Tales from the Inbox: The Rosetta Halo

2946-07-31 - Tales from the Inbox: The Rosetta Halo

This entry was submitted by Jozefina U., who has already been featured in a Feedback Loop episode of the vidcast. Jozefina is currently the mayor of a town of about 1,500 settlers on the frontier world of Botterhill, which is primarily known in the Core Worlds for the discovery of the so-called Rosetta Halo, a functional artifact likely built by the so-called Xenarchs. Jozefina and her two associates sold the artifact to a consortium of Core Worlds research universities for an unbelievable fortune in 2931, and it has allowed xenoarchaeologists to construct a partial translation of the Xenarchs' written language.

In this submission, Jozefina discussed the situation in which she discovered the Rosetta Halo. This story is probably household knowledge on Botterhill, but here in the Core Worlds, the haphazard and accidental nature of the find may come as a surprise to many of our audience.

Jozefina was the first to rappel into the grotto. Proper explorers would have brought a gravitc lifter or even a sled, but her little band was anything but, and had to rely on cable and tie-down spikes hammered into rock the old-fashioned way. It was all their lighter’s fabricator had been able to churn out on short notice.

“What’s it look like?” Anita called down, her head silhouetted against the tiny oval of sky at the top of the shaft.

Jozefina saw nothing but damp, dripping darkness in every direction, so she activated the lights secured to her wrists and swept them around in a circle. The cave was just that – a cave. It was damp, but fortunately the floor was not underwater – thin runnels of moisture trickled along the floor into a crack near one wall. “It’s big, but there’s not much to it.” She called up. Some of the rocks reflected the light oddly, but that was because they were damp and covered in delicate traceries of flowstone. The cavern wasn’t unpleasant, but compared to some of the larger cave networks around the settlement, it was fairly uninspiring. The region’s largest web of caves had made travel media all the way back in the Core Worlds for its size and grandeur; this one would not even warrant a footnote.

“Damn.” Walter muttered, his quiet voice echoing down. Jozefina knew that to Walter, every cave was a potential motherlode of alien artifacts or palace-like cascade of ancient stalagmites that would bring in endless tourism. He set his hopes high, and they were always dashed.

“We’ll, give it a good once-over look anyway.” Anita replied. “I’m sending Walter down.”

The rope jerked as the man hooked his harness into it and began to rappel down after Jozefina. She stepped away to give him a place to land, wandering down the cave’s long axis. Her attention fell on egg-shaped boulder roughly the size of their lighter’s cabin, which sat on a pile of smaller rocks. It was smooth across half its surface and marked with flowstone across the other half. The flowstone seemed to embrace the boulder, as if cradling it. Jozefina deployed the camera unit attached to her helmet and lined up for a few photos. The climb would at least not be a total loss; a few close-ups of the odd formation would be perfect fodder for her datasphere media feed.

As she moved from one interesting perspective to another, Jozefina stepped on something that snapped underfoot. Bending down, she found a long, straight stick of the local wood-analogue, its end sharpened into a point. “Odd.” She said. The wood was damp and probably worm-eaten, but that didn’t explain the sharpened point.

“What was that?” Anita called down.

Jozefina stood, still holding the stick, but she never got around to answering her associate's curiosity. The cavern was suddenly illuminated with a warm yellow-orange light. Confused, the amateur explorer looked up and saw a ring of bright motes slowly orbiting the egg-shaped boulder. There was an almost hypnotic pattern to the lights – and as they moved, they sharpened and grew more numerous, becoming symbols. Alien symbols.

“Woah!” Walter exclaimed. Jozefina turned around to see him disconnecting from the line, gazing up at the symbols. “Jackpot.”

“What?” Anita called again. “Did you use a flare, Joz?”

The flowstone flaked off the rounded bolder in great, brittle sheets, and Jozefina saw intricate carvings below. In the seams of the carvings, she saw the gleam of bright metal. “No.” She called up distractedly. “Found something.” She stepped forward, arm outstretched.

