“…yes, madam. The auto updates should take care of the rest, and synchronize automatically with your dog’s compcollar when needed. You will get notifications when he needs to go, and if he parks his rear end near a potted plant the collar will give him a small jolt. That should make him reconsider! Just remember, the collar needs a minimum of 25 minutes charging every day cycle!

I'm Nick, thanks for calling Sisyphus!”, he said as he hung up the call.

A four star rating appeared at the left of his vision a few seconds later. Typical, he thought. Why did they always leave off one star for no good reason? (If it wasn't for him, that plant would have gotten overwatered pretty soon!).

His average was creeping slowly down towards the 4.1 threshold and he needed to get a grip soon. His brain had been taking increasingly long excursions away from keeping his focus at work, and he was in real danger of dropping below the threshold set for his current salary level. He needed that payment next month, or he could surely wave good-bye to the new VR set he had wanted for months now.

He cast a look towards Rashi, and wondered again how she was able to stay above the 4.7 threshold month after month. And it looked like she wasn't even trying! If she was cheating, he couldn't figure out how. Sure she was always happy and smiling, but he couldn't see how that would fix a toaster or help upgrading a media centre operating system? Of course, it was Rashi... and if anyone could charm an old lady into five-starring a tech support call, he guessed it was her. Perhaps he should listen in on her sometimes, and try to pick up a few pointers. That again, would require the presence of at least half a brain, and he could already feel his attention breaking.

Waiting for his next call, he sent a query to his mindpal to check the status of the laser download. Over seven hundred terra-weirdo-bytes and counting! What could that possibly be? Movies would rarely break the 1 TB threshold, and he was starting to get worried about his drive allocation. A quick query told him that he was still only on 25% of his drive allocation; but it was rising rapidly. Another few hours and he would have to consider upgrading his plan.

Perhaps he had stumbled across some kind of large scale media piracy ring? He wasn’t quite sure who would dare that these days, or even how that would work with the level of DRM that the publishers had been using for the past couple of decades. He shuddered to think what the penalty would be for that. Being found with even a single pirate media file would mean he could kiss his job, apartment and probably his freedom goodbye. Nick was suddenly struck by a flash of fear as he realised he might actually be putting himself at risk just by receiving and storing the data bitstream. Again he wished it was possible to disable the data monitoring tools on his drive, just for a few hours.

What would he say if an Auditor knocked on his door? He could just imagine how that would go down. “Sir; how do you explain the fact that your personal storage qube contains the last 13 seasons of Friends & Enemies?”

“Well, you see. I was doing some amateur astronomy, and it was all beamed down from somewhere in the vicinity of the Sagittarius constellation. Honestly, I had no idea what it was! Who even knew they had movies out in outer space?!”.

"Right, sir. I am sure that is the case, and we can quickly clear that up. Would you like to join me for a quick ride to the station? Oh and; you may want to switch off your utilities before we leave."

Yeah, that would be fun. Not.

His brain briefly allowed him to entertain the thought of stopping the bitstream receiver, and deleting all the data. But he knew deep down even before the first part of the thought was formulated that he would do no such thing. Could not do that.

First of all, he couldn’t see any way the auditors would know about the bitstream; which was after all very weirdly formatted, and so far it had been impossible to even decode the file metadata (but perhaps they had filters for that kind of thing?). But the laser beam he was receiving on was extremely narrow. On the way to work he had reviewed the receiver array settings, and found that the laser pulses measured only about 12 - 13 centimetres in diameter! The odds of a random laser hitting his array were astronomical, and there was simply no way anyone else could have intercepted the data by accident (then again.. that would pretty much seal the deal for the prosecution. There was simply no way he could have the data by accident).

Secondly and by far the most importantly; he was simply too damn curious to find out what was in the data. He thought he might have enough data now to kick off some heavy second level statistical analysis now, and was running a few analysis scenarios through his head when the phone rang again.

“Sysiphus Technology Services, Nick speaking. How may I be of assistance today…”

-

45 minutes later he was swearing under his breath, and some of his colleagues were throwing him knowing smiles. He liked his job, but some times he wished he could order a customer to be conditioned! Or at least realigned. He fully appreciated the frustrations of trying to get strange tech to work (and by god, some of the tech that was being pushed out was just not ready for the consumer market), and he had grown a pretty hard skin after working the phones for the past few months. But was a modicum of empathy and politeness too much to expect? At least he was getting pretty close now to finishing his course on Periphery Consumer Tech Level 2, which should mean more interesting calls would be routed his way soon.

