Escaping the Cradle - Part 20

Escaping the Cradle

by Karen Page

Part 20

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Part 20
DATE:FC+45

As predicted the day was better than the previous two. There were still broken clouds, but the weather forecast speculated it would be cloudless by the end of the day. Typical British weather, cloudy during the day and then clear in the evenings when you can't enjoy the time outside.

It was a Saturday, and Ashleigh had taken Jenny for her swimming lesson. Jenny had wanted to stay behind to help in the lab, but Becky was having none of that. "No skipping lessons. That is school or swimming. I'm sure you'll be back for the actual test. We've got to finalise the setup."

"Greetings," stated James, as he sauntered in with Sam and Jessica.

"It didn't take you long to get here," frowned Becky. "You were at the factory ten minutes ago."

"We were naughty," said Sam. "We decided to take Eos for a test spin, since she cleared all system checks. We thought a test jump on planet was a safer first jump. We've parked her in the industrial unit across the road."

"Not outside?" asked Evan, leaning forward over the table.

"No, in the one where the server equipment is," said James. "Ashleigh gave me a key just in case we moved Aurora here for any reason."

"How was she? Any issues?"

"None that we know of. Sam and I are going to check things out while Jessica helps you with the test."

"If things are good, do you fancy a test tonight?" asked Becky, trying to sound casual.

"That doesn't sound like your usual MO. What gives?"

"Yesterday, I was collecting Jenny from school. I was talking to one of the mothers, and her daughter has started taking extra maths and science lessons. She wants to go to space and wants great grades. Anyway, it seems she has a telescope and looks out but has never seen a spaceship. I thought it might be a nice treat. We orbited over Australia, but not our home turf."

"I'm up for it," said James. "Let's hope we don't attract any Yvestigan ships."

"No, that wouldn't be good," responded Liam after looking at Evan.

Nobody said they shouldn't go. But the risk was something they'd all thought about but not voiced. Now it was out, they just looked at each other to make sure they were fine.

"I'll go if you want," said Liam to Evan. "It's my turn anyway."

"You're not both going," said Becky.

"We'll discuss it later," said Evan. "In the meantime, let's go through this. Jessica, I'm not sure if you've noticed Jenny's handiwork?"

Evan was pointing to the board that Jenny had converted from human frequencies to Hytuna based frequencies.

"Ah. Yes, it was in the primer. That's where I'd seen those numbers. Strange they put those specific ones in there. It was like a hidden clue."

"Yes, one that you only understand once you've got the answer. Grrr."

"Henry built a small Faraday cage," said Liam. "The sending and receiving sides will go in there. We might not get a response. It depends on whether we got it right."

"I'm setup to do the sending," said Becky. "I've got another device to record what we receive back."

"Great, so what are you sending?" asked Sam.

Evan responded, "Nothing. Step one is to confirm connection. Can we connect to them and get them to open up a return connection. I don't think we can do much more than that at the moment."

"It's no different when we're creating a program that calls a remote API," said Becky. "The first question is, can we connect. Then we get down to authentication and then real data."

"The same when we've launched a satellite," said Jessica. "Once its launched, the first thing we do is make sure we can connect to it. We have a whole commissioning process."

"Before we start though, I'd like to walk through each item," said Becky. "Make sure we have everything perfect."

As they walked through the process and checked each component, Ashleigh arrived with Jenny. Seeing that the team was engrossed in the work, they sat at the back and watched.

"It's like Ma has a checklist," whispered Jenny to Ashleigh.

"She does; I saw her working on it last night. Sometimes she can be quite methodical."

"Is everybody happy?" asked Becky. Her list completed. When everyone agreed, she continued. "Our first test is going to be at 256 THz ... Test underway."

"Destination address calculated," said Liam, watching the telemetry monitor. It was pointless watching the actual unit. You couldn't see the tunnel or what was being fed into it. Unless the box caught fire, it would just look like a box."

"Tunnel open and message sent," added Becky. "This is the structure the aliens specified in the documentation. I hope we did it right. No return tunnel yet. The response destination algorithm is quite complex, so give it a moment."

The room was quiet. Jenny jumped up and moved so she could look at the monitor. The clock on the top of the screen was the only sign that the computer hadn't frozen.

