Tales from the Inbox: The Tatianus Ranch Sighting

2946-06-08 - Tales from the Inbox: The Tatianus Ranch Sighting

It should surprise nobody that, within hours of my cautioning the consumers of this text feed not to get their hopes up about stories about the Angels, a cache of old material on that very subject has been given to me by an anonymous source. Following the usual, procedure, I took the content down to our local Naval Intelligence representative, who gave me enthusiastic approval to publish it for the Cosmic Background audience. I don't think our attache ingests this feed, but if she does: Lieutenant Simona Durand, thanks again for handling this quickly!

Our mysterious source sent me what he or she claims is all the publishable content from this source; given that I was authorized to publish it all after our local representative spent only half a day examining it, he or she must have some experience with the Bureau of Naval Intelligence's protocols. Perhaps our source comes from inside the bureau itself, but this is mere speculation on my part.

Evidently, this material was collected by an eccentric hobbyist in the 2720s or 2730s, and languished in hard storage on powered off devices for a long time. Many of the files are stored using encoding that none of my devices recognize, but about half are still readable (and Cosmic Background staff will work to get the rest translated soon). Note the date on this file; I shudder to think of the state of computing hardware in the mid 25th century. It's a wonder anything as old as these files is still readable on modern devices, but our tech team assures me that the means of storing text hasn't changed in a long time.

While I can find no other source for this material, I have discovered independently that the organization it is ascribed to was an active sensationalist reporting outfit in operation here on Planet at the time. A few other inquiries have convinced me that it is likely that this article really was published on the indicated date - as for the truth value of the reporting, the audience is encouraged to decide for itself.

Today's installment of Tales from the Inbox will publish the first piece of this material. Because of the extreme age of this source, I do not consider it time-sensitive, and plan to make several Tales from the Inbox posts sourced from this cache in the coming weeks and months. For those of you who will inevitably bombard my inbox with demands for the whole source to be made immediately available, remember that not everyone who ingests this text feed is a tireless seeker of data pertaining to the Angels, so I plan to intersperse these items with other kinds of stories. Also remember that if there really were anything new in my source, Naval Intelligence would have denied permission to publish it to the public datasphere anyway.

--Duncan

TYPE = newsfeed_archived_3.2c 

CONTENT_PROVIDER = { 

type: text, 

publication_name: "The Centauri Enigma", 

publication_type: local_news_gossip, 

provider: "Centauran Media Group, Inc." 

}

TIMESTAMP = "2456-01-30@12:48:17Z", 

TITLE = “Small Town Visited By Aliens: Visit by Angels Suspected” 

AUTHOR = “Roberta M. Roderick” 

FULL_TEXT = {" 

HARCORT, SPD, PLANET, CENTAURI: The small mountain prospecting community of Harcort is, for perhaps the first time in its many decades of history, a center of frenzied activity today after an alleged visitation by intelligent extraterrestrials in the early hours this morning.   

The tiny community of only 147 residents was the source of over fifty calls to local emergency response between local times of 3:10 and 4:25 AM, each reporting being overflown by unauthorized aircraft, strange booming noises, or the nearby landing of an unauthorized aircraft. As the remote region of Spine of Planet was once a haven for outlaws and brigands from more civilized regions of Planet, local authorities scrambled a suborbital to deliver a response team, but when they arrived in Harcort at about 4:45 local time, they found no sign of the expected local outlaws. 

According to Kress Voltolini, a local prospector and witness to the night’s goings-on who spoke to this reporter, the landings at Harcort were not aircraft, but landing craft from a spacecraft in orbit over Planet, though Centauran Control detected no unidentified craft in local space at the time. 

‘Three of them flew over my place at about three oh five,’ Voltolini said. ‘They woke me up and scared the hell out of me.’ When asked what the engine noise sounded like, Voltolini insisted that there wasn’t any. ‘Was the damn sonic shockwaves that woke me up.’ He said, ‘They were going really fast when they passed over the first time, then they looped back around slower, and went down over the rise. When they passed the second time, they were totally silent.’ He described the appearance of the craft as ‘a dead ringer for the grainy stills of the Angels they took during the Grinner war,’ but confesses that he did not have a good sense of the scale of the craft.  

The rise in question, just north of Harcort proper, is home to three goat ranches. The night’s activity, alien or otherwise, seems to have been centered around the Tatianus ranch, farthest from town. While this reporter could not collect statements from anyone from that ranch, she did manage to secure a statement from Lev Jurek, a handyman who was working at a neighboring ranch last night. At his telling, the alien formation flew right over his head while he worked on a failed segment of sonic fence and two of the ranchers stood in the gap to keep the animals inside the pen. Jurek also mentioned specifically the lack of engine noise. ‘I think they were gliding in.’ He said. ‘But they didn’t have wings, so I’m not sure what made them glide.’ 

