episode 06

The Message

“The message never made it to its intended recipient,” said the technician. Everyone else in the tent gathered around the display.

“That a fact?” asked General Morgon. One of his favorite questions.

“Yessir. See, here? This is a Class A dispatch, which uses a flip-bit to note if a message has been compromised.”

“How does that work?” asked the General, accustomed to asking frequent questions. He remotely dialed in the zoom function of the conferencing droid’s main camera to get a better view of the technician’s computer screen.

“Quite elegantly. When the message is opened, a single bit within the digital signature is automatically transposed from a zero to a one, nullifying the signature and signifying a compromised message – this automatically downgrades the message to a Class C dispatch. It’s like breaking a seal on a communique.”

“Should have said that in the first place,” said Jupiter One, as the General’s blank expression became apparent on the droid’s front display, “can we break this seal, Senior Tech?”

The technician paused for effect and then replied, “You bet, Sir. Give me half a minute.”

General Morgon shifted uneasily as the technician called upon an array of hacking software, designed, it seemed, to be the opposite of user-friendly.

Something of a fascinating discovery in the course of studying the nature of robot culture: though logic was the rule, there were places where logic broke down. For instance, security software in the world of robots was as rock-solid and impenetrable as one might expect – however, from a human point of view there were gaps and long-ways around the security. What made this possible was the fact that software innovation was not something the robots were very good at – it required more creativity than the robots on Casiadin were built to possess – and so the level of sophistication was not much better than when the robots first broke away from humankind to form their own civilization. The inverse was also true: human innovation had continued to grow since the break.

“Got it,” called the technician.

Everyone returned to the screen which was now a jumble of letters, numbers, symbols, and empty spaces. The technician was the one to state what everyone else was thinking: “That’s strange. It’s just a bunch of garbage. Random data. Meaningless.”

“Is this encrypted data we’re seeing? Some kind of code?”

“No it’s in the clear. What we are seeing is what was sent in the message.”

Just then Jupiter’s communicator squawked, “Jupiter One, we’ve picked up some movement on the scanners – southwest of us.”

Morgon responded, “What kind of movement?”

“Heat signature says it’s a robot, Sir. Walking right out of the desert. Directly toward camp.”