Let the program run as long as it takes. 59%
It had been almost two weeks. They’d burned through most of their emergency rations, along with their patience. For a prospector, Applejack was none too happy smelling like one. Twilight herself had spent at least a few minutes alone in decompressed rooms, screaming into her suit with the radio deactivated.
But then the lights came on. Twilight blinked, stirring only sluggishly in her space suit. Starlight’s voice came next, flat as ever but with more emotion behind it now for Twilight than would’ve been for the reunion of a lover. “Reactor emergency start-up sequence underway. Core temperature at five hundred degrees Celsius and rising. WARNING: Decompression damage detected in OVERFLOW ERROR. Warning, sections HABITATION, BRIDGE, FABRICATION, STORAGE, REACTOR, HYDROPONICS unsafe. Life support cannot be restored until fusion is restored. Please remain in COMPUTER CORE.”
Then came the whirring of the air recyclers, which filled the air with misty vapor from every vent as they cleared.
Applejack wasn’t far—on the other side of the survival tent, which they’d set up right beside the mainframes like this was some kind of campout. She reached out, settling one hoof on Spike’s shoulder. “No, can’t take that off yet. That’s near to pure C02 as can be belching out right now. You breathe that for a few minutes and I don’t think even Twilight’s magic will do for ‘ya.”
Spike groaned, rolling onto his side. “If I have to smell myself for another ten minutes I’m going out an airlock. This better have been worth it, Twi.”
“Yeah,” Applejack said. “Yer’ instincts haven’t led us astray so far, unlike mine. But I ain’t takin’ another campin’ trip like this. You can freeze me up with the others instead.”
“No need,” Twilight said, though the confidence in her tone was false. If she could only act wise, and actually find the program had done something worthwhile… she could turn their suffering over the last few weeks into a win. “We’ve given it enough time. You can go ahead and do whatever you need to get the Equinox back in working order, Applejack. If our computers aren’t working now, I’ll restore from backup myself.”
She rose slowly, stretching her tired limbs one at a time as she made her way past the screens. She kept her eyes on her hooves, not wanting to look at what they contained. If those screens said the Equinox was dead in the water… then only she would be to blame for their deaths. But the recordings are back, and the diagnostics sounded right. Feels like the reactor is going again too.
It didn’t seem like their computer was fried, despite how hard it had been working. Guess all those imperial bits really did get put to good use. Crystal tubes might be a thousand times more expensive than magnetic, but they didn’t go out.
Twilight could feel Spike and Applejack behind her, though she didn’t actually turn to look. They wanted to see as much as she did. She sat down in front of the screen, pushing the chair back a little to accommodate her suit. The arms were far enough apart that it wasn’t a problem for her, even as an Alicorn.
It was a mainframe terminal, utterly unchanged from what she might’ve expected. Twilight ran a jobs report, and saw that background usage had dropped near to its previous level, about 20% of the mainframe’s capacity. Though… that was strange. Available storage. Had dropped from the mind-bending 64mb to 16mb, a number she would’ve expected from a typical university mainframe.
She glanced over her shoulder, and sure enough all the tape drives were green.
“What is it?” Applejack asked. “Are we bucked or aren’t we?”
“I don’t… think we are.” She said, ordering a diagnostic while she flipped over to another terminal and called up the activity log. There was exactly one unready entry on the table, marked with her own credentials. “Fabrication request. One ▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯”
“Fab request…” Spike muttered, leaning over the arm and pointing with a claw. “What did you order?”
“Nothing,” she said. She flipped through a few layers of menus and commands to reach the request, eyes widening as she read it.
The order was for an item not found anywhere in their database, though with only a fourth of it connected anymore she couldn’t be sure if it wasn’t one of theirs. Except that it had no name, no attribution, nothing but the template.
“I ain’t never seen nothin’ like that before, cap. Print the raw.”
Twilight did, and a few seconds later the printer located beside her started to hum. Perforated paper emerged from a slot in the console, and Twilight tore with her magic, offering it to her engineer.
“What do you make a’ this, Spike?”
He leaned in to look, frowning. “I don’t understand. That’s a lot of silicon, but…” he glanced back at the screen. “That doesn’t look like a gasket. There’s no opening. Boron, phosphorous… is it a bullet?”
“No,” Applejack said. “It looks like soup to me. These production instructions look like my sister made ‘em.” She tossed the sheet to one side. “I dunno how this was worth a camping trip, captain.”
