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Post by Avery Heartshorn on Nov 28, 2008 22:19:26 GMT -5
"Sort of..."
She jumped up a bit to sit on one of the counters.
"So what did you want me to come over for? Or was I supposed to be back up for the fight?"
She put up her fists and mocked a thrown punch or 2.
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Post by Taaru Masako on Nov 28, 2008 22:33:13 GMT -5
Taaru failed to laugh or even smile at the joke. It registered to him that Avery was going to learn more than she may be able to handle by the time this thing was through. Whether she liked it or not, she was being thrown headfirst into his world.
He sent the message he had been composing to Jet, then set the datapad on the table and activated it's built-in holoprojector.
"How familiar are you with Centerpoint Station?"
The ancient superweapon in question blinked into 3 dimensions in front of them, rotating gently on its axis.
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Post by Avery Heartshorn on Nov 28, 2008 22:44:43 GMT -5
"It's like a ....'Hyperspace Tractor Beam' right? It moves planets to new systems.... I guess it supposed to be a super-weapon of sorts. I honestly haven't read-"
Suddenly it came into view in front of her.
"...read much about it..."
Her eyes locked onto the hologram and she examined it quickly.
"Why, what about it?"
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Post by Taaru Masako on Nov 28, 2008 22:54:00 GMT -5
Taaru tapped a command into the datapad, zooming in on a certain section of Centerpoint's outer shell. With a finger, he indicated a pattern of intersecting lines and what appeared to be symbols.
"The station is laced with this sort of geometry, inside and out. Eef you remember your father's paper...the one I asked you about....then these should seem familiar."
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Post by Avery Heartshorn on Nov 28, 2008 23:03:41 GMT -5
She jumped off the counter and stepped close, adjusting her glasses.
"Yeah they do seem familiar...I recognize a few of these."
She tilted her head, looking them over.
"If they're inside and out, wouldn't it be like....perhaps instructions, or warnings? Obviously it's a message of some sort.... Of course I assume you have all these written down somewhere so you can look at them in a more linear- line by line form?"
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Post by Taaru Masako on Nov 28, 2008 23:21:38 GMT -5
That shocked him...that she was able to figure that out so fast. Maybe she made up what she lacked in physical prowess with sheer brain power.
As she suggested, he had already collated this data, and come up with some surprising answers...
"Indeed. Heiroglyphs are similar to what your father discussed, though a quick analysis of presumed vocabulary in Centerpoint data show that diction is quite specific. Eet suggests navigational data....a theory which many have touched upon, but have not been able to prove."
"But I had hunches."
He punched another key on the datapad, and the image of Centerpoint unfurled. The extraneous bits of the station faded away, leaving only the heiroglyphs and geometric forms, which were now laid out in a Mercator projection- flat, as opposed to spherical.
"Peeling off this layer of Centerpoint and putting it flat does not really reveal anything, but I had new inspiration from your father....his previous work on Pre-Corellian civilizations, and the Ancients that most likely constructed this system millenia ago, suggests a highly developed language....one completely based in the universal language...."
He looked up at Avery, expecting her to complete the last bit for herself.
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Post by Avery Heartshorn on Nov 28, 2008 23:28:39 GMT -5
Her furrowed brows slowly relaxed.
"Math, of course..."
She crossed her arms and looked it over row by row.
"If I know my father, and everything he loved...it's patterns and puzzles...and if it IS a math-based language, there is a high probability of a pattern."
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Post by Taaru Masako on Nov 28, 2008 23:43:50 GMT -5
"Not just pattern. But a star chart!"
Eerie as it was, it was clear he was excited about this prospect...as if he'd completely forgotten the body in the next room, and the many that would most likely join it.
He tapped a few more keys.
"Problem ees, of course, how to treat data. How to project Centerpoint station lithograph into proper shape, yes? Your father's work gave certain clues: The Ancients, or Celestials, viewed the sphere as the perfect shape, which is evident in archeological finds. Considering they were a space faring species, this also lends some weight to theory that their language and mathematics was based on 4-dimensional polar coordinate system: Time, and space."
"So, knowing this, I treated our data here to get this," he tapped the datapad once more, and the Mercator projection morphed into a completely new configuration: spheroid, but unlike the first image of Centerpoint station, with what appeared to be orbits. Finally, this image was overlayed over a galactic map.
"The Celestials language had several orders of meaning, and the range of their tenses still baffles most linguists. Suffice to say, they even knew what the galaxy would look like thousands of years into the future, taking into account migrations of stars and planets."
"I was about to type in today's date into the projection, when our would be assassin ambushed me."
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Post by Avery Heartshorn on Nov 28, 2008 23:54:52 GMT -5
"You haven't put today's in yet?.... Well-"
She rose a hand, gesturing him to move on.
"Let's do it."
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Post by Taaru Masako on Nov 29, 2008 0:00:40 GMT -5
Taaru slid the datapad around and brings up a second hologram, browsing his executables for the right program.
"The Celestials had a calendar based on galactic rotation. Eet degrades over time, but degradation is known factor, and time can be kept by eet."
He found the program, and entered the the galactic standard date and time into it, a system which was based off of Coruscant's rotation and orbit. The datapad chugged, and spat out another value, which Avery would only interpret as gibberish.
Taaru copy-pasted this new value into the projection he had gleaned from the Centerpoint's lithograph. The vast swath of shaded region quickly reduced itself to a point....a point several lightyears beyond the Unknown Regions....beyond the Galactic Rim.
"Oh.....well that's bad."
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Post by Avery Heartshorn on Nov 29, 2008 0:03:26 GMT -5
She paused, watching the whole thing change.
"Bad?...What just happened?"
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Post by Taaru Masako on Nov 29, 2008 0:06:29 GMT -5
"Well....this point," he indicates said point," is in Uncharted Space. Outside of galaxy....eet ees not weekend trip to beach."
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Post by Avery Heartshorn on Nov 29, 2008 0:08:16 GMT -5
"How long would it take to get there? And on another note...."
She looked down for a moment before glancing up with a slight smile.
"What do we need to get there?"
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Post by Taaru Masako on Nov 29, 2008 0:16:01 GMT -5
Taaru pulled the hologram of the galaxy map back up and plotted a rudimentary course.
"Not factoring in transit delays, navigational forrays, or running through areas of space that belong to people that don't like us....maybe 3 weeks."
"And we would need an expeditionary ship with full crew. This is almost on scale of the Outbound Flight Project..."
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Post by Avery Heartshorn on Nov 29, 2008 0:22:15 GMT -5
"Where do we even begin to find people like that...and better yet, people we can trust?"
She sighed and adjusted her glasses.
"So we'd need a crew of somewhere around 50,000, plus a team of specialists, and maybe even assistants? That's....that's alot of money. How are we going to be funded for this?"
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