Pathfinder 5

Pathfinder 5

Chapter 6: Alien Message

David returned to the ship hoping that the box he delivered got the message through. But he could think on that later, first he had some work to go. He went to storage room to peel off his chameleon suit and stored it away. He put on his work clothes, mainly the jump suit of the Galaxy Survey Corp. It wasn’t much, just a white jumpsuit with a vest with some blue added in a few places and the Pathfinder 5 mission patch on the arm and the GSC logo on the vest.

He was thankful that the clothing allowed for a lot movement and he loved all the pockets, he could carry around anything with them. He walked the metal hallway to the machine room in the back of the ship which was right next to engineering. The door slide open as he walked in to see various boxes all sealed up. There were work stations to the side but what he needed was in one of the rows of boxes.

He looked around and found the large rectangular one with the yellow and black markings. He popped open the latch and started to pull out one of seven identical devices. They were the size of a small house cat but looked more like a metallic dragon fly with plastic rotor blades. It was light weight as he loaded it into a small slot on the wall that was nearest the outside fall of the ship. He repeated this every time until all seven devices were loaded into their births.

“Alright, AVI lock and load the Seven Dwarfs and get ready to launch them.”

“Affirmative.”

The devices were small drones used to help with surveying worlds as David watched them rise up into the ceiling. He knew that they were being loaded into the air locking system above as there would be a hatch above leading outside for them to fly out of.

David walked to the bridge and sat down in the chair as he used his implant to start up the holographic displays. “Alright give me control of Sleepy and I’ll load up the flight path for the others.”

He started working as with the other drones he was going to send them out through the forest to start with. He wanted a detail look of the area around him before sending it out to the village later, that is once he established some kind of trust with the locals. He decided to assign them sectors and slowly work their way out from the ship.

With that done he took a visor from the table and placed it on. The visor looked more like a large pair of thick sunglasses with a light coming out of them. What they actually were was a device called an Augmented Reality visor as he linked it up with his implant for better control.

“Okay link is steady, all systems are go, let them go AVI.”

The visor made him see out of the drone he called ‘Sleepy’ as with his hand movements he controlled the little craft. The ship was tracking his physical movements as it sent that info to the drone. He saw it rise out of the Sparrow I and he slowly started it on its journey. He flew over the forest going into the direction he had marked from his earlier time out. It didn’t take long for it to show up at the edge of the forest. David saw the little cottage and slowly started to fly Sleepy into one of the trees close by. David made a claw motion with his hand as it activated a series of legs to extend from it.

He very slowly moved the drone to a large enough branch, he couldn’t feel the drone hit the tree but the sensors told him it was. He slowly killed the rotors and walked the drone along. David wanted to keep the drone hidden but still have a clear line of sight with the cameras. If there was any reply he was hoping it would be from the cottage so this would let him know what their response would be.

He killed the link as he let the drone in standby mode a drone could operate for over a week on low power like that.

David pulled of the AR visor and sat back, it was a long day and he needed a break after that long walk in and out of that forest. “AVI pull up the entertainment vids, sports section.”

“What would you like to watch?”

David sighed as he thought about it. “I think hockey, what games haven’t I watched for Colony Nova Prime?”

“The next game that is listed is a home game against Mars Red Sons.”

“Ohhh, the Martians, turn that one on.” David couldn’t help but look forward to that. There had been a rivalry between his home space colony Nova Prime and the Martian team. It all happened fifty years ago when the Red Sons took out the Supernovas out of the first round playoffs on their best season in years. Then the Supernovas returned the favor next year, the two teams had hated each other since.

David sat back with his feet up as the vid screen came to life as the recorded game started to play. One of the things that all Pathfinders had was a huge library of Earth entertainment. It was needed to help keep the pilots from getting bored. The only problem was that there wasn’t anything from after his launch into the unknown regions of space. He’d have a lot of catching up to do when he got back but he would have plenty of down time for that.

So he had to watch things like sports sparingly or else he could watch a whole season in a month and then nothing else new until he got back.

David was going to enjoy this and he needed time to relax and unwind as he waited.

-Golden Oaks Library-

Twilight moaned as she was sitting at a table in the main room with her face literally in a book. She wasn’t reading the book she just had her face pressed up against the pages, her ears flat against her head as her depressing atmosphere could be felt.

Pinkie and Spike were the only ones in the library at the moment, Applejack and Rarity had to go back to work and Fluttershy had gone to feed her animals. Rainbow had gone to check on the weather team but said she would be back as soon as possible. That left Pinkie and Spike to try and get Twilight out of her funk.

“Come on Twilight, it’s not that bad,” Pinkie said to her friend. “Maybe it was all just a misunderstanding.”