Waiting was one of those skills that had been one of the harder things for Jenny to learn. She'd wanted things to be instant. Cakes to be ready as soon as she'd baked them with her Mummy was the first sign of this. Queues to go into a show or waiting to pay at the shop. Yet with Ryan she had been so patient. When he'd started to babble, she was there, talking to him and encouraging him as he tried to pull himself up.

"We have an inbound tunnel," called out Henry.

It had been pointless to say it. Everybody had been watching the monitor. They received data for a few seconds, and it stopped.

"What do we have?" asked Liam excitedly.

Becky tapped a few buttons on her keyboard, and both tunnels collapsed. Another few clicks brought up a screen with zeroes and ones. "That is the raw data. I've now got to analyse it and see if we can break this into something that makes sense. I presume some of this is Hytuna. We know how we were asked to send the request, so that will help a little. But they don't packet data like we do. You will have seen what Hytuna characters look like from the Primer, and we've learnt how to speak it, based on the localised phonetic translation."

"So how are you going to translate it?"

"Thanks to Jessica's help, we already have the response digitised. That is a major win. Now it is making sense of it. It isn't like we have a codepage for Hytuna. I presume they do have something like that, otherwise their systems will be totally illogical to us. At the end of the day, our data can be broken down to binary. It is how we convert that to something legible. If we sent them a Word document, it would be meaningless. It is compressed and has all sorts of control characters. We also send things in packets, and blocks. It is doubtful theirs are the same."

"The Prime Minister did say that our computers are not compatible. But surely, they will have come across this issue before. I can only hope we have something that makes this easier. A Computer Translation Primer."

"So how long do you think this will take?"

"I've no idea," sighed Becky, the sudden reality dawning on her. It was one thing to follow instructions to send a request via an interdimensional tunnel. It was another thing understanding the response. "I'm certainly not going to be taking after David Levinson.”

"And we've moved into really bad territory if you're bringing him up," laughed Evan. "No Jolly Roger?"

Jenny looked at her ma, and then across to Evan. She got a lot of their banter, but none of this made sense to her.

"They're talking about an old film," Ashleigh whispered in her ear. "Don't worry, we'll watch it later, then you'll understand."

"Jessica, you're very quiet," said Henry. "What's up?"

She bit her top lip pondering how to explain this. "How long do you think it took them before they opened the tunnel?"

Becky consulted the logs. "Forty-two seconds."

"Impressive. I didn't really think it would work. We followed the specification of the underlying handshake, but the spec didn't describe how we modulated the wave or handled error correction. This is all done by the transmitter and receiver. We just used off the shelf units. The aliens took what we sent and somehow managed to process it, understand the structure, and translate it to something they could handle. Not only that, but the data also came back in the same modulation that we sent."

"When you put it like that," said Liam.

"It would have helped that we had a very specific thing to send. The handshake described in that document," considered Becky, in deep thought. "It must have been some automated process, which is even more amazing."

"So, what now?"

"We analyse the data. See what we can make of it. I can send copies to your workstations."

"Pull it up on the main screen," said Jessica. "A few things we can discuss. At the beginning, we have a type of mirror of what we sent. It's not quite the same, but this bit is what we sent at the beginning. It looks like what we would call a preamble. A sort of identifier, and make sure there is some indication of what is being sent."

Becky moved the data into a text editor and put in a carriage return after the end of the preamble.

"I was also thinking about the data. It was something Sam mentioned. We encode data in bytes, which are eight bits. We do that because if represents up to FF in hex or 255 in decimal. And when put into Unicode, it might be double byte, or larger based on the definition."

"Yes," said Becky, wondering where Jessica was going.

"Well, they are octal. That is zero to seven. They get seven in three bits. Human system goes to Hex for efficiency of data storage. Decimal is too inefficient. For them, they can stay in octal.

"Okay, let me work on splitting the data like that, convert it to octal and see what we have. See if there are any patterns. It's going to take me a few hours to do this. Why don't you all go and check to see how James and Sam are getting on with Eos?"

"Eos is ready?" asked Jenny, excited. "I've not been in her yet."

"She's across the road," said Becky.

"Who is?" queried Jenny, not understanding.

"Eos is. James parked her in the business park across the street."

Jenny jumped up, grabbed her coat, and was heading out before anybody could react.

"She's eager," laughed Liam. "Okay, see you in a little bit. Good luck with your code change."

"It isn't too bad," replied Becky. "I have a whole suite of octal code. I just never thought about three bits. My whole life has been binary, decimal and hexadecimal. Octal seems a little alien to me. It's a whole new world. Now go join the others and I can get on with this. It won't be the full solution, but it might make the analysis easier."

