[68793] ChaeyoungUnknown“What part do I play in this, then?” Chaeyoung asked Garcia.“We have made little progress. I would like to change that.”“Progress on what, exactly?” she asked firmly. “Do you mean understanding the wonders of this place? Or do you mean progress in backwards engineering whatever that xenolith is?”Garcia gave a resigned sigh and shook his head. “This is the source of the tension between me and our leadership—”“Ninya Blanca and Sato?”“Yes. They believe we should focus on reverse engineering only and that we can ignore the rest—leave it to history to navel gaze. But this xenolith is something completely inhuman! It is obvious we need to understand these creatures, and that will help us reverse engineer their technology more effectively.”“If the xenolith is even their technology.”Garcia looked shocked, like Chaeyoung had just slapped his face. She waved at the vantablack, egg-like, xenolith.“You just assume this was made by these same creatures that died surrounding it, right?”Garcia nodded. “Yes, of course.”“Why though?” She gave Garcia a condescending and detached smile. “That xenolith differs from the rest of this place—this place seems like it’s carved out of a metallic asteroid, but that xenolith…” she shook her head. “It’s something else—it could be from somewhere else. And why are they all surrounding it? Why did they die here? Was it cultural? Did they die in a conflict? Or was it pure, base instinct to die together? We shouldn’t presume everything in this place has a common origin, or a single explanation. Now that we know technological alien life has existed, it’s obviously far more common in the Milky Way than we ever imagined, and that xenolith could just as easily have been as alien to them as they are to us.”Garcia’s face contorted as if he was really considering her words. He was silent for a few moments, so Chaeyoung turned back to look at the alien forms piled up around the xenolith. The more she thought about it, the more she thought it looked like a crush of bodies, locked in combat like some medieval Earther battlefield, crushed by sheer density as their enemies pressed inward. A mutual destruction trying to control the xenolith. She set aside the strange thought as something to investigate later.“An interesting possibility,” Garcia eventually answered. “That certainly would explain the other xenoliths.”“There’s more of these things?”“Yes. We found them in a tunnel before it collapsed. Let me show you.”Garcia led Chaeyoung out of the inner dome with the xenolith to another secured structure near the perimeter of the larger core lab dome. He shooed away other researchers from the closed lab space as the pair entered. Inside were a few simple desks to hold equipment, a handful of stowage bins—nothing that seemed unusual for a field site—except for the four xenoliths. A metallic construction scaffolding surrounded each xenolith, holding a vast array of scientific instruments and probes, just like the first xenolith she had seen. Grayson Services Group, or whoever discovered this site, obviously built up these tools around the xenoliths.Yet, these xenoliths looked different. Some xenoliths appeared damaged, while others seemed dissected petal by petal like a pinecone. These partially deconstructed xenoliths had a skin that was more of a bleak gray, rather than an entirely unreflective vantablack, though the least damaged xenolith seemed to almost pulsate with darkness. Only one of the three was fully intact and darker-than-void black.“Nawa oh!”[89][Di Lingua]: Woah! ↑ Chaeyoung exclaimed in Di Lingua. No, it wasn’t like the other xenoliths. Something strange covered this one, the one surrounded by alien bodies. How had she not noticed that at first? Whatever they were, they looked biological, like kelp fronds or strange avian appendages made of an opalescent purple mesh, except they were reminiscent of the various scientific tools that Grayson used to study the xenoliths. It had taken her a few moments to realize that these were not additional physics instruments you might find in a lab, but something quite alien.“What are those protrusions on that one?” Garcia pulled something from an outer pocket on his environmental suit and handed the ink display to Chaeyoung as he explained. “We aren’t sure what their purpose is, but our own engineers have characterized their construction. Materials-wise.”Chaeyoung flipped through the various pages on the rough and scratched ink display. A lot of material science jargon filled the pages, but it meant very little to her. Only the information about where they had found the xenoliths interested her. Through a now collapsed tunnel in a large room shaped like a Tokamak reactor chamber—a torus shape with a central pillar. There were manifold connections to other tunnels along the outer perimeter of the toroid. Strange protrusions and instruments similar in