In the deep, dark, inky blackness of space, there flew a shining silver ship, emblazoned on it's side, the USS Starlance. Like a bullet she soared on, except she wasn't being fired at anybody, just kind of going on, and who fires a bullet through ink? Also, space isn't really inky black anyway, ink sort of shines, and space doesn't shine, it's completely matte. There are stars though, and those do shine, but not in the way ink shines. I don't think ink undergoes nuclear fusion.
Can I start over? I wasn't exactly chosen for my writing skills. My names Robert, and I'm one of the many maintainence guys keeping the USS Starlance running. Sure, I can write pages on the bad wiring in sector 12, but a narrative? It's all this flowery, flowing, ambiguous language. I think I can weave a pretty good yarn, though, and hey, if I can't make something out of what just happened on the Starlance, I don't think there's any hope for me at all. So, I think I'll just tell it like it happened.
About a week ago, the Starlance was on its normal mission, exploring the not-exactly-inky blackness of space. Pretty boring. There's really nothing out there. Some planets, some moons, zooming off, taking atmospheric samples, marking off worlds for colonization. It's like we don't have enough worlds to colonize, we've got them by the bushelful by now, but hey, I'm not the one who makes the policy, I just fix things when they break down.
I remember like, a few months ago, when there was all this hubbub in the scientific sector about finding a planet with life on it, and they sent probes down and took a sample and brought it up. I waited around, pretending to fix a nearby relay. Finally, they brought it out, in a little glass globe, and it looks like some sort of sandwich condiment. It's just some red slimy stuff, and everyone's all excited.
So, when I heard about what had appeared on the long range scanners, I kind of expected something like that again. We'd go into an uproar for a few days and the scientists would have their champagne and they'd bring up some sort of purple slime for us to see. Then everything would die down and the scientists would dissect it under a blacklight and tell us exactly how this new form of slime absolutely revolutionizes the study of slime. If we probe the whole galaxy, we'll collect an entire rainbow of slime.
Anyway, as I'm sure you know it was exactly not what I was expecting, but the first thing that happened was that deafening noise. It came through on most of the intercoms, so we had to shut power to them. Apparently, the ships communications were also picking it up, and so we had to shut them off. The whole area was filled with the dreadful noise, like a billion wasps right in your ear.
So, I go and see my friend about it, because he knows about all sorts of stuff, and he is busy in his quarters, which he's filled all to the top with computers. He never has the lights on, and I'm always tripping over wires in his place. Somehow, though, he's managed to snag cheetos and mountain dew from the ships food machines. He's pretty amazing like that. So, I go in, and he seems really excited, and he's playing out that horrible screechy noise over and over again and has like a billion things on all of his computer monitors. He tells me that he's pretty much made sense of what that noise meant, and started rattling on about aliens.
Now, you might be saying, well, the crew of the Starlance didn't know what the noise was for another day even. I tell you, if I even suspected that my friend in his cheetos stained quarters knew something that the captain and all the scientists didn't, I would have told them immediately, though probably while laughing. I figured that they had figured this all out hours ago, but, hey, your tax dollars at work.
So, yeah, my friend knew about the aliens, but he didn't know everything yet. He told me that this noise was some sort of signal, but it wasn't from anything from Earth. It was a completely different sort of system, or something. He said that it was all over, that it seemed like some sort of machine code for computers. He said this computer was so huge, it had to be put on a lot of different planets, and this noise was the computer talking to itself. I asked him who would want a computer that big, but he must have not understood what I was saying, because he acted like I was talking blasphemy.
So, I walked back over to the maintainence depot, all the while musing about this big alien computer. Who would need such a huge computer? Maybe it was trying to figure out how to attack us best. I know aliens wouldn't be like in the movies, but sometimes you can't help thinking that they're all out to invade us.
Since the intercoms weren't working, there was a lot of work to do putting up wires and tin cans and such so that people could talk to each other floors away. Usually they just ring me up on my wrist when someone wants me to go somewhere, but now I had to go over to the depot, and all the work orders had to be submitted by hand, and it was just a mess. So I did my best to try and connect up everything and hopefully we'd be working again.
Hey, do you mind if I go over and get a glass of water? I didn't expect this story to last this long, and my throat is getting a bit sore. Anyway, most of the rest of that day, I was just hard at work, so it isn't terribly exciting. Don't worry, though, we'll get to the good bits soon.
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