Twilight leaned closer to the screen, searching it for meaning. The design was made of several constituent parts, and the totality would be impossible for them with their dreadfully low supplies. But it had pieces, and one of which had a flashing asterisk beside it. The computer could build it, if only she put in the order.
“We made contact with an alien race,” Twilight said, spinning her chair around to face her crew. “This was the message they sent. It has to be significant.”
“Getting our damn prospector back is significant, captain. We’ve already lost time. If they were smart, they could’ve got two good weeks of acceleration on us. We don’t have time for…” she waved a hoof through the air. “I need both of you on deck with me until we catch up.”
1. Shelve the blueprints, catch the Prospector. Applejack’s right, answering academic questions can wait. All crew members devote themselves to catching up with the prospector.
2. Forget the Prospector, build the thing. We had a destination in mind once that would’ve been rich in resources. If we really need a prospector we can build another one. Maybe with the help of alien technology along the way.
3. Archive the blueprint on a backup tape, then purge the computer anyway. Just because it’s working now doesn’t mean there weren’t a thousand undetectable changes that might kill us at any moment. If the Signalers wanted to send a message, they sent it. Now we get our computer back.
4. Have Spike build a section of the blueprint. Applejack and I are more than capable of repairing enough of the Equinox when our plan for recapturing the prospector is mostly magical anyway. Spike could use some more time to heal, and a little hobby project is just the thing.
(Certainty 150 required)
Lots of good options. I'll wait for others to comment and see what they think.
The Equinox's computer seems to run on the magical equivalent of vacuum tubes, so presumably the crew wouldn't recognise an integrated circuit (or possibly even the principle behind p-n junctions) to realise that they're being asked to build a computer.
Since the habitable-zone planet was described as a mass of metallic surfaces without any biosphere, a technological civilisation that had some variant of a "grey goo" event seems like one possible explanation for the way it looks. I think it might be safer to shelve fabricating that thing for now, at least until they've had a bit of time to think about it, and purge the computer for good measure.
Archive the blueprint. Now really isn't the time to burn through their remaining resources. Maybe they can build the thing when things are more stable.
Edit: As of this comment, I'm the only one that voted for this option. Interesting to see where this goes if the currently-dominating Spike option wins
I can't wait until twilight (hopefully) sees an alien computers and goes: "Wait, this memory chip smaller than a coin can store terabytes (or maybe even petabytes). and that processor that weighs a gram is literally a millions of times more powerful than our multi tonne computer?!?!"
I just think that would be hilarious to see
Ah the joys of traveling through space with only a toaster of a computer
1.The alien tech might be something useful enough to get them out of a bind, it could be something detrimental, or it could just be a welcome message. By putting it aside for later, they are forgoing the possibility that whatever it is might be useful to them immediately. After all, if these aliens are as advanced as they seem, they would realize what sort of disrepair the Equinox is in, and would attempt to maximize the visitors' chances of survival. That is, if they're friendly. Somehow, I doubt they're unfriendly; if that probe wanted to cause them any real harm, it would have.
2.They've already invested a lot of resources trying to catch the Prospector. If they don't catch up to it, all that will have been in vain, and if the alien device turns out to be useless, then they're fresh out of luck. They still have that saboteur on the shuttle to deal with, too.
3.Again, they don't seem hostile, and any changes they've made may be beneficial, but there's no way to know for certain at this stage.
4.Twilight's little epiphany here is loopy. Spike's engineering skills are crap. The ship was nearly busted by the time he woke Twilight up.
This is... damn, I don't know.
Doing two things at once? Yes, please! That was the point of having specialists, after all, wasn't it?
9268463 Even petabytes might be vastly underscoring, if theses are spacefaring aliens we're talking about. Our puny tera/petabytes would make them laugh.
9268365
Computronium. Not grey goo.
I'm just hoping for a robot that uses their computer voice, so it sounds like Starlight.
"She sat down in front of the ," - missing word.
Hey, when both is an option, I say go for both.
I'll go with option four. This will keep Spike occupied while Applejack and Twilight work on the ship. That's my opinion. Now, to go vote.
9268705
It was in significantly less disrepair before the message, though. And it's pretty plausible that tweaking the gift to the current state and needs of the visitors might be beyond even a highly advanced alien ship's programming. "Let it wait" is getting my vote. The ship is, after all, in pretty bad shape, and it needs all the attention the crew has to spare. If Spike needs light duty, put him on light duty; he doesn't need to be given a hobby for that.