Jurek went on to say how the three small craft landed silently on the grounds of the neighboring ranch. Using binoculars from his toolbox, the handyman says he watched from afar as two surprised people staggered out of the Tatianus ranch house to meet a trio of monstrous aliens, one coming out of each ship. ‘I think ol’ man Tatianus knew ‘em.’ He said. ‘Pretty sure that’s who went and met those things, but it was hard to see for sure.’ Jurek describes the aliens as ten to twelve feet in height, towering over the figures of the human ranchers, bipedal and with three equally sized and spaced fingers on each hand. He says that they were wearing some sort of full-body suits and suggested that he didn’t think they could breathe Planet’s earth-like atmosphere. 

Jurek’s story appears to be mostly corroborated by those who were in the Tatianus ranch up to this point, though this reporter only has thirdhand retellings of the stories of two employees of the Tatianus family who staggered into town at about 4:15, shouting that aliens had landed at the ranch. What Mr. Jurek said next cannot be corroborated and is nothing short of sensational. 

‘They talked to Old Man Tatianus for a few minutes.’ Jurek explained. ‘And eventually he pointed up toward the Spire, and they left. Flew up over the mountain, where a fourth, a bigger one, joined them, and they disappeared near the peak.’ The Spire seems to be a local name for Mount Valdimar, the third-highest mountain on Planet, whose plateau shoulder is only about forty kilometers from Harcort by air. 

This reporter was able to determine from local records that in his youth, Braden Tatianus was a climber, who made three ascents to Valdimar’s summit with fellow climbers Felix Bennett and Cornelio Ingomar - on a fourth attempt, Bennett perished in a fall and the ascent was scrapped.  

Did Braden Tatianus discover an artifact of the Angels on the mountain with his friends? Did this artifact claim Bennett’s life, or did he perish in a fall as was reported at the time? Was last night’s visitation the return of the makers of some artifact, and if so, why did they make contact with Tatianus rather than going directly to the mountain and potentially avoiding detection? The local authorities aren’t saying what they think, obviously. One can only hope the truth of this strange event will come to light in coming months… 

"} 

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Upcoming Events: Aston Pesaresi at CBCP Centauri

2946-06-07 - Upcoming Events: Aston Pesaresi at CBCP Centauri

Cosmic Background host Ashton Pesaresi will participate in several panels in October during CBCP Centauri, which is being hosted this year on the campus of Baumgartner University in the city of Pele. A full list of the topics of Ashton's panels, as well as dates and times, will be provided in mid-July, but it is possible that the convention will be sold out by that time. The only panel topic which we can confirm at this time is "The Interstellar Community as an Audience", as this panel topic was retained from last year's program due to high demand.

Entry passes to the yearly Convention of Broadcast Professionals can be reserved on the organizers' datasphere hub. Their hub also contains information about other aspects of the event, which will last six days.

It is possible that Ashton will miss one or two shows while attending the convention, but one of the other Cosmic Background personalities will almost certainly be on hand to fill in for him.

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Editor's Loudspeaker: Responding to Feedback

2946-06-07 - Editor's Loudspeaker: Responding to Audience Feedback

Wow.

Firstly, thank all of you who have sent feedback to the Cosmic Backgrounds team about this new feature - it's not even three shifts old, and we've already had hundreds of messages from the audience suggesting things we could focus on. Given that we know based on ingestion metrics that approximately ten to twelve percent of our audience members are out of range of any Hypercomm Relays at any given time, and far less than a third of our audience ingests our new content within the first twenty-four hours of its being published, this bodes well for the future of the Tales from the Inbox text feed feature.

Secondly, I need to address a common themes I've seen in the messages we've gotten Almost two thirds of the input I got suggested that I specifically focus on publishing stories related to the Reachers, the Angels, or both. A third of them suggest that I use this feed to catalog the frontier encounters which may be first sightings of the vessels of new xenosapient species.

  • While I do expect that we'll have content that touches on the Angels occasionally, be aware that Cosmic Backgrounds is subject to the law of the Confederated Worlds, and we cannot publish anything Naval Intelligence designates as a military secret, and that includes almost everything related to the Angels. If military secrets are broadcast to the datasphere from our studio, the resulting fines would probably put us out of business. If we are handed a story about the Angels, it is studio policy to give our local Naval Intelligence office the right to veto whatever content we make out of it, before it is published. Most of our audience know this already, but just as a reminder, those rules apply to the text feed, too.
  • The Reachers, by contrast, are legally fair game, and most of you already know how much we like to talk about them. Cosmic Backgrounds has been at the forefront of the re-entry of these odd, elusive sapients into the cultural forefront, after centuries of being considered nothing more than a data point in the historical record. Where I find reasonably plausible accounts of Reacher involvement in human affairs, I will of course share those stories, if they are sufficiently interesting. Since this is a text feed, I will leave playback of simple visual recordings to Sovanna, and focus on encounters which have a more interesting course of events.
  • The intent of this feed was not to turn it into a repository for stories about mysterious xenosapient encounters. We will have some content which fits that description, but not all of the dramatic events which take place on the Frontier have something to do with rare xenosapients. If you only wish to see accounts of a certain type, you can always configure your data ingestion protocol to search for the desired meta-tags.

