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Now when Jacob saw that there was corn in Egypt, Jacob said unto his sons, "Why do ye look one upon another? Behold, I have heard that there is corn in Egypt. Go down thither and buy for us from thence, that we may live and not die."
So went Joseph’s ten brethren down to buy corn of the Egyptians. But Benjamin, Joseph’s brother, would not Jacob send with his brethren: for he said, "Lest perhaps mischief befall him."
And the sons of Israel came to buy corn among those who came, for the famine was in the land of Canaan.
— Genesis 42:1-5
Project Coral Sound
Badr City, Egypt
Mideple carefully screwed together the custom fittings to connect the pod's unusual left-handed threads to their human equivalents. He'd made sure to test the pressure-reducing valve on their nitrogen tank before attaching it, since they still had no real idea what pressure the system was expecting; blowing out a gasket in this case was more than just a matter of an expensive repair.
Jack was filming the whole process as Solomon and Kat watched, and after a minute Joyce came out of the office area to join them.
"Alright, just released the video."
Solomon nodded at her.
They were all waiting to see what would actually happen when they tried powering it up, and although Mideple didn't expect anything too dramatic, he felt the anticipation as well and consciously forced himself to slow down to avoid accidentally cross-threading something or otherwise making a mistake.
Based on the wall thickness of the pod's included air tanks, he expected it would probably be fine with anywhere up to around 200-300 bar, but he cranked the regulator all the way to 0 just to be safe, before opening the valve.
As first, nothing happened as he slowly turned the regulator up, first 1 bar, then 2, 3, 5, 10, 15 ... at this point this was starting to get into the danger zone. If the pod didn't have it's own regulation or its regulator had failed this could easily be enough to start popping seals and blowing out thin tubing.
"There!" Jack called, and Mideple instantly stopped turning the knob and looked to where Jack was filming. "The needle on the pod's pressure gauge has just barely lifted off the peg. It's still in the... what would you call that color?" he asked Joyce.
"I don't know, it's sort of a cadet blue."
Leave it to Joyce to have fancy color names.
In any case this was a good sign; the pod's own gauge clearly worked.
While they couldn't read its markings, the colored segments on the gauge didn't take much guessing to figure out. The actual colors were different — it made sense that an alien race might perceive color differently, and in any case would be unlikely to assign them the same meanings humans did — but Mideple's working theory was that the green band marked a sort of "low pressure warning" zone, with the large orange indicating the normal operating pressure range.
And while it wasn't clear was if the narrow dark orange band meant "full" or if it was a danger indicator, the black-and-white stripes clearly did indicate danger.
Mideple waited for his more precise digital gauge to settle before reading it out. "A bit over 17.65 bar."
Jack pointed the camera at his cluster of gauges. "That's about 250 psi for you Americans."
That was rather high for a 'minimum' pressure, but if the gauge really did go to hundreds of bars he guessed it made sense. Still, Mideple couldn't hear any leaks, and the flow meter showed zero, so he started carefully turning the regulator again, keeping an eye on both the pod's gauge and his own, reading off the pressure every bar.
At about 22 bar they passed from the blue segment to the green one, and although they expected something to happen, nothing did.
Halfway to the bottom of the orange band. "Thirty-nine, fourty, fourty—".
Suddenly there was an audible click followed by the rapid sound of hundreds of tiny pneumatic valves firing pssht-click.
Everyone instantly froze as the rapid sounds slowed down and became more irregular, with one or two clicks every couple of seconds over a general background hiss of air.
After a few moments, Mideple realized he had started holding his breath, and he let it back out before checking the digital meter. The flow rate was still too low to get a reliable reading, spiking spiking into the milliliters per minute range at each valve click but otherwise staying at 0.
"Well, that was something. 41.36 bar," he read off the pressure meter, before pushing the button to convert that to PSI for the camera. "599.8 in American."
At that moment, an audible two-toned alarm started beeping from the pod.
beep beep ... beep beep ... beep beep ... beep beep
And then the pod's interior lights came on.
