Sliding into his observation bubble, Nick felt the familiar wave of happiness wash over him. The cocktail of curiosity, happiness and trepidation that never failed to grasp him as he forced his body into the declined chair. Even as his left knee startled with the sharp pain of hitting a bulkhead, his eyes were already scanning the screens that filled his vision. Looking at the new data and observations that was tagged since yesterday, he was searching for the nuggets of gold; those small telltale flags that would signal discrepancies from the central astronomical databases. Discrepancies that he could certify with his own name and signature, and submit into the central astrobase. Nothing gave him as much satisfaction as seeing his own name on the records that made up humanity's total body of knowledge of the stars.
A blinking cursor above a far away star designation grabbed his attention, and he opened the linked article. Poor old workhorse he thought, skimming the contents and reading that the new Vast Interstellar Superstellar Information Network telescope array had just corrected yet another of old James Webb's observations. With tens of mirror nodes circling somewhere beyond Pluto and more nodes being added every month; VISION was really beginning to earn its pay. Not a day passed now without some type of correction, improvement, update or addition of a new observation to the astrobases. He could hardly keep up reading the daily summaries!
Now if only they could get that damned Pegasus off the ground, he thought. 15 years and counting, and they kept blowing up the prototypes for the new sublight engine that was meant to power it up to the 0.3 c that they needed. Ironic... that even as they had managed to build a freaking portable worm hole generator that could take them (theoretically!) anywhere in known space in the blink of an eye, they were still struggling to get a craft going the third of lightspeed needed to activate the generator.
At least VISION had the resolution needed to build the needed astrogation tables for when the sublight drive was finally up and running, he thought.
-
Several hours later he was shifting in his chair as he attempted to loosen muscles that were slowly losing the fight against cramps. The chair fought back with the certainty of melded plastic bolted to steel bulkheads, and he considered logging off early today. With only 30 more minutes before he would have to leave and get ready for his shift, his attention was caught by a light suddenly blinking in the periphery of his vision. Turning his head he realized it was the first time he had seen that particular signal do anything, and read off the label. “E4” he thought, and sent a quick query to his mindpal. The answer came back immediately; L-COM-RCVR-AR1 appeared in front of his vision. That was... peculiar. He had only installed the Laser Communications Receiver Array as an afterthought, thinking he could intercept communications from VISION when they started using the laser for transmission; or even the Pegasus if they ever managed to send it into space. How awesome would that not be? Sitting bang in the middle of the communication coming back from the explorers; being able to listen in as they explored nearby space!
Frowning, his attention returned to that signal coming in on the LCOM. Nothing else out here would use tight beam lasers to communicate. He directed his main screen to display what was registering on the LCOM.
His eyes squeezed together in confusion as a long sequence of bits raced across the top of the screen, and continued to fill up the page with more 1´s and 0´s. Discrete signal pulses, that was obvious. The LCOM had the capacity to translate an array of different communication laser pulses into bits, and was obviously doing its job. The bottom of the screen began populating with the protocol decoder attempting to sort the bits into some kind of sense. Attempting because the hex characters kept changing multiple times per second, in a vain attempt to sort the bits into anything resembling a known encoding protocol. It was the first time he could remember that the computer had failed to automatically decode the protocol; as normally the bits would be interpreted and the translation shown in a readable format. Or at least, it would show some useful metadata.
“That is odd…” he said aloud and opened a protocol debugger window. “PROTOCOL NOT RECOGNIZED” filled the header, unsurprisingly and somewhat unhelpfully. Focusing instead his attention to the tables filled with statistical analysis below the header it was clear this was some kind of structured data. Repeating sequences were slowly accumulating, and one specific bit-sequence was repeating at very regular intervals. “Some kind of packet header?” he thought to himself, and noticed that the header was followed by a series of bits that looked almost… regular. Or perhaps not regular, but there was a pattern there, he was sure.
He quickly directed the protocol debugger to do deeper analysis on the pattern directly following the header, and nodded to himself when it reported back a few seconds later; informing him that it was some kind of packet checksum representing a function of the data between two headers. The analyser also reported a high probability that the bits formed up into 12-bit words. “Curiouser, and curiouser…”
Having now isolated individual frames, and hypothesizing that the data was based on 12 bit words, he had a good foundation for the next step of his analysis. The easy part was done, now he had to...