My only qualm is whether it's worth it to go to the effort of restoring from backup. But how long would that take? How sure are we the restore process will not itself run into a problem? Without this information, I feel wrong picking it. Maybe I'll go meta and look at the responses, and pick whichever one is likelier to beat #4. I have a bad feeling about dividing the crew's efforts. (Damn lol, it's about equal—no chance either way.)
The colored option sounds good.
9268444
I think people tend to get biased toward the character-specific options.
9269308
I normally agree with them, but just not this.
The Prospector is important not because of the ship but because of who or what is inside of it. Whoever or whatever it is needs to be stopped but the alien blueprint also needs to be printed because I personally think that it will be the key to the alien tech and the key to the system.
Only option 4 can do both and IMHO Both are needed.
so 4 but with a priority to stop the Prospector.
That was a tough one, but ultimately I voted for number 4.
Let Spike have something to do, too.
(But why is the text blue?)
Found a typo:
I believe that should be CO2, not C02.
(You used the number
0
instead of the letterO
)Doing a bit of both sounds good. Though from the looks of it we should avoid choices that put strain on their patience and relationships for a while since they're likely nearing a breaking point now.
Last thing they need now is doubting each other.
9269308
They remind me of the blue options from FTL: Faster Than Light. Basically extra options available to you due to the particular circumstances you're currently in. Usually this is because you have a specific type of crewmember, a special variant or kind of equipment, or some other factor.
In FTL, however, these options are almost always good, and there are almost no situations it wouldn't be optimal to choose blue options where they come up. Not necessarily the case here.
I'm not convinced option 4 is the best of ideas. Even assuming Spike is completely innocent (which he probably is, but it hasn't been definitively proven yet), we have no idea how complex the end-product of this blueprint actually is. If it wants us to build a computer with microchips and all that, there's no way in hell Spike could possibly build that by hand. In that case, only the fabricator might work, and even then it still might be too complex.
On the other hand, even in fucking up, we'd get a better idea of what this blueprint actually is. Of course, we also waste scarce resources by fucking up. Right now we're mostly on course to Proxima C, which I recall has loads of Helium-3, and therefore loads of fuel, but little else. Right now we're critically low on resources.
I think, therefore, the best course of action to take is to conserve resources. In that vein, recovering the Prospector, and the supplies on board it, takes top priority over the blueprints. Not to mention we'd get to question our mystery saboteur in the process.
So, option 2 is my pick.
Long term, we want to get to the moons of Proxima C, restock on a fuckton of fuel, then set course for Proxima B and hope to get useable resources from there. If there's grey goo or something infesting the surface, at that point, barring extenuating circumstances, we cut our losses and head home with the mystery blueprint.
Option 4. If Spike is doing something, even though it is highly likely he is innocent there is less of a chance for him to sneak off and do something he'd later regret.
...64 megabytes for an interstellar craft’s central control system?! I suppose it really does attest to ponies’ ingenuity and tenacity that they could make do with this kind of tech.
(I mean, our early rockets didn’t have a whole lot of processing power, but even a moon shot is a far cry from an interstellar first contact mission. Though having finally just seen First Man, it’s an eerie parallel.)
Prospector does not matter and external threat which was willing to use lethal force is contained within it. They got the goods and spike is already overworked, wounded and stressed.
Get the thing working, see what the thing is.
I'd recommend using a lighter purple for Spike's options, the current color is almost completely unreadable on the fimfiction night mode.
9273630
Alright, I'll try another color next time.
9272947
Yeah, I'm quite stunned by the number as well. Especially when you take into account of all the stored blueprints for their fabricator and forty years worth of communication from Equus. Must be one hell of a compression scheme the ponies are using. I frankly can't see how it's possible.
I like Option: 4
You have three individuals capable of doing something. Spike is still well versed with the engineering of the Equinox and can do something that won't endanger him, like building part of the blueprints in an effort to see what the Signalers sent them. Twilight and Applejack can continue to work towards capturing the lander. They spent a lot of resources to chase this thing already and looks like it will cost more, when they catch the lander I hope it will make up for it.
9272947
I know that having magic makes for a weird mis of capabilities, but you are right about 64 mb being pitiful. One would think that the ponies would wait a decade so that they can figure out how to magically make microscopic vaccumtubes, thus giving their computer 64 gb of ram, with a corresponding increase in processorpower too.