Chapter 3

Lutitut created the universe. It created the stars, then it created the planets to be bathed in the light. It placed the planets so they would receive exactly what they needed to allow life to exist and flourish. Lutitut created the minerals and elements first. Then Lutitut created the living organisms that would make the foundation for all life. Finally Lutitut created the Brek, perfect in form to fulfill their function.

- First of Firsts, the tale of Lutitut

Coming back to her office, Liuani could not remember walking back to her research space, she was completely distracted by the project before her. She knew that getting as much information as she could regarding the previous incident would be very helpful, as well as ensuring that the texts that had been collected then were available for reference too. She was wondering if it would be useful for her to review the medical analysis report of the unfortunate native. She decided that it would not be particularly useful for the initial investigation into the coming data.

The incoming data was in physical as well as electronic formats. That told her a lot as to the relative technical level of the society already. At least it is indicative that the society is in a transition stage, as all other observed societies that had evolved had once gone through something like this. When they started developing electronic storage media, other forms quickly died out, relatively speaking. The convenience of the electronic storage format just proved to be too convenient and usually drove the other formats into obsolescence pretty quickly.

But this collection has both, that should mean a better chance that the data will include documents that were in the physical form that the society might not have considered worthy of transferring to the electronic format. Liuani realized that she really needed to talk to Surot, she had no idea how big the storage hold on a reconnaissance ship was or how much it could hold. To be honest she was not aware of the storage abilities of the main computer on the ship either, so she could not guess on how much data might be coming. She was relatively sure that the significance of this race would mean they would gather as much data as was possible, so whatever the storage capabilities of the ship were, they would be used to maximum potential.

Liuani was aware of the immense amount of data that was in the archives from the other races, but she had no idea if it had all been gathered from a single trip or whether multiple visits were the norm. She realized that she needed to find out who was going to be responsible for linguistic interpretation. She had found in her other research projects that how the computer translated the documents did not always translate the nuance of the language and she did not want any mistakes made that could be avoided in the initial analysis.

Once in her office, she brought up her terminal and; she found the administrator had already sent her a link to the archive that had been set up to receive the data. She found the list of other researchers that would be working on the project there too. She recognized two of the other cultural researchers like her, the other two she had not heard of. The linguistic interpreter was listed as well, Cswir was his name. She sent him a message asking for a time that they could get together to talk about the project. While she was at it she also sent a message to Surot asking if he would have some time to talk with her.

She took a look at the archive arrangement to see what was expected. She was a little surprised at the amount of space the archive had reserved for the data, she did notice that the archive also included resources to manage video and audio files along with the usual documentation. Her system had already installed the necessary modules to support the video and audio links showing in the archive. Liuani spent some time creating a working module on her local system that would allow her to assign data from the archive to the workspace, allowing her to manipulate it as necessary. She made sure to verify the workspace module she created would be included in the backup routine of the archive.

She did notice that there was an archival link already set up in the resources portion of the archive. She gave it a click and her eyes opened a little wider when she saw what was in the existing archive, from the original visit. There was not too much data here, the subject was identified as having died early in the process and what documents had been recovered had been scanned into the system. There were only 34 documents on file. If that was all the documents that the Reconnaissance team had managed to get at that time, then there could not have been too much in print form then. That made her think that this was only 400 years ago and they are at the developmental stage moving from print to electronic media. That is a positive sign that the society is evolving rather nicely.

She gave the evaluations from the first mission a brief examination and it seemed to confirm her suspicions about the original level of technological achievement. The original team mentioned that they detected no signs of electromagnetic activity on the planet, no significant levels of industrialization, large amounts of agricultural activity in the most highly populated areas and no signs of any real pollution. This all pointed to a society that was still highly agrarian when the original mission had visited.

The mission lead does point out that there were ranging levels of technology employed by the native populations all around the planet, but very little in the way of trade. Apparently the planet had developed in such a way that large pieces of land were separated from each other by significant bodies of water. The mission lead commented that he originally expected to find the predominant race as aquatic due to the amount of water present.

