Post by allie on May 19, 2023 22:09:14 GMT
The Hook: If it was originally in digital form, the message was encrypted, but not well enough. What makes it interesting is the decrypted text: it's only a few pages long, but impossible to read. Is it nonsense? Is it a code? Is it something else?
The Line: All attempts to decipher the text with cryptography meet with failure, producing results less intelligible than the text itself. Scholarly research is more productive, and can eventually identify the text as written in Nahuatl (Aztec), which like most endangered minority languages the GEO High Commission on Communications lacks the resources to support.
Translation software is available for order from Earth, though finding it may take some time (and the usual costs and latency of interstellar communication). The translated plaintext is disappointingly unremarkable, though one or two words defy translation and several phrases ("smoke and jaguars," "obsidian flower," etc.) are either code phrases or cultural references. Who was meant to read the plaintext, and why someone went to all the trouble, remains a mystery.
The Sinker: 22nd-century Nahuatl is a proprietary language: every native speaker is a GenDiver citizen-employee. GenDiver also maintains dossiers on every known non-native speaker, who fall into three categories - missionaries, academics, and GenDiver intelligence officers - of which only the last is present on Poseidon.
At least one GenDiver intelligence officer has a computer set up to notify them when Nahuatl is mentioned on CommCore (this typically happens zero times per day on Poseidon). By the time the mystery is solved, they'll be, at the very least, aware of someone reading their message; depending on how it was investigated, they may have further clues and leads to follow up on, if not an outright confirmed identity.
The Line: All attempts to decipher the text with cryptography meet with failure, producing results less intelligible than the text itself. Scholarly research is more productive, and can eventually identify the text as written in Nahuatl (Aztec), which like most endangered minority languages the GEO High Commission on Communications lacks the resources to support.
Translation software is available for order from Earth, though finding it may take some time (and the usual costs and latency of interstellar communication). The translated plaintext is disappointingly unremarkable, though one or two words defy translation and several phrases ("smoke and jaguars," "obsidian flower," etc.) are either code phrases or cultural references. Who was meant to read the plaintext, and why someone went to all the trouble, remains a mystery.
The Sinker: 22nd-century Nahuatl is a proprietary language: every native speaker is a GenDiver citizen-employee. GenDiver also maintains dossiers on every known non-native speaker, who fall into three categories - missionaries, academics, and GenDiver intelligence officers - of which only the last is present on Poseidon.
At least one GenDiver intelligence officer has a computer set up to notify them when Nahuatl is mentioned on CommCore (this typically happens zero times per day on Poseidon). By the time the mystery is solved, they'll be, at the very least, aware of someone reading their message; depending on how it was investigated, they may have further clues and leads to follow up on, if not an outright confirmed identity.