Liam followed the rest of the team out, leaving Becky to get on with her work. The first time she realised she wasn't alone was when Ashleigh brought down a cup of tea.

"Thanks," said Becky, surprised. "I thought you would have gone to admire the new ship."

"There will be time again. I've not seen you for a few days. I missed you."

"You saw me last night," responded Becky, sipping her tea slowly and deliberately. Ashleigh being there didn't help her get on with her work, but it was a nice distraction.

A shimmer behind Becky caught Ashleigh's eye. "Becky, behind you."

Becky turned to find holograms of two aliens in her office. She closed her eyes briefly to regain composure. Although she could not identify their species, it was clear they were not the same. They talked between themselves in what Becky assumed was excited chatter, though she had no idea if that was their normal way of talking. She caught a few words, but the Hytuna was too fast for her.

"Ashleigh, please ring Sam to come now, just in case translation is needed. Only Sam. Tell them the others must not come back until we say so," said Becky, before saying to the aliens in stilted Hytuna. "Hello, I'm Becky. This is Ashleigh. My Hytuna isn't good. We're getting a friend to join who speaks it well."

The alien on the left gave a nod and then in perfect English. "I am Vers'am. It is a pleasure to meet you."

Vers'am and the other alien moved closer to Becky, looking her over. "A spectrum of light."

The second one said something, and Vers'am looked alarmed. Ashleigh moved to be next to Becky and when she put her hand on Becky's arm, Vers'am seemed to calm.

Becky asked, "I don't want to sound blunt, but why visit us? I thought you were dealing with Georgina Harries."

"Yes, but it is your team that made the communication link. It is your team that built the ship that brought your Prime Minister."

"You didn't make it easy. There were a lot of words in the letter you sent that didn't exist in the Primer. I presume that was deliberate?"

"Yes. You seemed to manage the task."

"Well, thanks to the translation when you talked at the UN. That filled in some elements we were missing."

The second alien spoke directly to Becky for the first time. "Fantastic. You do amaze us. For a world fragmented, you do seem to pull together. There is hope."

Sam came in, alone, which is what Becky had asked.

"Vost'am mentioned you," said Vers'am to Sam. "Amazing. Such a group of fighters against the dark."

"What do you mean?" asked Ashleigh, pleased they were still speaking English.

"The darkness of decay," said the second alien and then said some words in Hytuna, Vers'am nodded. "Without the work you've been doing, your planet would either wither with stagnation or kill each other in war. You are continuing the path that Becky started. The path of hope and a journey where humanity prospers."

"There are then those that have internal turmoil but succeed beyond all expectations. That duality of despair and strength stands out to our two races. The light differs for each. Sam has a steady pulse of light, and almost balance. Your Prime Minister is very similar, but less equilibrium than Sam. Becky, be careful as your light and turmoil are not in balance, but for some reason Ashleigh seems to help. Her presence seems to stabilise. We've never seen anything like it."

Becky was having a hard time with that. She wasn't sure whether they were talking about her gender issues, the prophecy or something else entirely. Ashleigh stroked her arm gently, and she refocused. Trying to steer the conversation toward something she could cope with, she asked, "Why visit us now?"

"You made the communications link. We didn't know where you were until then. Do you mind if we look around as we talk?"

"Go ahead," said Becky.

The two aliens walked slowly around the room, and into the lab. If they understood what they were looking at, Becky had no idea. "We didn't expect communications to be established until after your world visits us the second time. You've done better than expected."

"Thank you," said Becky following the two holographs.

"What you have received is a digitised version of the Primer. This should give you enough to unravel our format."

"Thank you for your help with the Yvestigans. We aren't sure how you are tracking our ship. Is it safe for us to continue our testing?"

"Jumps of a certain length are visible when you know what to look for. One of the Yvestigan ships broke quarantine and was removed. The ship contained Trposin. We aren't sure if the issue is just him or the government. We are debating what to do about them, as we have never had a species that caused so much conflict."

"Do you have a chart showing what systems are safe for us to visit?" asked Sam. "We don't want to end up in an Yvestigan system or cause an issue with one of the other species thinking we're invading."

"Something can be produced. When you have communication working well, we can give you the details. Or if your Prime Minister visits before that, we can provide it then."

"You are both council members. Why are you getting involved so much?" asked Becky. "I thought you would have others that did this interaction."