“I wouldn’t touch it.” Walter warned.

Jozefina touched it anyway. Nothing happened; the symbols did not change or vanish. The artifact – for that was certainly what it was – was warm to the touch, and vibrating faintly.

“What do you think it is?” Anita asked.

“Hell if I know.” Jozefina replied. “Get a claim marker from the lighter. This is ours now.” 

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Editor's Loudspeaker: Observations from the Committee Hearings

2947-07-29 - Editor's Loudspeaker: Observations from the Committee Hearings

The week's hearings ended today (early this morning in Cosmic Background time), and I have finished reviewing the recordings. As I promised on Wednesday, here are some highlights, which were not highlighted by the media staffers working for committee chairwoman Sylja Nisi-Bonn. Delegate Nisi-Bonn's datasphere hub has a list of other highlights which is far more comprehensive - my objective here is to point to an item from each day of hearings which I think is not receiving sufficient coverage already. I will clearly delineate my own thoughts with the marking [D.C.] where applicable. I probably don't need to remind you, but any opinions presented alongside these markings are my own, not necessarily those of Cosmic Background.

There are also other details about these hearings which probably deserve more coverage than they're getting; I encourage those in the audience with the time to do so to view the recordings in their entirety.

  • 2947-07-25: While the recorded interviews with survivors was what the datasphere focused on from Tuesday's hearings, The recorded testimony of the New Rheims orbital port stationmaster proved far more interesting. He asserted that ships which broadcast Naval Survey Auxiliary IFF codes had been performing some sort of maneuvers at the fringes of the system several days before the disaster, and that the Arrowhawk patrol group had arrived in-system shortly after the NSA flotilla departed. The station, being outside the planet's atmosphere, was presumably unaffected by the ecological collapse, but according to the Naval representative who provided the recordings, this official too had been evacuated.
    • [D.C.] The NSA ships were not reported in relation to this incident until this testimony. I did a cursory search, and could find no evidence of this activity elsewhere. NSA certainly does training exercises in safe, well-patrolled systems, but they are usually very public about these maneuvers and the ships involved. After all, the Survey Auxiliary is not a true military operation, and in theory it has no need for secrecy.
    • [D.C.] What happened to that spaceport station? None of the Delegates on the committee seemed to pick up on this detail.

  • 2947-07-26: Admiral Godfrey, representing the Admiralty Council, sat before the committee for nearly three hours. Early in his testimony, he admitted that Naval Intelligence issued Article 54(f) takedown notices for orbital images of the disaster which made it into the Core Worlds datasphere, and that they continue to regard these images and others like them as military secrets. Article 54(f) is the section of the Mandates which gives the Navy the right to censor data related to imminent threats to the security of the Confederated Worlds. When asked thirty-four minutes later in the same session whether there were any imminent threats to Confederated security, he replied that there were none.
    • [D.C.] Based on her reaction, I suspect that Ms. Nisi-Bonn recognized the contradiction, but this issue has not yet been raised in the questioning of later witnesses.

  • 2947-07-27: Climatologist Najma Wright provided only brief testimony which largely went unnoticed by the datasphere news-feeds. Among the things she reported was that New Rheims was among the most ecologically stable planets outside the Core Worlds. When asked whether the situation as she understood it was consistent with a "Carthage Order" scenario, she said that she did not have enough data to say, but that nothing she had been provided  as of her appearance ruled out the possibility.
    • [D.C.] No Navy crew would knowingly execute a Carthage order on a Confederated world during peace-time. Despite tensions between the Confederacy and the Hegemony, I don't think any Hegemony military crew would execute a Carthage order on any human-inhabited planet either. A Navy representative (I don't recall which) later confirmed that no Carthage order has been issued by the Confederated Navy, and I suspect this is accurate - but it doesn't rule out the possibility that the planet was attacked by a warship. If it was, and the ship wasn't a Navy ship, why would they cover it up?

