NOVPUBThe Department of Xenology was a madhouse. So many people were talking with so much excitement that it was difficult to even understand who was where, and what they were doing. Thankfully, our arrival caught the attention of the man in charge of the academic whirlwind before us.
Dr. Guthries hustled over to us with a wide grin on his face. “Hello! Catherine, Lily, you saw the breakthrough?”
“We did,” said Lily, ducking slightly to avoid hitting her head on the leg of a long table that had been tipped on its side and shoved too near to the door.
With the flick of a hand and a thought, I shifted the table away from her. It settled next to the wall — out of the way.
“Come, come! You can both work on a computer if you like,” he said, already turning away to lead us to one like we'd already said yes. “We could obviously take things slow, but after months of working on this, everyone is excited to get to the gooey informational interior!”
He laughed at his own joke while Lily and I glanced at one another, shrugged, and followed behind.
He took us to a corner where an alien computer was set up beside a human one, with various sketchy looking cables tying them together. Behind the alien computer was a 3d printed brick full of tech that was routing power to both.
“Do we have the method anywhere?” Lily asked curiously while I summoned a pair of chairs for us.
“Yes,” said Dr. Guthries, passing us a handwritten set of notes on a sheet of new Post-Ring paper. “It took us a while, but we discovered their version of an admin or safe mode login, and from there you can remove the main account’s password requirement. More detailed steps are on the sheet, obviously, but that’s the gist of it.”
Lily gave him a sceptical look. “And we can just… do that? Remove the password requirement? Surely the aliens had better security than that?”
“From what we understand, their security revolved around not connecting their computers to the wider Ring internet, a magically enhanced subsonic fear field, and an extraordinary number of automated turrets,” he said wryly. “The turrets were obviously missing by the time Catherine and the rest of the scouts went delving.”
“Right…” said Lily, giving me an odd look when my name was mentioned. “Well, I guess we'll get to cracking this thing?”
“Thank you,” Dr. Guthries said with a genuine little bow. “Everyone is quite excited with the trove of knowledge we've gained access to, and—”
He was cut off when an argument abruptly erupted between three researchers who were hunched over a different computer. Without a goodbye, he hustled off to deal with the altercation.
Lily took charge of unlocking the computer, which I was glad for, because while I knew my way around them reasonably well, this shit was well beyond me. I knew my limits — many and broad that they were.
“It's so weird to be taking hacking instructions from what looks like a loose page out of an ancient manuscript,” she commented while she worked. “Why is the paper yellow like that?”
The page was indeed a little yellow, especially if you compared it to modern paper. Well… old modern paper. Taking it for a second, I squinted at the fibers. We definitely didn't have the facilities to chop wood up into fibers for paper, so… huh, perhaps the corn? We had been growing a bunch of sweet corn, so…
“Corn husks, I think?” I guessed, handing it back to her.
“Using all the parts of the corn.” She laughed softly. It was a cute laugh — not quite a giggle, but high enough that it flirted with the difference between them.
It took her a couple of minutes to get the alien computer open, which would've been extremely impressive, but I remembered that the vast majority of the work had already been done. Being able to navigate what she was seeing on the screen was one of those tasks that had already been done — by me, specifically.
Sitting on another page of corn paper beside the keyboard was a cheat sheet for various words in the Umare written language. We didn't have any idea how it sounded yet, but maybe we would by the time all the computers had been plumbed for information.
“What do we want to look at first?” she asked, and the twinkle in her eye was enough to ignite a sense of excitement in me.
It was kind of worrying, I guess, that I wasn't truly excited until that point. I missed Mer.
Clearing my throat of the sudden lump that was settling into it, I took a moment to think. It hit me pretty quickly. “I want to see project files, or whatever their equivalent is. I want to know what the hell they were actually working on in that place.”
She grinned and turned back to the unlocked computer. “What was it like — the alien laboratory?”
“Eerily familiar, to be honest. They had all the same shit you'd expect to see in an underground research lab built by humans — even pot plants.” I said, then abruptly, “Ah, that one. Select that. It says… Project Scar-swift Rise, Scale 39, Reports.”
“Wow, that's a mouthful of snappy nouns,” Lily snorted. “What were they weighing?”
She selected the menu option at the same time she asked her question, so I was hit with a whole bunch of new information while trying to figure out what the heck she was asking.
“Huh?”
She glanced at me. “Scale 39. What were they weighing?”
With a tiny laugh — barely more than an exhale, really — I shook my head. “No, scale as in, the scales of a lizard. The Umare were kind of reptilian, so I guess it has some sort of protective subtext to it? It's hard to tell.”
On the screen was a list of reports that had little indecipherable dates beside them. I reached out and tapped on one that sat in the middle of the list.
