A little over a century ago, the building currently housing the museum was, instead, the main operating center for the West Coast Communications Array, or WeCCA, for short. In the early 22nd century, WeCCA was the largest network of conventional antenna arrays in the western hemisphere, spanning most of North America, and powering communications for early Solar System colonization projects, eventually going as far as detecting the first evidence for alien life. The Operating Center served both as the main hub for controlling the array, as well as a research center for new ways of compressing, transmitting and decoding data sent over astronomical distances.
Soon after the breakthrough of relspace, the labs main priority became researching different ways of using it for communication. It wasn't long before they discovered that it was, quite actively, used for communications by dozens of other alien species. But, as this wasn't the Museum of First Contacts, when the technology inside became obsolete and a large relspace transmitter station was constructed in orbit, all the old tech was archived, and the building repurposed into a museum to showcase the progress of human communications throughout the last half millenia.
And it's into these archives that Samantha was now slowly descending.
She walked past several rooms filled with decaying hardware and legacy servers storing data on hundreds of years of research, before finally reaching the door with the number plate "171" near the top. Judging from the scuff marks below, it seems that there was a name on the door, too, but it was removed a long, long time ago.
Samantha prepared for the worst, mentally picturing a cluttered room full of messy, live wires and a single, tiny server beneath them all that needed fixing. She firmly grasped the doorknob and pushed the door open to reveal...
...a perfectly ordinary office.
A horribly out of date, dusty, dark office, but an office nonetheless. There were bookshelves lining the walls, several decks of binders, three framed images of a striped, orange cat, and in the corner, an old swivel chair tucked into a computer desk, with a silver flat display and keyboard combination on top, the former turned on, and displaying a message.
She stepped into the room and looked around, eyes darting between the various tomes on relspace modulation and the paintings of the annoyed feline, before snapping out of it and approaching the display.
"Well, aren't you a sight for sore eyes," she said out loud, setting her pouch down on the desk and rolling the chair out to sit on it, "NanoLED matrix... coil membrane speakers... I'd take you home if I could, but I think Martin would actually kill me if I stole from a museum."
She sat down on the crusty fake leather cushion and read the message displayed in the top left of the screen in bright red pixels:
Node 0x00000000 Query Exception
Welcome to System Kernel Death Land!
rax 0x1 rbx 0x0 rcx 0x0 rdx 0x0
rsi 0x0 rdi 0x0 ebp 0xfdb8 esp 0xfd60
rip 0x3d46b eflags 0x210046
frame return address
0x0000fdb8 0x0003d46b
0x0000fe48 0x00011019
0x0000fed8 0x00067f01
0x0000fef8 0x0001eeec
0x0000ff58 0x000eeeea
0x0000ffb8 0x000a3e55
0x0000fff0 0x000fff08
0x0000fff8 0x000ad67d
Press any key to reboot.
Blink. While Samantha was a connoisseur of outdated technology, this eluded even her. Despite not quite understanding what it is that she saw on the screen, she was an expert at pressing buttons.
It took a second for her to remember how the old style keyboards worked, and with great anticipation, her index finger slowly pressed down on the spacebar.
The screen turned black, then turned on again, with several fans spinning up to full power in the computer block below the desk. Hundreds of lines of pre-boot initialization system diagnostics quickly flew past her eyes, too fast to read beyond a word or two, before the screen was cleared once more, and the system was finally booted:
Welcome to WeccaBSD!
,-. / /
* / \ `. __..-,O
: \ --''_..-'.'
| . .-' `. '. /
: . .`.'
* \ `. / .. /
\ `. ' .
* `, `. \
,|,`. `-.\
'.|| ``-...__..-`
| |
* |__| *
/||\ *
//||\\ *
// || \\
__//__||__\\__
'--------------' k11.3.1
Automatic login set: badanminton
MotD: "OSHA guidelines still apply at relativistic speeds."
wsh: Running on-boot suite.
nquery connect 0
Error: No reply after 50 attempts. Ping sweeping. . .
Found 11 viable inodes, sorting.
Running 'nquery connect 172'
Connected.
Precious crash detected. System restore initialized.
QUERY INODE master INDEX LATEST
- FOUND 17782 ENTRIES
- ACK SYNC TIMEDATE
System clock out of sync! Adjusting local time +261802s
Running data retrieval in background thread (ttyC5)
Printing running log to active virtual terminal (ttyC0)
daemon aucat -c 2 -f S16_LE -r 44100 /dev/aaint_test
- URG QUERY LIST 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00 PROP RETRANS
- ACK SYN none
- QUERY LIST INDEX SPAN 0x00, 0xFF PROP RETRANS
- ACK SYN 1 ERR
- PROC PERSIST
- ACK ALL
[~/]: _
Samantha's eyes lit up as she watched the ancient operating system boot. It's been years since she's seen something this old work properly, and now she had the chance to study it first hand. While her gaze was locked on the screen, her hands anxiously tapped along the desk until they found her PDAP. She managed to clumsily open the integrated camera, trying to not look away too often, as if the sheer act of breaking eye contact would scare the computer into crashing, and pointed it at the screen. "Jan is gonna be so jealous," she whispered, eyes darting up and down between her PDAP and the display, aiming to get the perfect shot.