  • 2947-07-28: While he is still in the field with his command, Captain Samuel Bosch of Arrowhawk recorded testimony for the committee several days in advance. Bosch's comments are already receiving a lot of media coverage, but what isn't is that there are several cut-jumps in his pre-recorded testimony. The editing job done on the recording was of high quality.
    • [D.C.] Given how many signs of cover-up there already are in this matter, I am skeptical. It's possible that Bosch will not see the hearings for several weeks or months; if the Navy chose to omit sections of his account, it will be some time before the omissions are corrected - if they ever are. Perhaps I am too suspicious; it's also possible the editing was the work of Bosch himself before he sent the file along.

  • 2947-07-29: Three officials from Naval Intelligence took the stand and their evasive answers have been exhaustively covered by the dedicated news sources. What went almost unnoticed, however, was their admission that none of them were involved in the decision to censor all images and data of the disaster recorded from orbit around New Rheims. This was surprising because they had been enrolled into the schedule of testimony as the officials responsible for invoking Article 54(f).
    • [D.C.] Perhaps this was a staff oversight - it would hardly be the first time - but the Delegates seemed fairly angry when they found out. I rather suspect the Navy lied about their relation to the decision, and sent up three of its most evasive smooth-talkers to delay the investigation. This probably didn't get a lot of attention from Delegate Nisi-Bonn's office because it indicates the Navy got the better of her; we can only hope she's learned her lesson.

While this studio is still not a news operation, we have decided to continue to follow this story; our audience feedback in relation to it has been tremendous.

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Editor's Loudspeaker: The New Rheims Committee Hearings

2946-07-27 - Editor's Loudspeaker: The New Rheims Committee Hearings

Delegate Sylja Nisi-Bonn's committee began holding hearings this week in Congress on the New Rheims cover-up. While I was not able to catch the past three days' hearings live - our studio and Yaxkin City are nearly on opposite sides of Planet - I have viewed the recordings of all the hearings to date. I know that many people in this audience are very interested in what comes out of the investigation, who don't have the time or bandwidth to view fifteen hours of recordings. As such, I will provide a brief list of highlights in a text feed post after the last hearing this week (on the 29th).

Some of you likely took my advice the last time the investigation was mentioned in this space, and added ingestion rules for Delegate Nisi-Bonn's datasphere releases related to the investigation; however, I have already spotted several concerns which her press office has chosen not to highlight, or perhaps which nobody on her staff recognized the significance of immediately.

As there have only been three days of hearings so far, it is too early to determine whether Congress is going to play along with the Navy's evident desire to keep the actual cause of the disaster secret from the public, but given how heated discussions between Admiral Godfrey and Delegate Nisi-Bonn became on the second day, I remain optimistic about our chances of learning what happened. Members of this audience should be cautioned that congressional investigations take months to reach even the simplest conclusion; though we can watch its progress day to day, we may not have answers before the end of the year.

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Tales from the Inbox: Ven's Angel

2946-07-23 - Tales from the Inbox: Ven's Angel

The spacer who provided today's entry was in his twenties in 2918, when he lived with his mother and sister on Ceres. His presence there during the last year of the Ceresian habitats was very easy for me to prove. I was also able to find stills of Angels inspecting the refugee camps on the worldlet, before it was evacuated, though Ven S. did not provide them. His story of a close encounter with an Angel holds up. If the date he remembers is accurate, the events below took place less than three weeks before the evacuation of Ceres.

He's now the captain of a small vessel running passengers and small cargoes between the worlds of the Silver Strand. As far as I can tell, that's all he does in the Strand; this is consistent with the evidently bare-bones lifestyle he seems to live in his public datasphere footprint. He's only an occasional consumer of Cosmic Background content, but he read another of my posts on the text feed where I mentioned the audience demand for Angel-related stories, and decided to send his in.