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
“What, the, actual, fuck.” some other part of his brain crudely interjected at this point, finally running out of patience with being ignored for what it considered way too long; firmly knocking him out of his mathematical reveries as he realized consciously for the first time what he was actually doing. His goddamn LASER ARRAY of all things was receiving data. Data that was still coming in; now at 3 gigabytes and counting. Or not bytes, he told himself. With 12 bit words, it was more like… “WTF” his brain shouted again. Data packets. On the laser array. Using a non recognised protocol? From where? From... whom?
He brought up the configuration data for L-COM-RCVR-AR1, and felt an unvoluntary shiver as he realized that the antenna array was pointed - not towards the inner planet as he had assumed was the default configuration - but out towards open space.
He looked out the small window into a star-speckled blackness as he asked nobody in particular “who out there is laser beaming data at me?”; just as his alarm clock pierced the stillness. Time for work.
-
“Good morning, this is Sisyphus Technology Services. Nick speaking, how may I help you?” Brain running on autopilot, Nick helped a customer through installing some custom plugin to their mindpal. Apparently, this particular plugin would help the lady at the other end of the call control their dog better. “He keeps watering the plants, you see…” she said; but Nick was not really listening.
He had left the laser receiver array with instructions to keep recording the bitstream of data (which was still fast coming in when he left the observation bubble), and to store it directly to his personal drive. He desperately wanted to return to his data analysis, and cast a quick glance at the clock his mindpal displayed in the top right of his vision. 13 minutes into his shift. Only another seven hours and 17 minutes to go. Another call came in, another customer was dispatched on autopilot, and the time moved another four minutes.
It wasn’t that he disliked his job; he actually quite enjoyed it. Most customers were pleasant enough, the tech they got to work with was pretty neat, and Anne was simply the best boss he’d ever had (in his entire 14 month long career). The pace was comfortable enough that he would normally be able to daydream at the same time as taking calls, sometimes he even had time to review the data that had been collected overnight and to share the more curious tidbits with other amateur astronomers. John kept complaining about the pay, but Nick had always thought it was decent enough that he wasn’t too bothered. (Then, Nick didn’t head off to the bar the minute the workday was over to see how quickly he could drink away the day's salary.)
Rather, Nick would normally pick up something quick to eat in the cafeteria downstairs and wolf it down as he made his way back to his lab. (Which was really just the tiny box room off the entrance hallway, crammed from floor to ceiling with various computer equipment). He would spend a few hours going over the treasures he had received in the past day or so, before heading up into the observation bubble for a long evening of just… looking at screens full of data and staring into the blackness. At peace.
He didn’t actually need the bubble for most of his observations, but the ability to look out into the deep blackness never failed to lift his mood. He hoped it would be a while before the landlord discovered that Nick had taken an actual blowtorch to the outside bulkhead of the apartment, cutting into the vacuum and constructing a polyglass bubble “with just enough room to stretch out my legs”, as he had told the workmen. Of course, he had made that request over a video call with just his face showing, so the bubble had ended up being a comfortable size for a normal length person. Nick was by now well familiar with the sensation of embarrassed regret every time he threaded his legs into position in the bubble; bending them just so in order to fit in.
But then, a few moments later, all that would be forgotten. Work, food and cramping legs. Above him was the blackness of space. Some days, when the habitat was tilted on its side, he would see the soft light of Saturn herself glowing at the edge of the bubble, reflecting off a gaggle of Saturn’s moon wannabes drifting across his field of vision.
-
His first memory was not that of looking into the night sky (that was actually about fighting with some other kid in the nursery about possession of a particular piece of Lego he needed to finish building a construct he would later claim was a car), but it might have been the second, and the third. His mother had always claimed stars reflected in his eyes when they took him home from the hospital after his birth, and he remembered vicious arguments with his sister about whether to leave their bedroom window opaque or transparent when they were going to bed. She was certain some kind of space snake? tiger? bear? (It was always something new!) would crash through the window and eat them in their sleep, and for some reason she would not be reassured when Nick calmly told her that “No, there’s no such thing as a space snake. And if there was, it wouldn’t bother with little us, but go after the president, or the space force, or some such. And even if, for some strange reason it was targeting you, the polyglass window is no more difficult to break down when it is transparent, than when it is opaque”.
Eventually, her screaming and yelling would force their father to intercede - and without fail, his judgment would come down on the side of keeping the window opaque and the apartment peaceful. That was, until he left them. After that, Nick and Sae had to settle their arguments without parental intervention. The arguments stopped after that, when it was just the two of them. He wished father was still around to side with his sister.
-
"Sae, want to hear something crazy?" he texted his sister between another two calls, and smiled as she responded "You did the dishes?!".