Technomancer: Birth of a Goddess

Chapter 257 256 - The Network

Even with her linguistics skill, it takes Emily longer than she thought possible to decipher the written form of universal common.

The Terminal itself is ingenious, with a surprisingly easy-to-use, light-screen interface that responds to the lightest energy-charged, intent-infused touch. The language settings are one of the first things she finds and begins to translate. Finding the option to connect her Translator and dictate the contents on screen in its limited Ulean English speeds her up greatly.

However, even with the assistance, the new language she faces is a melting pot of seemingly nonsensical words and phrases linked together by twisted grammatical rules that nearly outstrip runic spellcraft in complexity. To make matters worse, the moment she leaves the few simple programs tethered to the ship's main processing core for onboard use and opens a Net browser, Emily's hit with a flood of disjointed information that only serves to muddy her data pool.

She manages to wrangle the new alphabet in a few hours that feel painfully long to her, but would be blisteringly short for anyone else, finding it's formed of a blend of twisted cursive and clear-cut lines that echo the runes of power that she's studied intensely for her arcane pursuits. In the process, she comes to two overwhelming conclusions that are impossible to ignore.

First: The Network is a mess, and the pitiful excuse for a search engine accessible through the front end of the ship's wider connection is incredibly limited.

It returns pages of raw data that barely seem related to the terms she inputs. There are a few lightly edited pages interspersed between the junk, but with only a few rough terms entered to try and gain a wider world view, Emily gets pushed from a sprawling spreadsheet tracking a company's costs and income to a long string of words roughly describing the fall of a planet three star cycles ago faster than most would be able to process.

Second: The Network is the most beautiful thing Emily's ever seen.

Even while shackled by the poor search engine, the sheer quantity of data she's able to gather each second dwarfs her fastest studying speed in Ulea's libraries. Her machina hums in sync with the Terminal in her hand, and the memory banks in her cortex swell as tens of threads sort the rapid influx of information without hesitation, discarding only excess bloat and keeping records of nearly everything, no matter how inconsequential it seems.

Emily's quickly able to build a rough picture as she catalogues recurring planet names and civilisation markers, the unique character codes used to tag ownership of planets, ships, space stations, and even local data packets being sent and received. The first flood of information is all from within the galaxy cluster they've almost left, Moer 385, which sits within the outer zone of The Federation of the Six Elements' territory, The Manaless Ring. The information is all publicly available, sitting in open databases and information nodes, without any kind of verification needed to send requests to view it.

A glance at the basic browser's code tells her why, as it's set to only access a few open information bands known to be safe and near untraceable, using public data broadcasts to skip entering any details about the requester. Instead of modifying the program within the Terminal, Emily traces the connection's flow through the ship's main quantum data relay. She uses a thread of machina to link the relay directly to herself instead.

Emily builds a quick query in her cortex, modelled after those sent by the browser, asking a random open information node within Moer 385 for one of its historical logs. She leaves the sender code blank and transmits, waiting a few minutes for the relay to pick up the response being sent with another stream of unrequested data for others. Instead of cutting off the rest of the transmission like the Terminal's browser, Emily grabs the full thing, finding eighty per cent of it encoded and impossible to read.

She sets a couple of cores to attempt to break the encryption by force while she sends a few more open queries, gathering raw data. Next, she attempts to falsify the sender code on her query, picking a random space station currently making requests and changing the final digit on their code by three values. She sets the data packet to request a content log and sends it off, waiting patiently for a response.

Nothing has happened after ten minutes, so she tries again, this time injecting a small burst of spatial mana into the query, wrapping it within the machina holding the sender code. A few minutes after sending off the data packet, Emily feels a faint quiver in her magical senses, indicating the distant packet has been "unwrapped", and the mana within has dissipated.

So, it's still being read.

She tries again, this time binding mana to the sender code and the request payload. She only gets a single pulse back to her magical senses.

But ignored.