Though I did not clear this story with Simona Durand, our local Naval Intelligence attache, Ven's story does not contain anything they tend to find objectionable. Unfortunately, since we published what we knew about New Rheims, Simona has not been quite as responsive with our requests as she has been in the past; I do hope that our studio's decision to post what we did about New Rheims has not damaged our working relationship with their representatives.

Ven hurried home as soon as he’d heard the news: the Angels were coming.

The streets of Afolayan Park were no filthier than they had been the day before, but with such esteemed visitors on their way, the slums attached to one of the oldest and largest habitats in the system seemed intolerably unkempt. Afolayan had once been one of the best off-Earth habitats in the system, he knew, but the War had changed many things. Refugees from the devastated regions of Earth had come to Ceres as they had flocked to the other less-affected habitats in the system, and Afolayan, Ceres’s largest habitat, had opened its doors and allowed Earth’s unfortunates by the thousands. Ven and his family had been among these refugees who’d settled into the hastily-assembled accommodations installed in what had once been the mining city’s park district, a hundred meters below the Ceresian surface. 

Ven’s father had hoped the chaos on the old world would ease, and that in a year or two, he would be able to return to Earth and continue his old life with his family. The authorities had promised that they would put right the regions ravaged by Rattanai armies, and that the refugees – no less than two billion strong when the exodus finally petered out – would be slowly returned from exile.

Ven’s father and grandfather had died waiting, watching in dismay as fifteen thousand refugees resettled in Afolayan Park became used to their squalor, fighting for a small number of issued luxuries and a chance to respond to job postings offered by the city’s permanent population of miners, engineers, geologists, and metallurgists. Afolayan Park was all but walled off from this population; without a pass, none of the refugees living inside could get past the well-guarded checkpoint leading into the city proper.

Ven had been born to the Park, the second generation of interminably dispaced persons. Now his twenty-fourth year was approaching, and still there was no news of resettlement for anyone in the slums. As he clambered excitedly up the irregular, often-repaired stairs of the building to the family’s small third-floor residence, he wondered if he would die under the enclosed, artificial sky of Afolayan Park, too.

“Ma!” Ven called as he entered the residence. “Did you hear?” In the dim light, he could just see the urn containing his grandfather's and father’s ashes set on a shrine-like table in the corner, surrounded by flickering holos.

“Hear what, Ven?” His mother, who'd always longed for a life she never knew under the warm Ceylon sun of her grandparents, seemed more sickly than usual, sitting by the tiny, dingy window with her cracked reader-slate.

“Angels are coming. Where’s Jaya?”

“Ven, the Angels wouldn’t come here.” She replied with a sad smile. “Jaya has been out all day. Probably spending time with that Sidley person again. She seems to like him very much.”

Ven winced. His older sister had grown into life in Afolayan Park better than their mother, but not much better. He didn’t have the heart to tell his ailing mother that Sidley was a narcotics-pusher who worked for one of the more violent street gangs in the Park. He tried not to think about what striking, dark-haired Jaya was doing to get her fix, in absence of credits or luxuries with which to buy Sidley's wares. “The Angels are coming here, Ma. To the Park. Everyone’s talking about it.”

“Why would they do that?” She shrugged.

“I don’t know.” Ven admitted. There were rumors, but nobody knew for sure. He set down the bag he’d carried back from the distribution center. “Here’s what we got this week.”

The sight of the half-full bag animated his mother, and as she rifled eagerly through it, Ven took her place at the window, looking down at the street. A pair of thugs ambled by, covered in garish nanotattoos identifying their allegiance. Ven watched them check the electric scooters chained to the front of the building across the street for anything worth stealing, then slouch against the façade of a building while shouting rude things at a trio of young women who had tried and failed to avoid their notice. Ven remembered what Afolayan Park had been like when the refugees had first come – it had been grim, spartan, but orderly and hopeful. Now, it was still grim, and still spartan, but the order and hope had suffocated below so many meters of rock.

“Any media stamps?” Ven’s mother asked hopefully.

