Pov: Earth
The control room stunk of cigarettes, stale coffee, and sweat. Several people had cleared room on the floor and had laid down to get what sleep they could. The team's all-nighter was turning into days. At the front of the room a monitor had been set up, displaying each message from the other side that came through. There was a lot to discuss with their new, possibly alien, friends. The haggard team had taken turns at the main computer, typing questions and receiving responses. They had worked like this for hours, their new 'friends' on the other side seemed to require no rest.
There were two people, or aliens, or things, responding on the other side. Brains and Percy, they had introduced themselves as. They made no note of who was speaking when responding to the human team, not that it usually mattered, but every so often the tone would shift just enough to be jarring, and it would occur to Miller all over again that this was not one voiceless person he was communicating with, but a team like his own.
Miller had tried to get some sleep but it hadn't come easy and eventually he had given up. All as well, Moore had been on the keys the past several hours and looked ready to collapse. A lot of data had to be sent on both sides, and it couldn't exactly be emailed to their new friends, so that meant he and his team had to manually type data, and similarly, manually write down the data they received. They had been working in shifts around the clock.
The company was still on red-alert. In some drafty conference room Miller pictured big men in big suits talking hushed in the gloom of emergency lighting. It would be a meeting of his boss's boss's boss. The people who ran this research facility. The people who were in charge of letting this 'quantum tangle' continue or not. Or at the very least, they were the people in charge of the power. And boy did this tangle require power.
These big men in big suits would want answers. They had already sent people to come peer into the room, to pull researchers out of their busy haze to answer questions about what was going on. These people were concerned and empathetic, they asked questions carefully and kindly, but Miller could see the coldness that rested at the end of these questions. The men in their meetings would not care about the loss of three people, not if it was a choice between financial disaster, or the loss of confidentiality. If they knew their big secret was out, and that his team had spent hours and hours sharing all the top secret data at their disposal to some mystery people on the other side… well. Well, these men would flip the switch and end this entire ordeal. His daughter, his friends, would be lost forever.
He could face the consequences when his daughter was back. He looked around at the disheveled, baggy eyed team working around him. They all would be facing consequences after this. They all knew it, yet here they still were.
"The situation has gotten complicated?" John read aloud from the screen. "Uh oh. What do you think they mean?" His words had caught some attention around the room and tired eyes looked up, taking time to squint at the screen as if to confirm he had spoken correctly.
Miller gripped the armrest of his office chair. Quickly he leaned forward to type his reply, speaking out his words as a courtesy to his new audience: "What do you mean?"
The reply came right away:
The Decepticon fleet has arrived as anticipated. Their presence may greatly complicate our efforts. Cautionary maneuvers have been taken, both our locations remain secure. For now.
"Both of ours?" John said.
"For now?" Miller said
"Decepticon?" Moore said. She looked around at the others, "Have they used that word before: Decepticon? Do we know what that is?"
Someone else chimed in, "So this is a Navy then? Decepticon fleet?"
"Either that or Star Wars," Moore's voice was dry. What would have garnered a few polite laughs a day ago was now met with silence. Miller tapped a pen against the desk, he held the cap in the corner of his mouth, pinching the plastic between his teeth, on the paper in front of him were scrawls of equations and half-hearted doodles. Moore was probably closer to the truth than she wanted to be. No one had been saying it, but they had all been thinking it. All evidence so far was very heavily leaning in a very Star Wars direction.
They were dealing with a very likely extraterrestrial first-contact scenario. No one had fully confirmed this yet, their new friends had made no point to ask, and to be frank, he and his team were in no rush to find out. Pleading ignorance was their only excuse right now once this all came to light.
Miller had no idea what mess they were in. There was certainly more to it than met the eye. The idea of contacting not only aliens, but space fairing ones, and the idea his daughter could be on their ship right now. Not to mention this news of whatever this 'Decepticon fleet' was. It was like they had poked their head into a warzone. Where exactly had his daughter been sent? It made him dizzy with fear, imagining her embroiled in whatever chaos was unfolding on the other side. He just hoped they would keep up their end of the deal and let her speak to him.
Whether these were aliens or not, Miller himself did not have much doubt on the matter. They sure felt like aliens. They asked questions no human would need to ask. Like their questions about food, which they always referred to as 'fuel.' The obsession about 'fuel' had Miller's team reading nutrition labels off whatever protein bars, chips, chocolate bars, or other snacks existed in the office. Their possibly extraterrestrial friends had spent hours asking for definitions of various food compounds that had been in the nutrition labels. It had been a bizarre interaction that left things feeling more like a research paper than a first-contact situation. They seemed very desperate to make sure Kathrine was well-fed. As a researcher he was frankly baffled, but as her father he could only be thankful.
