Chapter 5

The wind is eternal. The air is the medium for the passage of life. We are of the wind, children of the eternal movement. To ride the flow of the wind is life. First was the vastness of the wind. Weia knew it could be better, so she made trees whose leaves would proudly show the wind. Then she made ground for the trees to stand upon and to give the wind shape. Then she made the plants that would fill the wind with smell and aroma. Then she made the rains so the plants would thrive and the wind could be seen. Finally she made the Ostogot, so we would ride the wind, knowing it’s eternity. And Weia knew, that is enough.

- The Song of Wind, Tale of Weia

Heading back to work in the morning, Liuani was energized. The matches last night were some of their best games. It certainly showed they could compete with some of the best teams in their league. But best of all, it had both distracted her from what was going to be arriving today, and exhausted her enough that she was able to get a decent sleep. At this point, she had to say this was starting out as a great day.

She encountered Cswir as she entered the lobby of the building when she arrived. He looked to be a little distracted at first glance.

“Good morning Cswir. Today is the day. I have not had a chance to check my messages, but I don’t expect there to be any delays so we should have something to start with before the end of the day.”

“Hello Liuani. I did not notice you, sorry. I hope so, I am very excited to get a look at the new languages and cultures.” He seemed happy enough to see her, but still not completely awake yet.

“Is everything alright?” the last thing that Liuani needed was for one of the team to get sick right at the beginning of the project. She did feel a bit of guilt that she was more concerned about the project than if Cswir was ill.

“Hmm? Oh no, everything is fine. I ended up staying up quite late last night. I downloaded all of the texts yesterday to my portable terminal before I left. All of the material from the original collection. I wanted to take a look at the languages, start to get familiar with the characters used. Did you know that there are at least 4 distinct and different groups of characters in the different texts. That is odd but not extreme. But what really makes me curious is that as far as my software can determine, one has 26 distinct characters, another has over 100 distinct characters, all different from the first group. The third one confuses the software, it is not sure what makes distinct characters there or if every character is unique, which makes no sense at all.” Cswir had this distracted look on his face.

“So you started already, nice. From the sounds of it though, it doesn’t seem like you were able to get too much out of the available texts?”

“Well what is really curious is that, none of these languages have any relation to the other. Nothing! As far as my software can determine, there are no shared grammatical rules for any of them. Fascinating.”

Liuani had to smile at his enthusiasm. She wondered if he was aware of the amount of data that would be coming in? She thought it might be interesting to see if he is still as enthusiastic once that challenge has been presented.

Her com chirped at her. There was a message from Surot, he must have gotten in earlier than her today. He sent that he would not be available to make lunch today, his section had decided to prioritize getting the incoming ship processed and all the material stored and categorized. He was expecting that to take well into the later part of the day. Ok, at least now she knew that the ship was still on schedule.

Liuani had a good chat with Cswir, this was the first chance she had to get to know him at all. She found out that he had always had an interest in language. He had even managed to become fluent in Brek, though he claimed that he had a horrible accent. She expressed more than a little disbelief at that because as far as she was aware, the Brek language incorporated some whistles that were outside of Sel hearing range. He explained that while he could not hear the sounds, he had worked with his AI and using biofeedback, had been able to learn how to generate the correct tones. He was able to feel what his throat was doing to make them, and that it was apparently good enough to work. He did admit that it had been more of a challenge from a previous mentor than any real interest on his part originally.

Liuani left Cswir at his work space, saying she would see him in the conference. She dropped onto her work couch, brought up her displays, configuring them this time for the upcoming conference later and adding the configuration to her schedule. Once she placed her com unit on the surface of her desk, it linked it to her work space systems and updated her calendar to reflect that Surot would not be joining her for lunch. There was an update from Rysal waiting for her as well, but it was just a request that if she got there first to arrange for some wattyl loaf to go with the lunch. Her system had already checked the online menu for the cafeteria and confirmed that it would be available today.

Liuani checked the status of the incoming reconnaissance mission and it was still on schedule. The updated time should have it landing in just over 6 hours. According to Surot, it will be close enough to start the electronic data transfer an hour sooner than that. That will mean the data will be arriving about the time she meets Rysal for lunch. There really wasn’t much more for her to do at this point. The conference she had scheduled really was not much more than a detailed meeting to get to know each of the team members, nothing much would be done until the full data was available.