Liuani checked the medical examination of the unfortunate subject, but there were no mentions of it’s being a water based life form, in fact the analysis did indicate that the user was distinctly not suited to a water environment. Liuani was thankful for that in any case, nothing made the research more frustrating than trying to deal with documents that needed to be kept in a wet solution to preserve them. The examination also indicated the subject was bipedal, with two functioning limbs for manipulation and tool use. The subject was omnivorous and used stereoscopic vision, viewing range was more toward the blue end of the spectrum than she could see, but it was estimated that the subject’s eyes were likely less efficient in darkness than Sel eyesight.

Vestigial fur over the body in patches, hearing is via 2 organs on either side of the head of the subject. Estimates are that the range of hearing extends into the slightly higher frequencies than Sel standard and about equal to the Sel standard in the lower frequencies.

While she was reviewing the medical evaluation, her terminal showed that Surot was looking to connect. She accepted the connection and his image popped up on her screen. He was calling from his office and seemed to be a little stressed today.

“Hello Surot, thanks for contacting me. I am looking for some information on the how much information the surveillance ship will be returning with. Can you give me any idea on the expected volume both physical and electronic?”

“I knew I had forgotten something”, was his immediate reply “I meant to attach the summary statement to the archive, with a brief description of the incoming survey. I can tell you that the physical is about 90% of the ships capacity. They were able to obtain a lot of physical material. The ship is also carrying a 98% load on the electronic storage. Apparently the subjects had a global communication network that the surveillance team were able to access, with a significant amount of data. They have managed to break the data in to two gross divisions: sociological and scientific. There seems to be slightly more sociological, but there is a lot of both.”

“Ok that is good..but I don’t know what 90% equates to, what is the storage capacity on the ship?”

“Ah, I guess you don’t usually get this end of the surveillance process do you?” he had seemed a little surprised for a couple seconds. “Well the hold has space for 1000 cubic meters of storage and the onboard systems have space for 10 ZB bytes of data.”

“Let me get this right, you did say they were utilizing about 98% of the available space for electronic data?” she could not keep the tones of disbelief from her voice.

“You heard correctly. Apparently the global grid contained a lot of information, but they were able to access smaller networks as well. It really is a good return for this kind of mission. The data download is expected to take longer than the physical unloading.”

Surot gave a small hiss of entertainment at seeing the look of shock on her features. He realized that she had had no idea about what was coming her way. He had been made aware of the team that would be getting access to the data as it had been assigned to him to ensure the timely and organized storage of the material when it finally arrived.

“We are expecting the ship to arrive about 28 hours from now. We should have everything unloaded and stored about 6 hours after that. You should have access to some of the data within an hour of the ship landing if you like, but it will be incomplete of course.”

“Thank you Surot. That is just too much data to take in raw, I need to find out how they plan to file that. I am hoping that they have a plan.” Liuani was feeling a little queasy at the amount of data that she would be working with.

“Well I see your name listed as the primary researcher, so wouldn’t it be up to you as to how this gets organized?” Surot was not sure what to suggest, it had not occurred to him that anything special would need to be done with it.

“What did you say?” Liuani said, more out of reflex than a need for him to repeat the statement. Her fingers were already opening the archive as she asked him. It did not take her long to find the team assignment in the directory and sure enough, it was listing her as the team lead for the archive. Wow. She had not thought to check, this was a big honour for her, also a big responsibility. The more she learned about this, the more she was sure that there would be more than the usual group of academics that would be looking over the results of this evaluation.

Surot could see that Liuani was checking into something, so he gave her a minute to find whatever she was looking for. But he really had a lot to do and wanted to get to it.

“So that is what you needed yes? I don’t mean to appear abrupt, but I have a lot tasked to get done before I am finished today.”

“Yes, that is exactly what I needed to know, thanks. I appreciate the information, you have given me a lot to think about now. I was unaware that I was the one leading this project. I expect that I will need to get back to you again a few times before this is finished. Is there a better time in the day to arrange a get together if I need to?”

“I would recommend doing them early if possible, but I am not so busy that I could not accommodate a meeting on short notice. Either way, have fun. It sounds as if you will be very busy soon.”

“Definitely! See you at lunch then?”

“Should not be a problem. Later.”

