Seeking To Understand

Sandbox Earth #10

INDEX| Episode 9 | Episode 10 | Epilogue

Assessing The Haul

“What exactly had you recovered?”

“Well, a whole lot of junk, at the end of the day. There were hangars and warehouses filled with charred debris. I don’t know what they did with the bodies they found—I think they cremated them, or maybe some biologists took them to dissect. I don’t like to think about it. I was concerned with the photographs and the markings on the debris. This was where I was most at home.

“We also had found some ancillary personal effects. Things that looked like books, or manuals—marks written on a page, in any case. That was extremely valuable. I found some things that looked an awful lot like warning signs, just with different colors and symbols than we are used to.

“It can seem like a daunting task—you have a set of symbols and you have absolutely no verbal context, and you are supposed to translate a language that has no relationship to English, French, German, Spanish into those languages. The first thing I did was look for common symbols. Their markings were rigid, lots of straight lines, lots of sharp angles. But I was able to find some common symbols in various examples. After maybe two or three days I had a pretty substantial symbolic inventory of their language. What would really unlock things was a native speaker. If I could hear them pronounce the symbols I was finding, I could decipher words and start to see relationships between words. If they could point to their hand and speak their word for hand, I could know that it means ‘hand’ and start translating that way.

“We didn’t have that, so the next best thing is to find context. That’s why I took photos, I needed to see not just the symbols but where they were and what they seemed to be speaking about. This process was only just beginning, it would be three more years of hard work and more than a few lucky breaks before I could really crack their language.”

“Were there any surprises?”

“Oh, plenty. We found what felt like an individuals cabin, so it was filled with personal effects and clothes and things. I think we found a journal—Once I unlocked the language I wanted to translate it and publish it but they wouldn’t let me near it if they even had it.

“The thing that most surprised me was eavesdropping on the chit-chat around the warehouses when I was studying there. I would hear about the wretched state of geopolitics. They thought Americans had taken an engine, that Russians had taken some weapons. In Pakistan they were putting up a decent fight to keep the imperialists away from the debris in their mountains. A fisherman in the Pacific found an alien gun floating in the water.

“The materials scientists seemed to find the Hull very interesting. I didn’t quite understand what they were talking about—it was their thing, not mine. So discoveries were being made left and right. I only knew about these ones because I was around them, but you know others had made discoveries in secret. The Japanese had a secret space program, for pete’s sake—and they managed to launch rapidly and get into orbit and steal an engine from the dang ship. Nobody knew how they did it, and history shows they were able to reverse engineer it faster than anybody else—once they got my help.

“The bottom line is that I could feel that things were different. The world was dangerous, and uncertain. Our old status quo had been shaken up in a big way and all the nations of the world were scrambling over each other to get the first bite at the apple. We didn’t even know what we were chasing after, we just knew it was space garbage that might be interesting. Turns out it was! Any time we watched the news and some regional conflict broke out or some other surprising discovery was made, I wondered whether it was alien technology being unlocked in some warehouse just like mine.

“The world was scarier now. Our planet was a sandbox, and we were doing just fine playing with the tools we had, but someone had just thrown new tools and shown us that we could leave the sandbox and play in the playground. But when you leave the sandbox you also leave your familiar playmates. You have to be a little tougher to play outside, a little more cynical. Humanity was growing up, and it was completely by accident.”

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Thank You For Reading!

Thank you for reading Part 3 of Sandbox Earth, the prequel to the Adventures of Tylus Worran. This is the deep lore of the infancy of humanity’s life among the stars! There is one more episode coming, so keep an eye out next week!

I hope you enjoyed! Thank you for reading, and God bless you!