- canman88
- |
- Elder Mythic Member
“Anything new?” one of the crewmen asked anxiously as he hurriedly entered the room and half ran to a chair in front the main console.
He slowly sat down to keep his vision steady as the crewman next to him gestured towards the large monitor in front of them. “See for yourself.”
The two men sat motionless as they watched the mysterious numbers count down. What used to be a busy screen filled with communications data, network status reports and various graphs and statistics was now replaced with a single line of numbers on an eerily dark background that seemed to pulse with dim light every so often, revealing strange symbols hidden across the screen. The only thing breaking the dead silence in the room was the soft hum of the array of computers lining the walls and the faint sound of muffled beeps as the numbers ticked down.
For almost twenty three hours, the two men had been effectively trapped in the building with no way of communicating to the other stations ever since the countdown appeared without warning and scrambled their network subroutines. Their remote outpost was just one of several hundred nodes of the massive communications grid that honeycombed around the planet, monitoring traffic and maintaining the integrity and security of the infrastructure. Not another soul on the planet had any idea of the situation at GCN-215/7. To the rest of the world they were running green.
“It’s been going for a whole day and nothing’s happened. Why would it start at ten days?” Matthews had become increasingly impatient, yet he couldn’t bring himself to leave the console. Just five months out of traineeship, Matthews had not yet become accustomed to the immense tediousness of his job. He was always a restless person growing up, never accepting having to wait for something, which was a respectable virtue towards his tenacity and determination, but also became one of his biggest vices.
“I…I don’t know.” Jansen responded, slightly irritated at the irrelevance of the question. He then took a moment to dwell on the thought. “Maybe it’s a…”
It took the men a whole six seconds to comprehend the loud, high-frequency noise that suddenly started emanating around the room. As if waking from a state of paralysis, they darted to different areas of the room trying to locate the source. The acoustics of the room made it nearly impossible to hone in on the piercing noise.
Almost a minute later Jansen yelled out “I got it! It’s over here!”
As Matthews came racing over and skidding to a halt next to him, Jansen fiddled with the controls at the small console to try and stop the painful screeching.
“Just shut it down!” Matthews yelled over the noise.
Jansen knelt down and slid down the cover to the console’s support panelling. With a satisfying punch he hit the computer’s power switch. Both men stood at the console, half hunched over trying to overcome the ringing in their ears. Letting out a long breath, Jansen caught a glimpse of the console’s monitor, which a second ago was pitch black.
Dozens of lines of ones and zeroes scrolled down the screen. The crewmen, forgetting about the sudden headaches they had gained, watched intently at the numbers flowing across the supposedly powerless monitor. The numbers began to scroll faster and faster until they became a white blur, and then abruptly slowed to a crawl until the page of numbers stopped. Matthews and Jansen meanwhile had leaned in closer to the screen, almost touching heads. A segment of numbers in the middle of the screen pulsed a vibrant orange and the remaining numbers faded away into the blackness.
Jansen slowly turned his head until his eyes met Matthews’, which were still glued to the console monitor. “We need a binary converter.”
to be continued...