Still. How silly would he feel if this whole time they had been speaking merely to a ship tracing circles in the Atlantic or Pacific? Who would it belong to then? China? Russia? But the issue with highly top-secret operations was that word really did not tend to get around.
Before Miller or John could ask any of their questions another message appeared.
Let us worry about the Decepticons. It is imperative we discuss the Cube.
Ah yes. The Cube. The center of this whole situation, at least he assumed. They all had theories around the room. Their new friends had asked them out of the blue about the cube not long ago. It had been shocking to see them be wise to a secret that had taken Miller years to uncover. It made him nervous. His superiors would not like that their friends had known about it.
Hell, he wasn't supposed to know about it either.
"How will the cube help us?" He typed.
The Cube is an ancient artifact of ours. As you've realized it has incoded in it a tremendous amount of knowledge and energy. My kind's first experiments with quantum travel heavily involved the cube, the first few eras of quantum generators were derived from information contained therein and their schematics were subsequently added to the cube when these early models were retired from use.
"Interesting, but what are they getting at?" John asked Miller. He didn't have to type this question because an answer was already coming through.
This is the core of our current problem. These older models had been scrapped because of their frequency-based honing which limited the number of generators that could exist at any given time. Once all compatible frequencies had been used, duplication or recycling of frequencies for new generators introduced significant risk. Should any two generators function using the same frequency and then be activated at the same time, unpredictable results could occur.
"Unpredictable results such as this one." Miller typed.
Precisely. These generators were scrapped before my time. Frequency-based generator application saw only a brief period of use before generators were redesigned to mitigate this risk. I have only encountered one frequency-based generator in my time, the rest I had seen only as illustrations in the archives.
He rubbed his temples motioning for John to take over the keyboard. John was a fast typer, able to keep up with Miller's rambling. John typed as Miller spoke. "Right. You mean the one we built. The one we made by using data from your cube. So how does this help us? If ours is the only one around, how is it still interfering with these newer models you have?"
I will correct myself. I have encountered two generators, yours being the second. The Ark is an ancient ship, historical. We discovered much of its tech had not been updated during the many millennia it had spent dry docked, including its generators. An unfortunate discovery, but as you have pointed out, we believed its use would have very minimal risks.
"But we built our own generator. We weren't recycling old blueprints, we had none. Our whole team built the prototype from the ground up."
Yes, and it was an admirable effort. Remember, studying the cube and its unique energy output was how the first quantum generators were invented. It appears to me that you have followed this path similarly, and in the process have rediscovered frequency-based quantum travel.
Miller felt exhausted. "Perfect. Maybe there could be a warning label next time."
John paused, taking on a small smile, his fingers hovered over the keys, "Do you want me to send that, boss?"
Miller puffed at the remark. "Sure, why not." With the clack the message was sent.
It does have a warning, right under the big label "discontinued."
He deserved that.
Whether our generators function on identical tech or otherwise is moot. It is the Cybertronian principles you have utilized from the cube and the frequency you chose to operate on that has allowed our generators to entangle.
Miller held his head in his hands, "This is ridiculous." John looked up, ready to type. Miller waved him away tiredly, "That comment was to myself, don't send it." So they just so happened to dust off tech that had been meant to stay retired, and also just so happened to pick the same damn frequency of the only other remaining old-school generator perhaps in existence. This whole ordeal was just a long line of dominos, tumbling from one highly unlikely event to the next.
This is relevant, mind you. Knowing this means undoing this may be easier than expected. Easier in principle at least. As stated, new complications have recently arisen.
Miller looked around at his team, "Decepticons, right. So what does the cube have to do with reversing this?"
Do you have access to the Cube?
"No, we aren't even supposed to know about it."
Over the years his team had essentially been given numbers and spreadsheets and whatever small slivers of lab data their superiors had felt his team needed. Not that those were hardly legible with their heavy-handed pass of the ol'black-marker. But they had figured it out. Some of it, at least. They had no name for their discovery other than to call it 'the cube.' A massive object of incredible power. No one in his team had seen it in real life, but the data didn't lie. For some reason their superiors kept thinking they could keep their big secrets away from the people they were paying to figure out said secrets. As if half his team's job wasn't working backward to figure shit out.
Their friends continued. Is there a way to be given access to the cube?
"No." Miller said, "Or, I think the odds aren't in our favor for once. If my superiors realize the extent we've been communicating, I think they'd shut our power and lock us up. We've kept the details of this incident from them so far. We can offer some energy readings and reports we have in storage, but that's all without raising suspicion."
You realize this makes things more difficult
They seemed almost disappointed. Miller looked at John, "Are they whining? Tell them tough shit, it's the best we're going to get."
Unaware of the exchange, the other side continued, this time taking an unexpected turn.
John and Miller read the message displayed on the screen. "They have a surprise for us?" John asked. Another message flitted in.
Hi Dad.