It’s night time in my harem office. A faint flickering causes me to look up to the window. As I do one of the stars detaches itself from the sky and floats to the window.
“May I come in?” it asks.
“Please.” I motion.
The star slips into the room, grows, and transforms into a glowing translucent sphere from within which Jalena steps out looking like a cross between Fairy Godmother and Tinkerbell.
“How’s it going, Jalena?” I turn back to the bag display.
“Now that the language has been broken, I’ve worked over the inscriptions,” she says, “They’re mostly language but the big ones are still meaningless. Those are either single words or some combination of word and design that we still can’t figure out. The green container, for instance, has as its big inscription OFF. OFF could be a word, but if it is, it’s a word meaning one of the following: a) something that is not flowing, b) binary zero, or c) removed from another object. The contents of the container, however, are a complex mix of organics that seem to have no special electrical, sealing, or levitating properties. Either there’s another meaning for the word OFF, or it’s just a coincidence that this design looks like the word ‘off’.”
“Well, that’s one thing you were right about, this stuff doesn’t make sense easily. Will it ever make sense? What if there is no sense to it?”
“Cheri!” Jalena sniffs. “If there was no sense in that bag our job would be easy and never end. We’d just put out random pronouncements forever. You’d have your job security and not have to spend a day in court to get it.
“No, our task calls for more. I smell opportunity here but as yet I don’t know what it is. That bag was not supposed to be there. In fact, all that corrosion caused minor damage to other parts of the tomb. There’s a secret in it—something there that Homo sapiens didn’t want to reveal to us thousands of years later.”
“Then perhaps we should look carefully at what they have revealed and look for gaps.”
“Now you’re thinking! How soon can you have results?”
“Not soon, Jalena. It’s the weekend, time for me to do things in the real world.”
Jalena pouts. “No robot to do your work, how do you keep up?”
“I have several and they’re all doing fine without me interfering, thank you.”
At first Jalena looks sad, then, as if an idea had just come to her, she says, “Perhaps, Ron, you would like to use your fine physical specimen for your profession this weekend?”
“Travel to Antarctica? Now … why did I think you might suggest that?” I grin. “I have reservations, and I’ll be leaving in two hours.”
She grins back and says, “Not just that. I have also asked the protoshops to construct some models of our age-regressed objects. I want you to handle them. I’ll have them waiting for you when you arrive. When will that be?”
I check the schedule. “I’ll be landing about fourteen hours from now and ready for traveling to the tomb and handling things in twenty-four.”
Jalena accepts the news stoically. She must be cyber, I decide. All cybers run on quicktime, even compared to slugs, so they have to grin and bear it when a physical actually does something physical for them. For them it’s sort of like a physical watching somebody write a check in a grocery line instead of swiping their card. While a baby cries behind you.
“In the meantime,” I said, “keep working on the gaps in the library information. I’ll be doing the same.”