Twilight just groaned into her book again.

“Man I don’t think I’ve ever seen her like this before,” Spike had seen Twilight at her best and at her worst moments. He had been helping her earlier with getting any books they had on languages based on gestures but they only had one book on the subject unfortunately and Twilight had been reading it over and over again.

“Well that’s why I’m here Spike, if there is any pony that can get her out of this it’s me,” Pinkie said pulling out a few random items from her mane. Silly goggles, a few streamers and some other random items to help her try and cheer her friend up. Pinkie always wanted to see everypony happy and smiling and having one of her friends, one of her closest friends even, not smiling was a bit painful for her to see.

The door to the library opened up as Fluttershy looked in. “Um, Twilight?”

“Hey Fluttershy come on in,” Spike told her hoping another friend might help things out. It was then that he noticed a box she had on her back, a very familiar one in fact. “Fluttershy is that the same box we left by the alien ship?”

“Oh yes, I found it outside my home.” She replied as soon as the words were finished Twilight’s head snapped up and looked over.

“Wait, what!?” The purple unicorn saw the box as she quickly used her magic to levitate off her friend.

Fluttershy gave a small yelp but let Twilight do her thing, after all this was why she came to Twilight.

Twilight levitated the box and opened it up, she had no idea what it was going to have in it. She hoped that maybe it would be some kind of communication although the last thing she expected to see were several cookies. At least they looked like cookies to her and there was red frosting with what looked like crudely drawn cutie marks on them, their cutie marks that is. There was one more with what looked like a small figure with a tail and spikes, she had to guess that was to represent Spike.

“Ohhh, the alien gave us cookies!” Pinkie took the one with her mark on it.

“We don’t know what they are yet Pinkie, they could be cookies but we have no idea what they are made from.” Twilight levitated the one with her mark on it. “I’m going to have to study these to make sure we can safely eat them.”

“Well they’re kind of stale tasting.” Pinkie said with a mouthful of cookies.

Twilight’s head snapped to her friend, her eyes wide and her mouth open. “Pinkie! I just said that I don’t know if they can be eaten, for all we know they contain something that is poisonous for us to eat!”

“Oh...well I feel fine so I guess they’re good,” Pinkie smiled. “Besides cookies are meant to be eaten.”

Twilight groaned in frustration as she lit her horn up and did a quick poison detection spell. It was something she learned after the poison joke incident to avoid dangerous plants in the future. So far her spell wasn’t detecting anything dangerous to ponies in the pastries. She took a small bite of the cookie with her mark on it testing out the taste.

Pinkie was right, it wasn’t like the fresh cookies you’d get from Sugarcube Corner. They weren’t bad at least and the frosting was tasty. “I think they have some preservatives in them.”

“Really, why?” Spike said looking at the one in his claws with his image on it not sure if he wanted to eat it or not.

“Well think about it, who knows how long it takes to get from one point to another in space,” Twilight told them. “Even if you can travel faster than light it could still take a long time to get to someplace else. You’d need to have your food last a really long time.”

How fast and how they actually did manage to go faster than light were two questions she really wanted to know. It was then she noticed that there were papers under the cookies. She pulled them out levitating the papers in front of her.

“What’s this?” She asked out loud.

“I was hoping you might know, I couldn’t make sense out of them,” Fluttershy told Twilight as she gave a small taste to the cookie with her mark on it.

Twilight looked at the paper and had to pause, this wasn’t like the kind of paper she used all her life. She squinted and took a closer look, she couldn’t see any imperfections, it was completely smooth to the touch too. She looked around and found her microscope and brought it over as she placed a sheet under it.

“Wow this is really made well,” Twilight muttered as she was starting to think on how fine it was created.

“So the paper is made well?” Pinkie asked not sure what was so important about paper.

“Yes the quality is really amazing,” Twilight then took a look at one of the papers.

It started with one dot, then two crossed lines another dot, two parallel lines and then two dots. The next line was repeated only now there were two dots, another dot and then three dots. It was repeated again but now two dots, two dots and four dots.

That was odd, it was kind of looked like it was counting up but-wait...no it couldn’t be. She looked over all the other lines one the left side of the paper.

“One plus one equals two? One plus two equals three?” Twilight scanned all the lines and it seemed to work out. One the other side there were the signs that had to mean ‘plus’ and ‘equal’ with strange symbols. Those had to be the corresponding numbers in the alien’s own language!

“It’s math!” Twilight yelled out looking at the pages and showing them to her friends. “This side is the basics and the other side are the same equations but how they write it!”

“Ohhh,” They all said as one looking at the page.

“So it gave you math homework?” Spike asked her.

