Young Explorer’s Adventure Guide Volume V

Machine Language-2

Yuka realized everyone at her table was staring at her. "What?"

Gyllis grinned and waved a hand in front of Yuka's face. "I said, did you find anything interesting today? Where's your brain? Out in space or down on Sulis?" she joked.

"Very funny." Yuka rolled her eyes and took a bite of the soft bread nugget, to allow herself time to answer. "I left the rover analyzing some water samples," she said, reminding herself it was not a lie. She was just leaving out the part about the robot she'd seen—or thought she'd seen. "The valley I was in looked pretty nice. The trees—"

Across the cafeteria, a hand slapped loudly down on a tabletop. "—have to make a decision soon!" Subchief Sano's angry voice filled the room.

"Calm down, Caterzina." Another of the Fulls, a man named Dr. Howsie, spoke in a loud but oddly calming voice. Dr. Howsie was a biologist. He often came around the rover stations asking for the latest reports on plants and animals so he could study them. "We need to learn more. We still have time—"

"Not much," Sano ground out, and even though her voice was lower now, such a hush had fallen over the cafeteria that everyone must have heard it.

Yuka felt as if something stirred and sloshed the soup in her stomach. What if the robot she'd seen meant they couldn't land on Sulis? What if something or someone else already lived there and wouldn't welcome them?

Or what if the robot could give them information about the planet, information that could help them decide what to do?

Maybe I didn't even see it, Yuka told herself. I won't say anything until I'm sure.

A little voice inside her head told her there might not be time to be sure, but she pushed it away and ate her soup.

Yuka did not have to return to her console until the morning; even in their desperate circumstances, people needed time to eat and sleep to continue doing their jobs. But as she lay awake in her bunk, thinking about the strange robot, sleep seemed far away. When Gyllis' slow, even breathing in the other bunk signaled she was asleep, Yuka slipped out of bed and into her clothes. With the lights in the corridor dimmed even further for the ship's artificial night, she could barely see, but she knew the way to the rover control bay.

The bay lay in quiet darkness, standby lights blinking on and off randomly in the gloom like sleepy but watchful eyes. The rovers didn't run at night; there weren't enough operators to form a night shift. While the colonists slept, the rovers recharged their power sources, analyzed samples, and ran reports. Yuka had the bay to herself. She wondered if she could find the strange robot again without prying eyes peering over her shoulder.

The pads of her right-hand fingers on the touchscreen made barely-heard soft thuds as she brought the console to life. Yuka had to concentrate to press lightly with the green-skinned prosthetic fingers on her left hand as well, to keep them from making a much louder noise.

The screen glowed to life, showing the eerie nighttime view of the rover's surroundings, the lake water lapping purplish and dark nearby. It was night on that part of the planet right now, too, so the rover's cameras brought the landscape to life with its thermal imaging. The dark water was cool, but the grasses and trees glowed slightly warmer, their outlines flickering dull yellow on Yuka's screen as she turned the rover. She'd send it back to the trees where she'd seen—maybe seen—the robot. Because the robot might know a lot about the planet. If it was real, maybe it could help them.

But when she turned the rover, she didn't have to send it anywhere. The robot stood right there, balanced on its spidery legs.

It had come looking for her. Well, no, not for her. But for her rover.

Yuka realized she had gasped and covered her mouth with her right hand, thinking. The robot was mostly a dark shape, cool in the thermal imaging, but glowing warmer here and there where its internal systems produced heat.

She waited for it to do something, but it just sat there. Yuka blew out a long breath. All right, she thought. It's real, and this is my chance. I need to communicate with it somehow.

Well, she'd had brief training about what to do if the rover encountered any intelligent life-form. Unlikely, since they hadn't detected any signs of civilization on the planet, but possible.

With a few keystrokes, Yuka opened the rover's communications manual in a small window on her screen. It was capable of communicating in various ways; sending machine language code, displaying basic pictograms and full language databases on its own screen, and even playing text-to-speech sounds through a tiny speaker. She slowly typed a message for the rover to speak, the fingers of her left hand awkward on the touchscreen. She sent it as a databurst too.

Strelka?>

The robot didn't respond in any language Yuka understood, although a string of symbols appeared, glowing blue on part of its dark front surface that hadn't even looked like a screen. It also sent a rush of data at the rover, which received it but did not produce any kind of translation for Yuka.

Hunching over the console, Yuka scanned through the manual. Finally she found:

Rover 1491 Exploration Units are capable of quickly learning and teaching unfamiliar languages through Fredkin gates, statistical analysis, science-based platforming, and lexical chunking.

Yuka frowned. That sounded encouraging, although she didn't understand some of the terms. She kept reading.