"It is important to us. Species that make it to this level are rare. It makes us sad when species die out. Each species brings something different to the Council. Each has their own joy, knowledge and culture. Hopefully one day you will get to see the way each of us expresses ourselves. Are you happy to transport your Prime Minister again?"

"Yes," said Becky. "We are testing a bigger ship, so we shouldn't be as cramped as last time. We are happy to transport her. It helps having backing like that at home. I'd also ask her if she could provide a linguist to help you with your translations. You have multiple Hytuna words translating to the same English word. That happens sometimes between Earth languages, but we then describe the differences. It stops confusion."

"You're jumping ahead," said Vers'am. "Relationships are not at that stage yet and you don't speak for the world."

"Hello," said a breathless Jenny, rushing into the room.

At the same time there was a small scream of terror from Jessica, who'd been rushing after the young girl. Jessica had run back outside, and Sam rushed to check on her.

"Jenny, you shouldn't be here," said Becky, with a slight rebuke.

"I just wanted to say hello," she said sullenly and then turned to the surprised aliens and said in Hytuna. "Hello, I'm Jenny. I'm pleased to see you."

She held out her hand to shake theirs but when she reached it out, it passed through. "Oh, hologram!" she exclaimed, sticking to Hytuna. "What are the children like on your worlds?"

"A mixture," said the Reginadde, solemnly. "Some are shy. Some inquisitive."

"Do they go to schools? What are your houses like? Do you have cars?" ploughed on Jenny.

"Those are big questions," said the Reginadde, giving Jenny's queries as much importance as others. "But ones I can't answer as you don't know the Hytuna for me to describe them."

Jessica came back with Sam. She didn't enter the room but stood by the door watching and holding onto Sam for protection. "Sorry, " she said in Hytuna. "I got scared. Sorry."

"It is okay," said the Reginadde. "I'm very surprised that more of you are not like that. When we visited your United Nations, most were frightened with some not even able to come into the room. We were holograms then. There has only been five humans who have met us in person, and they must have been very brave."

"Humans have a device called television," said Jessica in English. "It can show broadcast images. Televisions here show sixty frames per second, which is quicker than the human eye can process so instead of being a series of images, it looks real. Some of the things shown are factual, but some are stories. One of the types of stories that have been around for over fifty years are of Aliens invading Earth. In fact, the first time was not even television. There was a radio play of The War of the Worlds in 1938. Some listeners thought that Martians were actually invading Earth."

"Ah, so much to fear," said Vers'am in English.

"Not all shows were like that, but enough to install a level of irrational fear."

"It certainly gives a bit more insight to what Georgina Harries said. Thank you. Now we must go, but I'm sure it won't be the last we see of you."

"Do you have the concept of Pen Friends?" quickly blurted out Jenny before they could disappear.

Becky's heart sank. What was Jenny up to now?

"I don't understand your reference," puzzled the Reginadde.

"It is an old concept. It is where you write to someone from a different part of the world. You never meet, but you write letters or emails to each other. It is a way that children used to discover people unlike them. I remember being told my Great Granny had a long-standing Pen Friend in Australia, which is the other side of the world. They kept it up all their lives and actually met when they were very old."

Vers'am looked at his colleague before turning back to Jenny. "We still don't understand."

"What Jenny is asking is if you have the concept of email. Where a message is sent electronically to a person. Let me demonstrate. In this program, I have a to address, that is where the email is going. I have a subject and a body. I'm sending this message to Jenny."

A second later, Jenny's phone made a ping sound, and she showed the aliens the message.

"We now understand. Yes, we have something similar but inter species messaging isn't as big as you think. Some trade, some security, but most messages are within their own systems."

When the two members of the alien council disappeared, Becky turned to Jessica. "Are you okay? Is there anything I can do to help?"

"I just feel a bit foolish," she replied, her head down a bit. "Even Jenny feared less than me."

"Head up," snapped Sam. "You aren't foolish. You reacted as most will. It showed them what they are up against. At least your heart rate is coming down. Remember how frightened you were when we went to Disneyland Paris and how quickly you recovered?"

Jessica laughed, remembering that time with fondness. "Ah yes, and I just started to relax when my parents appeared, and they didn't even recognise me."

"Jenny, let's go and talk," said Ashleigh. "Leave your ma to finish her coding."

