The Rosetto Stone : Too Good To Be True

[rosetto 0]

Sal awoke in his bunk distraught. He usually slept very well on QoB but for some reason he had tossed and turned for several hours until he finally gave in to sleeplessness, got up, dressed and found his way to the bridge. It was empty except for the 2^nd in command, Chris Nickles, who huddled in the command chair shaking quietly to himself. Sal politely nodded and wished him a good evening. He received only indiscriminant grumbles in return for his efforts. He didn’t press his luck and walked over to the helm controls.

 

 

 

All was as expected, ‘Steady As She Goes’. This was the part that ‘Dirt-Lovers’ hated; thought was incredibly boring and deemed a necessary evil. Interstellar spaceflight was vast distances and unimaginable to most people who spent their lives within one star system or worse, one planet. Sal thought it must be like those people of the late 21^st century, Earth, who were just exploring their own system. Mars was over three weeks away and the colonies on Europa and around Titan were just glimmers in the eyes of wild scientists or science fiction writers.

 

 

 

Sal looked at the forward viewer and stared for what seemed like hours. He had been in this seat before, traveling from one system to another, covering the distance, but this was distinctly different than what he had expected. The sky outside of an stellar system was filled with points of light in almost every conceivable direction but that wasn’t what he saw ahead. It was a ghostly image with fewer and fewer stars in their path. Beyond were still stars but their distance was so great that only the brightest and largest ones pierced the darkness. The others simply formed a deep purple haze across the viewer. This was why ancient humans named it The Milky Way.

 

Shaking himself back to reality, Sal quickly flipped over to a tactical view and checked the tracking systems which kept QoB in sync with the other two vessels of their rag-tag convoy. There was nothing unusual here either and although he was quite pleased with the situation, he couldn’t help but feel uneasy. Still, he had nothing to report and so he set the helm back to auto and quietly left the bridge bound for his quarters.

 

 

 

His was the first stateroom after leaving the neck of QoB. A drink dispenser sat in the hall just outside his door. He grabbed a cold tea and re-entered his room. The lights came on and he could see the pile of papers he’d left hours ago stacked neatly on his desk. Sipping his tea, he picked up the tablet that had the translator routine loaded. Then he scanned in another of the images provided by Dr. Phantos that came from the first expedition. The image contained several paragraphs of the alien text and was accompanied with diagrams that were dominated by circles and arcs. It appeared to be some kind of mathematical or scientific document which, he thought, was the reason that the expedition had taken it.

 

 

 

‘High-light then translate’

 

 

 

Gibberish…

 

 

 

Sal sighed deeply and looked at the document, then at the tablet. He reviewed the code behind the translate function to insure that nothing had changed from before. It was the same. It had to be ‘luck’.

 

 

 

Being a meticulous scientist, Sal rechecked the document that he and Selek had used and it translated just fine. This was the progress of science; one step forward and two steps back. Sal would have to regroup and reevaluate exactly what Selek had done and determine why it seemed to work. ‘Well’, he thought, ‘At least I won’t be sitting here twiddling my thumbs.’

Edited March 20, 2011 by rosetto