She tries reverting the final digit of the sender code to the real thing and once again attempts to send the request with two magical marks. She gets two faint magical responses, but doesn't see a single sign of a digital response across the open data bands the ship is scraping.

Emily tries again, this time forming the mana into a basic binding spell and weaving it tightly into the sender code. She's able to feel the information node forming a response, using the original sender code to return it, but it's fired out onto a random data band she's not watching, and she quickly loses track.

It takes her nearly an hour to create a spell to track the response, using a flood of pings to narrow down the frequencies she needs to tune the ship's relay to watch.

When she finally has the information node's response in hand, she finds it unencoded but unhelpful:

Please provide your session verification ID to complete a data request.

"Damn," she mutters under her breath, lying back in her bed with her Terminal sitting open on her chest and an array of glowing light screens floating above her. "Valid sender code isn't enough if they're already in a closed session…"

She picks through her forming database of requests, both encrypted and not, and begins breaking them down into fragments, trying to better understand their syntax.

It takes nearly a day for Emily to finally send through a request that isn't immediately met with refusal. She sets it up with a fake sender code, creating a data centre that doesn't exist on a planet that does, and assigns it a request code commonly recurring across the first messages being sent by other requesters on the same planet.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

The returned response is fully encoded, but comparing it to the rest of her dataset flags up several similarities with other first returns, suggesting a common encoding key she can break.

Emily severs her connection to the ship's quantum relay and turns off her Terminal before falling into her spatial tattoos, leaving a mark on her bed and vanishing into her Pocket Factory. The space within has expanded massively since the dimension's original conception, but it still feels a little cramped when Emily appears on the floor in the centre, thanks to the machines packed in tight around her and Elisime's belly hanging low above.

Emily Blinks into the ship and settles in front of its main Logic Core, sitting cross-legged and letting her machina flow out freely, filling the empty space around her and connecting to every exposed metal surface at once. Her energy spreads to the soldiers in the ship's storage and the other inanimate occupants of the dimension alike, but Emily barely acknowledges them. She focuses on cracking the new encryption system, using her full cortex and offloading as much processing as possible to her army.

***

After three days, Emily finally returns to her room in the Heavy-blade Pirates' mothership. Her stamina and machina are significantly drained, but an excited, satisfied smile curls her lips.

She reaches out and connects to the ship's quantum relay again, building a data request with a delicate blend of mana and machina before sending it off into the ether. A response is fired back after a few minutes, and Emily drops the entire result into a complex formula in her mind, rapidly unravelling the unreadable blend of characters and revealing another message.

Session [#BD35ED3Q] successfully authenticated. Access level C-01 ID valid for one galactic hour, key: GhBs35GstlHHysW.

"Yes!" Emily chirps happily, getting comfortable against her bed's backboard and pulling out her tea kit to brew a focus-enhancing drink.

She sends out a data request with the new session ID, asking for the information node's content logs. When she gets a response, she plugs it into her new decryption algorithm using the provided key, unveiling a long, scrolling list of accessible data.

"Perfect," she murmurs under her breath, scanning through the list. "Where to start…"

Her attention is caught by several time markers, and one of the first questions she asked herself upon meeting the Heavy-blade crew rises back to the forefront of her focus.

Why do we use the same unit of time, with an almost identical translation, despite Ulea being disconnected from the greater universe? I know Ulea's was created based on the sun, but I would have thought most planets would have different day-night timings thanks to orbital variations.

She begins searching the content log for key terms related to time, shooting out requests for anything that looks like it could be helpful. Her search takes her through countless planetary records documenting dated exchanges and important events, but eventually brings her to a small bundle of research notes looking into various topics, gathered under the tag of something called Universal Echo Theory, and marked as being sent in a large data packet from another information node deeper into Federation territory.

