by Dan Haronian
The Flyeye tried to focus its eye through the lens but the images alternately sharpened and blurred.
"It cannot focus," said the technician a few seconds later.
"Go to manual," said Carr.
The technician’s neck moved fast and the control over the eye reverted to a joystick. He moved the joystick back and forth slowly and struggled to focus the image.
"Something is not right here," he said when it was finally clear enough to see some details. Heneg approached the big screen, excited to study the images as they cleared.
"That looks like Sosi, and this is Su-Thor," he said victoriously. "Can you focus on the rest of the room around them?"
"It's difficult," said the technician. "The images are completely twisted."
"Maybe there's a malfunction in the Flyeye," said Heneg.
"No, I don't think this is a window," said Carr. "I think it's a lens."
"A lens?" said Heneg.
"I can try focused the image a bit better," said the technician. The picture blurred again and then cleared. Now they could see a sharp image of Su-Thor sitting on the bed. He tried to focus on things that were near the edges of the image but the quality deteriorated abruptly.
"I think this is a monitor," said the technician pointing to a spot on the screen that glowed near the edge of the image.
"Yes, this one too," said Heneg pointing to another spot next to it.
"This must be a control room or something like that," said the technician.
"Are they hooked into the network?" asked Heneg.
"No, there is nothing in the network indicating they are connected."
Heneg lifted his eyebrows. "Remember who we are dealing with. Disappearing into the network is his one of his talents."
Perplexed, he walked toward the screening shaking his head. He pointed to the bright spot. "I don't suppose you can focus in on that a bit?" he asked.
The technician shifted the view to the side and tried to focus on the bright spot in the image but it remained blurred.
"Maybe we could mount a lens on the eye that would correct for the distortion," said Carr.
Heneg continued looking at the blurred images of Sosi and Su-Thor, then turned back to the bright screen. "Well? I don’t understand what you are waiting for?"
"It will take a couple of hours," said Carr.
"Very well," said Heneg. "Update me when you are ready, I want to be here when you send it in."
Water clear and fresh hide under the gases lighter than air hiding in heart of Naan waiting to drown the people plague they are to battle did not know how weight on their life it is need absolution of sins to cure gases.
Sosi looked at the paragraph, shocked by the fact that it talked about the gases that caused the plague. The gases in the pools were lighter than air. Many gases are, but most gases didn't breakdown to form deadly molecules. Or did they? It didn’t really matter if they did or not elsewhere, clearly it was the case on Naan. The rest of the paragraph spoke of the history of Naan but like all of the other paragraphs it was meaningless.
When they came to Naan there wasn't even one normal terminal. Even when the network was finally available he’d never found any significant information about Naanite history or language. The Doctor had told him once that the language came from a remote place in the galaxy. It made sense that if the language came from there so had the first settlers. Maybe that was where the shuttle had come from. He thought about the Doctor. If anyone could help it would probably be him. He spent all his time with Daio though, busy with much more important things.
Water clear and fresh hide under the gases lighter than air hiding in heart of Naan waiting to drown the people plague they are to battle did not know how weight on their life it is need absolution of sins to cure gases.
The more he read the more he felt he wasn’t really reading the text property. Nevertheless it was suddenly clear to him that someone, a long time ago, knew about the gases that caused the plague, and knew where the gases were coming from.
…weight on their life it is…
He couldn't help thinking about this word weight. This was how they’d eliminated the plague. Adding weight to the gases prevented them from evaporating into the air, and eliminated the chain reaction that led to the creation of the deadly molecules. This was not what the sentence was saying however. This word didn't seem to be in the right place but apparently nothing was in place.
He woke up in the middle night with an odd thought. The bed was uncomfortable but that was not the only reason he couldn't sleep. There had never been a developed culture of folklore on Naan, but there was one thing he remembered from the early days of the City of the Chosen. A few weeks after Su-Thor joined him there, when the first houses were beginning to spring up around the hill, there was a big feast beside the creek in the valley. The newcomers started the celebration off with dances and songs with unique melodies, but as the evening went on people, especially kids, started playing a game: the game of skips.
"Everyone knows this game," one of the ladies attending the celebration had told him. She’d frowned for a moment then added, "One way or another."
Sosi learned later on what she’d meant. The kids that got infected with the plague played the game to distract their minds. Su-Thor had learned about it while working at the hospital during the plagues.
Now he was wondering if that was the key to the text on the shuttle’s terminals. Was it some kind of sick skipping game? The thought wouldn’t let him rest. Despite the late hour and his weariness he got up from the bed. He turned on the light and walked to the monitor. A paragraph appeared on the screen but now he tried reading it skipping every other word in the text.
Water and hide the lighter air in of waiting drown people they to did know weight their it need of to gases.
He read the paragraph several times and tried to place commas here and there to bring out some kind of meaning. It still made no sense. He tried skipping two words:
Water fresh the than in Naan drown plague to not weight life need sins gases.