“Spike this is important to start a dialogue,” Twilight clapped her hooves. She hadn’t screwed up and the alien was trying to communicate with her. Maybe it realized that she couldn’t communicate with gestures and decided to start with simple math.

She had been so worried that when Celestia found out she might have screwed up first contact with an alien, Twilight had been running various scenarios on what her punishment could have been. Everything from moving away from Ponyville to no longer being her student but now she didn’t have to worry about any of that.

“Spike can you get me the chalk board and some papers?” She asked him.

“Sure thing.”

Pinkie looked at Twilight as she noticed the smile on her friend’s face and looked to Fluttershy as she whispered to her friend. “Nice going on bringing that here, Twilight looks a lot happier now.”

“Yes she does,” Fluttershy agreed glad that Twilight was back to normal.

As the two decided to leave Twilight to her work, Twilight was eagerly going at the papers with a vengeance. She spread them out as each paper seemed to cover something different. One had the math questions in the alien language on the left side this time but on the right were what had to be words.

Taking a closer look at the alien language it looked like a lot of the parts repeated themselves. There was another page with what could be letters. There were large ones with a smaller one next to it, at the bottom was again small sentences of the alien language. Twilight puzzled it out trying to see the logic of it.

“Okay so the first page is to show how they write math, the second page...is how they write the equations in their language?” She said more to herself as Spike was gathering up everything she needed. She felt like she was on the right track but what was the third page?

“Well if that is how they write it how are we supposed to know what means what?” Spike asked her looking at the second page.

“Maybe...that’s what the third page is for?” Twilight reasoned out. Looking at the third page it looked like it might be an alphabet. But the bottom...could it be examples of their grammar?

Maybe they were examples of simple sentences in order to give examples of how their language was structured?

She would have to reason them out later but it could be correct. There were other pages as well, some were the equations on them but there were blank spots on them. It was most likely a test to see if she could fill them out or finish the equations.

Twilight grinned, she was going to show this alien that this pony had math skills.

She threw herself at the challenge as with Spike’s help she worked for over an hour on figuring out the alien puzzle. The chalkboard was used to help her keep track of what they found as she double checked her work. The math looked easy enough, it as the alien alphabet that was a bit more of a challenge for her.

She started by having the alien numbers and their words and wrote down the Equestrian counter parts, that made it easier to remember which was which. The alien language sentences were a bit more trouble, she could see numbers in them but wasn’t sure what everything else was. At best she figured it was just explaining what the math equations were.

What she found out so far was that their match was based on a base ten mathematics. They went from zero to nine before the numbers started to change.

By the end of it she figured out all the math questions so far, she rechecked her work and she nodded proud of herself.

“Okay so I think that does it.”
“So, what now?” Spike asked her.

Twilight had to think on that, what was next for them? She needed to give her answers back but did that mean going all the way into the Everfree?

Twilight started to pace as she thought about it, the alien left the box with Fluttershy for a reason. Maybe it knew where she lived? Rainbow and Fluttershy did say they met it near her place so maybe when it saw Fluttershy with their group at his ship did it figure that leaving it with her the box would be delivered to one of them that could solve it?

She paused to think on that, it made sense as why else had it left the box with her?

So if she kept following that logic then maybe if she left the box by Fluttershy’s place the alien would see it. Perhaps it was even watching for the box to be returned. There was something else though and that was, what would be her response to this? Sure she could just hand back the answers but if it was trying to build a bridge between their languages it couldn’t just be one way.

Twilight suddenly got the idea to not only send the answers but to send her own version of the test. Something that would help the alien know that not only she understood but also to help build an understanding of her culture.

“Spike get me some scrolls we got our own math homework to give to the alien,” She smiled as she paused a second as her eyes crossed over a certain section it was the children’s section of the library and another idea hit her. Maybe it was time to not only send back her own math challenge but to step it up a little.

Looking through the books she found one that parents would use to help teach young foals. Although she was a bit hesitant on just giving away a book from the library but it was for a good cause. Plus she could always ask for it back later...she hoped at least.

She took a breath, this was important moment in Equestrian history, first contact between an intelligent alien race, she could stand to lose one book.

Twilight groaned, this was going to hurt a lot more than she thought as she pulled the book and set it aside for later.

-Sparrow I-

“Oh come on!” David yelled at the holo screen. “Come on are you blind, that was a hooking!”

“Commander your stress levels are rising.”

“Thank you AVI,” David sighed annoyed. “God, a 5 to 2 game this sucks.”

He was tempted to just turn it off, it was the third period and only one minute left, the odds of a comeback was pretty much impossible at this point. He looked around for the leftover cupcakes, he felt like he needed a pick me up at the moment. He pushed off his chair but before he went far a beeping caught his attention.