She went over her database configuration one more time, there were some minor correction suggestions from the management software to fine tune her filters and some of the data archiving process. After a quick look, she accepted the modifications as she was no expert and the system suggested changes did not appear to make any effective difference to how she wanted the data organized.

Her system gave her a 10 minute warning for the conference time. She closed the database interface and organized her notes on the Humans that she had set aside after her brief by the director the other day. She decided at the last minute to add the bio for each team member to be displayed below their connection location during the conference.

The time arrived for the conference and she had all of the connection requests pop up over her desk in less than 5 seconds. ’Everyone seems eager anyway’, was her first thought with a small smile.

“Hello everyone, and good morning.” She had waited for them to all notice the connection had been established. From the other side of her desk, if someone had looked, it would have just shown a three meter wide, one meter high opaque panel that indicated a communication display arranged directly in front of Liuani. Off to her left were three displays set to show information from the first contact mission, these would show as translucent to someone on the other side of the desk, allowing them to see Liuani through them.

Each team member was shown from the shoulders up in a 3d rendering showing their work space behind them, wherever that was. Each being also had a label above them identifying the individual and their location. Liuani was a little surprised to see that the two senior members, Hyusef and Loissel, were not located in her city, they actually worked in KongonFlow apparently, impressive. Their location showed as the head research facility for the Sel Reconnaissance and Research division.

Her system had automatically added the most recent projects for each team member to the bio section for each member. The two senior members had not worked on a project in a number of years and of course this was Lyssot’s first project.

“I wanted to welcome everyone to the project this morning. I know that the material for the project is still on the way, expected to be here in just over 4.5 hours. The electronic data may be available somewhat sooner, we will just have to wait and see. I have taken the responsibility to design the database for the electronic data and it will be ready to start organizing the data as soon as it is in the system. I will include a link to the database at the end of this conference. If you have any questions, suggestions or concerns regarding the database as I have laid it out, please don’t hesitate to let me know. This is the first time that I have had the chance to design one from the base up, and would appreciate any feedback.”

Everyone was acknowledging what she was saying and there were no signs of dissatisfaction. They all knew she was the team lead on this project so it was not a surprise that she would have designed the database. On the request for feedback, there were the usual nods of encouragement. Lyssot looked a little tense, probably wondering if she was expected to find something to comment on.

“Other than that update, I am hoping that we could get to know each other a bit more this morning. I expect that we will be spending a fair amount of time together over the coming months as we go through this data. I will let you know that I am more focused on studying the philosophical evolution of races. I specialize in studying the cultural evolution as defined by how the race establishes ethical and moral decisions and applies them to cultural norms. I am interested in the effects that maturation and technological development have on the application of the stated ethics and philosophies of a culture.”

There were no looks of surprise on the faces of anyone, so it looked like they had researched her as well. Liuani expected that they would have done the same amount of research as she had done, most likely. All that she had said was something that could be derived from reading the publicly available information on the different projects that she had been a participant in.

“Good morning everyone,”stated Cswir, the next to speak up. “As most of you know, I am here to smooth out any possible translation issues with the texts. You are all aware that the system will handle the majority of the translation but that there is always some elements of the races that are...I think the word ’informal’ is the best description. I will be going over the data to work with the system translation from the very beginning and see if we can’t identify the ’informal’ language rules as quickly as possible, but if you have something that you think is incorrect or you are not sure, I will be available to address these concerns at any time. If I am not in here, I have my work terminal configured to echo to my com unit at all times and I will get back to you as soon as I am able.”

“Hello to everyone and I just want to say that I am very happy to have this opportunity. I know how significant this project is, and how unusual. A lot of researchers would love the chance to work on this project, I will do my best to see it is a complete success.” Lyssot had the look of intense determination of someone that wanted to show they were capable and eager to do well. “I specialize in the political evolution of a society. This is my first project to work on since I finished my course of study, but I have received numerous awards for my work while studying and I am eager to get started on this project. I chose this focus because I have always been fascinated with the directions that cultures take to get to where they are when we examine them. I believe that we learn to appreciate our own situation, culture if you will, when we understand how another has chosen to evolve.”