style to those attached to the xenolith covered the central pillar. Around this central pillar were the four xenoliths, almost in the same condition as they were now, except there was now a lot of human equipment. At least one of the broken xenoliths also had an alien corpse entangled within its twisted and broken pinecone petals, which was no longer the case.Chaeyoung looked up at the human-built scaffolding, then back down to the image on the ink display. She did not want to say what immediately came to her mind, that the protrusions seemed like human instrument scaffolding and that it seemed like the aliens of this place were themselves studying and reverse engineering xenoliths. It left her with a sense of certain doom, and she glanced toward the dome-within-a-dome. “This body,” she pointed to the image of the corpse that was entangled in a broken xenolith, then waved to the xenolith she thought was the same one in the image on the ink display. “It was found entwined with this artifact?”“Yes, that’s correct.”“Did you keep any samples of that?”Garcia noticeably shifted his weight and seemed agitated.“Is there a problem?” Chaeyoung asked after Garcia had not answered in nearly a minute.He shook his head. “No no! It’s just…well…this place is very dangerous.”“Look, drop the cut. You want me to invest emotionally in this project of yours? Sato claims I will get to live if I help. I presume you’re going to convince Mimo and Ali to focus on these xenoliths, and then you want me to… what, exactly? Do basic research? Bring up questions? Feed information to the physicists so they can reverse engineer some alien computer?”“That’s…essentially correct, yes.”“Then why are you holding back critical information?”“Our early efforts were very sloppy, to say the least. That’s part of the reason we abandoned them.”“If you want the research to be less sloppy, then I need access. Full access.”Garcia gave a long, resigned sigh. “Fine. We didn’t keep a physical sample, as we deemed it too dangerous, but we have all the data we collected in our exocortex.”“Ah,” Chaeyoung said with a knowing nod. “Of course, you use an exocortex.”Garcia looked offended. “I take it you’re familiar?”“I did work in Jay Sea for two and a half years, so yes.”“And you were less than impressed?”“I just don’t see what the appeal is for exocortices over other autonomous research architectures, especially for scientific applications.”Garcia shrugged with his hands. “We don’t need to get into the arguments now. Whatever your opinion of them is, they work, they’re well tested, and you will have to integrate into our system if you want full access. We don’t use hardlines, only softlines, so it’s non-invasive, EAR-only.”“If that’s the only way, then fine.” Just another compromise, she thought to herself as Garcia led her back out to the main dome. As they walked back to the exit, Chaeyoung bent low for a closer look at the mash of squid-ink black leafy veins. When alive, the wavey fronds of glow grass were bioluminescent and reacted to the touch like an anaconda wrapping itself around its next meal—like some kind of selectively carnivorous plant, only the roots served as its jaws. This carpet in the core lab was quite inert. Chaeyoung wanted to touch it, rub the black inky material leaking out of the crushed leaves between the fingers of her environmental suit’s glove, but her memories of her last run-in with glow grass caused her to pause and simply look.“Dr. No?”She ignored Garcia and kept looking at the dead glow grass mat inside the core lab. There was sympathetic pain in her joints from her memories of glow grass wrapped around her HEAT BRACE glove. At least this time there was no space-cold ice she might accidentally sublimate with her radiators if she fell over. She was aware someone was now looming over her shoulder, but she didn’t turn.“It’s safe to touch that stuff,” an unfamiliar voice advised.“Ah, Dr. Daniels. Have you met our latest addition?” Garcia said gregariously. “You can call me Ty,” the strange voice said.A hand appeared in front of Chaeyoung, palm up. Chaeyoung looked over her shoulder and saw Dr. Daniels—Ty—in an environmental suit standing behind her and to her right. She turned back to the glow grass carpet and abraded one leaf between the fingers of her glove. It was strange, like rubbing fine sand. Rough, but not providing much resistance between her fingers and pouring out almost like a liquid. She grabbed at these long root fibers, but they were flaccid and dead. Their flesh fell away, revealing something like white threads. Chaeyoung imagined the roots like a flexible skeletal structure, once again putting the glow grass somewhere between terrestrial kingdoms of life. It was plant-like in so many ways, yet distressingly animalistic. Stationary most of the time but evolved to grip tightly to hard materials and dissolve them almost like a leech.She thought she could even hear the bone-roots crunch in her fingers as she dug into the mossy root bed. “Why do they turn black?” “Magnetite,” Ty said as he stooped down beside her. “The grass seems to produce magnetite when decomposing. Pumping this space full of oxygen essentially killed them, slowly.”She turned to see a flushed, pink-skinned ovular face with bored green-blue eyes. Ty had a gregarious smirk, but it was discordant and unconnected to his unsettlingly steady and non-blinking stare. “Erm, prastitey?”