Phase Two

There is too much information lacking in the communications technology we were trying to engineer, so for now we will be unable to work on phase two of our exploration, so we will have to continue our search manually for Calypso. Using the star maps we acquired we jumped with a little more purpose in the direction we believed Calypso would be. This time when we arrived I began to recognize a few constellations, the angle was a little off but it told me that we were getting close. I had to make sure my excitement didn't cloud my judgment so as in all previous systems I sent out probes to scout out the area surrounding this star. To my surprise when the probes returned they informed me of something of great interest. It was another research station much like the one I converted into this ship. The planet it was orbiting didn't contain life and so I needed to know what it was doing here. We quickly approached the new cube and docked with it, the cube accomodating us without question. I stepped inside and began trying to determine its purpose.

So I was correct, the aliens who built these things had no imagination! This cube was developed for the purpose of relaying communications to other research stations and monitoring the nearby experiments. When asked what experiments it was monitoring it informed me that by telling me the experiment would fail. Not knowing what else to say about that I then asked it to give me a copy of its programming and technology specifications, this it did without question, omitting the information about the experiments that it could not tell me about. I left the cube as it was and returned by my ship. By uploading the information into my modified cube we were able to replicate the communication system the aliens had created and then modify it to allow two way communication, the piece that had been missing that would have allowed us to do this from the beginning. It appears as if the aliens only anticipated sending commands to their different research stations and never needed them to report back directly. This was strange as they were conducting research without the aliens occupying them but then the aliens only wanted to know results or progress when they came back to the cubes. The other curious thing about the technology was that it didn't require the broadcasting cube to actually know where the other cubes were, they were just linked somehow through this technology. In order to avoid interference with their broadcasts we adjusted a few of the parameters to create our own network, thus separating the ship from the alien's control and putting it completely into mine. The ship didn't seem to object in the slightest to this, it seemed more than happy to accomodate my request and gave itself fully to the task. We then began constructing probes and sending them out to the different stars, to map out their systems and report back to us in order that we could find our destination much faster. It would only be a matter of time until they found Calypso. Thus began phase two of exploration, not just finding our destination but finding other places to go to as well.