Petals of Titanium -- My Life as a Mecha Setting Bridge Bunny Quest

You drift over to your work station, positioned on the starboard side of the chevron, near the tip, directly after the comm station. An adjustable chair is bolted to the deck, facing a three dimensional, holographic display mounted into a bulkhead running down the centre of the bridge. You slip on your interface gloves -- thin and white, with lightweight haptics built into them for ease of use with your workstation -- and detach the headset snapped onto the side of your chair.

"North." The terse greeting comes from a short, clean-cut looking man sitting at the comm terminal. He glances up to look at you, and you instantly snap a salute, which he returns somewhat less crisply.

"Good morning, Sub Lieutenant Mazlo," you say, respectfully. Mazlo, the ship's chief communications officer, is your direct superior, and his irritable, fidgety presence is always a little stressful, compared to one of the comms techs who fill in while he's off shift. In response, he only nods. Which is just as well, for your part.


As you settle yourself down into the seat and strap yourself in, the work station detects the telltales in your uniform and matches them to your biometrics -- it automatically inputs your login credentials, and adjusts itself to your height and work preferences. Your "screen" contains a keyboard as well as a simulated writing pad, but a significant amount of the interface consists of you physically reaching out and manipulating what's displayed there, aided by the slight tactile feedback provided by your gloves. What you're greeted with, initially, is a miniature version of the larger display at the centre of the room -- the ship a tiny, blue model, with a representation of the space around it that could be scaled up or down as the user saw fit.

The irregular shape of Phoebe can already be detected, along with the long-range beacon of the station informing anyone who approached of its status as a closed naval installation, requiring clearance to approach. Beside you, you are aware of Mazlo attempting to establish direct communication with Phoebe control, so far without success. Unusual, but not unheard of, and his muttered curses on the subject of "ring particle interference" seems plausible enough. While hardly as dense or as visually spectacular as the more famous inner rings, the Phoebe Ring is clearly visible on your scans as a massive disc of dust particles, extending outward along the tilted plane of the moon's orbit, with the moon circling around in the middle of it. It is particularly troublesome in terms of scans, owing to the still-spreading debris field from that Battle of Narvi at the outset of the Imperial Civil War.

The approach to the moon makes your job on such a shift only marginally more interesting than normal -- it consists mainly of monitoring the scan feeds as they come in, keeping watch for anything particularly noteworthy. The computer will of course populate the spatial model on its own, but it is not entirely to be relied upon in all cases, requiring human supervision to examine any anomalies or to second guess its assumptions -- the AI had a database of millions of scenarios to draw from, but when it came down to it, a human was still better at anything requiring abstract thinking. Still, with a steady course and nothing in the vicinity but the dust of the surrounding ring and the slowly approaching moon, there's little for you to do aside from continuously confirming that things are fine.

In this spirit, over an hour into your shift, working on your second coffee pouch of the morning, you find yourself staring a bit longer than is warranted at the feed of a garbled bit of noise picked up by the scanners. Such things are hardly uncommon in the normal course of things, dotted as saturn is with so many disparate colonies, and can come from nearly anything. The instruments your ship uses are delicate and extremely sensitive. It's better to end up detecting the garbled remains of a short-range public radio broadcast from Agricultural Station 2B than it is to filter them and end up missing something crucial, like enemy movement on the edge of sensor range. At this distance from Saturn, it's much more likely caused by some non-functional but still-emitting piece of battle debris Something stops you, however, from making the flicking motion that will dismiss the feed entirely, however, and it takes you a moment to decide exactly what it is that seems so subtly off.

At first, it looks perfectly unremarkable. Perfectly random. The three dimensionally rendered peaks and valleys of the signal snake in all directions, and neither the audio or textual representation of the seeming junk data produce anything more sensible. Then, all at once, it hits you: The signal seems a little too random. There's no ghost of the original message, no fleeting trace of an intelligible message for your eyes to catch onto. And that, when you really think about it, is profoundly strange. The more you stare at it, the more you're convinced that the message wasn't accidentally corrupted sheer distance or time -- it was deliberately scrambled. You glance over to Mazlo, who is still fruitlessly attempting to establish an advanced communications link with Phoebe.

"Sir?" you prompt. Your polite tone is clearly audible against the background hum of work stations, the quiet hiss of air filtering, and the steady, distant thrum of the ship's drives. He looks up, beady eyes squinted in annoyance.

"What is it, North?" he asks, just barely turning his head enough to acknowledge you. He's not being outright rude, but it's obvious that he's far from pleased at your interruption.

You swallow your doubts, pinch out a copy of the feed, and drag it over to the icon for his work station, quickly tapping out the confirmation. "Sir, we've been getting this signal on and off for the past hour," you begin. "The mecha squad picked it up, and beamed it back to us."

"We've been getting junk noise for the past hour?" Mazlo asks, not sounding particularly receptive.

"I don't think it's actually junk noise, sir," you say, speaking carefully. "The pattern is too random to be natural. It looks fine at a casual glance, but when you look more closely, it breaks down. Like it's been scrambled. See? Here, and here."

"Is there a particular reason, ensign," he asks, sounding less and less patient, "that you're looking closely enough at scan noise to think you're starting to see patterns? I believe you're meant to be monitoring the feeds for things of actual significance." With that, his eyes turn completely away from you, and you have the undeniable sense that you have just been dismissed.

Shoulders hunched in on yourself, you turn back to the workstation, and consider dismissing the feed entirely. Maybe Mazlo has a point -- you're bored, and inventing work for yourself where there isn't any. But no -- no, there's definitely something there. You steal a glance back over at Mazlo, ascertaining that he's once again too engrossed in his own work to take much notice of what you're doing. It's not as though you can't do both; there's not so much data of interest coming across the scanner feeds that you can't find the time to examine the signal more closely.

You've always been good at finding hidden or obtuse patterns, ever since you were young. An obsessive love of imaginary languages and word puzzles, which amused your father and drove your elder sister crazy, eventually became an affinity for serious language study, and later still a talent for code breaking. You don't have the connections, at the moment, for a post in naval intelligence to be a realistic career option, but that doesn't mean that such skills never come in handy in your current trajectory. You run the signal through one analysis program, isolate a promising portion, and run that through several more. It's tedious, and takes long minutes of delicate work, but the more you do, the more certain you are: There's a message not so much buried or obscured by the noise, as there is one interwoven into it. What you've sussed out so far is still far from intelligible, however. It's a series of random words and nonsense phrases, primarily in text, but at this point, it's at least obvious to you for what it is -- an encoded message disguised as scan noise.

You steal a glance over at Mazlo once again, and if anything, his temper has only worsened. There's no indication that he's made any progress in his task, and you suspect that the captain will be somewhat annoyed with him if she wakes up to find things still at the same point as when she went to bed. You doubt he'll welcome another interruption to draw his attention back to the feed he did not quite order you to stop looking at, but strongly hinted that you should disregard. Still, though, it is plain to you that this is a communication of some sort, even if very strange and currently encoded. You have additional software on your terminal that you think you can use to get a clearer picture of it, but it will require more of your attention than what you're doing.

What do you do about it?

[ ] Attempt to report your findings to Mazlo once again.
[ ] Quietly attempt to break the code yourself before you report it.
[ ] Save a copy of the data and focus on ordinary work for the rest of your shift.

OoC: There was no wrong or trap answer to the previous update's choices, and there would have been opportunities for the other talents to be useful in the story, but it is kind of amazing, honestly, that you all more or less zeroed in on the one combination of specialisation and talent that I specifically took note of and thought "that would probably be immediately useful in the next update".