Lyssot looked like she might have been wondering if she had come across a little too naively possibly, but she did not say anything else. The connection placed her in the same city as Liuani but at another location in the city. From the looks of the image background, it appeared she was sharing her working area with at least one other person.

“Well, good morning to all as well. I am happy for this chance to get a personal feel for everyone involved in this historic event as well. I am sure that we are all aware now of the significance of this project and that it is likely to be very closely monitored by not just our immediate supervisors, but also by the council as well.” Hyusef spoke a lot like an instructor, with a careful pace to his speech that makes sure everyone is able to clearly hear everything he is saying.

“I don’t mean to make anyone nervous or anything, I just point that out to underscore the importance of what we are doing and emphasize the opportunity that we have been given. From my perspective, the underlying history that we already have with this race adds a level of mystery and complexity that I am personally looking forward to getting a better understanding of. My focus, as some of you may know, is the history of a race. Nothing too specific in the way of some researchers, I am interested in the origins, physical and cultural development, biological characteristics, and social customs and beliefs of this race who call themselves Human.”

Liuani noticed that the system was not placing him at the main research building in KongonFlow, but instead at what appeared to be a private address. It takes some connections or achievements to get the full network connections to the main databases from a residential location. She began to think that taking a deeper look at his background might show some interesting events.

“I want to add my own good morning greetings to everyone as well.” started Krissel, “I am a focused in the evolution of the technology that is used by the subject race. I will be focusing on identifying technological evolutionary patterns for as far back as the data will allow me to. I do tend to get extremely focused on those facts and won’t necessarily associate the development of breakthrough technology with any other events that could be happening to their culture at the same time. So if anyone does have some specific things that they want looked into or just an understanding of where they were technologically at any given time, please make a point of asking me directly. I am happy to assist if I can, I just may not notice these things on my own.”

“Also, I will be spending most of my time and analysis on examining each major technological breakthrough and how it was utilized. A lot of my focus is on studying precisely how the technology was utilized. Seeing what uses a race makes from a breakthrough can reveal a lot on the race.”

She was located in the same building that Liuani was working from. Liuani made a note in her calendar, thinking it might be interesting to add her to her lunch invites. Being as interested in technology as she is, Rysal might have someone to share interests with, she thought with some humour.

“Good morning. I don’t have much to add to the conversation here. I just wanted to say that I will be focusing on the data involving the pure sciences. I will be examining and analyzing their level of achievement, as much as the data will allow me to, in the physical sciences. I am mainly interested in how close they are to FTL engineering.” With that Loissel was finished apparently.

Liuani gave her a few more seconds to see if she wanted to add anything more, but it became fairly clear that Loissel did not have anything else she wanted to say at this time. That was fine, they would all be together on this project for the next several months most likely.

“I am glad that we all had the opportunity to get together before the real work begins. I would like to ask for one thing from everyone though, to be done when you get the chance. I would like to have a statement on file detailing each person’s goals with this project. I would like to have it added to the archive with the data, this way there would be a public record of the context of our work to use as a reference for anyone that may want to use the results for whatever research projects that may be done in the future.”

Liuani took a minute to check the reactions to her request. For the most part, the reaction was positive, Loissel seemed to have a brief negative look cross her face but it was at most a momentary flicker before her face displayed it’s calm and attentive attitude again. Liuani was starting to think that there might be a bit more stress to this project than she had anticipated. Only time will tell if this becomes a problem was the only answer she could think of.

“Ok then, do any of you have anything you want to discuss? I had only intended to have a very informal meeting this morning so if no one has anything to bring up right now, that is fine. It will not be a problem if any of you would like to have some time to think about it after the data is here and then to come back with any specific requests.” Liuani figured that there was not likely to be too much in the way of requests yet, but she had thought that it would be a good idea to put that out there just in case.

“I have not been able to find out from anyone, but do you know if there are any educational materials included with the incoming data, either electronic or physical?” not surprisingly that question came from Cswir.

“I am not aware of the contents of the data yet, so unfortunately I can’t give you an answer about that. You did get a chance to look over the report of the amount of data that they have managed to bring back though, yes?”

Cswir acknowledged he had with a quick head shake.

“I don’t know exactly the make up of the physical material that they are bringing back with them, but with the sheer volume of electronic data, I would be surprised if there were not at least a couple educational documents in there.” Liuani continued.