[90][Di Lingua]: Erm, excuse me? ↑ She stumbled as she tried to shake the discomfort of the scientist’s emotionless glare. “Why did you kill it?”“They’re hungry little bastards.”Chaeyoung clenched her fist. “I know.”The scientist ignored her comment and continued. “Found high oxygen content makes them behave—which is how we established the core lab—but the high oxygen also kills them. Two stones, one bird.”“And outside this dome?” “We tried clear cutting them, but they’re like a weed. Anything with a high iron content gets covered. They leave our dome alone, most things ceramic too, but the walls of that cavern…it’s basically a waste of resources to clear anywhere but inside this dome. And every time they reproduce…it gets messy.”Intonation made Chaeyoung think it was supposed to be a joke, so she smiled politely, but turned back and tore at more of the grass, grimacing at the crunch the root-bones made.“How often does that occur?”“Twice every Solar year.”Chaeyoung kept picking at the dead root bed of the glow grass and caught a glint of metal beneath the fibrous material. She gently pulled up a mat of the dead roots and exposed a fist-sized section of smoothed, yet pocked, metal that was covered in an overlapping triangular pattern. “Is this—?”“Yes, it’s octahedrite—like a meteorite. The entire structure is carved out of the stuff.”“Structure? Is it not a cave attached to the mining tunnels?”“Not at all. There’s the old Wharton and Wake mine, dug into the rich aluminum and mineral deposits, and then there’s this metal rich hollowed out asteroid. Wharton and Wake dug down into the deposit, found an iron deposit on a survey, and instead found this sealed alien habitat.”“Buried kilometers under ice and hidden beneath the metal rich surface deposits,” Chaeyoung said as she rubbed her hand against the material, perceiving a consistency to the gentle ripples along its surface. “It’s…incredibly regular for a naturally occurring asteroid.”“We have all the data collated in the exocortex.”“Speaking of which, Daniels, we were just on our way…Dr. No?”***There was barely any time to speak to Mimo and Ali when Garcia brought her back to their shared hab. According to Garcia, it was their turn to see the core lab, and Chaeyoung needed to connect to the exocortex. She told each of them anchuan shiyong for luck, waited as soldiers put together an exocortex flat, and listened as a technician guided her through the connection, acclimation, and integration process.While being wired up, and connected via EAR to the exocortex, her thoughts were solely on magnetite blood and iron asteroids. She stripped down, connected electrical leads all over her body, put on clothes again to keep herself warm, and laid down in a specially designed padded flat. Then she closed her eyes so her EAR could more fully immerse her into the exocortex’s data hallucinations. The whole setup resembled a common virtual reality system, but scientists designed this system with precision and extremely high fidelity.It took Chaeyoung a few hours to acclimate to the sensor input. Haptic feedback, not just in her fingertip implants, but all over her body from electrical leads. Smell, temperature, textures—she perceived all the senses as the exocortex interpretation layer fine-tuned itself to her unique nervous system. Eventually, she began seeing coherent images on her EAR.At first, it was very little more than vague shapes and fractals and flashes of light, but slowly it resolved into shimmering EAR windows, user interfaces, and finally, she fully integrated into the exocortex. There, in front of her, was the entire surface of the planet, and it even had its name displayed. She was on an icy world called Tritonis Prime in the Sipapu system.The image was as clear as if she was seeing it with her own eyes. She reached out to touch it. On her EAR, she saw her hand reach out, even though she knew her arm wasn’t really moving. With her fingers wrapped over the icy planetoid, feeling its frosty surface in her palm. With a flick, she spun it around. Data spilled into the corner of her vision, and sensor connections flashed on and off along the surface of Tritonis Prime as the exocortex pinged them for data. When she saw that, she almost laughed in elation, but the realization that it was all false data crushed it. She did not have access to the surface systems, at least not