Conversion of three-bit binary to octal didn't take Becky long. While the conversion process went through the data stream, she started creating pattern matching logic based on the Primers first twenty words. She hoped she would be able to find the human characters and could then use them as boundaries for the Hytuna.

She looked at the progress. It was a large amount of data, but her computer was quick. With about thirty minutes to wait, she locked her machine and decided to venture across the road. The output would be horrible as the Unicode Consortium hadn't yet made any decision on incorporating Hytuna characters and glyphs into the character encoding standard. There were a few early fonts published based on the private use area, but it was all hit and miss.

When she went to the front door of the building, Jenny and Ashleigh were waiting.

"I'm sorry Ma. I didn't mean to disappoint you."

Becky crouched down and opened her arms. Jenny rushed in and they hugged. "I know it was exciting to see the aliens, but it wasn't an arbitrary choice to keep everyone out. I was trying to keep the conversation on the communications. Work out what we had and see if I could work out what next."

"Mum said if I did that again, she would ban me from joining in downstairs."

"Good, that saves me saying it," responded Becky making sure they were on a united platform. She didn't want Jenny playing off between them.

"But I learn so much," complained Jenny.

"Yes, but I need you to do it safely. You rushed in because you were excited. Jessica said no, and you didn't listen. She came across and got frightened."

"But there wasn't anything to be frightened of."

"To you, no, but Jessica was. Just like I heard that Evan and Liam got scared when the mercenaries were coming. People get frightened. Jessica said her fear was irrational, but sometimes it happens.

* * *

"Eos, are you ready?" asked Becky. The sun had set thirty minutes ago, and twilight was upon them. This would be an opportunity where the sun would still glint upon the ship making it easier to see.

"Yes. All systems powered on," responded James. "After all the checks today, it will be good to take her into her first orbit."

"The systems are green," said Evan, sitting next to Becky.

"Go when ready," ordered Becky, not taking her eyes off the telemetry.

There was no countdown. No tension. The ship was ready, and it would open the interdimensional tunnel at the press of a button. It was a bit like driving a car. You turn it on. Green lights, and off you went.

"We're going in three … two ... one."

A second later, over the relay they heard. "In orbit."

"They're coming in via the tunnel communications," said Evan looking at the relay.

"It's great to be in space again," said Liam over the communications.

"Roger that," growled Evan which provoked a chorus of laughter.

"Nobody has reported seeing you," said Ashleigh.

"Give them chance," said Becky playfully. "Anyway, let's get down to the actual business. How is she doing? Any system issues?"

"None," said Henry, glad they'd given him chance to find his space legs before they'd involved him. "All systems humming as they should."

"Do you want to fire thrusters and do some movement?" suggested Evan.

They'd spent the afternoon confirming the checks they wanted to do. They'd got the original list when they'd tested Aurora, and it was just a modification of that.

"There is a sighting," said Ashleigh. "Someone in rural Oxfordshire has noticed you."

A minute later someone had posted an image. Their zoom was quite impressive. Several replies that it wasn't Aurora sparked more interest.

Jenny took out her phone and sent a message to Kelly, saying she'd seen on the groups that there was a spaceship over England. Her response was instant. Not only had she seen the posts, but she'd seen the ship.

After an hour testing, all seemed good. They'd done a few small jumps so they could be seen over different parts of the UK and even went over the Channel Islands. They stayed at each location for ten minutes. There had been no sign of aliens.

"Are the sites clear for the small tour?" asked James, knowing the window of twilight glint had gone.

"These are the places confirmed," said Ashleigh, having spent the last two days making calls anonymously to places that had advertised as safe Aurora landing sites. "The coordinates will be uploaded in a moment. Start in Leicester. Then Birmingham, Hull, Glasgow, Inverness, Caernarfon and finally Armagh. If you feel in danger, leave."

It seemed fitting that the first public display of Eos was at the National Space Centre. The museum had a huge planetarium, showing details of space, and displays on planets and previous rockets. The demand for space knowledge had grown, and they had been holding events in the evening. The only other place in the country that might have been as fitting would have been outside the Science Museum in London.

"Coordinates for National Space Centre applied. Departing."

Jenny was watching social media for the site, and soon there were photographs of Eos. As soon as the ship had arrived, the word had spread, and the visitors had streamed out, eager to view the ship. This was a sight nobody had expected, but it inspired them. There had been conflict and strife. There had been job losses and problems with the economy. The sight of Eos was giving them hope.