Lockheed-Martin Skunkworks Division
Palmdale, California
Mike was woken up by the buzz of his phone as it rattled on the table beside his bed. He wasn't entirely awake yet but he picked it up going through the motions to read it but not actually comprehending it, before putting it back down, rolling over, and pulling his blanket back over his head. As he lay there trying to fall back asleep, something about that notification gradually trickled through his brain, until all at once it triggered something and he instantly sat bolt upright.
He quickly grabbed the phone and read the notification properly this time.
YouTube: New from Toomey Tales
Taking apart a REAL Alien Spaceship: You Won't ...
(🕑 Watch Later) (🔔 Options)
Matt had gotten in to work a few minutes earlier than usual, but as he made his way to his cube he was intercepted by an excited Dr. Rob Canales.
"I've got something!" Rob exclaimed. "I need to show you this."
Over the past two weeks the physics team had had Angela complete several thousand sigils they'd constructed to try to figure out some kind of pattern, but so far nobody had made any real progress at all, much less actually made a sigil work.
Matt quickly followed him over to his station, where he pointed at a graph on his screen. "Look at that slope!"
Oh.
"What am I looking at?" The labels on the axes gave some indication, but he still had no idea what exactly the "counts per second" were counting, nor what was being measured in millimeters.
"Ok, so you know how the helium lamp sigil works, right?"
"Yeah," Matt nodded. While seemingly simple, the actual physics of it were surprisingly involved. Rather than emitting light directly, it worked by bumping electrons in atmospheric helium atoms to higher energy levels, so that they'd emit a photon with a corresponding wavelength once they relaxed back to the ground state.
Rob continued. "And you know you can do the same thing for other noble gases, right? Good, but so it turns out that when you do it to a really heavy element — I'm using radon here — occasionally it knocks the electron off completely and ionizes the particle."
"Ok, but what's the significance of that?"
"I'm getting there. But anyway, so I've got it set up with a radon lamp and an electric field in the vacuum chamber with just a bit of the gas, so when this happens the ions gets shot in opposite directions and I'm able to pick it up on the scintillator, which is what's I've plotted here." Rob again indicated the graph, before continuing.
"And as it turns out, the response to tweaking this little mark right here," he pointed to the other monitor at a magnified view of a sigil (presumably the radon lamp). "There's actually a measurable gradient to the falloff!"
"Let's back up. Can you explain why that matters?" Matt had some idea why it might matter from his experience with machine learning, but he wasn't sure what exactly the significance was here.
"Ok, so we've known for a while that sigils have a certain amount of tolerance to them, that as long as all of the marks lie within a certain threshold the exact location doesn't matter, but if anything is beyond its threshold then it doesn't work at all, just bam on then off. We've tried measuring the exact response across this threshold before; we've all been worried that this might actually be discontinuous which would have all sorts of implications about the nature of our universe. But more importantly, that would also make it nearly impossible to map out the full on-off boundary for even one sigil because of the high dimensionality.
"But! This proves it's not! Since this proves the activity of a sigil is continuous, then it's possible to measure the gradient and work out the tangent space at each point and actually trace the boundary!"
Matt was starting to get a clearer picture, but he still wasn't convinced entirely. "That makes sense, but the fact that we're able to measure the gradient in this case doesn't mean this method will generalize."
"Ah! But don't you see, this proves it's possible, for other sigils we just need more sensitive measurements!"
The instant he'd finished watching the video, Mike had shot off an email to the legal team, and had immediately gotten to work. He wasn't sure exactly what the implications of this were, but the fact that there were supposedly a complete set of plans for the pod was undoubtedly significant. There wasn't a lot to go on: there was a lot of, ahem "artistic", camera work, especially on the shots showing snippets of the plans or the other books, so far he'd been able to reconstruct several pages from the footage, and as he worked a plan started to form.
Over the past two weeks, Angela had spent what felt like forever completing thousands of sigils that the physics team had constructed, the vast majority of which served no practical purpose other than to be detectable by the human's digital sensors so they could try to guess how they worked. At first it hadn't been too much of a drag, but despite the fact most had only minute variations initially from one sigil to another, nearly all of them had to be completed in completely different ways.
