Going Bold

The rest of the day was busy for Andrea and Lin. Having sent her report on the successful first contact through the portal alongside all the recordings of the event, Andrea worked diligently to practice the language she’d learned so far from Unla-Ela and the trio of their subordinates. Meanwhile Lin felt she could finally dedicate a significant chunk of time and focus to studying the samples her drones had been collecting and attempting to automatically process. While she would still be watching Andrea’s back as she met with Unla-Ela and their team the next day, Lin decided that her full attention on the meeting was not needed anymore. When she mentioned this to her partner, Andrea pointed out a critical reason for Lin to focus on her research instead of security at the meeting site. “It’s a waste of your time to focus entirely on securing the meeting point, especially since relations seem very peaceful. It’s more important for our medium and long term safety to get a handle of the strange phenomena we’ve been witnessing.”

Their division of labor in the near term allocated, The two spent the rest of the afternoon and evening in base camp working on their respective tasks. After it had been dark for several hours Andrea took the time to clean up before heading to get a full night's rest. Considering the multiple hours of hard foot travel Unla-Ela’s group would need to get to the meeting place when compared to the half hour of easy riding that was Andrea’s trip, it didn’t make sense for her to push herself on time. She would have hours for further language practice and planning for the day’s meeting before she even had to leave base camp in the morning. While Andrea was ensuring she was well rested, Lin decided to take advantage of her lack of physical need for rest by spending the night processing samples from the environment around the base camp and starting a borehole to explore the geological makeup of the planet's crust underneath the valley.

Lin utilized another type of utility drone to dig the borehole, it was a squat cylindrical machine able to bore a hole a little wider than the average human and pulverizing all of the excavated material into a particulate dust that would then be transported away from the mining face by a ribbon of graphene that was kept slightly charged to adhere the dust from the excavation this would run back up to the top of the borehole where a system to separate the dust off of the ribbon and begin processing it for refinement and/or disposal was set up. This system was a multi-purpose one intended to function for both scientific surveys, exploratory mining and small-scale industrial exploitation of resource deposits.

Lin's primary objective for the excavation was scientific, she sought a better understanding of the geological history of the region both for the sake of the knowledge itself and for safety since seeing indications of regular volcanic activity or earthquakes and various other phenomena would be useful knowledge. Boring down could also, in theory, be used to reveal the presence of certain types of contaminants in the geological record that might indicate intelligent tool making cultures in the distant past, this had never been found before but in theory it was possible and was another side item that Lin was keeping an eye out for.

The secondary benefit of the borehole project was of course the raw materials it made available. Even a small excavation could be an excellent source of minerals, silicates being a major component of basically all rocks, were always being brought up, but traces of other elements could be found and if she was lucky she might run into denser deposits of rarer materials. The silicates were themselves incredibly useful of course, in fact a critical function of the refinery equipment was reprocessing some of the silicates to produce a geopolymer that could be sent back down the ribbon to the boring drone so it could print tunnel supports and variable utility features, such as ladders and cable runs.

With the borehole operation running, Lin focused on examining the samples she’d been gathering since the duo had arrived through the aperture. The automated systems had done a decent job of beginning to sort through the samples and test them against expected values for various physical, chemical, electrical, magnetic, and radio-logical metrics. So far no exotic elements had been detected in unexpected quantities and all of the inorganic samples had exhibited expected traits and behaviors. Lin had spent the afternoon and evening hours double checking the results of the tests verifying that the fundamental elements appeared to be behaving in the expected manner both chemically and physically. Her checks showed the results found by the automated systems to be accurate.

Where those same automated systems had been running into unresolvable anomalies was in the organic samples, particularly the live samples, the testing algorithms had been throwing up flags for possible system errors before throwing up more flags when the self-diagnostics came back showing no issues. In the little bits of time Lin had been able to spare prior to the meeting earlier in the day, she had peeked at some of the flagged issues and noticed a number of strange phenomena. Now that she’d gotten the relatively dull foundational work done Lin picked out several of the flagged items at random and began to study them more closely.

