Chapter 27: Chapter 28 ICARUS Lighting up the Ring

Icarus stood at the edge of his bed. In front of him floated an image of the Rings of Titan. One of the rings had a cable that stretched all the way around the gas giant; every single asteroid in that ring was now connected.  

The thick cable linking every large object in the ring wasn’t just designed to hold the objects together. Inside was a fibre optic cable and an electricity cable. The length of the cable meant data travelling through it would have a noticeable half-second delay – not enough that any two people on opposite sides of Titan wouldn’t be able to talk easily, but it would be noticeable.

The electric cables weren’t in use yet. Icarus hadn’t started laying the solar panels. The design was such that the side of the planet that was in light should be able to feed electricity to the dark side.

Icarus and Ship were about to start installing solar panels when they encountered a mystery.  Icarus couldn’t be sure, but it looked like an artefact. But not a human one. Not something dropped by one of the ANTs. Lex assured him it wasn’t anything from the ship. It’s impossible for us to manufacture that were the words Ship had used. So maybe it was alien.

“Can I see it yet?” Icarus called out.

“It’s still being scanned,” Ship replied.

They found it in one of the fabricators. They had specialised fabricators that mined resources, turning them into pellets; raw resources that other fabricators could use to create anything.

Asteroids were loaded into these fabricators. Then a while later the door would open, revealing stacks of raw pellets inside. Iron, gold, silicon. There was a lot of gold on these asteroids – so much of it that Icarus was contemplating painting the ring in gold. He had added a golden coating to the cable running around the ring.

Icarus was making coffee when he got the alert from Ship that one of the fabricators had stopped working. It was processing asteroids but failed to process this one particular object.

Fabricators are very powerful and complex machines, designed to process anything. They break anything down into its constituent parts so other fabricators can recombine them into almost anything.

However, this fabricator couldn’t break the material down – it seemed to be having trouble identifying it. But this wasn’t what bothered Icarus. It was the symbols on the side of the object that triggered his fascination.

“The scans are complete,” Ship called out.

That pulled Icarus out of his daydream.

Ship threw a screen in front of Icarus. It was made up of multiple elements in the periodic table, and a few elements not found on the periodic table as they currently knew it. He had highlighted where on the table they should be.  

Ship pointed to the location of the material on the periodic table. “It’s stronger than any material we thought possible.”

Icarus swiped away the view. “I don’t care about that. Show me the writing. Bring me the object.”

An ANT quickly scuttled across the floor and handed the object to Icarus.  

Icarus took hold of it. “This is what I wanted.”

It was large and square, about the size of a stack of books. It was a deep, shiny black – he could see his reflection in it. He spun the object around. On each of the sides were etchings that appeared to be multiple repeating patterns that looked like two arrows pointed towards each other.

He looked closer at the sides, turning the object around slowly. The sides weren’t flat, but bowed inwards. Icarus turned it sideways. He could see that if he placed it on a table, only the corners would touch the table. The middle and sides wouldn’t touch a table or flat surface.

Icarus wondered if it was a design choice, to prevent the markings from wearing off. He held the object closer. There were hundreds of markings on it. They didn’t run left to right, but rather started in the centre and moved outwards in a clockwise direction. At least to Icarus’s human brain it appeared that’s how the writing looked.

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He was barely able to contain his excitement. Just the thought that what he was looking at could be alien writing gave him goosebumps. The whole reason he decided to go on this adventure was to communicate with aliens, to try and decode a language.     

Icarus held the object up to show Ship. “See these markings? It’s clearly a language, Ship.”

Icarus knew there were generally six different systems of writing humans used. The most commonly known systems were logographic and alphabetic. But he knew with aliens there could even be a seventh system of writing.

Icarus began to talk through how he could decipher it. “Ship, most people think deciphering a language that uses the English alphabet would be much easier than translating hieroglyphics. It’s true that there are thousands of different symbols. And in a lot of ways it isn’t easy to identify a pattern. That’s what all logographic languages have – each symbol represents a different word.”

The ideas and theories were flowing into Icarus’s head. Hieroglyphics was the one idea that he kept coming back to. He took a deep breath. “But when translating a human language there’s a few assumptions you never have to question. There are so many shared concepts. We have eyes that see in an extremely narrow wavelength of the electromagnetic spectrum. There are only 840 different sounds we can actually make with our mouths. Our sense of smell and hearing is extremely limited. These things constrain what our language might be.”

Icarus was jumping up and down at this point, just thinking about what this language could potentially be. “We can’t anthropomorphise this artefact. We have to leave our preconceptions at the door,” he said.

Icarus looked at the square object once more and flicked it with his finger. It made a thudding sound, followed by a slow ringing which vibrated through it. He looked down at the lush carpeted floor.

“Lex, can you remove the carpet projection?”

Icarus watched as the carpet disappeared from one side of the room to the other. It looked like a wave passing, leaving only metal ship floors. It looked cold to Icarus. Even though he couldn’t feel the cold, his mind was telling him not to place his feet on the ground. He jumped up onto the counter top and sat there, his duck-shaped feet dangling off the edge.

“This is solid? There’s nothing inside of this?” Icarus asked.

“Correct,” Ship replied with a nod.

Icarus threw the object in an arc towards the solid steel floor. It flew through the air and thumped on the ground. Rather than bouncing, it thumped down hard on one corner.

“Lex, can you bring the carpet back? But leave the spot where the object is with no carpet on it.”

The wave of projections rolled in from two sides of the room. This time it looked like two carpets were being rolled out, somehow meeting perfectly in the middle. The section of floor with the object sticking out had a perfectly circular hole in it.

“I’m loving the effects you’re doing here,” Icarus praised Lex.  

Icarus jumped off the table, landing on the soft carpet, his cartoon feet pressing into the floor. He walked over to the object. He could see it was balancing on one corner which was wedged about three centimetres into the steel. It was so hard it had indented the floor.

Icarus had to wiggle it a few times to get it out. He threw it up in the air a few times and caught it. “I believe the shape of the object is the message it’s trying to communicate. It’s obviously designed to survive.”

He jumped back onto the table. There were many possibilities to explain what it could be. It could be a random piece of a spacecraft that had fallen off a ship coming through this system. “Lex, give me a breakdown of how often each of these symbols are used. Order them by which appears the most.”

Icarus knew figuring out which codes appeared most often was the first step in decoding any human language. He began putting that theory to use, to see if it worked on alien languages too.

He briefly remembered about the ring world he was building. He addressed Ship. “Can you sort out the grid? Get the solar panels live. I want to figure this object out.”

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