A study into the formation and recurrence of major civilisationally-connected concepts

This study is being initiated on the first day of the two thousand and eighty-fifth year of the universal calendar at Frostbloom Research Post Q83 in hopes of furthering our understanding of the unexplained recurrence of certain concepts across the greater universe. As our great civilisation has spread across the cosmos, we've become increasingly aware of the odd workings of fate…

…event marks four years since this study began, and it has become increasingly obvious that time itself remains a constant so great it's near-impossible for sentient civilisations not to deviate towards a common reference point in its vast existence…

…confirmed a stable, empirical measure based on the frequency of electron movement within certain elements….

…despite our decision to observe Subject P5426 without any interaction, we've started to notice the same pattern of vocal communication forming as with subjects P1245 and P3370. Yet to find any traces of external magical interference…

…study to be discontinued in light of interest from the Spacetime Investigation Coven, folded into greater research files: [Universal Echo Theory]

"Universal Echo Theory," Emily says, rolling the words around on her tongue as she browses the rest of the research papers, reading scattered entries on everything from language formation to biological evolution and planetary accretion. "Fascinating."

***

A couple of days before the ship reaches Xlanax, Emily and Silvia once again find themselves in a training room mid-spar.

"So, how's The Net?" Silvia asks, her voice carrying to Emily with ease despite the crackle of lightning filling the space. "You've been locked away since I gave you that Terminal. I hope you found something worth all your attention."

"It's incredible," Emily replies honestly, releasing the spell held in her hand and searing half of the room with wild tongues of charge that just manage to catch Silvia's side as she dances between them with flowing grace. "Obviously, the browser available for the crew was very limited, so I had to work out how to safely send marked dummy requests without being tracked. But the Network itself? It's beautiful. So much information freely available, such a finely optimised communication process with a well-worked syntax… A wonderful creation that feels like it was just made for me to break."

"Haha," Silvia laughs, slashing and sending over five arcs of blood for Emily to weave between. "How so? I've only ever heard great things about The Network's security."

"Well, it doesn't exactly feel fair that I can blend my mana and machina so well. I felt how the system's insulated against separate interference from both, but it's also clearly designed to be utilised by mechanics."

Silvia hums along without interrupting, attacking from behind with a sweeping kick that Emily spins and meets with her shin.

"As long as I wrap my mana completely and compress it enough to get in unnoticed, I can slip past a lot of the magical defences. I was able to track messages' frequency bands after a few days using a small trick with spatial mana, and I even made a spell that lets me send out a mass ping across The Network to find out which nodes have data I'm interested in. Give me more time, and I can't wait to see what I'll find."

Emily bursts into a fountain of charge that sends out rippling energy to fill the space, trying to catch Silvia in a weave of lightning that she cuts and slips between with an easy grin. The Vampire asks more about Emily's research on The Net, listening with rapt attention as she speaks about the Universal Echo Theory she's gathering information on.

Silvia notes that while the name doesn't sound familiar, the concept of the theory is nothing new to intergalactic society: similar species and languages pop up on newly discovered planets all the time. No one thinks to question it that much, at least, other than those starting the very same studies Emily has spent days trawling through.

Eventually, their sparring chat circles back to their familiar trading of questions and answers with blows.

"So, what is the cargo your crew mentioned carrying when you picked me up?" Emily asks after finally catching her opponent with a shot from her Whisper, feeling the back of her neck prickle in warning as she speaks.

"Don't you already know? I'm certain the ship's permissions aren't enough to keep you from getting access to the cameras in there if you really wanted to…" Silvia purrs, dissolving into a mist of blood and dropping a crushed bullet where she once stood as she flows forward to wrap her claws around Emily's throat.

"I thought it best not to interfere too much with the ship itself in case Eidecht catches me." Emily holds her hands up in surrender, not having expected Silvia's sudden change in state and feeling the end of their spar coming.

"Ahh, yes. Caution, not a lack of desire."

"I'm asking you, aren't I?"

Silvia grins and relaxes her grip. She spins and brushes her fingers against Emily's chin before gesturing for her to follow in one smooth motion.

"That you are. Come with me, you're better off seeing for yourself."