Like a pair of hungry animals, my eyes fell on the resulting text and gobbled it up. It was sent by the person whose work station this had been, and it detailed how a test done that day had given frustrating and inconclusive results.
Shifting to get a better view, I began to read a section of it to Lily. “‘Applying stabilisers to the homogenised’ — um, there's a word here that I can't figure out — ‘has at least contained the instabilities that were introduced by the attempted application of the Island 39 catalyst. Some among our nest-of-thought suspect that either the catalyst or the ‘blank’ that we were provided are defective in some way. However, I would like to point out that during test 5, we discovered that materia from Island 39 is volatile even by the standards of the Deep Archipelago.”
The way that word defied classification was extremely strange. It was like my magically enhanced brain couldn't figure out what it was even trying to represent.
“That all means absolutely nothing to me,” Lily said apologetically.
“It's important to remember that they were studying some form of magic at this place,” I explained as I flicked to a new report.
Lily made a thoughtful noise as I began to read again.
“Correspondence with thinkers at Scale 129 has given us new roads to walk. Their Scale ran into similar problems during the development of an interface for Island 129. On their advice, we will be using a stabilising agent created from an Island that is more predictable in its ‘blank’ parameters. Due to time becoming an increasingly scarce resource, we have chosen to contact Scale 40, as their nest-of-thought is located nearby and not as endangered by the deteriorating situation above us.”
“I think the scales are maybe the labs?" Lily mused when I finished. “According to the other xenologists, they had thousands. Dunno what an island could be, though.”
“I almost think they're the various realms of magic,” I said. Either that, or the islands were their forward operating bases within the realms.
Lily, having captured an image of the report on her phone, flipped to the next one, but I didn't read it.
“Can we swap to like… their version of emails? I want to see the less sterile language,” I said, finding and tapping the button to bring us back one menu layer.
Lily perked up and pushed some of her brown hair out of the way so she could squint at the screen. “Oh, are there dates? We could try to find the correspondence between them and Scale 129.”
Looking back, I found a combination of words and numbers that might be dates, and when in the email section, I began to search through them manually. Of course, they weren't actually emails as we understood them, but it was the closest thing that made sense in my mind. That kind of thing was true throughout the Umare language, obviously, but it went further than that. Everything from the user interface of the computer, to the subtle etiquette of exchanging messages with another person — it was all warped and unfamiliar, like looking at something through distorted, frosted glass.
“This one,” I said, tapping on a message that was sent a few Ring-spins before the report was created.
“Sent with dulled teeth. Your ear was correct, we did encounter a similar issue, although I personally believe that Island 129 isn't chaotic in the true way, but is playfully random. Often, we find ourselves beset by a number of inexplicable blockages, until our will, or our anger, begins to crest the tidal bore. Only then, will we gain a seemingly random stroke of luck’s favour. As for solutions in the pursuit of creating a viable thirling, we used materia provided by the thinkers in Scale 128. Their Island’s propensity for ordering itself along one dimensional forms, that are then woven into more complex structures, is uniquely suited to providing order in the face of precocious chaos.”
“That's… very dense,” Lily said as she snapped a picture of this screen too.
I could only nod as I considered what I'd just read. Island 128 sounded very familiar… like a certain realm of magic that Ryn had been encountering recently. If the Curled Loom and Island 128 were the same, then it established that the Umare had known a lot about the realms of magic. Without a word, I scrolled to the owner of the computer's reply to that message.
“Sent with dulled teeth. Scale 128 is a neighbour to both of us, so I will recommend that we contact them. Physically moving a sample of materia from their scale to ours may prove difficult, though. Our proximity to the impact site of the ancient machines’ war-moon has continued to be a problem. The Claws do their best, of course, but the situation is far from contained. Given your close dealings with them, would you consider Island 40 to be a viable substitute? They, at the very least, are situated in the opposite direction of the continent-crater.”
My head was beginning to spin as I attempted to translate the Umare writing and understand what they were saying without the context of their culture or their technical terms. I think it might be worth my time to write the emails and reports out in order, so I could get the full picture in a more linear format. Plus, it'd be cool to bind it all into a book to put on a shelf.
“I think… maybe I have to ask this question, and it might be stupid, but what are we actually going to get from this? It's interesting, but kinda… I mean, how useful is all this?” Lily asked, cringing slightly at herself as she asked it.
I could only shrug. I didn't want to get her hopes up yet. “We'll see. Let's go through and take pictures of as many screens as we can, and I'll work on making it make sense later. We gotta understand it before we'll know if it's helpful.”
She sighed, but nodded and moved us back to the base menu screen. “Well, let's start from the top…”
