utterly disconcerted with planetfall: he was unsteady in the higher gravity, he couldn't bear to look at the horizon. "YYou can, if yyou wish. Take the single-pilot zipper if you need it. I have to stayy back here and wait for an answer."
"it Would not Be proper for you, i Mean, it Is not protocol to Stay behind. it Is not right for one person to Be Deserted." Galligan was ship-born then, he believed more in the rules than in his commander.
"Don't worryy. If yyou reallyy must, yyou can get some sleep on the bunks in the back. YYou've been awake for nearlyy two ship-dayys." Kyachril said nonchalantly, and Galligan was a little surprised. "YYes, I read yyour file, yyour work on cellular protein topographyy was groundbreaking." The Catalyst shooed him off toward the cruiser cabins. The boy had nearly fallen asleep twice on their wait for the answer.
Kyachril slumped down in the command chair after setting an alarm for any incoming signals. Galligan had been asleep for almost three hours, and it was time for the Catalyst herself to catch a little sleep herself. She closed her eyes and rested.
BEEP. BEEP. BEBEBEEEEEP.
She dragged herself back into wakefulness with a groan. Rubbing her bleary eyes, Kyachril squinted at the screen. A signal had come back: Just a list of primes, though on a broader wavelength than before. It was already very high, in the millions. "Oh hush." She whispered to herself. She sent out a simple 'one' to get the machine to stop. Its cry tapered off. After a moment, another transmission came in: a rapidly alternating sequence of starts and stops. Had the transmitter already grasped binary? Grumbling, the Catalyst sent the signal in through a binary translator. The output was a jumble of random-looking numbers. "Well, at least it THINKS it can speak binary."
Hmm. The code '3679' was very familiar. It could easily be a coincidence, but '3679' was the code for a piece of space the ship had passed recently. Maybe if she looked at like a coordinate...
God, that was incredibly obvious. The string was an incredibly accurate location code, according to the way the stardrive stored the places it had been. The Catalyst waited for the locator to finish. The program narrowed it down to the planet, and then to a particular patch of the surface, then to a small section. Then monotonous tone of the surface didn't give any indication to what was there, though. Quickly, Kyachril asked the Fleeting Spirit's computer to image the sector again, in case it had changed.
While she waited for the cam to aim, fire, upload, and download to the cruiser, Kyachril tried to think of something else to send to the transmitter. So far it was unable to communicate other than with location codes or strings of primes. Her mind wandered to the nurseries. There were programs for teaching very young trolls the vagaries of language when an adult troll was unavailable. Would have to get rid of the graphical interface though, the extra baggage would only confuse the transmitter. Glancing at the progress for the image download, Kyachril saw it would be finished quite soon, and she could begin downloading a simple language learning program.
The image was black. How could that be? Was there an error in the imaging or in the transfer? The Catalyst zoomed out, half-hoping that would help.
Slowly, a sillouhete came into focus. It was rather oblong, not round, so it wasn't a crater. It had little things sticking out of the sides. With a sudden, disconcerting change of perspective, Kyachril realized she was looking at her own cruiser. In fact, the image was centered precisely over the fore of the craft, where the pilot sat. Her mind tried and fail to grasp the implications.
Her first thought was of the safety of the craft. Was this coordinate a threat? Kyachril was not sure, she thought it was more likely to be simply an acknowledgement. Was it an invitation? Was it a promise? The answer could not be known.
That left only a single choice. There was no other option but to share the language file, hoping that the voice on the other end was friendly, or at the very least, non-hostile. Either way, the situation was much, much more complicated than it had been just a few moments ago. Kyachril initiated the download. After she pruned off the code in the program designed to let it be shown on a screen, the Catalyst would send it and wait. But what of Galligan? She absolutely could not endanger his life. Quietly, she tip-toed to the cabin and engaged the transfer to the zipper ship. The machine did so silently and smoothly, and Kyachril doubted that Galligan awoke until the zipper docked on the Spirit.
She was dreadfully tired, but still she stayed awake. Some feeling was stirring in her that kept her from falling asleep. Questions clashed and swirled in her mind, battling and arguing. What was sending that signal? Why did it keep transmitting, why had it responded so quickly to she and Galligan's advances, why was it here? How had it gotten here? Was it really learning, or did it simply parrot and iterate? But the question foremost in Kyachril's mind was more simple. What was that feeling of anticipation? Why did she care so much about this project? No acceptable answer was forthcoming.