“Actually I have to admit that I am a little unsure of how much material is going to be brought back. The brief that I had only stated that 94% of the storage space had been utilized. That is great, fantastic...if I had any idea of the total space that had been available. Do you have any better idea of the amount of material that is being brought back?” this was from Krissel.

The others all seemed to give a similar response to the statement. You could see that the idea that 94% did not really convey a sense of the actual volume of material out of context, was a bit of a surprise to Lyssot. Understandable since Liuani had not really considered that particular fact initially either.

“Ah yes, I understand the problem.” Liuani had not thought to add the detailed information that Surot had provided to her, to the initial brief to the team. “I have a friend in the Reconnaissance section and he was able to provide me with a more specific answer to that question as well. According to him, the incoming ship has space for 1000 cubic meters of storage and the onboard systems have space for 10 ZB of data. The physical storage is about 90% and the electronic is about 97%. So as you can see, there will be a lot of material for us to work with.”

She could see the change the numbers had on their perspective of what would be involved in using the data from the material. Lyssot looked like she had just been told she had a surprise oral examination on her least favourite topic. Hyusef and Krissel both had developing looks of enthusiastic excitement growing on their faces. Cswir looked like he could not decide if that was good news. Loissel did not look like she was surprised at all by the information.

“I have been shown where the physical material will be stored here and just want to reassure everyone that there is no sign of any special storage requirements, so getting access to the material should not be a problem. I have already arranged with security to allow for everyone to access the storage area at any time so, your ids should have been updated by now. I was told that the electronic transfer would actually take longer than the physical one, but I think my friend might have been exaggerating a little there.”

She gave a small smile at her attempt at humour.

“Any other questions at this time?”

No one else seemed to have anything to add.

“Ok then, if we have nothing further to discuss today, then I would like to request we have a weekly conference to review how everything is going. I suggest same day and same time as today’s meeting? Any problems with that idea?”

No one disagreed, Hyusef and Loissel took a few seconds longer to verify as they obviously checked their calendars to confirm they had the time available on that day. After a few seconds they were able to acknowledge the time was good for them as well.

“Again, if you have any problems or questions, I encourage you to let me know as soon as you can, no need to wait for the weekly conference. Other than that, I will let you all go and next time we will be speaking will be at next week’s meeting. Have a good day.”

Liuani was satisfied with how the meeting went but she was not sure how to Loissel’s action. She was not sure if there was something about Loissel that she needed to look into or if that was just how she was. For now she figured that she would just let things develop and see if any problems appeared. Liuani expected that there would not be much time for her to concern herself with Loissel’s odd behaviour once she got the chance to start going over the material coming in.

The rest of Liuani’s morning was spent doing little things, she did not have much on her plate with the other project she had been working on suddenly not hers anymore. She found herself reviewing her configuration for the database for a third time and realized that she was more nervous than anything. She really wanted this project to succeed. It had not occurred to her how much it meant to her for everything to go smoothly. She still was not sure why she had been given the responsibility of heading up this research project, especially with senior researchers like some of the others that were assigned to this project.

Before she knew it, her system provided her with a five minute alert before her lunch appointment with Rysal. That surprised her, she automatically checked the time and was shocked to realize that she had drifted through the last couple hours lost in the minutia of little details. There was no message from Rysal so she could assume that she would be there. Rysal was very punctual that way. She locked her system and headed over to the cafeteria.

Just as she was leaving her office, she remembered that Krissel was nearby as well. It was easy for her to locate his contact information and try contacting him. She got the tone indicating his com unit was receiving the communication request.

“Hello Liuani, what can I do for you?”

“Hello Krissel. I was just heading out to get some lunch with a friend and wanted to extend an invitation to you. Since you are working in the same area as I am, I thought it might be nice to get to know each other this way. You might find my friend interesting, she is a research scientist working on Wysallean fields. So, are you up for some company? If you already have other plans, don’t worry, I can understand as this was a last minute thing.”

“That would be great, but unfortunately I am not going to be heading to lunch until later. I appreciate the thought though, how about tomorrow then? “

“Alright, that sounds good to me. We usually just head to the Cafeteria about this time. I will meet you at the entrance to this building about this time, ok?”