Liuani thought about the situation, with the new information she knew that she had not appreciated the challenge before her. All of her experiences had been accessing an already established database, she never had to set it up before and found herself unsure where to start for a few minutes. It did not take her long to consider that seeing as how she would have the say on how the data would be organized, she could take the opportunity to configure it exactly as she would prefer.

In all the other research projects that she had worked on, she had always ended up having to construct individual search strings and filters to allow her to find the data relevant to what she wanted to look for. This time she decided that she wanted to try a different approach with the setup. Instead of breaking the data into different sections, she decided that what would work the best would be to construct a series of queries which would automatically parse the data and construct the different links of connection between the data. Doing this would allow her to add more queries later on if that turned out to be necessary, or if she just wanted to focus a specific search in a more specialized way.

Once that was settled it did not take her long before she was able to get busy designing the queries that she wanted to apply to the archive as soon as possible. For a beginning she figured that getting the archive with a working time-line for the data would be useful, so setting one query to index all entries based on the race based date system was first. That did not take too long and it made her realize that it would be a good idea to be able to separate the hardcore science from the rest, so that was her next query. It occurred to her that it was more than likely that there would be instances where overlap in the fields is going to happen. So she designed a filter to create as many necessary indexes as the system decided were necessary based on a simple algorithm on the density of scientific material in any given entry.

She decided that as there was going to be a video and audio component as well, it would be best to configure an index that allowed for separate organizing of that. So she arranged for the queries to run over the data as a whole and to apply the queries to each separate group. She added a query that would allow for an index that cross-referenced the groups on the basis of date. Liuani knew from experience that there would always be some data that the system was just unable to identify into any of the given categories so she created a catchall index for anything not assigned to any other index. At least this way she was sure that she would know where everything odd would end up.

Liuani realized that there was not much she would be able to do to organize the physical data until it was here and she had a good idea of what form it was in. She sent out messages to the other researchers letting them know that she would like to get together before the arrival of the data at least once to see where everyone was at and to see what, if any, specific plans they had regarding the data. In case they were unaware, she let them know the estimated arrival time of the ship and suggested a morning virtual conference early tomorrow morning. She listed a time and asked for anyone that could not make that time to please let her know before lunch if possible and by the end of the day at the latest.

As she settled into getting setup for the incoming data, she considered that it would be good to get some feedback from the other team members for what they will be needing. Liuani also realized that she should have some idea what the others would be focusing on, if they had any projects of their own that they wanted to use the data for. It occurred to her that she had never had to coordinate this kind of research before, she had always just made use of existing data for solo works. She had not appreciated the amount of work that needed to be done on a new archive.

She spent the rest of the morning refining the queries and designing dataset filters to allow for specific concerns. She also sent meeting requests for the other team members to discuss coming up with a more coherent plan for addressing the data. She managed to take a look at the bios of the other team members, she was a little surprised that some of them were more senior to her and one was completely new to the institute, this being the first project she would be involved in.

She was almost late to lunch with Surot and Rysal. Surot let her know that the ship was still expected on the projected time so she had just over a day to finish getting ready before the real work began. Rysal was moving ahead with her experiments, Liuani began to suspect that Rysal’s supervisor might have let her do them to get her to stop harassing him about them. But to be truthful, Rysal did have a lot of respect in her field, so she could probably get away with more odd projects than some others.

Surot told her where the physical data would be stored once it was unloaded. He pointed out that it was a secure area and she might want to consider arranging her access as soon as possible before the material arrived as the department and security would be a bit busier then. After lunch she left with Surot to see the space that would be used for the storage and to contact the security supervisor for that section to arrange for access for her team. It was no problem to get the access added to their security profile after she identified herself and provided the project number. The security supervisor did caution her that they were unaware of any special storage needs at this time and would have to possibly amend the access depending on what was in the material.

When she got back to her office she made a point to message her team to get them to verify that adjusted access had been successfully applied to their profiles. She already had replies to her earlier requests and the meeting times she had suggested were all accepted with no qualifiers. She spent the next couple of hours going over the little bit of data that the original reconnaissance team had managed to bring back. There was not too much that she could do, they did not have enough cultural information to be able to translate the documents. She could tell that the documents came from at least three different cultures. Everything from the style of the writing to the characters used were very different.

