Rystole stood across the wooden workbench from his friend Bert Morris. The table, like most of the room, was a mess with copious electronics in various states of repair.
A matter printer hummed in the corner and filled the room with the smell of melting plastic and other materials. Racks of electronics used for communication in the colony lined the walls and a few plastic tubs were filled with raw materials. Two desks with embedded terminals sat behind Bert and the workbench.
The room itself was printed concrete, like most of the buildings in town. The walls had the hallmark horizontal lines of piped concrete. The whole town had been printed before the colonists arrived four years ago.
Bert sat in a swivel chair with wheels and was wearing a nice collared shirt that was patched up in a few places. It was the typical clothes of those who worked in the city. Rystole’s father wore a similar type of shirt.
The formal wear, at least formal by Rystole’s standards, contrasted with his loose-fitting T-shirt and canvas pants. Teachers always pushed him to dress up for class. But Rystole was more interested in saving time when he eventually got back to the ranch.
Bert worked in the town hall and had graduated last cycle despite being the same age as Rystole. The town hall didn't have that many staff members, mainly the town’s speaker, doctor, and communication director.
Bert was apprenticing under the comms director. Which is why Rystole had come to him after school with the broken radio and questions about why it repelled the slugs. The same broken radio that was lying in front of his friend on the workbench.
"There's nothing in there that would bother living beings,” Bert said, pushing his long sandy hair out of his eyes so he could look at Rystole. “Unless they knew it could be used to call for backup."
"Even if they did know that it's not like an army of pitchfork-wielding ranchers were going to do them any harm," Rystole replied.
Bert nodded his head agreeing with Rystole's point. He poked at the broken radio, eventually popping open the back to get to the inner components.
Rystole learned in school that the radio had two systems of communication. One that enabled them to communicate locally and another one that connected to the tall radio tower in the center of town and connected them with the rest of the Central System.
The wavelengths that the local radio used weren't small enough to cause any tissue damage or irritation like UV or X-rays would, at least not in humans or any other lifeforms humans had discovered or created.
The general theory was any lifeforms able to handle the damaging rays of their local star could stand a few megahertz here or there.
The communication that linked them back to human civilization was another beast entirely. It leveraged sub-matter pathways that humanity discovered after centuries of research in the stars.
The entire setup was beyond even the comm director’s understanding. The colony of Dale Cannon just needed to know how to install and maintain it. Scientists deep in the Central System figured out the rest.
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If something went wrong with Dale Cannon’s comms someone monitoring it in the Central System would notice it and send them a new one. But space was big and starships didn’t always move quickly enough to save colonies.
"You'd think if the radio irritated them in some way they would avoid the cabins," Bert said after the radio’s components were laid out in a neat grid on his desk.
"I wish they would." Rystole wouldn’t be worrying about the farm right now if they did.
Bert rolled his chair from the workbench to his desk on the far wall. He typed something into the terminal embedded into his desk as Rystole followed him. Bert was much quicker than Rystole was at using those terminals and a map of the settlement was quickly on the screen.
"Here's where the slugs have attacked," Bert said as several red dots appeared on the screen. "They outline the edge of town. They don't approach the town hall itself."
"That's just because they know it's densely populated and they'd be outnumbered. Right?"
"That's a big assumption, Rye," Bert replied. He rolled across the room on his chair. "We don't know how intelligent they are.”
"They can't be that intelligent; there's no civilization on this planet,” Rystole said.
"That's a very human-centric view of intelligence." Bert began probing the radio with a contraption Rystole hadn't seen before.
“They don't do anything the buffcows don't do, including avoiding large groups of people. The slugs are just more dangerous than the buffs."
"Your cattle aren't exactly harmless," Bert replied still probing at Rystole’s broken radio.
Rystole knew he was right. He'd come to school a few times as a kid with bruises and scrapes and a broken arm once.
"As for this thing,” Bert continued, “it seems like you busted one of the core stabilizers of the sub-matter crystal."
Rystole only replied with a confused look now leaning against Bert’s desk.
"The stabilizers help integrate your digital inputs with the sub-matter crystal. Which then sends your data to the tower and out to the Central System."
"So, I broke it?" He didn't need a fancy probe to tell him that.
"You broke it in an interesting way. Knocking out a stabilizer like this increases the output of the crystal. You wouldn’t notice it though because most of the radio’s interface is digital. It'd just throw errors."
“But a broken stabilizer would make the output stronger?" Rystole said slowly, starting to catch on. "And the stronger signal bothered the slugs?”
It didn't make sense to Rystole, the sub-matter pathways took millennia to discover and were considered one of humanity's greatest technical achievements.
The slugs on the other hand showed no signs of technological advancement based on the Central System's scan of the planet before Dale Cannon’s founding.
There were cases and examples where scans missed signs of life or technology but they were rare. And it was even rarer that those situations ended well for the colonies.
Bert nodded. "And they may be avoiding the town because our radio tower doesn't have the same kind of stabilizers."
“You still use digital inputs to transmit though,” Rystole said gesturing to the computer he was leaning on.
“Sure but the tower sends and receives massive packets of information and it's easier to do that with higher outputs from the crystals," Bert responded rolling back to the terminal causing Rystole to jump out of his way.
"So, if we break our stabilizers we could keep the slugs away?" Rystole asked as Bert typed into the terminal.
Rystole was glad to have a potential solution for future attacks but it didn't necessarily help his mother.
"Here it is," Bert said.
His friend had pulled a diagram up on his terminal for Rystole to see. It was a schematic for a sub-matter radio, but that was all Rystole could tell.
"I thought I'd remembered some research about increasing the output of the crystal,” Bert said. “It didn't have any application at the time it was discovered because it wasn’t stable enough to transmit data. But I think I could use it to put something together that might help us out."
"Something to keep them away?" Rystole asked.
"Just come back after school tomorrow and I'll show you what I've come up with.”