Genocide (85 hits)
Category: UberMadness! EntryRating: 2 on 1 review (Rate this item) (V)
Submitted by TheRedUnderYourBed (View user info) at 2006-09-24 11:17:27 EDT
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Mission log, transmission now in progress. Twenty-one hundred hours, gee-em-tee. Live vocal feed down to Earth, but the ionosphere's playing up a bit on the night hemisphere. Nice fireworks for those in the northern hemisphere, but the data processing from the computers will have to wait for better bandwidth.
Another routine mission to the radio telescope monitoring substation. The sensors are all taking care of themselves, as are the primary systems, and repair robots take care of the maintenance work. Still, for some stupid reason, mission control still insists on sending people up here to send back the data. At least it's cheap enough, what with the skyhook swinging us up here at the price of gravity. It's a fun ride, and a good way to acclimatise to space travel, I suppose.
Above, in the forward viewing portal, the dawn reflects brightly off the clouds.
This is not quite true. For spacecraft, the only real reference to up or down is the viewing window itself. Sure, even in the twenty-first century there was rotation-based pseudo-gravity, and by the beginning of the twenty-third, industrial neutronium production meant that even a thin sheeting on the bottom of deep-space craft added rather a lot of weight to the matter - I'm sorry, you'll have to pardon the pun.
It's a bit odd, because it feels like you're hanging on the underside of the world, with an infinite drop below. On the other hand, there's nothing below to hit. Out in the greater universe, direction is based entirely on reference points, and for the most part those reference points are arbitrary. So of course, up isn't the same for everyone. The basic thing is that what you can see at the pre-defined top of the viewing portal is a planet, at sunrise, with a lot of light reflecting back up to me.
Another thing is, being as we're in orbit around Earth here, sunrise, or its equivalent, comes every ninety minutes or so. That means in an eight-hour shift, five or six dawns is ordinary. Not that day length doesn't vary massively depending on the particular planetary body and its spin. But in this case the day length is artificially shortened by the fact that we're spinning around faster than it, and it's blocking the light from the sun, rather than the planet's natural rotation carrying us into the shadow. I hope you didn't fall asleep during my speech there.
I suppose you're wondering what is about to happen. Natural enough, as, if you weren't interested, you wouldn't be listening. I'm about to check the radio log for recent messages and check for any anomalies that may correspond to an intelligent signal. We've had a few, over the years, but mostly from species either too far away to reply again yet, or last-ditch death speeches of aging races.
For some damned reason, a good half of all intelligent species in earshot have lived on planets in some way too unstable to support them for more than the few million years they needed to evolve, before the environment went ape-shit. The only messages those types sent were the galactic equivalent of wall-graffiti, basically saying 'we were here'. Same thing almost happened to Earth, though we had a fair hand in that one.
This looks rather promising, just now. It seems most of the work has been done for us; it's in twentieth century German. I'll set the translator on it, and look up the history file.
Here it is. In the twentieth century, it went damn-near unnoticed when the first radio signals were unwittingly cast out into the galaxy. First sound, then flat-screen pictures were broadcast with abandon. What with a planetary scale war about to be unleashed, nobody paid much attention to the fact that most of what was being broadcast was little more than propaganda.
Some old racist turds, by the name of Hitler and the Nazi party, sent out some of the first TV pictures. Some two hundred twenty five light-years closer to the core, a bunch of aliens have got his message. They didn't much like what Hitler had to say, and I've just received a letter of reply condemning his fascist ass and hoping we beat the shit out of him, which we did, in the truly gruesome fashion of projectile warfare.
And the translator is done. Ding! Wow, that's - well I don't know quite how to say it, but it looks like we've got some neighbours. It'll probably take a week or so to get it all organised, but it looks like that old genocidal maniac did us a favour. If the first signal they replied to had been the original SETI transmission, we'd have been waiting another thirty years for it. That was a pretty ambiguous message, too, so we'd have got nothing like that kind of understanding on the first round.
I'll make a surface upload to the main processing station just as soon as I get a clear transmission path, estimated time of arrival ten minutes. That's one hell of an aurora we got out there tonight folks, so get to a window if you can. The lights are on, and it looks like one hell of a party. We've got a whiles to get ready, so take your time because we haven't built the car yet.
Transmission out, twenty-one hundred and five, gee-em-tee. Have a nice day.
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Submitted by Genko (user info) at 2007-06-04 23:48:53 EDT (#)
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