“I’m gonna admit,” Nathan said as he knelt in front of the console whose couch he’d first fed to Saucer, heels hooked inside the hoops that had been hidden by the couch in question, “I expected more obvious answers.”
Saucer didn’t reply. The word Processing remained written just under the status section of his HUD, in the top left of his field of view, and when his eyes flickered over to look at it directly, the tiny hexagonal prism with bulged top and bottom faces that was just to the right of the word rotated slowly in place.
A progress indicator, it was, and he recognized that without any trouble.
“The thing is,” he murmured to himself, “this is deeply weird. Because it’s not weird enough. Aren’t these supposed to be aliens? Why can I even recognize this as a crew station, why can I recognize that as a couch and this as a console?”
The obvious answer did not occur to him for many long moments, during which he attempted to brainstorm plausible reasons why it might be so. Could it be that there was a fundamental harmony or even unanimity of bauplan across the multiverse? Certainly not, judging by the vast variety of shapes and forms of people that he’d seen in his time in the arena.
Eventually, rather embarrassed by how long it took for him to arrive at it, he came to the clearly correct conclusion—and for once, it was actually correct, unlike so many other clearly correct conclusions.
His Interlife partner, the one who had yet to choose a name, had navigated him into a circumstance that he would be able to handle. It was a kind of constraint on the evolution of technology and biology around him; he was in a place where he could succeed, if he avoided making the kinds of egregious errors he’d made in his previous life.
“Note to self,” he murmured to himself, “be sure to express gratitude and appreciation next time, and may that time be some distance into the future.”
With that in mind, reassured that it was a tractable puzzle and that the points of commonality he found with the design or the crew’s mindset were likely to be true rather than hallucinations, he checked his HUD—still Processing—and got to work.
The first thing he noticed was the lack of any obvious interface, and the second was the odd shape of the overall installation. It was anchored securely into the floor, which made perfect sense, but its face—and it presumably was its face, since it would have been facing the crewmember—was almost entirely solid. It was about three feet tall, and was made out of three somewhat-separated blocks.
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“Saucer,” Nathan said briskly, “can you spare me a ruler?”
Obligingly, a set of measurements crawled across the view in his helmet. Each of the blocks was a precise one-foot cube, and they were joined by two-inch spans of a different metal, or at least one that was differently colored. Those were the same one-foot depth, as measured on the axis of “from Nathan” to “away from Nathan” rather than how deep into a planetary gravitational well a space station might be, and they were a half-inch short of a foot on the left-to-right axis—within the frame of reference as defined by his vision at the moment of analysis, of course—in width.
“Two inches tall,” he said distantly, talking out loud to himself as though he were solving a puzzle or debugging a piece of code, which are fundamentally similar for all of their extensive differences, those primarily being around the fact that a puzzle is intended by the puzzle author to be solved in a way that imparts an emotional arc of flashes of insight whereas debugging a piece of code is an experience of stochastic sadism inflicted on the righteous by the universe. “A foot deep, barely under a foot wide. I feel like if it were meant for hands, wouldn’t it be taller? I guess I could fit… a finger or two in there?”
He almost thrust his hand in there to experiment, but then hesitated. Thinking it over, he squatted back onto his heels and shook his head, continuing to study the console.
“There’s a groove, I’m gonna call these grooves even though they’re also kind of like joins, up top. It goes around the topside of the thing, same size, half an inch deep and two inches thick. Rounded where it would corner. That makes two pairs of grooves and one up top, and they’re all a kinda shinier metal, a little more greenish, a little shimmery; the main cubes are kinda matte. I wonder… aliens seeing in different spectra is a science fiction trope, and it’s not like Earth didn’t have some of that. Bees have a wider range of vision, since they can see in ultraviolet, right?”
This was, of course, an oversimplification in the traditional style of the Wikipedia Scholar—though Nathan learned the factoid not from those hallowed pages but rather from that oddest of place-phenomena, Tumblr—but not entirely incorrect. It was true that the vision of bees had evolved to have a different range of vision, but in the process the lower-energy range of light that was visible to humans was lost to them; a shift, rather than a simple expansion.
“Saucer,” he said after a moment’s pause, “could you please give me a, like, color expansion? Widen the band and compress the existing actual colors into a smaller range, so that I can see in ultraviolet and infrared?”
His view blanked, going black. Cognitive Buffer was written across the center of it, with a countdown from twenty seconds. He waited patiently, and when the countdown hit zero, the space station was a very different, and far more colorful, place.
“Wow,” he said softly. “It’s all so… blue. A little bit washed out, though, and kinda monochromatic. Can we do this again, but compress everything that’s green and below into the reds? I know it’ll give me a weird asymmetry on the scaling, but let’s give it a shot please. And thank you.”
His helmet blanked again, and when his vision was restored, he was rapidly enlightened.