yet. “Fuck.”This was why she didn’t like exocortices. They were more like a nervous system, grown rather than engineered, which meant they had all these connections to every database, system, or tool Grayson Services Group had wanted to network. This included a communications system to the outside world, so for obvious reasons, they had cut her off from these. Yet, the exocortex retained memory of these former connections and retrieved data from the random noise in the circuits of the network at the edges of the space Chaeyoung could see, creating the illusion of her still being connected, like phantom pain for a severed nerve. Phantom data and hallucination.If she had been involved in the creation of this exocortex the hallucinated data would feel a certain way, like in a lucid dream it might appear garbled or obviously nonsense. She was told people who built their own exocortices could immediately identify synthetic, phantom, data from real data. By following this method, the Jay Sea project on Europa usefully deployed exocortices. That had taken years, not hours. Hallucinations and phantom data would pose a problem for her.“Show me the mine and the research complex.”In moments, the entire mine, the alien doorway, and the strange alien complex appeared as a three-dimensional model. As Ty had claimed, the complex was extensive—if the map was to be trusted. In many ways, it was similar in layout to the Mu Herculis derelict, only it wasn’t a spacecraft, and it was about three times the total size. Exterior ice flows had caused half of the tunnels to flood or collapse, but the alien structure had maintained pressure. “What is the source of the atmosphere?”Within the blink of an eye, three portions of the alien complex flickered in yellow. She selected one point with her hand. Images, data, and various theories popped open on EAR windows all around her. Oke, she thought to herself. This was interesting, but not what she wanted to focus on in this moment.“Show me the artifact samples that were collected, order by relevance or interest.”Too much data flew past her on EAR windows, but it began organizing itself into various categories that might be interesting. It still wasn’t exactly what she wanted, but she learned a lot more about the alien complex. One region of the complex revealed evidence of recently defunct autonomous machines that had mined radioactive materials, while another region contained strange metallic forms that vaguely resembled alien bodies. Silvery metal filled the semi-translucent forms instead of leathery flesh. Within large, seemingly intentional, flooded regions of the complex, explorers came across various types of living creatures in different states. These were all of interest to her, but she still had the vision of the alien body smashed into the xenolith stuck in her mind.She imagined the xenolith, moved her hands as if she was constructing it from clay. Slowly, an imitation of the alien artifact appeared in front of her. She pinched the newly formed three-dimensional form, rotated it, ensured it looked correct.“I am looking for samples related to this artifact, either found in it, near it, or associated with it in some way.”Hundreds of windows of interest disappeared. A handful jiggled for attention as the exocortex highlighted them. “There! Give me all data on that sample.”Her blood went cold as the details surrounding the xenolith’s recovery scrolled on her EAR. Multiple deaths from environmental suit breaches on sharp edges of the xenolith. Unclear causes of death, but signs consistent with anaphylactic shock. Grayson found multiple neurotoxins, chiral allergens, and hostile single cellular contamination. Massive amounts of what appeared to be ferrofluid in the bloodstreams of the deceased. Characterized alien samples contained similar levels of ferrofluids. After studying them, Grayson had destroyed these samples to prevent future exposure. The researchers collected samples from all alien bodies and tested them for ferrofluid contaminants. About half of the bodies curled around the xenolith had even higher levels than the destroyed sample, so they isolated the xenolith rather than destroy it—but research slowed down.The results were interesting, providing a detailed chemical composition of the alien body, comparisons to other samples, and a distribution of ferrofluid samples. It took her hours to pour through all the data, cross-correlate it with other artifacts and samples. Her first realization was that the ferrofluid also seemed to contain polyoxometalate—molecular metal oxide clusters—in very high concentrations.She wasn’t sure what the implications of this metal oxide cluster structures found inside a ferrofluid could be, and the exocortex did not help. A few hours struggling to understand, to digest the massive amount of data, asking the exocortex to run various analysis, and she wasn’t making