With a sign he slumped back down unto his chair as he looked at what it was, it was the drone he left by the yellow Pegasus’ little cottage. Waving his hand over the screen he shut off the game as he changed his focus to the monitor.

“Well maybe something interesting is going on.” He pulled up the visual as he watched the purple one with the horn coming back. She looked around the area as David zoomed in the image he could see something he didn’t understand. Her horn suddenly glowed as the saddle bag she had glowed and opened by itself. He then watched as the box he gave back was pulled out and hovered in the air and left on the ground.

“What...the actual fuck...” His mind went blank for a moment before he shook it as he kicked it back into high gear. “AVI please tell me you got readings off of that?”

“I’m sorry Commander the drone is too far away for a proper energy reading, only a small sample was able to be collected.”

David cursed his luck, this was something that he hadn’t expected, could they all do that, or just the ones with the horns or was that one special? Again more questions were just growing and he really needed to be able to try and communicate with these creatures as it was starting to really frustrate him.

He watched as she seemed to be waiting for a bit, maybe it expected him to be waiting around? Well at any rate after ten minutes it looked like the little one was disappointed at least it seemed to be. It was odd how expressive they were, you could see the human like behaviour come through clearly. David watched her leave and he contemplated going to get the box but that was a long walk and it was getting dark.

The drones were still scanning but they had reported a lot of animal movement, including some larger ones that seemed to be getting more active.

Cracking his knuckles he pulled on the AR visor as he linked back up with Sleepy, he was going to use the claws to grip the box and sent it flying back.

After some time he managed to get the box back, he had been a little worried about the weight but thankfully Sleepy pulled it off just fine. He decided to keep the drone back and use it to send the box back when he was done with it.

Currently David was in the small workroom as he opened the box. Inside of it were papers as he pulled them out. He saw that the papers with the blank spots of the math questions were back and all filled out. Looking them over he could see that these creatures figured it out, not only that but they got everything correct.

“Well I’d call that a success,” David smiled and looked at the other sheets of paper these weren’t from him. They actually looked like they were scrolls of all things. He pulled one out and opened it up and he couldn’t help but smile.

“Smart little one aren’t you?” He had in his hands was a nearly exact copy of what he had sent but instead of human letters and numbers they had sent their own version.

“Now this is something I can work with,” He couldn’t wait to get started on that but the last item was what really got his attention. There was a book in the bottom of the box, although the fact that it looked like any book you’d find on earth was a little creepy. He picked it up and opened it up, there were simple images and what looked like a few words under each image, the images took up most of the pages.

Flipping through the book he suddenly realized what he had.

“It’s a kids book!”

“Commander?” The ships computer asked.

“AVI get ready to scan this book, we’re going to scan in every page we’re going to use this to help with building a base for their written language with this.” David felt excited the aliens were smarter than he gave them credit for. Sure he couldn’t know how each word was said but knowing sentence structure, verbs and nouns would be very helpful in figuring out their language. Plus he could use this as a way to help with the actual language later on.

“AVI I think it’s time to step it up a bit, get the next set of papers ready and can we made a simple music player of some kind with the resources we have on the Sparrow?”

“The 3D printer can made most of what we need but spare electronics are available with some modifications to them.”

“Awesome, start on the case and get the list ready. I’ll scan in the book and get started on the math questions.” David felt a bit giddy at all of this. Looks like he not only saved his ass but things were going well, now he just had to figure out ‘I come in peace, let’s be friends’ in their language.

“Looks like it’s going to be a long time, hey put some music on while I work will you?”

“What would you like?”

He thought about it, “Put something from my millennial classical period on.”

There was a pause before heavy guitar sounds filled the ship with a loud voice singing.

Give me fuel,

Give me fire,

Give me what I desire!

David bobbed his head with the beat of the song, some of the other pilots during training gave him a hard time because he liked classical stuff, especially the millennial period which was the late 20th century and early 21st century period of earth’s culture. His uncle had gotten him into it and David loved some of that old stuff, hell a lot of the current culture could be found to have roots in that period.

They still had things like Star Trek, Star Wars and companies like Disney would never seem to die. Hell they were some of the oldest companies in the world for a reason.

“Churning my direction, quench my thirst with gasoline,” David sang with the music. Sure he liked current shows, films and music but there was just something about this period that really spoke to him. Sometimes he thought he would have loved to have lived in that time, but then remembered a lot of the crap that happened in that time. Hell humanity was still stuck on Earth the entire time and were only just starting to entertain the thought of leaving the planet.

So no thank you, he liked his time period and if he did live in that time, he wouldn’t be here on an alien world trying to understand a sentient alien race.

He sat in a chair looking over the scroll with a smile as he worked out the match problems to the music.

Next up Chapter 7: Cultural Exchange