“That sounds good to me. Thanks for the invitation, I will see you tomorrow then. Enjoy your lunch”

“Thanks, you too.”

Oh well, Liuani thought, never hurts to ask.

Rysal’s focus on her experiment seems to be getting more and more intense was the first thought from Liuani on her way back to her workspace after an interesting lunch time conversation. Liuani felt a little guilty that she could not pay as much attention to what Rysal was talking about. It was all she could do not to rush through lunch to race back to start looking at the data. When she mentioned to Rysal that the ship from the 7th prelight was due to arrive after their meal, the only comment was Rysal wondering if she would be able to get access to the single subject to run through the scanner.

Liuani did not really blame Rysal though, she could understand what she was going through. Now that Rysal had the go ahead to run the experiments that she had been wanting for so long, much anything not directly connected to that was not really on her screen now. Liuani admitted that she had a tendency to get wrapped up in her work too when she has a new project and she expected that she would be cancelling meal times to work on this one too.

As she was walking back to her office, her com chirped with an alert. She could feel her excitement surge when she read the alert. She had set up the database to send her alerts to system or status changes, and the alert was a notification that data was being added to the archives.

Back at her terminal, she was able to see that the data was transferring to the central database already. The ship should not have landed yet, but Surot had mentioned that the data would be probably be able to start being transferred before the ship had landed. It was not much yet, and the algorithms that she had created to organize the data had not had much time to really get started yet. The systems on the ship had already started the language interpretation. Added to the data gathered from the original reconnaissance and there should be something available in another hour or so.

The initial summary of the electronic data from the recon ship shows it is composed of 31 distinct languages, including unique characters for each of the languages. That is the most she has ever heard of in a single subject race. The Brek were the most extreme in the other direction, having only a single language and alphabet for the whole of their races span, but 31 is unexpected.

That should make Cswir’s task rather...interesting. The thought brought a smile to her face, she imagined that he would enjoy the challenge. The original material brought back over 400 years ago, obviously was not a representative sample of the diversity of languages on the planet.

The summary listed the contents as 61% texts, 21% video and the remaining 18% audio files. It will take the system time to process the data from the video and audio files, so there won’t be any references to them in the filters and database until that is finished.

It was 95 minutes later that the system alerted her to a change in the readiness status of the database, it now had enough information available to activate the search function. She checked the status of the data transfer and it was still showing about 5 hours until the data was expected to be finished transferring. It would be at least another 8 to 10 hours after that for the computer to finish processing the video and audio files to be able to include them in the filters and queries.

Liuani spent the rest of the afternoon going through the picture files, just wanting to get a glimpse of the planet itself and the beings that lived there. The pictures showed a variety of living conditions that might have even earned respect from the Rotali. There were vast cities, massive bodies of water, huge areas of plant life and greenery. She could tell that there were different levels of industrialization all over the planet, there were many examples of impoverished and starving individuals. More than a few pictures showed some pretty extreme violence. The race was still very unstable but was certainly evolving.

There were many pictures of sandy dry areas, she was especially appreciative of the ones showing somewhere called ’Sahara’. It looked absolutely amazing. But the presence of so much water, and so many other pictures showing so many areas of heavy concentrations of plant life, including in many cities, showed how different it was from her homeworld. In many cases the plants were obviously intentionally included in the city planning. This would certainly indicate the race has a fondness for the natural look and wanted to include it in the growth of the city. There were many pictures of green, plant filled spaces in the middle of otherwise completely developed city areas.

As she went through the pictures, it became clearer that these humans seemed to enjoy all the different climates. There were many pictures, everything from snow filled landscapes with humans laughing and riding machines or with something attached to their feet to riding different machines, with either two, four, six or eight wheels across dry obviously arid environments. They seem to be able to live, play, and work in all of the environments, including the water.

She was amazed at the diversity of the humans most though. The pictures showed an incredible variation of colour, size, and dimensions. She was fascinated to see the variety in individuals in all climate zones. She was a little surprised to see so many of the pictures were of humans with no clothing. Many times the pictures were of multiple humans. It was clear after a few pictures what differentiated the genders, but she could not tell which were the egg layers. Well, that would most likely be explained in some of the texts that she had not had a chance to go through yet.

