Origin - Season Two Read Online Free PDF Page A

horizon.
    “You can head on up,” MacDonald said, pointing at the ladder leading to the helipad above the bridge. “Yoshi’s ready.”
    Mitch sat looking out of the small viewport as they closed the distance to the strange vessel. The Pandora, built at a cost of 245 million dollars in the South Korean port of Busan, was a ship like no other. It had taken considerable guile and ingenuity to mask her sole purpose—to act as a landing platform for a visitor from the outer reaches of space—from her builders. RP One had been sitting in the hold for almost a year now, and still she had yielded only a fraction of the secrets they knew she must hold. Mitch and Heinz, along with a small support team, had devoted almost every waking hour in that time to putting the puzzle together.
    Two months ago the first major breakthrough had come when, with the help of Professor Watkins, they had finally isolated the sequence required to access RP One’s onboard logs and backup files. Because the mainframe onboard Origin used every available sub-system in the network as a backup location, this had meant access not only to RP One’s mission log, but also to a host of random and unrelated data. These, more than anything, had made it possible for Watkins to begin the laborious task of first deconstructing the language, then translating the cornucopia of available information.
    Using a camera system set up in front of one of the terminals on the bridge, they had started recording this one frame at a time in image form before sending them on to Watkins for translation. It was an awkward and time-consuming method, but lacking any way in which to physically connect the two radically different computer systems, it was the only choice they had.
    Mitch, who was quickly becoming as fluent in the base-8 programming language used by the onboard system as the base-2 language he had spent his entire life studying, nevertheless remained clueless when it came to the actual written language, dubbed Saishan by Watkins after the literal pronunciation of the planet’s name. That job had fallen to Naoko Misora, a boy barely out of his teens whose parents had arrived at Aurora from the University of Tokyo in 1992. Naoko, already fluent in English, German and French by the time he was ten, had been Watkins’s first understudy. Watching the two of them converse in that strange language was a surreal experience. Neither guttural, nor particularly harsh, Saishan, by Watkins’s account, sounded most similar to Hungarian, a language unique among all the hundreds spoken on earth. This arrangement had made Naoko somewhat of a permanent fixture in Mitch’s life, and it was Naoko who stood waiting for them as the helicopter set down on the pad behind the superstructure of the Pandora.
    “How’s Sarah?” Naoko asked as soon as Mitch was in earshot.
    “Don’t ask. You’d think I was having an affair.”
    “Aren’t you?”
    “No,” Mitch said, laughing. “Well, not really.”
    “Women can become jealous of anything, trust me. Even a spaceship.”
    “Really? And where did a boy who can’t possibly know the first thing about women stumble onto that scrap of wisdom?”
    Naoko offered him a wide grin. “I read a lot.”
    The others were waiting for them in the hangar. RP One, RP being short for Reconnaissance Platform, sat flooded in bright light. Its bulging round shape made it look more like a creation of 1960s science fiction than a real alien artifact. The near-indestructible alloy it was made from seemed to absorb the light, giving the hull an odd two-dimensional quality. It stood on four retractable legs, each twice the height of a man. True to the calculations Heinz and his team had made, these now rested on reinforced plates a foot thick, supported from below by girders that ran the length of the ship. At over seventy thousand tons, RP One had the added distinction of being the heaviest non-solid object of its size on the planet.
    “How are you