Quoted By:
“A few days after entering MIZAR-IX’s gravity well, MERRYGATE told me that the void was replete with radio waves. Out of curiosity, I tried to listen in by routing the output of the external antennas through a standard audio converter. It was horrible. Screeching wails and grating chirps. I threw my headset off immediately – much to her poorly-concealed amusement.
Fortunately, she found the encrypted signals much more informative than I did. As days ticked by, she reported considerable success in dissecting the basic structure of their communication protocols. Trinary logic with a septenary counting system. Transitional instruction architecture that suggested mid-early implementation of quantum computation. Cryptographic techniques were curiously primitive even in light of their limited hardware, suggesting significant vulnerability to the key-breaking subroutines bundled in MERRYGATE’s codebase.
After only a week’s time, I gave her permission to conduct an intrusion attempt. While her plan was supposedly straightforward, the details were too complicated for me to follow. This was unsurprising: no human could match the computational speed of a machine, especially when the game was being played on their virtual home-turf.
I only saw a rendered abstraction of her progress. But even in this simplified format, I could tell that her pace was remarkable fast. Hardware scans raced around the wireframe system-map, flashing white-blue before being replaced by the amber-red pulsing of a meticulously written military icebreaker.
The haul was both more and less than what I expected. On the positive side, we had something resembling a map of the system. Enough video and text data to last a few lifetimes, assuming that she could work out the compression format. And most importantly, tens of thousands of shipping/traffic manifests kept in the short-term storage buffers. Even without looking through their contents, the existence of these logs made it clear to me that MIZAR-IX could not be ignored. Unless I blockade these vessels from communicating and coordinating with each other, I will have little chance of reaching the inhabited inner system.
This leads me to the less positive discovery of her search: most of the critical systems responsible for governing the colony were air-gapped, run on isolated hardware that is simply inaccessible to an external intruder. But MERRYGATE found one critical exception…
