Now comes the maddening, gratifying part of the game. Trying to figure out a way to connect to the… device? Relay? Chip? They had already started to anthropomorphize it as some sort of beating heart creature. A leech.

It took them a while to trace out and understand the connectors and how to connect to the ship’s system so that they could run some tests and see if anything is still there. If there’s anything worth learning.

And hey, if it turns on then that easily quadruples the potential price.

One of the longest parts of the whole affair was finding a recipe for period-appropriate wires and printing off yards and yards of the stuff. Then figuring out how to glue the wires to the metal blades on the edge of the card that housed the chip.

It turns out that it needed to be conductive glue. Regular glue stuck the wires in place and there was metal on metal contact but nothing happened. That was a setback for a whole day. But they found a recipe for solder and printed out too much of that and then they were good to go. A quick zap of plasma melted the glue and it immediately hardened when the plasma was removed. Genius.

Then there was the question of how to power the thing. They could pick up that there was still some amount of electrical activity in the core of whatever this thing was. They set up a power supply to push that exact amount of power properly modulated for ancient circuitry (those printed wires came in handy).

Once everything looked like it was set up properly, it was time for the smoke test. Apply power and hope the whole thing doesn’t explode.

They wished they followed a faith so that they could have some higher consciousness to ask for assurance. But it was too late for that.

Push power.

A buzz, a hum, the sound of something faintly spinning up, then a sort of defeated sound. But no explosions. Yet. That was a good sign.

Next, it was time to jack the device into their ship’s diagnostic system. Hope that the device pushed out some sort of data so that the system could analyze it. Then they might be able to initiate some sort of interface they could use to read it out.

A day was spent building a wiring harness to interface edge connectors with friction plugs. Wires to arteries.

They were running out of time. Her friend – “friend” – would be here with his scrappers and they’d haul away anything they might need that’s still on the ship. They still hadn’t really spent much time over there since they found the device.

But they did have a strong sense of Deja vu as they explored the engineering spaces.

Anyway, once the scrappers were here they take whatever’s in place on arrival.

They hooked up all of the interfaces and applied the power and…

… cryptic entries began to flow across the screen to the left of the test harness.

Can you translate this?

I don’t even know what this is was the answer behind their corneas.

They loitered some, watching some sort of code fly by as pulses of light, waiting for the machine to start to translate. But this was clearly going to be a rough one. It’s not like they had much reference material onboard about operating ancient computers. They also wouldn’t be able to take advantage of anything off board considering the reception out here was terrible. It would be doubtful they’d be able to connect to the Centrex.

Well, this will take a while. I might as well go back to the ship to look around. The scrappers should be here tomorrow if they came straight and didn’t get lost.

They left the room to suit up.

The device started to reach out.