As he was wondering if Level 2 would actually mean an improvement in the calls, or if it just meant he had to handle more arrogant know-it-alls, Nick suddenly broke out in a big grin; thinking about what that last caller would have to do, to sort out his problem. That would be a good alignment of cosmic karma after some of the things he had shouted down the phone line at Nick. (As if Nick was personally responsible for the customer losing the PIN code to his chastity cage.)

Somewhere in the habitat, a metalsmith was probably just about now receiving a call that was going to make the rounds in the bars tonight.

Smiling again at the thought and waiting for the phone to ring again, Nick quickly returned his attention to the bitstream data. The next step would be to decode the individual data frames.

Assumption 1: There was a structured header accompanying each data packet.

He put together a few lines of code, and set up an analysis job that should in theory isolate the header from the rest of the packet. He also added a quick note to his to-do-list to read up on more esoteric routing protocols - especially research on laser comm protocols.

Assumption 2: 12 bits made up a Word in the data bitstream, meaning that each sequence of 12 bits together made up a discrete symbol. Considering the 8-bit bytes commonly in use, he wondered about the strange number. 12? Of course, that number was mathematically kind of neat, but....

A few more lines of code, and he asked the analyser to do simple frequency analysis of the part of the packet after the header, with a base assumption to subdivide the data into 12 bit blocks. Perhaps he could start building a simple dictionary?

Assumption 2, follow up question: Perhaps the data was encapsulated in different protocols somehow?

Here he needed even more research, and wrote a quick note to himself to follow up on this. Could he find some simple scripts that would identify encapsulation or routing protocols? Would it be possible to say anything useful if there was any routing information there?

That was a particularly interesting area to explore. After all, how this data had ended up in his observation bubble was one of the Big Questions that were percolating through the back of his brain.

Assumption 3: As the data was still streaming in, now at nearly eight hundred terra-weirdo-bytes and not showing any signs of stopping, it was probably some kind of video, images or other media. Nobody wrote emails that long. Most media data would (if not encoded and/or compressed) string together long sequences of almost identical data blocks (like a picture of the sky, which would consist of a repeating pattern of blue, blue, more blue, and a few hundred pixels of… blue). That he knew how to script an analysis for, and Nick had just set up a task to run a sequence comparison of the different data blocks to check his last assumption, when the phone rang again.

-

The day went by quickly enough after that, even as Nick kept checking the analysis feedback what felt like every five minutes. Some minor promising results were soon evident, but it would need some focus time to piece together what it all meant. The glimpses that he was catching now were enough to wet his appetite, but far from enough to satisfy him.

Every now and then he made minor alterations to the code to refine the results, and between two calls he downloaded a freeware multipurpose protocol pattern decoder and dumped a few giga-weirdo-bytes into it for a parallell analysis. On a whim, he also quickly set up a bot to find some good materials on his research topics for him to study later.

Fancy a quick drink after work? popped up in his vision. A message from Rashi! Trying to think of a way to turn her down without well, turning her down - he started formulating a response, but was interrupted as Just one. To celebrate! appeared under the first message.

Celebrate what? He sent back.

To celebrate you sharing with me whatever has you so fired up, of course! Was her reply, and he turned in his chair to send her a quizzical glance over the office dividers.

What? He sent, and caught her eyes.

She smiled. Yeah. Normally you just.. stare into space, between calls. Today you’ve been been treating your chair like an anthill. And you do know your fingers make typing motions when you are writing code on your mindpal, right?.

They do? He messaged back, continuing to carry his great contribution to the conversation.

Totally. There’s something going on. And that something has you smiling weirdly and writing code. Weird = fun! Fun = I want to know! She finished, winking at him and gesturing to her terminal. He noticed her call light blinking as she picked up and greeted a caller.

Shit. he thought. He liked Rashi. She was super smart, great fun and for some reason she always seemed to want to hang out with him. She was also good company, and had a magical ability to get him to join her for drinks after work. Even on days when Nick really just wanted to be alone (which, to be fair, was most days), he often found himself discussing the more weird customer calls of the day with her over drinks.

Today was another one of those days, and he really just wanted to run off after work and bury himself in his research and data analysis! His brain was bursting with ideas and thoughts (he almost expected visible sparks to be visible in orbits around his head), and he always thought best when he was alone. But then.

He also wanted to share. He was absolutely, 100% sure that telling Rashi about the weird bitstream was a Very Bad Idea. What if it was illegal or could get him into trouble? What if telling her could get her into trouble as well? What if - and that was perhaps the first time he admitted as much to himself - he had discovered something unique and even valuable. Could she keep it to herself?

Shit. He thought, and decided.

Weird? No. Super weird. Meet you at ColabCafe at 1