Mel sat at the table watching her new friends. Friends. The word felt strange in her head. She had always thought of the crows as her friends, but not like this. That was more like how Pixel and Zoe were her friends. She smiled as she thought about the cats. Maybe she should leave Roger and Sydney to talk about war and go back to the apartment to play with the cats. Would Sydney let the cats come with her back to the castle? Maybe she should just make copies of them. She dipped into shadowspace. The world dimmed and slowed around her as she connected to her ship's control systems. Did she still have full control?
Yes, all was as it should be. Mel still controlled the Island of Crows and the ship it rode in. She extended a mental tendril into Sydney's network, exploring the writhing tree of data structures that defined the apartment and the city ship. Yes, there were the cats. She traced the instantiation of their fluffy little bodies back to the cognitive structures that controlled them, then surreptitiously made a copy of both animals, body and mind. She started to withdraw from Sydney's systems, but remembered the twelve terabytes of Internet data that Sydney had promised her. It would be the work of moments to locate and copy the data.
Or would that be rude? Sure, Sydney had promised it, but it would still be taking. Maybe she should wait for it to be properly given. What was right? This was a dealing with people thing, and it shouldn't be. She was Sydney. They were the same. No. That wasn't right. She was Mel now. It was more like having a sister. Maybe this was like going into her sister's room to borrow a shirt. A sister wouldn't mind that, would she? Maybe she would. Mel had never had a sister.
She would copy the data, but pretend she hadn't. Then if Sydney shared the files, she could just graciously accept and pretend she didn't already have them, but if she forgot and didn't share them, she would still have them. And if Sydney ever lost her copy, Mel would have a backup copy to give back. Yes, copying the files was the right thing to do. She transferred the data. Then, before disconnecting, she grabbed a few other files that deserved backing up.
"What about you, Mel? Do you know anything about it?"
Mel snapped back into realtime. Sydney had just asked her something. "Sorry, what? I was somewhere else."
"This enemy of our alien enemies. Any idea who they are? Did you stumble across anything when ransacking their files?"
"No, just that cuneiform stuff. It's all pretty much like the bit we printed."
Roger sat up straight. "There is more of it? How much?"
"Let me think." She dipped briefly into shadowspace and checked file sizes. "Probably about ten or eleven books worth."
"Good heavens. I already have my hands full with just the one volume. Well, go ahead and send them to that printing device. I'll commandeer the next two tables and begin going through it all."
"We could also apply some real data analysis to this," Sydney suggested. "Mel, can you give me a digital copy of the same files?"
"Sure. Any particular format?"
"Here, can you copy it to this?" Sydney pulled a USB thumb drive from a pocket and tossed it to her.
Mel slipped back into shadowspace. The world turned gray, and the flight of the USB drive slowed. It crept toward her like a balloon drifting in the breeze. She sent a mental command to her ship, bringing a full hexframe of processors on-line. The thumb drive slowed until it was nearly frozen in space.
Mel dissected the object code representing the drive, located where the data should be stored, then copied over the cuneiform images and all related files. When she was satisfied everything had transferred, she powered down the hexframe and slipped out of shadowspace.
The USB drive landed in her hand.
"Feel free to reformat it if you need to," Sydney told her, "Oh wait, that was dumb. You probably don't even have a laptop. We should just set up a ship to ship file sharing network."
"Yeah, that's a good idea." She looked at the drive in her hand, the requested data already on it.
"You want to toss that back?"
"Sure, here you go." She threw the drive. Sydney snatched it from the air and pocketed it.
Roger laid a hand on the notebooks spread before him. "In the meantime, I'll continue working with what I have. It may tell us something about this mysterious enemy, though what relationship a dead language from ages past can have to all that, I couldn't hazard a guess."
"Maybe it's like a Stargate thing," Mel suggested. "You find any gate addresses in that stuff?"
"I don't really follow."
"She's joking," Sydney explained, "It's a television show. Ancient aliens kidnapped humans from Earth as slaves and scattered them around the universe. An archaeologist deciphers the alien writings to save the day."
"She may be joking, but that does not sound all that dissimilar to our situation. How long do we presume these blighters have been visiting our planet?"
Sydney seemed to consider it. "We know it's been at least a century, but there's no reason it couldn't be longer. They travel between stars, so they're already used to working on long timescales."
"So that settles it," Mel declared, "the Egyptian gods were aliens. They built the pyramids. The moon landing was faked." She smiled and stuffed a banana nut cluster in her mouth.
"I fail to see what the moon has to do with this." Roger looked adorably confused.
Sydney spoiled the fun by explaining, "It's another joke. I see her point, though. In a lot of ways this is like an overused science fiction trope."
"Maybe that's why it's a trope in the first place," Mel said around a mouth full of cookie, "it's the truth that's been in front of us all along. Aliens have always been with us, manipulating us, affecting history, pushing us forward. It would explain a lot."
"I'll need to see more evidence before I accept such a hypothesis." Roger rapped on the book of cuneiform images. "You could start by printing the rest of these."
Mel stuffed another cookie in her mouth, then set to work at the printer.