Check your ingestion queue tomorrow for another exciting audience submission on Tales from the Inbox!

--Duncan

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Sponsor Message: Chandler Rose | Trust Nothing Less

2946-06-06 - Sponsor Message: Chandler Rose | Trust Nothing Less

Our sponsor, Kosseler Shipbuilding, wanted to provide its own story for the new series. This story is well documented in local newsfeeds, and will be featured in a Kosseler datasphere marketing campaign - but our readers get to see it first. Our audience has always rewarded Cosmic Background's sponsors with their business, and I hope that, if you are in the market for a new ship, you'll consider what Kosseler products have to offer.

The station crew crowded the viewpanels to gawk at the ship which drunkenly maneuvered toward the outstretched docking collar. The little yacht's hull was mangled almost beyond recognition, and it was a wonder to the steadily increasing audience within the station that the vessel had not only survived its ordeal, but had made a successful star drive jump in its condition. The name of the ship, Eustace Shelby, was all but invisible, the painted markings scoured off those remaining plates of hull still attached to the vessel's bent frame.  

Shelby missed the docking collar once, then again, its few remaining maneuvering thrusters sputtering dangerously. Over the radio, station control suggested that the lone occupant of the limping ship take manual control and attempt to complete docking himself. 

"Hell no, boss. Shelby's got this." The pilot replied. His bravado, piped to the nervous onlookers, inspiring a scattered, tense cheer from the small crowd within. The ship's plight had been known aboard the station from the moment Shelby had completed its jump into the system eleven days prior, but until the ship was finally close enough for docking, they hadn't been able to see the damage with their own eyes. Some hadn't believed the pilot's story, when he'd first established contact. Now, it was easy to believe. 

Chander Rose, pilot and owner of Eustace Shelby, is something of an adventurer, who takes his little yacht into dangerous territory in search of lost treasures, derelict ships, and other mysteries. He has had more than his share of run-ins with criminals and claims to have had at least one encounter with a Rattanai raid-ship, but it was not fire from hostile weapons which had shattered his ship, but an accident so incredibly rare that no previously recorded incidents exist. Chandler's ship had survived a blind, head-on collision with a comet.

Chandler took Eustace Shelby out of Sebastiaan Station on the twenty-seventh of April, intending merely to go and see The Gorgons, three spectacular gas giants in a nearby system, for himself, as do many tourists and explorers passing through Herakles. His jump completed normally, but Chandler couldn't see the Gorgons' stellar primary, which should have been dead ahead. A collision alarm had sounded, but too late – the icy lump and Shelby were moving too fast relative to each other for there to be any hope of avoiding impact. 

Still, the autopilot corkscrewed wildly before its pilot could react. The screaming alarm had not yet ceased before Chandler, strapped into his crash-padded station chair, heard a roaring crash and the tearing of metal, the stars outside his viewpanel spinning too quickly to follow, dancing to a discordant tune played by dozens of shrieking alarms. The gravitics stuttered for only a few seconds, but it was long enough that the force of the ship's tumbling knocked its lone pilot unconscious. Chandler's last thought as his vision went black was that nobody would ever know what had become of him. 

When Chandler Rose regained consciousness, he was surprised to find that not only was he still alive, but so was his ship. Eustace Shelby, a Kosseler Pegasus, was in bad shape, with most of its external fittings torn off and its outer hull almost half-gone, but the cabin life support was still working. Any atmosphere breaches had been quickly and automatically sealed. Shelby still had main power and its Himura unit was intact. 

After a day's worth of EVA repairs, mostly to jury-rig new radio fittings, and to restore a small percentage of his original primary thrust, Chandler powered up the Himura and calculated a jump back to Herakles, every moment expecting something to fail. Yet, despite its bent frame creaking, the battered Shelby carried Chandler Rose to safety. 

On the third try, Shelby's autopilot found the docking collar, and a cheer rose from the crowd gathered inside the station. Chandler, uninjured but haggard, stepped through, and the cheer grew into a roar. Chandler Rose had survived his improbable accident. 

When asked later by a local newsfeed correspondent what he credited with his survival, Chandler did not hesitate. "My ship saved my life." He told her. "I'm alive today because of the engineers at Kosseler." 

If you're in the market for a new vessel, consider Kosseler Shipbuilding products, built to only the highest standard of quality, safety, and comfort. Whether you travel for business or pleasure, can you afford anything less?

In honor of Chandler Rose's amazing story, the buyer of any new Kosseler Pegasus who mentions Chandler Rose will receive a 5% discount on their final purchase price. The first one hundred buyers who mention Cosmic Background will receive an additional 5% discount.

(These offers apply only to purchases of new vessels and are cumulative with other outstanding offers from Kosseler Shipbuilding only up to a 20% total discount. Void where Kosseler representatives and/or products have been banned by law. Claimant need not be physically present to purchase. A delivery fee may apply to orders placed from outside the Core Worlds. See Kosseler's datasphere hub for more details, and to see the features of the Kosseler Pegasus product line.)

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