I Fell From The Dark

27

Jean was right. Work did help.

Which of course was the point, Mia thought: we're designed for a purpose. Dishwashers probably enjoy washing dishes. And I like reading through binary dumps which were sent from an unknown spaceship to a probe twelve years ago.

Her innate knowledge of the probe only helped her so far: afterwards she had to read operating system documentation and hardware schematics and instruction sets. But she had a feeling she already knew what was going on; and when she had closed the last window on her tablet, she had confirmed her suspicions beyond a doubt.

'That message was a hack, alright,' Mia said. 'It did two things. It stopped the logging from recording the message, which is why you couldn't see it; and then it forwarded another message to the Solar Pilgrim. So the only recording was here, on the low-level radio wave sensors. Did you know that this had happened?'

They were sitting at a desk, drinking hot, sour stew from a cardboard cup. Moon food wasn't much better than space food, but at least it wasn't in a squeezy pouch.

'I guessed something like that,' Jean said.

Mia nodded. 'I have the second packet, which I guess is also a hack, but I don't know anything about the Solar Pilgrim's computers, so I don't know what it did. Do you think this is what sent Pilgrim insane?'

'Probably, yes. Just like the probe, there was no record. But it corresponds to the kind of time which everything started going wrong for the AI.'

'So it was hacked. So here's the thing: when you hack computers you need to understand the inner workings. You need to know about exploits and the intricacies of the hardware. You can't just squirt random numbers and get a result like that. This was crafted by someone who understood these probes very well.'

Jean didn't reply for a while. He slurped out of the pot, and chewed on the grains. Then he swallowed and looked at her, staring into her eyes.

'That's right. We know that these ships are from one of Earth's colonies. We don't know who's in them or where they're from.'

Then he looked away.

Huh, Mia thought. Well, I knew it wasn't alien, because everyone kept telling me. But I guess that's interesting. And I know Jean a little now, and I recognise some of his body language, and looking away pointedly is not normal. I wonder if he's telling me that he can't tell me?

'Did you find anything else?' she asked.

'No. There were no more broadcasts. I saw you eject. You were lucky.'

Mia thought of the grey faces, the misery, the way Pilgrim had cried when she'd died. She wasn't sure that being here was better. It was her turn to look away. 'Perhaps.'

They were both ate in silence for a while.

'I'm going to report to Albert,' Jean said. 'He might be able to understand the message which got sent to the ship. You all finished?'

Mia nodded.

'Come on then.'

She picked up her mind box and followed Jean out.