“Hello World”

And there it was. “Success” written in bright green blocky letters on my guild issued P31-S interface screen.

There are only a few things in Engineer’s life that can count as extraordinary achievements. Surviving the drop to Arethusa Prime and then making it back to orbit alive. Kick starting a power sequence that lights up a Shard so bright it hurts to look at it.

And then there’s this… Running a brute force attack to unlock a Monolith — an ancient structure surrounded by myths and legends that so many are even afraid to look at.

I’ve spent two years working on this one. It felt good.

Needless to say I was eager to find out what kind of loot I’m able to finally tap into. I plugged the interface cable into my workstation and loaded up my test software. Monolith let out a gentle humm.

I’ve heard stories of fellow guildsmen using Monolith’s computing power to cook up recipes for impossible mineral compounds and alloys, calculating orbital re-entry patterns for asteroid infested planets and even discovering new drugs that can get you so high you will need a parachute to come down.

Sure, you can use Monoliths as giant supercomputers, ten thousand times more powerful than anything we have made ourselves. But has anyone tried to see if they can store any data? I’ve seen enough samples from Arethusa to think that they actually can.

The theory behind my test was simple — if I could write data into the Monolith’s internal structure and then read it back through my interface, it would mean Monoliths can be used for storing information too, like a giant hard drive.

I typed “Hello World” into my interface and saved the payload. My hands were trembling in anticipation — “Breathe, it’s just a piece of old hardware” I quipped to myself. I tapped on my interface to launch the test and I leaned back in my foldable chair.

A few moments later my interface chimed: “Test complete, 1 record written, 1 record read”.

It worked! I opened the interface to check the record for corruption.

It read: “Hello Explorer”.

Like being hit by lighting, I jumped from my chair away from the Monolith and landed on my back a few meters further in a huge cloud of dust.

Could it really be…? Or is my mind playing tricks on me?

Trying to catch my breath, I hastily wiped the thick cover of dust off my interface screen and it was still there, staring back at me: “Hello Explorer”.

That ancient thing that stood here for centuries spoke back at me, in plain English, over my interface… I sat there looking at the towering structure above me, in absolute shock.

This changes everything.