That didn't make any sense either. He went to his bag lying over next to the bed and pulled out a digital pad to write down the new sentences. He tried skipping three, four, and five words as well but nothing sensible came out of the paragraph.
Tiredness overtook him as he stared at the screen:
Water the in drown to weight need gases.
He rubbed his eyes. They were starting to water from lack of sleep. He opened them again and tears blurred his vision. He wiped them and gazed at the sentence that skipping five words yielded and wrote it on his pad. Now I can go to sleep, he thought shaking his head. When he looked at the sentence again though, the words reminded him of something. They were not quite in place. He read the sentence the other direction:
Gases need weight to drown in the water.[1]
"Gases need weight to drown in the water," he read out loud. Shock hit him at once and he shivered. It made sense. Not only did it make sense, but it also revealed the way to prevent the plague. He rubbed his eyes again then smiled awkwardly thinking he must've made a mistake when counting the words. He went over the paragraph again, counting the words one by one, making sure he hadn’t made an error, but there was no mistake.
He stood up and started pacing the room. He ran his hands through his hair and his beard, stopping from time to time in front of the screen and staring again at the sentence. It couldn’t be true. It's had to be a coincidence. How could the paragraph, written hundreds of years ago, know about the geology of Naan, the plague, and its cure? Maybe this shuttle, somehow, was not old after all. Maybe someone had a very expensive sense of humor and this paragraph didn’t predict anything.
He went back to the terminal and spent the rest of the night decoding other paragraphs. The pattern varied. Sometimes he had to skip three, four, five, or six words before he found their meaning. Sometimes he had to read them forward and sometimes backward. Even then the meaning of the sentences w
as not always was clear to him. It was as if the text was written with endless dimensions.
Will not land will not sleep unless trees receive it like the Books dense pages, rejected other not one of brothers.
Now he read: Will not receive Books other brothers.[2]
Seven world destroyed by man confusion, blinding will be of his own doing, they see nothing but blur image of real all confusion from pride and vanity, no one care of followers future, new would will be lost by confusion, he will see the way for saving world number eight
Now he read: seven will see all, one will see eight.[3]
This didn't make sense but then was this paragraph:
Seven days will rise confuser, see them will small outcast, all rises he will see, remember how arrived from there, they all confused the one the special, the one that sees to depth like father, will those who see him blind to see his glory, sleeping days are sometimes eight.
Which led to the same sentence: seven will see all one will see eight.[4]
He went back to the first paragraph:
Onimin wisdom hidden in machine flew circuitous ways until his brain sanctioned he all its secrets revealed waited for world sanctioned to tell until seven and its secret where to it will carry them.
But nothing he tried could decode this paragraph. He fought the tiredness that was gradually overtaking him. He began to wonder if it was all a dream. There was a thud from above. His eyes opened wide and he tried to recall what he’d been doing for the last few hours. He tried to find a thread of sense connecting the events just to prove he hadn’t fallen asleep and dreamed the whole thing. When the room around him started to spin he laid his arms on the narrow table in front of the screen, lay his head on them and fell asleep.
An hour later he woke up feeling dizzy. Again he tried to remember what he’d been doing. The last thing he could recall was that he couldn't find anything in the paragraph by skipping seven words. He wondered if he'd finally reached his limits. He still had countless questions about the meaning of that paragraph, but he felt sure that skipping refined the text.
He looked at the text on the screen. The letters started to wobble and he felt his head spinning from exhaustion. He placed his finger on the screen and counted words but he was so dizzy that everything got mixed-up. Finally he stood up, shuffled over to the bed, and fell onto it.
"I think he's asleep," said Carr.
The technician adjusted the sharpness of the picture. They could clearly see Sosi's head lying on his arm in front of the terminal.
"He's been in that position for quite some time," said the technician.
"That's it?" said Heneg when the video feed focused in on the screen right above Sosi's head. "Can you make it any clearer?" he asked.
The technician tilted the eye upward a bit and the picture blurred again. He adjusted the focus, and repeated the action several times.
"It looks like writing," said Heneg. "Can you sharpen it a bit more?"
"It's impossible to improve it sir," said the technician. "Any adjustment that will clear up one section of the image will blur other sections."
Carr nodded. "Focus in on different parts of the screen and save the pictures. We'll combine them later on."
The technician changed a few parameters and moments later several pictures appeared on a secondary screen.
"Looks like Naanite writing," said Heneg.
"We’ll have it cleared up in a couple of seconds," said Carr.
Soon the individual pictures where replaced by one large sharp image of Naanite text.
They gazed at the screen silently trying to understand what they were seeing. Wrinkles appeared on Heneg's forehead and Carr shook his head. "What is that?"
"Are you sure everything is okay with our system?" asked Heneg.