A particular type of bark from an exceptionally tall species of tree in the forest valley exhibited the electrical conductance of a superconductor but entirely failed to interact with magnetic fields. Lin was amazed at the phenomenon, a charge would equalize with almost no measurable resistance, but only when applied to the parts of the bark sample that would have been the top and bottom while it was on the tree. The bark of this tree grew in discrete segments and when Lin attempted to run current across the sample segment the resistance was what she’d normally expect from tree bark. After more experimentation Lin realized that there were two small regions at each end of a bark segment that would transfer charge between them without detectably passing it through the bark between them. Setting the mystery aside for the moment, Lin decided to check on the next anomaly on her list.

A tiny mushroom that never even made it to the lab. Upon being disturbed by the drone tasked with harvesting it, everything within several centimeters of the mushroom suddenly plummeted in temperature, with visible frost forming, before the mushroom cap launched vertically at nearly 90 m/s like a little rocket then bursting shortly after climbing past the upper canopy of the forest. As Lin reviewed the sensor footage of the event, she noticed that from the rough calculations she was able to run, the amount of heat energy lost to account for the temperature change in the estimated mass of air, soil, plants, and water around the mushroom was roughly equal to the amount of kinetic energy needed to launch the mushroom’s estimated mass and detonate it. A detonation that Lin was fairly certain spread spores into the winds well above the tree canopy and dispersed them for kilometers. Needing to brainstorm how to secure a physical specimen to examine without having it explode, Lin decided to move on for the moment and look into another anomaly.

While cataloging microscopic organisms from a sample of ground water the automated systems had detected microscopic points of high temperatures that reached boiling point for in a fraction of a second then cooled off normally. This tiny oddity was actually what Lin had decided to tackle first, and it had paid off. From what Lin could determine it appeared as if, somehow, certain types of amoeba were causing points of boiling temperatures in the cytoplasm of other microorganisms causing their cell membranes to rupture from over-pressure, then sweeping in and eating the resulting debris fields. This had Lin seriously reconsidering the level of danger posed by diseases on this new world, Andrea’s engineered organs and implants were easily able to crush all known infectious diseases and parasites, and had in fact been vastly over designed to handle the most wild and unlikely worst case scenarios the designers could envision. However the designers had been working on a paradigm of physical reality that none of the organisms in this world seemed all too bothered with. Lin pinged Andrea’s implants with a high priority bio-hazard threat, and queued an alert for when Andrea woke up so she could get permission to draw samples and data and make sure something strange hadn’t already climbed aboard her partner. Despite the potential threat, when Andrea's implants returned an "All bodily functions nominal." status report in response to the bio-hazard warning, Lin decided that it wasn't so urgent a threat that she needed to disrupt her partner's sleep. Having spent the last couple of hours in intense study of the specimens, Lin decided to take a quick break.

While Lin was taking her break, she checked on the progress of the borehole, finding it had progressed about 16 meters over the course of two hours. The tunnel supports printed from geopolymers, refined from the silicates hauled up, appeared to be within tolerances. Seeing the rapid progress of the borehole reminded Lin of the ethical issues that could arise when considering the harvesting of non-renewable resources from a planet with an indigenous sentient species. Fortunately, these issues had also been considered in-depth by the Surveyor Corps and the policies they developed were subject to regular oversight and review by the Central Intelligence.

The established guidelines for Andrea and Lin's current situation was to gather resources to the minimum needed level with minimum environmental impact and effectively zero long-term environmental impact as well as documenting all extracted resources in order to later offer compensation to any relevant beings or organizations. It was one of the exciting frontiers that Lin and Andrea would be exploring, since they would be on this world for years and figuring out the socio-political landscape and who to provide compensation to would be one of their goals. Lin knew from talking with Andrea that there were a number of potential issues that could arise, not least of which would be dealing with cultures that didn’t see the resources as theirs in the first place and who might even be offended by the offer of compensation. Andrea had told Lin that her plan in a case like that would be to offer a socially acceptable gift that just happened to be as valuable to the receiver as the harvested resources were to Andrea and Lin, repayment couched in other terms, thus satisfying the emotional needs of both parties.

Lin's contemplation of the difficulties in ethically interacting with societies acting under different moral and ethical paradigms was cut short by the automated sample processing systems flagging another new anomaly. She returned her focus to her laboratory's systems and went back to work. There was something remarkable and groundbreaking waiting to be discovered and satisfying her curiosity might also just save their lives.