A lot of the documents were obviously handwritten but some definitely showed the characteristics of some form of mechanical reproduction. She did notice that a lot of the texts used very stylized presentation, it seemed to her that these books had some cultural significance, if the detailing was significant. There were some notes from the original team, providing some details as to where each of the documents had been acquired from the planet, what kinds of cultures had been observed, and descriptions of the locals.

She had been a little surprised at the original team’s decision to include descriptions until she had read a couple and began to realize that ’humans’ seemed to be quite varied in their physical appearance. She was happy to note that the genders were the usual male and female. But other than that, there were wide variations in everything from height, weight, skin colour, as well as distinct variations in some physical characteristics that she would not have imagined. No other observed race displayed this level of involuntary differentiation. She could not wait to see what, if any, differences this kind of variety had lead to sociologically.

Having reviewed the available data, Liuani felt she had a better idea of the kind of variety to expect from the returning scout. As for her team, she was a little intimidated being in charge of a research group, but was determined to show she could do it. Liuani had her AI queue the information on her team at her terminal.

According to the backgrounds of Hyusef and Loissel, the two members that were more senior to her, they should have a lot to look into on this race. Hyusef is a noted specialist in racial interaction behaviour. He has published a number of presentations detailing the sophistication of the development of the Seralli social structures. He actually speculated that their living in a water environment has meant that they have a better ability to perceive things in three dimensions. He has stated that most of their entertainment activities utilize some form of three dimensional application. The result is that they demonstrate a much higher sensitivity to the relative placement of objects. This has lead to many of their aesthetic developments, as demonstrated in several of their most significant pieces of art. This has carried into how they design their personal living spaces, with personal residences looking more spherical than any other observed race.

Loissel should find the variation in individuals very fascinating. She has done a series of research projects into how the minerals in the ground that the different cities in the Brrlk homeworld has shaped not only the colouring patterns of their cities, but also affected the race as a whole in colourization and texturization of their body fur. She has made several compelling arguments for the environment contributing significantly to their sense of identity. She postulated the theory that the Brrlk have so integrated this variation into their social behaviours that certain cities are significantly larger than others due to the colour that the beings in that city display. It helps that the Brrlk cities have to be separated by a substantial distance to prevent a general weakening of the environment which can lead to collapses of the cave systems.

Lyssot looked like she did well at the academy but this is her first project apparently. According to her file she finished her courses at the academy less than 3 months ago. She received a rank of Prime though in Evolutionary Politics, that is impressive. Liuani could not tell what she had been doing in the time since her graduation. It should not have been a problem for her to get a project to be assigned to. Unless she was looking for a specific type of project. If that is the case, then there would appear to be something about this one that interests her. Liuani made a note to question her further regarding her expectations for the project.

Lastly was Krissel, she looks to have the same amount of time on projects as I do, was Liuani’s first thought. It looks like Krissel has earned a reputation for unvarnished honesty, which could be a positive though Liuani could imagine it had lead to more than one confrontation with other researchers. She has participated in seven large projects over the last 5 cycles, 4 resulted in her receiving citations for the depth of her analysis and provocative analysis of the data. Though on one occasion she apparently offended someone as there is a note in her file that indicates some official question of the work she performed for an analysis of the Brek Hegemony. Liuani could see where the problem might come in, the Sel have a stable relationship with the Brek and if Krissel had tried to push a point of view that was not widely accepted, that could cause her problems. There was no note as to the specifics of the difficulty, but just that it had been resolved successfully.

Liuani checked the clock and calculated she had about another 22 hours until the ship should arrive. The group had agreed to a virtual meeting first thing in the morning when they had arrived at their office, about the 8th hour. She figured that she had done everything that could be done for today and logged off her terminal and packed her shoulder pack. She was looking forward to tonight as once the data arrived she figured she might be a bit too busy to be as regular a participant in the Molir league. But for tonight, she was available and looking forward to a little orchestrated chaos. Something to take her mind off the coming project.

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