The principle of it hadn't seemed too far-fetched — after all how else do you study a black box other than by observing its inputs and outputs? But as the days had stretched into weeks she'd found herself becoming more and more mentally exhausted from this process, on top of the stress she was feeling from being stuck in this one town for so long.
On top of that, by the end of the first week she'd started actually having difficulty completing most of the sigils correctly. She'd explained to the humans before that for more complicated sigils it could often be hit-or-miss whether it would actually end up working, and it would often take a few tries to get it correct, but by Friday she'd started having trouble casting even bottom-tier warmth spells successfully more than about half the time, let alone the deceptively simple sigils the humans had concocted for her.
Initially she'd thought it was just an issue with motor function, so she'd slowed down to make sure all of the strokes were correct, but this had only helped a tiny bit. When she came back after the weekend and looked at some of the earlier duds though, it was obvious that most of them were completely wrong.
And not even just a little bit wrong; wrong enough that they were truly ugly, rather than beautiful and orderly like a functional sigil should be. The fact that to her they'd seemed correct on Friday somehow felt dirty initially, like some sort of scandal, and combined with her elevated stress levels from staying in this one town for so long, she really hadn't wanted to talk about it at all.
That had lasted all of about 20 minutes until Matt had showed her one of the research team's attempts, which by comparison had been truly horrifying. This reminder that none of the humans would be in the least bit bothered by any of it, and in fact couldn't even tell the difference, had helped her get past this to explain the issue.
This perceptual shift had been of particular interest to Brenda and the others of the cognitive science team, but at this point they were mostly occupied setting up the "fMRI machine" they'd acquired. Aside from some minimal questioning, they'd mostly left her alone, so her interaction with that team had been fairly minimal over the last two weeks.
Now, though, the machine was apparently ready to test, and they needed her so they could calibrate it.
Angela wasn't a radiologist specifically, but the concept of using technology to image a patient's internal organs was familiar. X-rays were a fairly standard diagnostic tool that could be used on a wide range of species, and Angela had heard of other tools that were capable of imaging soft tissue on some species.
But this was something else.
A year and a half ago, before she'd landed here, if someone had claimed technology existed that could, in real time, measure not just the structure but the activity, in a person's brain, and then infer their mental state based on it, Angela would probably have dismissed the claim out of hand as either pure fantasy or paranoid conspiracy theory depending on who was claiming it. But given what she'd seen so far, the fact it was humans making this claim... well, she was inclined to believe them. For them this technology wasn't even considered experimental, but was in fact a routine diagnostic tool for a wide range of both physical and mental disorders.
According to them, fMRI picked up activity based on the difference in magnetic properties between oxygenated and deoxygenated blood, and the fact that humans used a very similar iron-bearing heme group to phascolians meant using the same tech on her was plausible. Unlike her though, where the iron atoms bound into large multi-subunit protein polymers dissolved directly in the blood, humans used much smaller "hemoglobin" proteins contained within specialized red blood cells. They were hopeful that this wouldn't be too much of an issue, but the differences in size and structure would undoubtedly have some effect.
But whether it would ultimately work on her, and whether or how much they'd be able to learn, they were still determined to try.
"Ok, as a first order of business, how useable are these?" Mike slid printouts of his best reconstruction across the meeting room table to Angela and the engineering team. Once legal had confirmed he was in the clear to purchase a FloatPlane subscription for the higher-quality video, he'd basically had to start over from scratch, but the significantly better original footage meant he'd been able to recreate them with far better detail.
"The smaller bits of text are kinda difficult," Angela said after a moment. "But still readable."
The engineering lead agreed. "Some of the linework is fuzzy, but this is miles better than the satellite scans we've been working with. Where'd this come from?"
Mike explained the situation, how there had apparently been a full set of plans stowed on-board the pod, and that Coral Sound were now using them as part of a sort of "hoax reverse-engineering" video series about the pod. "I don't think they actually believe it's a hoax; they're probably just using that as a cover to gain popularity and avoid interference. But in any case the plans themselves are clearly genuine."
"Ok, but how does this help us generally? We're going to need more than just some of the drawings if we want to base our design on the plans rather than reverse-engineering the pod ourselves, and I'm not sure how it'll be possible to get all from video. There's apparently several hundred pages in total, and even assuming they continue showing them on video we're probably not going to be able to get everything."
