Tom
An Old Friend
May 18, 2073
Steven Wayne Mills, using the Canyon Quantum Supercomputer, discovers the photon signal from our nearest galactic repeater. A mere 28.8 light years from Earth and it is believed to be the size of a large marble. It pulses the signal at 2 billion hydrogen electron shifts and is stable. The God Photon, as it has been deemed, contains quadrillions of information packets which changes with each pulse. Sometimes packets enlarge, sometimes new packets emerge but it grows geometrically. CQS is tasked to isolate a single packet and extract the data. With the whole planet's data storage at it's disposal it is only able to store the first section of one packet. This section is now called School because it is the instruction data that is used to unlock the contents of the packet.
School is sent to the Deep Water Data Supercomputers in the Indian Ocean and is slowly understood. DWDS has determined that the language of the Universe is not mathematics after all. It is a language of emotions and experiences. Each symbol in the alphabet represents an emotional state, a specific experience or is used as a combiner. This Master Alphabet is more than 16 trillion characters and still growing. It is hypothesized that a single word in this encyclopedia could represent a whole lifetime of observation, feelings and tasks. A single sentence might contain all the history of the rise and fall of a nation. A single paragraph that might encompass the lifetime of a whole planet.
We learn from School that the Universe is saturated with repeaters and beacons. Beacons are used to gather up the ever changing conditions in it's range of influence and that data is updated and pulsed on a single photon. This Encyclopedia Universe is actually a repository of the whole Universe that is updated in real-time from a human perspective. As of this moment we can only read the most basic information. There is, however, a sub-module that has been discovered that hints at Reading Requirements but at our present limited computing ability we are unable to decipher the building requirements of the Reader.
What we do know, using the most basic information gained, is very little. There are still elements we can not decipher and a billion or so simple characters that are still to be identified. Not that we are fumbling about. We have identified that there is not a single species responsible for its creation but that it has been operating for around 8 billion years and is a collection of information condensed by every civilization that has been Schooled. In addition there is an artificial element that monitors the real-time changes in a sphere of influence that adds information as well. We also know that photons are faceted and each facet contains a separate set of packets dealing with specific boundaries we think of as galactic super-clusters.
...to be continued