| Stardate: 92572.5 | Examination of RG-691c Ruins | Report Submitted: CMDR North |
ALLCON,
Lieutenant Van, Ensign Brecken, and I returned to RG-691c to follow-up on our investigation of the civilization ruins detected in prior survey. With an adapted shuttle and EV suits, we made landfall and started trying to trace the signal.
A short trek through the oven later, we located a ... best description might be an antenna or beacon, maybe? Pretty thick width, poking straight out of the ground, some eight or nine meters tall. Found a hatch not too far off from it, which we forced open and headed into a small cavern underground, where we found the base of the beacon, glowing with some alien power source.
And it... started talking to us. In this deep, mech voice. Took a few lines before the universal translator picked out a pattern and started making sense of what it was saying. It called itself the 'Guardian' of the vault we were in, the underground cavern, I guess.
I've attached the audiolog of our conversation with The Guardian, but the summation of findings goes roughly like this:
a. the Guardian referred to the planet as 'Thela', the homeworld for a non-organic species referred to as the 'Thel'. Said species had managed to annihilate itself through global civil war and conflict. The vault we were in contained a collection of 2048 individual Thel consciousnesses, constructed before the war's end, in order to preserve the species.
b. the Guardian has been attempting to signal the Borg for the past several months. I assumed at first that this was the signal that had destroyed DLP112, but upon further questioning, this turned out to not be the case. The Guardian's signal was a low subspace frequency (carrier 594.04), was being transmitted every five seconds, and nowhere near powerful enough to cause the blowout that DLP112 experienced.
c. the Guardian had calculated that the Borg had the appropriate technology to construct a container for the Thel consciousnesses, so they could be relocated to a new, inhabitable planet. We suggested that we might be able to assist with this task and offered to download the specs for this container to determine if we could perhaps build it ourselves. The Guardian initiated a data transfer with my tricorder.
b. the Guardian has been attempting to signal the Borg for the past several months. I assumed at first that this was the signal that had destroyed DLP112, but upon further questioning, this turned out to not be the case. The Guardian's signal was a low subspace frequency (carrier 594.04), was being transmitted every five seconds, and nowhere near powerful enough to cause the blowout that DLP112 experienced.
c. the Guardian had calculated that the Borg had the appropriate technology to construct a container for the Thel consciousnesses, so they could be relocated to a new, inhabitable planet. We suggested that we might be able to assist with this task and offered to download the specs for this container to determine if we could perhaps build it ourselves. The Guardian initiated a data transfer with my tricorder.
This is where things got really weird.
For a machine, the Guardian was pretty shocked at the material already on my tricorder. I had the listening post findings on it still and the Guardian identified something from those scans as 'the external code from the original Thel'. Then it said something about 'conflict trying to start again', which coincided with some serious tectonic disturbances, and the Guardian seemed to shut down ... or at least go into a low-power state, power core light dimming and such.
Cavern was still shaking up a storm, so we retreated back to the shuttle and took off. At 100 kilometers off the surface, the tectonic activity on the planet ceased altogether, so our best guess at this point is that we induced the shaking somehow, for some reason.
ACTION ITEMS
- I've tasked a couple engineers to take the specs of the Thel 'container' and see if we can't build one. One thing's for sure, I'd rather not have an entourage of Borg showing up on our doorstep, so if we can offer the Guardian an alternative, hopefully it'll like... quit inviting them.
- I've gone back to my original report on the DLP112 findings and pulled access to the LP data log file. I will also be initiating a retroactive anti-copy security lock on all currently existing copies of the file and following that up with messages to require file holders to delete their versions as soon as possible. I'm not sure what exactly is in the data scans, nor if it's at all dangerous to us, but we're going to be restricting access to the data until we know for sure.
- Lieutenant Van will be following up with Command and figure out next steps.
I have to admit that I'm pretty stumped. We got a lot of unanswered questions here. The Guardian was pretty helpful, but definitely cryptic at times, too. I didn't understand anything it said, really, about the code and corrupting data processing and cripes. Too weird.
Though I do wonder, the way the Guardian said it... like, "conflict is attempting to start again". Kind of makes it (conflict) sound like a machine? Not sure if that idea has any merit in it. I get the feeling that even though the UT was able to clarify a lot, some of the terms were still not translating, at least, not in a way we could understand.
//SIGNED//
CMDR North, Alleya
DS13 Intelligence
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//ATTACHMENT// rg-691c_expedition_audio.log