“Couldn’t get any.” Ven replied, turning around. Escapism had, he suspected, was the only reason his mother hadn't died young of heartbreak; he would doubtlessly be sent to trade other non-essentials for media stamps with other residents in the next few days.

When Ven looked out the window once more, the street thugs were gone. Since this usually meant trouble, he frowned, pressing his face to the polymer panel to see down the lane in both directions without seeing anything that might have spooked them. “They’re here.” He whispered to himself.

“Hmm?” His mother, still sorting out the rationed items, didn’t look up.

“Angels.” Ven replied, as the building shook again, a little stronger. Around a corner down the street, a trio of Solar Refugee Authority men in full riot gear ambled into view, weapons ready. SRA almost never ventured deep into the Park in such small groups, but Ven already knew they weren’t alone.

Stooping to avoid a web of datalink cabling strung across the intersection, an Angel stepped around the corner following the three men. It was almost five meters tall, and it looked nothing like the Angels Ven had seen in datasphere media snippets. Where the Angels which had penetrated the Rattanai defenses of Earth to hold the line against their armies on the ground had been bulky, heavy-looking frames, this one was spindly and graceful despite its size, its faceless head turning side to side as it examined its surroundings. A tubular object like a weapon barrel protruded from its left arm, but Ven thought the metal-sheathed alien looked like more of a scout than a warrior.

No, he realized, as it deferred to its human escort’s choice of direction. It wasn’t a scout. It was an emissary. Nobody had ever seen an Angel without its armored suit. The secretive xenosapients had saved humanity twice in recorded history, without asking anything in return, but no human had ever seen the face of an Angel.

The SRA men led their charge toward Ven, and the towering alien ambled along in their wake, the few refugees on the streets gawking up at it. Ven noticed that its lower legs were reverse-articulated, like those of a bird, and that though its footsteps shook the foundations of Afolayan Park, it avoided stepping on any of the litter and debris choking the street. 

“Look at that.” Ven whispered. His mother paid the spectacle no mind, even as the floor under her feet rumbled.

The alien stopped halfway down the street and pointed to one of the buildings, its head tilted in an obvious question. The men turned around to address it, but Ven had no way of hearing what was said.

Its curiosity satisfied, the alien followed its minders down the street. With a thrill of something like terror, Ven realized that it would soon pass right in front of his window – and that its head would be almost on level with him. He wondered if it was better to hide and let it pass, or to try to get its attention.

The Angel’s eyless gaze swept each sagging building, each alley, each pile of refuse. Though it was impossible to determine what it thought, Ven hoped it was disappointed. He hoped that it knew that most humans lived better than the Afolayan Park refugees, and that the Park was, at least supposedly, a temporary situation.

Finally, when the shuddering grew too extreme for her to ignore, Ven’s mother joined him at the window. “That’s an Angel, is it?” She asked rhetorically. “Hmph. Doesn’t look all that special.”

“It’s amazing.” Ven replied, not really paying attention to her.

The Angel stopped in front of the window, looking down at a refugee who gawked back up at it from the side of the street. Its domed head was only two meters away; Ven wondered what was behind all that metal. Was it really an alien, as the datasphere media said? Was the Angel merely a machine, serving the interests of distant masters? Or was it something else entirely, something which hid within an indestructible shell to protect its surroundings  rather than itself?

The pedestrian moved on, and the five-meter-tall creature looked up to Ven’s window. The young man gasped, his blood seeming to turn to ice in his veins, even though he had no way of knowing for sure that the Angel could see him, there was no doubt in his mind that he was observed. Though it had no eyes or expression, its attention speared Ven, and he felt as though every layer of himself was being peeled back for its silent inspection. 

Before he had time to even gasp, Ven saw the Angel turn away, and the uncomfortable impression vanished. Gulping a few breaths, Ven watched in silence as it followed its SRA guides to the far end of the street at a stately pace, then turned out of sight.

“I wonder what they mean by bringing that thing here." Ven’s mother muttered.

“It means things are changing, Ma.” Ven guessed.

He wasn’t wrong. 

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