Even with her linguistics skill, it takes Emily longer than she thought possible to decipher the written form of universal common.
The Terminal itself is ingenious, with a surprisingly easy-to-use, light-screen interface that responds to the lightest energy-charged, intent-infused touch. The language settings are one of the first things she finds and begins to translate. Finding the option to connect her Translator and dictate the contents on screen in its limited Ulean English speeds her up greatly.
However, even with the assistance, the new language she faces is a lting pot of seemingly nonsensical words and phrases linked together by twisted grammatical rules that nearly outstrip runic spellcraft in complexity. To make matters worse, the mont she leaves the few simple programs tethered to the ship's main processing core for onboard use and opens a Net browser, Emily's hit with a flood of disjointed information that only serves to muddy her data pool.
She manages to wrangle the new alphabet in a few hours that feel painfully long to her, but would be blisteringly short for anyone else, finding it's ford of a blend of twisted cursive and clear-cut lines that echo the runes of power that she's studied intensely for her arcane pursuits. In the process, she cos to two overwhelming conclusions that are impossible to ignore.
First: The Network is a ss, and the pitiful excuse for a search engine accessible through the front end of the ship's wider connection is incredibly limited.
It returns pages of raw data that barely seem related to the terms she inputs. There are a few lightly edited pages interspersed between the junk, but with only a few rough terms entered to try and gain a wider world view, Emily gets pushed from a sprawling spreadsheet tracking a company's costs and inco to a long string of words roughly describing the fall of a planet three star cycles ago faster than most would be able to process.
Second: The Network is the most beautiful thing Emily's ever seen.
Even while shackled by the poor search engine, the sheer quantity of data she's able to gather each second dwarfs her fastest studying speed in Ulea's libraries. Her machina hums in sync with the Terminal in her hand, and the mory banks in her cortex swell as tens of threads sort the rapid influx of information without hesitation, discarding only excess bloat and keeping records of nearly everything, no matter how inconsequential it seems.
Emily's quickly able to build a rough picture as she catalogues recurring planet nas and civilisation markers, the unique character codes used to tag ownership of planets, ships, space stations, and even local data packets being sent and received. The first flood of information is all from within the galaxy cluster they've almost left, Moer 385, which sits within the outer zone of The Federation of the Six Elents' territory, The Manaless Ring. The information is all publicly available, sitting in open databases and information nodes, without any kind of verification needed to send requests to view it.
A glance at the basic browser's code tells her why, as it's set to only access a few open information bands known to be safe and near untraceable, using public data broadcasts to skip entering any details about the requester. Instead of modifying the program within the Terminal, Emily traces the connection's flow through the ship's main quantum data relay. She uses a thread of machina to link the relay directly to herself instead.
Emily builds a quick query in her cortex, modelled after those sent by the browser, asking a random open information node within Moer 385 for one of its historical logs. She leaves the sender code blank and transmits, waiting a few minutes for the relay to pick up the response being sent with another stream of unrequested data for others. Instead of cutting off the rest of the transmission like the Terminal's browser, Emily grabs the full thing, finding eighty per cent of it encoded and impossible to read.
She sets a couple of cores to attempt to break the encryption by force while she sends a few more open queries, gathering raw data. Next, she attempts to falsify the sender code on her query, picking a random space station currently making requests and changing the final digit on their code by three values. She sets the data packet to request a content log and sends it off, waiting patiently for a response.
Nothing has happened after ten minutes, so she tries again, this ti injecting a small burst of spatial mana into the query, wrapping it within the machina holding the sender code. A few minutes after sending off the data packet, Emily feels a faint quiver in her magical senses, indicating the distant packet has been "unwrapped
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