By executing the subroutine Language_A36 and allowing the Rover 1491 time to interact with the foreign language user, any language can be deciphered and communication established.

That sounded a bit too easy, but Yuka didn't know what else to try. Scrolling through the commands on her screen, she found Language_A36 and set it to run. The rover sent out a burst of data as unreadable to her as the one the robot had transmitted. She held her breath, wondering how the robot would respond. Answer? Leave? Produce a weird weapon from somewhere and blow her rover to bits?

But after a moment, the robot sent another stream of data to the rover. The word Analyzing displayed briefly on her screen before the rover sent the robot another data burst.

Yuka sat back in her chair and let go the breath she'd been holding. It would take her months or years to learn to communicate with an alien or an artificial intelligence like the robot, but the rover's computer could do it much faster.

Overnight? said the voice of doubt in the back of Yuka's mind.

Maybe, Yuka answered, watching the unreadable data bounce back and forth between the two machines. After a moment, she got up. Maybe now, she could get some sleep.

After breakfast the next morning, Subchief Caterzina Sano stopped all the rover techs on their way into the control bay. They crowded in a knot in the doorway while she stood with folded arms.

"We must find the most habitable places on the planet, and we must find them soon," she said. Her grim face looked older than it had the day before. "Our supplies are running low, and so is our fuel. We have to conserve enough to get everyone down to the surface on the shuttles when we leave the ship for the last time. And we're getting closer to the planet all the time. We're down to days now."

No one answered, but everyone nodded. They'd heard all this before, and Yuka thought everyone understood the situation. But Sano seemed unable to stop reminding them. Arten caught Yuka's eye and rolled his own, making sure Sano couldn't see him, and Yuka smothered a smile.

"If several valleys seem equally welcoming, we may divide into two or more landing teams, to increase our chances of finding the best spot to settle," she continued. "It's extremely important to get all your data collected and analyzed so we can make final decisions."

Yuka frowned. No-one had ever mentioned splitting up before. There were so few of them left from the original numbers on the ship—dividing them on the planet didn't make sense. Others in the group seemed about to say something, but the look in Sano's eyes stopped them. She turned and left them to get to work. People whispered and grumbled, but Yuka tuned them out. She'd worry about it later. She had to see what had happened with the rover and the robot.

Yuka brought her rover console to life and pushed the camera control to point straight down at the ground when the screen powered on. She didn't want anyone looking over her shoulder and seeing anything to make them ask questions. She'd spend a couple of minutes looking at the data from last night and then send the rover about its usual business.

Her report screen showed page after page of communications data between the rover and the robot. She scrolled through them quickly. The first pages were pure gibberish. Strings of numbers, unrecognizable symbols, and then...scientific formulas? The symbols and numbers changed to pictograms, and finally, an alphabet appeared. The formulas came again. Yuka felt butterflies of excitement in her stomach. Had the machines found common ground and begun to communicate with each other?

She glanced around, but everyone was busy with their rovers. She opened the communications screen and, after flexing her mechanized fingers to lubricate the joints, typed in a data message to send to the robot.

The robot returned a data string, which appeared on Yuka's screen as gibberish, but then her rover offered a translation. Controller acknowledged. Pass code?>

Pass code? Yuka had no pass code to use for a robot that hadn't even come from the Strelka! She thought for a moment.

she sent.

Yuka pressed her lips together. She'd managed to set up communications with an alien robot, and it wouldn't talk to her without a pass code? This was ridiculous. But maybe if it wouldn't give her information about the planet, it could tell her other things.

So what is a Controller? she wondered. But maybe she shouldn't let the robot know she didn't know that. She typed and sent,

.>

Hmm. Like the Strelka had sent the rovers ahead? Well, maybe that was something. The Controllers might not be here yet.

Yuka sighed, but she felt like she was getting somewhere. This robot seemed to be an advance information-gatherer, like the rovers. But if the Controllers were coming to this planet— she gulped. When? Might as well ask.

.>

So maybe it didn't know. Okay, how long had the robot been here? The Strelka rovers had been there for five days. But how could she get a meaningful answer about that from the robot? A day or a year would probably mean something completely different to the robot compared to her Earth-based sense of time. Yuka considered what she already knew about this planet.

The planet's tilt and rotation speed combined to give it a "day" that was longer than Earth's—about 28 hours. That's how long it took between one sunrise and the next on Sulis. On the Strelka, they'd started lengthening the day and night cycles so the colonists could begin to adjust.

Yuka bit back a yelp of frustration. She didn't know how the robot decided what information it would give her and what it considered secret. Pressing her lips together, she awkwardly typed, She held her breath, waiting for a reply.