The first segment decoded last night, and we've been running it through translation since then. It was a montage of collected writings, recordings, and thoughts, stored in multi-layered formats that built layers of context as one dug down into them. It appeared to be chronological in order, the first of these "memories" was a scratchy video recording.
It was shot from low orbit above Albedo. We could see the Chalcedony Sea, though it was smaller and clearer back when this was shot. Digging into the file, we developed context. The recorder, whom we assumed to be Ark, decided to land his ship off the coast of the Chalcedony Sea, roughly where Calico - our planetary capital - exists today. From first-person reference in the file, we determined that even at this point, Ark was an Immortal. He was one of three on the voyage from Earth, and with him were some thousand human beings - our ancestors.
We were watching our own founding as a colony.
I remember the looks on the research teams' faces. They could see parts of themselves in the faces of these recorded colonists. Each one was faced directly by Ark, each one was spoken to. Named. One Thousand Names. None of us were willing to say it, but we were all thinking it. This was our history. Our heritage. Never before had we cared to think of it, but here, we were living it through the memories of an ancient, space-faring soul.
The second file recovered seemed to be a remembered poem. Spoken words mixed with unresolved images.
"Icey vie. Beyrn tru Heigh. Irula san gyre, Beyrn tru Heigh."
The language was undecipherable, but each word evoked an image of, what appeared to be, sunrise on a different planet. The pictures were diffuse, but two were clearly identifiable. Earth. Albedo. In each, there appeared to be a shape in the picture's right, a dark outline too blurry to be identified. Context inverted the colour of the pictures, and revealed hand-written notes scrawled across the face of the sun.
"I was here with you, though now only I remain.
Perhaps one day, there will only be sunrises, and no one to witness their beauty.
For now, I remember you, and I am content.
We don't see it now, but every sun sets."
The third file recovered was an analytical sample. We'd seen ones like it before. Albedo's water levels, trace elements, metallics, metalloids, mineraloids, and one statistic we hadn't seen before. Ultradense. Context revealed yet more handwriting.
"Forgiving terrain for impacts. Meteroids average roughly 300 cm in diameter. Material suitable for Immortal component manufacture. Nanite precision is refined to less than one-ten-thousandth micro-arcs, finer than even Nemesis average precision. Recommend colony research applications for nano-technology. Applications could be far-reaching beyond just Immortal benefit."
The scrawl of the letters forms a crude outline. Two hours of computer processing revealed it as a crustaceomorph nanite, bristling with tiny appendage-tools. These, we'd seen before too. Children were injected with them on their third birthday to augment their immune system. Throughout their life, these tiny machines mended tissues and destroyed infected cells using tools finer than gene-surgeon's scalpel.
At last, we reached the end of the decrypted block. More poetry and hazy memories. What was more useful was a strand of polymorphic code at the end of the section. It kept repeating a linear numeric sequence:
"001002001003"
What could it mean?
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