The technician shrugged his shoulders. "The problem is not on our side. The eye is basically a camera with a correcting lens. It can’t rearrange text."
Heneg straightened a bit and thought of his stupid question. "Yes, of course," he said and looked at Carr. "Transfer it to my pad."
"He's moving," said the technician and they all gazed at the screen. Sosi straightened on his chair. The technician increased the field of view. Sosi's head hid the lower part of the screen but they were able to see changes in its upper part.
What's he's doing?" asked car when he saw Sosi's hand pointing at the screen.
"He's reading," said Heneg.
"With his finger?" Wondered Carr.
"He's been doing this all night, maybe he’s just tired," said Heneg.
Car sighed, rubbed his tired eyes. "There's one thing we have in common, sir," he said shaking his head.
"What is that?"
"This is probably the best training we had since this unit started, but we are really pushing them."
Heneg nodded. "I see what you're saying, but let’s continue this training for as long as we can. I don't think we'll have a better opportunity to test our capabilities anytime soon."
Another hour went by and the technician played with the adjustments on the Flyeye’s sensors. They took some new pictures. When they saw Sosi suddenly standing up the technician increased the field of view. They watched him walk to the bed and collapse onto it.
"I think he passed out," said Carr with a grin.
Heneg gazed at the pad in his hand and paced the length of the control center.
"We can reconstruct more such sections for you if necessary sir," said Carr.
"Yes, excellent," said Heneg without lifting his head from the pad. "Maybe it's something he's writing. Some kind of secret messages."
"Wouldn't it be more convenient to do that at home?"
"I don't know. Maybe he wanted to get away from everyone. Maybe he is writing a memoir in a secret code?" he shrugged his shoulders. "I don't know," he said gazing at Sosi lying on the bed. "I think we should take a break. Leave someone here to watch him and the rest of you get some sleep. We continue this special training tomorrow and see where it takes us."
I arrived at the wrecked shuttle the next morning with my father's portable terminal. He was lying on the bed face up staring at the ceiling.
"So are you settling in?" I asked when I walked into the room.
He turned toward me and said in a tired voice, "It’s looking that way."
"Something new?" I asked and placed the portable terminal beside the big terminal.
His gaze froze for a moment. He lifted his left eyebrow a bit, and shook his head then returned to staring at the ceiling. "Do you remember the word games your mother played with you when you were little?" he asked in husky voice.
"The dual meaning game?" I asked and stepped closer to him.
"No, the word skipping game."
"Of course."
"I think that is what we have here. The paragraphs have meanings that are revealed by skipping words.”
I paused for a moment and looked at his tired face. "Really? The skipping game?" You have found message in that nonsense through skipping?" I asked to be sure.
"Exactly."
"What kind of messages?"
He pulled himself up, placed his legs on the floor and rubbed his face. "I don't know," he said looking at me. "I don’t understand all of them, but there are important things here. Descriptions of events from Naan's history."
"Things from Naan’s history?"
He looked at me. "Prophecies that came true."
"Can you give me an example?" I asked hesitantly.
He looked at me with his tired eyes and said, “The plague, the gases, it’s all here. Even our landing."
"Our landing?"
"Ours, mine and your uncles’."
"Your names are there?"
"No. Not explicitly but I didn't read or analyze the whole thing. It’s too much work."
"What do you mean you are not explicitly mentioned in the text?" I asked and tried to hide my doubts.
"It says three from one escaped to Naan," he said and studied my expres
sion.
I nodded, and he lay back on the bed, closed his eyes tightly for a few seconds, and then opened them again.
"I guess it's not easy to believe," he said.
"I don't know," I said. "I guess I need to see it for myself."
"I guess so."
"I brought your terminal," I said. "I assume you're going to hook it up to one of the shuttle’s terminals?"
"The terminals here are only a database. I need some computing power to help me unravel the messages faster."
"Maybe you should transfer this text to your terminal at home and work from there. It’d be easier for you and mom."
"I know. But I'm not sure I want to take them out of here."
"Why not?"
He rubbed his face and said, "I'm not sure I understand this thing well enough yet."
"So, why can't you work on it from home?"
"Because I don't want it to reach the network."
"Why not?"
"Because!"
I nodded. "Are you sure you are understanding the text properly? Maybe the messages are not as deeply hidden as you think?"
He smiled. "This shuttle is a few hundred years old. The text in the databases predicts many things that have already happened, and I have only touched a small part of it."
"What about the future?" I challenged him.
"The future?"
"If this text is hundreds of years old then its prediction of events that happened thirty years ago is just as remarkable as its predictions for twenty years from now. Did you find something in there about the future?"
He gave me a quick look as if something had just cleared in his mind. "I didn’t think about that," he said, surprised.
I walked over to the terminal and looked at the screen. "Do you need anything else?" I asked. "I can stop by again tonight if there’s anything you need."