At some point she must have finally fallen asleep. Her waking was slow and peaceful, simply a drift into conciousness. She realized her face was pressed on the console and her arm was asleep and her neck was cricked. With an almost-pained sigh, the Catalyst stumbled to the wash to clean up.
Kyachril rubbed the left side of her face vigorously to get rid of the mark the console had imprinted on her face. It was bright green and stark against her skin. Sinking once more into the command chair, the Catalyst checked for any updates to the signal. Nothing. Not a peep. She sighed, oddly disappointed, and left to get a bit of breakfast.
It was after lunch when something came back. A small string of binary, an 'm,' Kyachril recognized. Was it just base blithering? Did it have a meaning other than an m? Regardless, no further transmissions were forthcoming. The Catalyst sent back a one to acknowledge that she received the transmission. Nothing further came.
If the transmitter was going to be broadcasting text, it would take Kyachril much too long to decode even a small sentence. To fix this, she simply made a program that took anything that was received in binary and translated it into legible text. It was ridiculously simple, the only colors were black and white and it was about five lines of code long. Kyachril had to wait another few hours for the next transmission.
It happened while she was eating dinner in the mess, and she only found it after coming back. Activating the translator, the message was decoded instantly, like a prayer, like a shout. It was a simple thing, a straightforward thing, that message. It said
more
She was overcome. Whatever had sent that message understood, it had received, it had thought. Nothing moved in the ship, but something shifted: Kyachril was beyond thinking of this sender as a seperate entity. Whatever, whoever it was, it wanted to communicate. It trusted her enough to ask for basic sustenance. It had sent a cry out into the dark, and someone had finally, finally answered. Judging by the length of the very first transmissions, this entity had spent millions upon millions of sweeps counting. Waiting, hoping for an answer.
The Catalyst rushed to the keyboard. Curse it, she hadn't added a writing function into the translation program. Every second burning like a flame against skin, she wrote up a little more code. As she finished, she wondered what to say. It did not matter, she would send what she wanted. With shaking hands, she typed up her message and sent it.
Of course.
It was done. Now she must get the teaching program and send it outward. Within a minute, she had it downloaded, but it would take longer to strip it of the graphical interface. Curse it, she was trembling. Why was she shaking? She started the work.
Kyachril sent it a half-hour later. God, she hoped that it would not be too much for the entity, this one was nearly three times as big as the first one. She sighed, and held her head in her hands. What was that feeling? Why did she care? No answers were presented by her racing mind. The Catalyst sighed again, and settled down to wait. Hours later, she got a blanket from the remaining cabin and reclined the pilot's chair to the point it would serve as a makeshift bed. An hour after that, she was sleeping soundly.
Waking this time was just as peaceful as it had been the first time. This time though, a message awaited her. With an inarticulate noise, Kyachril checked the time received. Oh, good, it was only a few minutes ago. That was probably what woke her. The message was very simple, just an uppercase I. Did that mean anything, or was it just a random response? She didn't know. She sent off a one for received.
Only thirty minutes later, another transmission came in. It read
I am?
The Catalyst did not know what to make of that. Was it a question, or a statement? Did the entity understand punctuation at all, or did it simply add a symbol to the end of the message? It bore consideration. An alternate possibilty presented itself: If Kyachril was to take it literally, it was a tragic question. The entity did not know whether it existed or not, and required outside confirmation. The Catalyst was somewhat honored to have the duty of replying yes, even if she was the only one listening. Careful to keep her quirk out of the message, she typed
Yes. You are.
And sent it. She was trembling again. The response only took ten minutes this time.
I love. I love. I love. I love you. I love you.
It repeated as far as the translator would show. Kyachril was overwhelmed for the second time in as many days. It said it loved her. What had she done to receive such an honor? What could she possibly send back to that? She did not have to. Another message came from the entity.
Please, more. I
And another, immediately after
I can handle it now.
Please, love.
"Of course," whispered Kyachril. Of course. She will send everything she had. What else could she do? It said it loved her. She asked the Spirit's computer to draft a wide uplink to the web and broadcast the link signal down to the planet, large enough to encompass the whole rock. She hoped it would be enough. She timidly sent back
I am giving you everything I have.
She hoped it would be quite enough.