| |
––––––––
Templemer, Planet Hoarfrost, Lupasha System, Coro Region, Tolo Arm
May 9th, 2038
Terry held the bottle as Pōkole drained it greedily. He dearly missed his friends’ help, but that would still be some weeks coming. Pōkole jerked on the empty bottle, reminding him what he was there for. Terry climbed out of the moon pool and got another, balancing the 10kg container in the water where the calf waited eagerly.
“Here you go,” he said and offered it to him. It was taken immediately and hungrily. He used to really enjoy feeding the ravenous little guy. He realized more every day that a large part of the fun had grown to include the companionship of his friends. Not to mention Katrina, of course.
As the calf quickly went through his seventh jug of milk, Terry thought about her. Aside from classes, he hadn’t been alone with her since their ill-advised trip to the excavator stash. He’d tried a couple of times, but his mom was always there to stop him with a none-too-gentle reminder that he was grounded—for a month.
She hadn’t even wanted to let him continue feeding Pōkole until he played his trump card. “It isn’t fair to punish Pōkole for what I did,” he’d said. She’d relented only after telling him he had to do it by himself. Feeding the calf a hundred liters a day was no mean feat, especially by himself.
“I miss Katrina,” he said to Pōkole.
“Terr, Terr, more?”
The young orca’s language continued to develop faster than anyone had expected. Dr. Orsage said she hoped they had more calves so she could study whether it was a phenomenon related to the pinplants or not. The bottle was empty, so he went for another. Almost two more weeks before his month of grounding was over. A part of him knew he’d gotten off light. It didn’t help when he chafed like he was then. At least she’d also allowed him to continue swimming every day to build up familiarity with the leg. He missed his friends and Katrina then, too. Crap.
Finally Pōkole was stuffed, and he swam out the lock to rejoin Moloko and another pair of orcas who were waiting. While the huge predatory cetaceans had no real fear of the Oohobo, the calf was at risk. They protected Pōkole with the same vigor they’d protected Terry. He guessed they thought of him as their calf of sorts as well.
His duties to Pōkole discharged, he stopped by the mess hall for dinner. There was a little table reserved just for him, on the far side away from all the others kids his age, or even close to his age. His friends were all there at the table he used to share with then. Dan spotted Terry as he entered and waved. The others looked up and waved. Katrina’s eyes lit up when she saw him, and Terry felt his heart flutter.
For a second, he considered sidling over there as if he was going to get something. When he glanced around, he saw Doc with his people nearby, and he was watching Terry closely. He’d hoped the man would at least partly understand and maybe cut him a little slack. Nothing could be further from the truth.
“This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen you do,” Doc had said. “Frankly, I expected better of you. But I guess you just had to step over the line in a big way, didn’t you?”
Terry hadn’t had a response, so he’d kept quiet. Even when the one-month grounding sentence came down, he’d held his peace. What could he offer in his own defense? It was a dumbass move. He did his best to hold Katrina harmless, claiming it was all his idea, and it mostly was. Still, she’d caught some blowback. Her own grounding was over after two weeks. He glanced at Doc, then went over to get a drink and returned to his solo table.
Back in his quarters, he was early enough he didn’t have to face his mom, which was good. Her reproachful disappointed looks were worse than Doc’s by far. She hadn’t said anything more about the incident after the first day. “I trusted you,” was all she’d said before pronouncing sentence.
He spent two hours doing his homework, and some time studying pinplant technology. Afterward, he went back to his current personal project—the files he’d copied from the strange extractor.
“You want to redeem yourself a little?” Doc had asked. Of course he did. “Figure out what the Selroth were up to from all those files.” Offered a chance to get out of the doghouse, he went to it. Only it proved much more exhausting than he’d expected.
Of the thousands of files, most were routine records of one kind or another. The extractor’s original OS was still functioning and creating operations logs dutifully, as it had been for more than 300 years. Each subsystem generated a report each hour. There were 122 subsystems. This resulted in a lot of files.
The work was complicated even more because the system didn’t seem to follow a normal convention in naming files, or dating them. “It’s all designed to stymy investigation,” he’d told Doc after two days of work.
“Sounds like a good job to keep you out of mischief,” he’d replied. Despite being frustrated, Terry went back to the task.
Now 15 days into his analysis of the files, he finally felt he was making some progress. The biggest part was deciphering the file naming convention. It had taken him two weeks just to realize that each name was linked with the date in a rotating series of identifiers, and those were in Selroth. He got his slate to translate, and things made a lot more sense. For the first time, he eliminated 90% of the files by identifying their timing to coincide with routine equipment log files. Score.
With only a fraction of the files left, he was able to move through them much faster. He hadn’t gone back to the weird 3D file yet. He didn’t know where to start with it. After the drama about his punishment, he’d checked with the GalNet, but found no help there with the unusual programming methods. So he stuck to what he could work with.
Huge groups of files were put aside using his understanding of naming conventions. The further along he got, the better his understanding grew. He intermittently opened files to look for anything interesting. It was close to bedtime when he came across the first files matching the criteria of the program he’d first cracked.
“Locate and secure,” he read from his slate, translated off the program commands. What does that mean, he wondered, and dug further into the file. There was some indexed information, but nothing understandable would translate.
Terry ran searches for related terminology in the files and got several hits. Amazingly, most of those were in the discarded data logs. He recalled the files to view and went over them.
“Still working on homework?”
Terry turned at his mom’s words, surprised to see her there. “No, I was working on the files...files for Doc.”
Her eyes narrowed in suspicion. Nothing had been said in his punishment about working on the files retrieved from his misadventure. “It’s late,” she said after a few seconds. “You need to go to bed soon.”
“Yes, Mom,” he said. She watched him a little longer, then went into her room.
Terry waited for a moment, then went into the little kitchenette and grabbed a meal pack from the cooler. He collected his slate and retreated to his room, closed the door, and set up on his little desk.
The meal pack was self-contained and made by their autochef. He squeezed the tab and it chemically heated itself as he went back to his research. The meal was almost cold again before he remembered it was there. He begrudgingly shoveled the fish and noodles into his mouth—feeding the machine, as Doc called it, all the while displaying files on his slate’s Tri-V.
He had the machine’s Tri-V range maxed out, with nine square meters of space in his tiny room full of file elements and floating descriptions he’d added to them. As he worked, he thought the strange 3D file that had made no sense might be onto something. If you could operate in 3D, you could process and collate an order of magnitude more data.
He caught himself yawning and glanced at the simple chronometer in the corner of his Tri-V display. It was past midnight already. He needed to get to sleep or he’d be useless in classes tomorrow, which would get back to his mom.
Terry spent another half hour going over the log files, trying to understand what they meant, and what the Selroth were doing with them. However, eventually he gave in to fatigue and crawled into his bed. Shutting off the lights, he drifted off with files and content buzzing ceaselessly through his mind.
* * * * *