She waited in her workspace until she received the notification that all the data had been received. It would still take the system time to process all of it into the categories and sections that she had created for the database. She expected it would be fully configured and ready by the time she started work in the morning. But now that she knew it had all been downloaded successfully, she set up a couple of specific queries with the system. She wanted to get a display with a break down of the database: how much fell into each category she had set up. If the miscellaneous category had too much information then she would have to examine it first and see about developing further filters and/or queries to split out the data.

She also set the system to creating sub-groups for the data based on language used for the media; she directed the system to set aside all philosophical data as well as anything that fell into the definition of artistic. She decided that it would be interesting to look for other patterns in the data. She set another query to organize a display of how much of the data fell into reality based content and non-fiction. She was thinking that the non-fiction would reflect the creative side of the culture and it would be interesting to see if there was a preference to one or the other. After another second she added the filter to arrange the results by language as well.

That is enough for one day, Liuani was fairly sure that she would not be able to go through all of that tomorrow as it was, but it should make for some interesting reading for the next day anyway. She knew that she needed to schedule time soon to get a good look at the physical material that was brought back and to examine the subject that was brought back. It would take at least a day or two before any biological information would be added from the subject.

She checked the status of the material and did not find any restrictions on accessing them. There were some warnings about handling restrictions but otherwise, they would all be available to any researcher from the group. For the most part, no one else will be able to get access to the material until the group is finished with the initial researching and processing. Part of their job is to provide the context for the material so anyone else who wants to reference it will know what is relevant to whatever they are doing, if at all.

A lot of the material had already been identified in the most general sense and there were several examples of weaponry used by the Humans. They were all included in the group of material that fell into the category with the handling restrictions. There was a group detailed as ’body covering’ that was also fairly detailed and included a good number of associations to pictures already.

Liuani finished shutting down her work station and headed out. Her team had not made the tournament but the next round was scheduled for that night and she was definitely interested in watching the next round of eliminations. Her other team mates were going to watch as well, except for Fysal who had another commitment that night. They had agreed to meet in the host server ’lounge’ 10 to 15 minutes before the first match was scheduled. That left her with just over 90 minutes to get back to her place and get something to eat.

The next day was the first day that the database was fully integrated with the electronic data, it would take another day for the material to be finished getting added to the database. Liuani was not really sure where she wanted to start. There were a lot of options to start with, the database listed a massive number of texts that fell into the categories she had created for ’philosophy’, ’religion’, ’history’, ’belief’ and ’culture’.

She found it interesting that all five categories had texts that could be traced as far back as 4000+ years in the past. She would not be surprised to see distinct trends in the evolution of the race due to these five elements. She was not sure how much the multiple source languages would complicate any analysis of these categories. The different languages would not impact her ability to study them, the systems automatic translation to Sel would allow for her to understand them. It is the fact that so many of the categories have multiple texts in the same time frame but from obviously different sub-cultures, that made it a challenge.

Liuani had done this often enough for other projects, she organized her data first by category then by timeline and finally by language. She would start with ’history’ as that is a statement of what happened. After that she would examine ’culture’, this would provide the context for each of the social groups that existed on the planet. Then she would look at the ’belief’ category as that is not restricted by organizations usually. Liuani had found that generally, ’philosophy’ was a broader umbrella than ’religion’, so it would be studied next. Finally, she would examine how ’religion’ has affected the development of the culture.

She would separate the texts at that point in 100 year segments, accepting that there would inevitably be cross-overs between the times. Finally the resulting data would be separated by language. She was expecting that each language would likely reflect a different set of perceptions and social group effects on the data.

There was a lot to get done with how she wanted to approach the data. It took the morning to set it all up, many times the system would come up with something it could not fit into any of the categories and Liuani would have to give a manual decision. She was surprised that she needed to contact Cswir a few times for what looked to be a ridiculous translation. Most of those were the system not interpreting correctly but a few times the ridiculous translation was what was there.

She managed to meet with Krissel for lunch. Rysal was happy to get the chance to talk about her project to a new face and seemed to appreciate that he understood a lot of what she was talking about and showed sympathy to her issues she had with her supervisor wanting to manage more of the project. Krissel had explained that he had not managed to get too far in the data yet, most of it was far below their current technical abilities and it fascinated him to see what the humans were doing with the science/technology that they had mastered.

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