headway, except a growing sense that the xenoliths seemed even more out of place compared to the rest of the complex. She found her attention drifting, and she began focusing more on the glow grass.The glow grass was an oxygen producer, though that very oxygen was lethal to the glow grass in large enough quantities. It was a familiar scenario to early Earth, when the earliest microbial life almost destroyed itself by producing oxygen. This alien grass reproduced from spores, like a fungus or mushroom, twice a Solar year. It had several metal and composite digesting enzymes that Grayson had characterized. It seemed to, literally, eat the iron of the surrounding asteroid and turned that remediated iron into various iron sulfate compounds.As Ty had alluded to, the iron sulfate compounds in the glow grass would react with lithium hydroxide salts from brine pools around the alien structure, that could react anaerobically to produce magnetite, hydrogen gas, and water, but this process seemed to speed up post-death. This turned the glow grass black, but the production of the magnetite would naturally stop after exposure to highly oxygenated atmospheres.The apparent anaerobic nature of the glow grass and the lack of curiosity from prior researchers startled her. Oxygen was toxic to the glow grass, yet they had some mobility, complex cell structure, and were quite large. All very unusual, even once thought impossible, for an anaerobic life-form. Oxygen was necessary for high-energy processes such as complex multicellular structure and locomotion. Though, Chaeyoung realized the glow grass was more allergic to oxygen than truly anaerobic—the percentage had to be quite high before it was outright lethal, and the grass could still proliferate if the oxygen was in the handful of percent range.“Huh.”If the grass was a kind of iron-eater, why were complex ferrofluids a core part of the xenolith? For that matter, why had glow grass not grown onto the xenoliths like it had covered almost every other iron surface? There must have been some kind of feedback between the two, otherwise the conditions of the ferrofluid seemed akin to the agar in a petri dish for the glow grass—it should have grown even more densely on the xenoliths than anywhere else. Liquid iron for the iron-eaters to eat.The thump of boots vibrating through the floor of the hab brought her mind back to the world outside of the exocortex. How long had it been? She pulled up a clock on her EAR, saw she had been laying down in this flat with her eyes closed for twelve straight hours. If it was accurate, Chaeyoung guessed she did not feel sore because of the sub-Lunar gravity. She yawned, her stomach grumbled, her head pounded from dehydration, and she opened her eyes and sat up.“Fuuuuck,” she groaned to herself in the face of the blinding brightness of the overhead lights.“What were you up to?” Ali asked.She rubbed her eyes, pulled the exocortex electrodes off her body. “Catching up. Getting ahead.” She opened her eyes cautiously, seeing if the light was still too bright. Ali was sitting in a chair next to the flat, looking tiredly at Chaeyoung. She smiled at him shifted to the edge of the flat, using it like a chair as she took the last of the exocortex electrodes off.“How about you two?”“I think we might understand the alien circuitry in the xenoliths.”“Nawa oh, already?”“We never told you what we were working on earlier, did we?”Chaeyoung shook her head. “No, but Garcia did. Closed time-like curve computers. CTCCs. Predicted to be a different class of computer based on ERR–AL physics, revolutionizing computation, and changing our understanding of the exclusion zone itself. You pioneered them with Vis before she left the project. Is that about, right?”“Ah. More or less,” Ali said then leaned over, held his face in his hands, let out a long, tortured sigh. “The xenoliths are the most advanced CTCC circuits we have ever seen, but they’re definitely CTCCs.”The reaction took her aback. She frowned, uncertain how to handle the situation, and looked at Mimo. He had slumped down on the floor next to his bed pod and stared blankly at the far wall. His eyes were unfocused, his arms limp.“You’re certain?” Chaeyoung asked Ali delicately. “That wasn’t a lot of time—”“Yes!” Mimo said. “We’re certain.”Ali sighed, lifted his head. “Don’t mind him.”Chaeyoung shrugged with her hands. “Neva palava.”[91][Di Lingua]: No problem. ↑Ali nodded. “We’re certain, Chaeyoung. And it’s bad. Even if we drag our feet, even if we sabotage anything we can get away with, we’re probably only months away from bootstrapping an entirely independent research program based on CTCCs.”Chaeyoung tilted her head, trying to understand the implications.“I mean they won’t need us—any of us—in about two months. Three if we’re lucky. They’ll be able to do everything they want on their own.”“Pol tsow.”[92][Di Lingua]: Shit fuck. ↑