The alien iconography blinked above the projected surface of Gaia, taunting Jian incessantly. He checked his plant’s chrono. He’d been down in the pit for eleven and a half hours already. His eyes felt like they’d been plucked out of his skull, lightly marinated in lemon juice, dipped in sand, and stuffed back into their sockets.
Jian grabbed a water bottle and squirted a short stream onto his face to wash away the sweat and give his eyes some moisture. Then he dug into one of the pockets on the arm of his flight suit and retrieved a pair of pills from a small cylinder. One red, one yellow. The red was a reasonably strong painkiller he hoped would blunt the coming headache he felt developing behind his right eye. The yellow was a strong stimulant, a nozey-dozey as the other pilots called them. They were supposed to keep a pilot alert during long-duration flights, but they often found other uses for them.
He’d wiggled out of the cumbersome and hot expeditionary suit hours ago. It sat crumpled behind the map room’s chair like a discarded layer of skin. He’d need to don the suit again before returning to the shuttle to resupply in another day or two, but in the meantime Jian lounged in the relatively unencumbered comfort of his flight suit. Although even that was starting to itch.
He rubbed his eyes until streaks of light wandered across his field of vision. It felt like flight training all over again. Sleepless nights spent cramming for exams, flying high on strong tea and stronger drugs just to keep awake. Except this study guide was written in a language Jian couldn’t even read, he had no idea what was on the final test, and if he didn’t pass, his friend would probably die. No pressure.
Jian stood with a groan and stretched. His legs threatened to fall asleep if he didn’t get up and work some blood into them every hour or so. Slowly, he paced back and forth on the catwalk bisecting the map room, careful to stay away from the edges. Whoever built the facility hadn’t seen the point of handrails, either because they didn’t have hands, or because they figured anyone dumb enough to fall off the edge of a catwalk deserved their fate.
Behind him, the now-familiar-but-still-kinda-creepy scratching of Polly’s insectoid legs against the deck followed as he paced. Like a loyal pet, his little autonomous friend hadn’t left his side since they’d exited the Buran. Polly seemed worried about him. Of course, it was just as likely Jian’s brain was anthropomorphizing the little bionic bug, but that’s how it felt whenever he glanced over at his trio of peering green eyes.
The expedition hadn’t been completely fruitless. Jian had figured out how to manipulate the map of Gaia, zoom in on items of interest, and select them to get more detailed information. Of course, that information still popped up in a language he couldn’t read, but at this point he was willing to embrace the small victories. The level of detail the projection had available was insane. Jian had spotted one of the drone cargo ships plying trade between Atlantis and Shambhala by the wake it left on the ocean. The display’s resolution was enough to read the registry number off the side of the drone’s hull. Data spooled out next to the ship’s image. He’d tagged those characters in his plant’s translation matrix as probable speed and bearing data and gave it something to chew on for a while, hoping it could pick up on new patterns.
He’d made a couple of dozen similar assumptions as he jumped from one point of interest on the map to the next, trying to give his plant enough connections to make a breakthrough. But there was a big risk in doing so. When he looked at the data streaming next to say, Shambhala, he was assuming the ancient alien intelligence that programed its user interfaces found the same sorts of things interesting about the city as he did. For all he knew, the beings that built the facility couldn’t care less about population figures, resource consumption, or construction rates and instead focused on the total weight of potassium contained in the city’s inhabitants or the number of windows in its buildings.
Aware of the monkey wrench cultural assumptions could throw into the translation process, Jian tried to be as general in the connections he made for the program as possible. But he had to balance that caution against being too nebulous and giving the matrix connections so broad as to render them effectively useless.
Frustration gripped Jian. He wasn’t used to having so little control over a situation. He was a pilot; maintaining control was kind of central to his profession. This sitting passively on his hands, waiting for something, anything to happen… it wasn’t exactly his speed.
Jian glanced back at Polly scurrying along behind him and stopped, then held out his forearm, inviting Polly to climb up to his perch. The tiny creature complied eagerly and soon clung fast to the fabric of Jian’s flight suit.
“We’re going to be here forever, aren’t we?”
Polly held up his manipulators.
Jian sighed heavily, then looked at his feet. The situation was rapidly approaching hopeless. Jian could spend months down here in the bone-dry chill of the map room trying to learn this dead language without making enough progress to matter. Benexx would be long dead by then, and his whole insubordinate expedition would count for nothing. He’d have wasted his career on a crazy plan that any sane person would have known was doomed from the… start…
Polly had held up his claws in a “no idea” gesture. Like he understood what Jian had asked. Or at the very least like he’d known he was being asked a question but didn’t understand it. Either way, holding up his claws was a human gesture. It was something Polly had learned from Jian.
Jian had taught it to him.
Jian smacked his own forehead with an open palm. “Fucking duh,” he said aloud. He’d approached this entirely backwards. He was trying to learn the alien super-intelligence’s language, when he should have been trying to teach it his language. If the nerds back on the Ark were right, that’s what it had been built for in the first place. To act as a bridge between the past and the present, adapting to whatever cultural and linguistic drift had occurred over the eons.
He sprinted back to the chair and plopped into position, as awake as he’d felt since entering the chamber. Jian zoomed in to the projection of Shambhala and selected it. The now familiar, yet still unreadable text began to spiral inward next to the city. Jian cleared his throat.
“Shambhala,” he spoke clearly and loudly, careful to enunciate each syllable.
The text next to the city froze in place, then disappeared entirely. In its place, a pulsing white oval circle appeared. Something was listening to him.
“Shambhala,” Jian repeated.
A curved, flowing character appeared in the air, followed by another, and another. Three characters, three syllables in “Shambhala.” They were syllabograms, not unlike Chinese or corresponding Japanese characters, Jian was sure of it.
Jian tagged them in his plant’s translation matrix and assigned the correlation a ninety-nine percent certainty. Then he moved to Shambhala’s harbor and selected the beanstalk leading up to the Ark.
“Space Elevator.”
Five characters appeared, the first separated from the other four by a tiny curving slash mark that Jian recognized from the other texts. It was ubiquitous, like a period, or a comma. It was used to separate the symbols, he guessed. To delineate a pause, a start of a new word. A press of the space bar was his assumption. He moved on to other icons, repeating the process and tagging the results.
Then, Jian decided to push the envelope. He held two clenched fists in the air.
“Zero,” he announced, then extended a finger. “One.” He extended another finger. “Two.” He repeated the process. “Three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.”
When he ran out of fingers, Jian put his hands down and waited. The projection flashed, processing what it had just seen. Then, a new character appeared in blue, harder edged than the ones it had been using to catalogue Jian’s map labels. Then another crimson symbol followed in line behind it, this one attended by a bright green dot below it. And another, this one with two bright green dots, another with three dots. The pattern continued until thirteen characters hovered in front of him, zero all the way through the ancient program’s base-twelve numerical system.
Jian’s chest flooded with satisfaction.
“Now we’re talking.”