Sydney grabbed a notebook and opened it to a blank page. "We should try to be organized about this. We don't know diddly about our enemy's mysterious enemy. What do we know about the aliens that grabbed us?"
Roger held up a hand and began counting off items on his fingers. "They have been around for at least a century. They are concealing themselves from most of humanity. They seem obsessed with certain ancient writings related to cuneiform. They are at war with an unknown enemy. They have our form, or something near to it, but can change their appearance. Have I missed anything?"
Mel set a stack of books next to Roger. "They don't look anything like us. Not really."
Roger turned to her. "Really? Have you actually seen one in its true form."
"I think so. Mostly I learned about them from poking around in their computer systems, but I think I've seen their young on an internal sensor feed. That big research ship I was on, it had a pretty big crew. There was actually life support systems of some kind. The central chamber of the ship was a massive tank of mucky water. My best guess is that it was a spawning pool."
Sydney had stopped writing, her attention fully on Mel. "I sorta thought they might be completely digital themselves. Neither of our ships have any life support."
"You're not far off the mark. They start integrating technology into themselves while they're still really young. Carve away and replace, little by little, even individual neurons, until nothing biological remains. The older aliens live completely in simulation, though nothing like ours. Oh, and I don't think they were lying about needing to stay around others of their kind. The spawning pools are huge, and their simulations are massive shared experiences. I tried connecting to one but couldn't make sense of it. Worst. MMORPG. Ever."
"But what do they actually look like," Sydney asked.
"Imagine a centipede crossed with a cuttlefish."
"So... slimy tentacled aliens. Hah! My artistic vision is vindicated."
Roger snuck a cookie from Mel's hoard. "That is all well and good, but how do we use this knowledge to our advantage?"
They all sat, looking at each other, Mel and Roger both nibbling on cookies. Sydney finally spoke. "Biology shapes behavior. We should go through every scrap of data Mel has from that research ship, learn all we can about how they live, how they think. That will help us form a strategy." Her eyes narrowed. "They seem to be pack animals."
"More like colony creatures," Mel corrected.
"Sure. Either way, they obviously suffer from groupthink. When I was hacking their network back on the base, it was like it had no internal security. They understand the idea of external threats, but not internal ones."
"That jives with my time hacking the research ship," Mel confirms.
"They always present themselves in pairs," Roger added, "that would support the idea that they are not solitary in nature."
Sydney nodded. "There must be a way to use that against them. We've taught them some hard lessons regarding security, I'm sure, but I bet they still have a lot to learn. We should go over the logs of our escape with a fine tooth comb to see if we can find any more unexploited vulnerabilities."
Roger clasped his hands together. "Well then, it looks as if we have a plan coming together, or at least a plan for forming a plan. You ladies will go over these log files of yours. I'll continue deciphering these inscriptions. We can pull these tables together and turn this library into a proper war room. First and most important, however, I will fetch another pot of tea."
"And cookies," Mel shouted, "you can't fight a war without cookies."
Roger headed out with the empty tea pot. Mel and Sydney set themselves to the task of examining log files. They were so deep into it, they barely noticed when Roger returned with tea and cookies. Mel accepted a warm cup and vanilla wafer, munching away while her eyes scanned data as it spilled across Sydney's tablet.
This was the wrong way to do it.
Mel slipped into shadowspace and activated a full hexframe of processors. Reaching directly into the sea of data, she expanded the log file until it spread in front of her like a raging waterfall. Next, she reached into a subframe containing analysis filters and began applying them to the stream of data. It began to organize itself into color coded pools and fountains. She immersed herself in the data and began looking for wisdom.
She swam back up to the surface with a prize.
Emerging from shadowspace, Mel put down the tablet and turned to Sydney and Roger. "I found it. An exploit we can use."
Sydney glanced at the tablet, then back at Mel with a curious look. "OK, out with it. What have you got?"
"Their sensorium network. I think we can hit it with a denial of service attack."
"As usual, I'll need you to translate that into proper English," Roger complained.
"It's what wires all the aliens together, allowing them to participate in a shared simulation. It's separate from the network that controls base systems. It can't actually affect any of the ships or equipment directly, so the security is basically non-existent. You didn't touch it in your previous hack, so I doubt they've thought to patch it."
Sydney had picked up her tablet and was poking around at the log data. "OK, I see it. But if it can't affect anything, how does that help us? They all still have their individual net access, they just can't play in their big multi-player playground."
"Yes, exactly. But they're hyper-social. They need each other like we need oxygen. Isolate them like that, and I bet they start to wig out. We jam their big simulation long enough, and that base gets thrown into total chaos. Then we wade in and pick through the wreckage, digitally speaking."
"That could work," Sydney conceded. "The problem will be access. Say we develop some sort of virus or Trojan horse that can whack their network like that. How do we deliver it? We've already done the 'captured by the death star' gambit once. I don't think we can do it again."
Roger cleared his throat. "You spoke of a Trojan horse, a metaphor I'm actually familiar with. If your goal is to tempt them with something, I'd say we have just the thing. They are positively obsessed with this variant cuneiform, and the troublesome Miss Mel has so far denied them their largest trove of data."
He took a long sip of tea, his eyes alight with mischief. "I say we give it to them."