"I'm getting there." Mike paused before continuing. "Ok, so the idea is, to try to influence them to leak as much of the plans as possible so we can use them. One important fact is that we can legally interact with any of their public-facing social media stuff within certain limits, so if we're able to influence them that way we may be able to get what we need. Convince them that their audience wants to see more of the documents, or perhaps even leak some of our info back to convince them that 'the community' might be a resource they can use to help figure out the documents. Anything we can get them to make publicly available we can use."
That sounded a lot more convincing in his head.
Ian, the Lockheed VP in charge of the status meeting, seemed to take the concept seriously though. "Hmmm... On its face the concept seems a bit unusual, but ... well, compared to our other options it's not half bad a idea..."
After they finished discussing the impact of Mike's plan on other aspects of the project, focus turned to Brenda and the cognitive science team.
"Ok, so progress: We've got the MRI machine set up and calibrated for Angela's physiology. So far we've been able to gather some good data for biomed; we were able to get most of the internal anatomy and soft tissues to show up without issue, and we now have a much clearer picture of cardiac and respiratory functions. Angela's earlier illustrations and explanations along with her medical texts were good, but it's nice we could confirm and augment them with our own imagery.
"As for actual cognitive science: We've been able to identify most of the cranial lobes. For the most part they match up with Angela's texts, although the auditory cortex is in a slightly different spot that indicated. Without any other references we can't rule out the possibility that Angela may be abnormal in this regard, although we think it's more likely that the location is just more variable from individual to individual than previously believed.
"As for our main goal, examining and understanding phascolian sigiliation to hopefully shed insight into how sigils themselves work... well, we've run into some technical hurdles. I'll let Justin explain, he's our lead MRI tech." She indicated the man sitting next to her.
"Ok, so as you know, the main reason we needed our own MRI scanner wasn't primarily for confidentiality reasons, rather we expected we'd have to modify the scanner to run beyond its normal parameters in order to get clear images with the differing biology. Not something we'd likely be able to unless we owned it. Fortunately, this turns out to not be the case, although the clearest images do require settings right at the edge of what the original firmware would've allowed. Unfortunately, the clearest images aren't clear enough to image at the level of individual neurons, and while for a human patient we'd normally be able to inject some kind of contrast agent to help with this, that obviously won't work here."
Brenda took over from here. "Since the modifications needed are actually much less than we thought, it's feasible that we could try to get time on a more advanced scanner capable of doing what we need without a contrast agent, but there's only a couple of places in the country that have machines sensitive enough for that. I've reached out to some of my contacts and I found someone at NIH who's willing to sponsor us, but ..."
She paused. "Well, I'm not sure about the logistics of this. We'd need to move the cogsci team to Maryland, near Washington DC, and aside from the expense of relocating we're also going to need Angela out there in person on a fairly regular basis."
By this point Angela had largely stopped paying attention to the meeting, but this brought her back. The only reason she was in California was that she'd agreed to work with them in exchange for help off this planet, but she had been here far too long; she urgently needed to get out.
"I understand the need," the VP began, "but having Angela flying back and forth regularly —"
Angela cut him off. "Sounds good. When can we leave?"
"Hold on. As I was saying that's going to take a lot of time from other efforts, also there's the issue of the actual transportation. The company has a handful of private jets that we could probably use — this definitely qualifies as VIP travel — but they're mostly for irregular use. Things are going to get expensive if we're flying her back and forth regularly."
"Hello? I'm right here." Aside from the issue of being discussed in the third person, something about being escorted everywhere in a tiny private plane felt deeply unappealing to Angela.
"If I may," Matt broke in, "actually, our team has been considering something similar. Several of our experiments have started to move beyond what we can realistically do here in Palmdale due to the need for more specialized equipment and setups.
"There are a number of national labs that have what we need, but since NIST is fairly close to DC it might make sense if we found a sponsor there rather than elsewhere. It makes less of a difference since we probably won't need Angela there in person anywhere near as often as they will, but —"
Angela was glad for the support. "That sounds like a great idea. Also, there's no need for a private plane, I'm fine with ordinary air travel."