R3ɃeL OuTp0st - Contact
"Hey man, are you on level 9 yet?"
"No, still inching along", said Vandicoot from up atop the pier, on the radio.
"I'm on level 10!", said his buddy Sadgem.
Both were on Pluto icy terrain, perched atop a hill in the snakeskin territory 59.
But, it was a usual day on their outpost, ever since they landed 30 days ago.
Both were anarcho-capitalist, thrown to the outskirts of the solar system by choice.
Both were fighting the banking elites, that still hadn't gone down after the economic collapse of 2019 AD.
"Wow man, level 9? How are doing that?", inquired Vandicoot.
"Just need to double your Yagi antenna, and point to 56.667 azimuth, 23.776 altitude", replied Sadgem
"I wish I had Hanna in my life"
"Hahaha, yeah man, she told me all this on the sat-phone. You know I couldn't have known all that"
"Yes, now its my time to 3D print an extra Yagi antenna"
Vandicoot remotely started the 3D printer that used resources from the stone miner. The harsh environment meant they had to have bulky space suits, but it helped them stay grounded, literally. The gravity was 1/15th that of Earth, unlike their bank balance that shot up to 1500000000 fold after their discovery of what Oumuamua really was.
The comet passed by Earth in 2018, but its trajectory had baffled scientists. It baffled Vandicoot and Sadgem as well. They were just running a small on-line store on the Ethereum chain back then. Someone gifted 1000 ETH to them when Oumuamua passed by, but they couldn't connect the dots back then. It was Hanna, a friend of theirs who was a curious astronomer who was at their home one night and told them about Oumuamua. Vandicoot didn't take much notice but had the fancy that it was an alien ship.
A month passed by and on 14 Jan, 2018 - something odd happened. Sadgem's mobile had a new app installed and it was having an alien language, he rushed to Vandicoot and showed him what was happening on his phone. He called Hanna as it looked something like a trajectory of an object that was detached from Oumuamua!
The object landed on their porch after 5 days, while Sadgem stared on his screen for every second of these 5 days. They examined it closely and it was a computer of some kind, round in shape, but translucent with yellow cracks on it. Kind of like an egg but very odd, it did nothing and just sat on the ground glaring at them, which they glared back at it. All three of them had decided not to tell about this to anyone and tried to do something with it. But it didn't even crack with a hacksaw!
Then a few days later another 1000 ETH landed in Hanna's wallet and to her astonishment, she got connected to a peculiar WiFi signal, whose SSID was same as her ETH public key! When Vandicoot and Sadgem came close to it, they too got 1000 ETH each. They reckoned that the object from Oumuamua was the source of the WiFi hotspot, but how?
[To be continued..]