Hold the Line

Despite having been dragged across the galaxy by the cosmic storm, the orbital complex suffered very little harm. We found the living and commercial spaces of the habitat in almost perfect condition. Not a single bit of dust laid atop the surface that would betray a previous occupancy, as if it had never before been used.

Inside the central control hub we were greeted by a bewildering input system: dials with no explanation, levers with inconsistent settings and a great amount of buttons flashing a whole spectrum of colors at seemingly random intervals. Fortunately, we eventually came across a manual. Once this is successfully translated, we are confident we can reactivate the habitat.

Unfortunately, our previous estimation appears to have been optimistic: the manual turned out to be just as incomprehensible as the control system. Half of the pages appeared to be missing and the pictorial instructions make significant semiotic assumptions. The other half of the manual is written in difficult to interpret hieroglyphs.

However, the last page displayed a com frequency accompanied by a set of characters translated to 'help desk'. We're attempting this frequency now.

The manual's com frequency connected us to the help desk mainframe of a commercial entity known as Skygarden.

With a friendly though neutral tone, the help desk AI informed us that it appreciated our reaching out, and asked if there was anything it could aid us with. Among the listed options were 'answering questions about subscriptions', 'learning about the new line of smart defense systems' and if we wished to know more about the corporation's 'social responsibility initiatives'.

However, the subsequent options continued to direct us to entirely unrelated topics. Worst of all, it would often put our … on hold only to drop the call. Obviously, the service AI has not survived the passing of time as well as the rest of the habitat.

Nevertheless, we will continue trying to find our way through this arcane system.

Our … report that regardless of what they said to the AI, after passing through several menus, the system would simply revert back to a previous statement.

We attempted to run several simulations to map out the exact menu tree, but our efforts returned recursive errors and an inability to both solve and check the solution at the same time. Even running a quantum model achieved no desirable results. We suspect we accidentally collapsed a few wave functions in the process.

We're at a loss.

Finally a breakthrough! The AI admonished us for using inappropriate language and stated we should wait until we are contacted by a customer service representative.

For a while we were left waiting, and then the com line was reopened. The entity on the other end introduced herself as the record keeper of the Skygarden Corporation. The help desk itself was an AI program she had inherited from the last record keeper. As far as she knows, the com station had not been used since the bankruptcy of Skygarden many decades ago. When we questioned why she remained working for a bankrupt organization, she simply said it was in her contract.

Explaining our situation, the record keeper dug up an old quick start guide to the habitat. She will transfer digital impressions of the pages to us soon.

With the new guide in our possession, restarting the habitat required little effort.

After the noise of activating machinery slowly died down, we decided to reach out to the record keeper once more to thank her.

She told us she had recovered some information on this station. Apparently it had been built over five centuries ago as a prototype, but was lost in the astrological chaos following a particularly nasty cosmic storm. The loss of property and development costs was enough to bankrupt Skygarden.

Helping us was the record keeper's first useful task in years.

"Besides," she said. "It was nice to hear my great-grandmother's voice on the line again, even it was just an AI."