“Damn it Jim! We are a water mining effort, not a place to play games with portable computers.” shouted Russel Thompson, the base commander.
“Yes, I know.” said Jim diffidently. “NASA is going to want to evaluate this carefully. A starfaring alien has contacted me and left us these transceivers. I suggest you have a materials expert or a computer expert take one apart and verify that it is alien technology. Otherwise, merely use it for a couple of hours. It will quickly become clear that it is much more advanced than anything we have.”
“Further, the alien Zircule, has authorized me to offer any current resident of the moon free longevity treatment. He needs to calibrate his equipment and the best way to proceed at the moment is to treat live people and allow the process to learn from the results. The longevity treatment is guaranteed painless and reliable. The calibration process merely takes a little longer than the standard treatment will,” Jim explained quickly. “I have been through the treatment yesterday and it did not harm me. I am feeling better already but Zircule said the full effect would take two months to kick in. I am on a stringent exercise program to help the effect for the next two months.”
“Jim, perhaps you should consider returning to Earth,” said Russel quietly.
“Nothing wrong with me,” said Jim calmly. “That will be clearer to you when you come visit our settlement or use the educational transceivers. We will be greatly expanding the settlement with Zircule’s assistance. There is no way to fake the capabilities of the transceivers. I estimate that it would take more advanced computer processing capacity than we have available on the entire planet Earth. You will quickly see what I mean if you check the engineering design and analysis tools.”
"Sir, the holographic interface itself is far beyond us. We could duplicate the effect with a building full of equipment but not miniturize it all into a handheld computer," volunteered Alicia York, P'hd Computer Science, NASA Mission Specialist. She kept all the remote handling telemetry and servo systems working for the remote operation of equipment on the base and at the mines. Hundreds of operators daily depended upon her skill in maintaining their interface equipment to get their job of running Lunar mining equipment done.
"All right," said Russel. "I will put a tiger team together to do a thorough scientific and engineering evaluation of one of these devices down to destroying one, and only one, in the process if necessary. They will seek an answer to the question of is it alien technology or not?"
"Sir I do not have any doubts and the treatment does not seem to have hurt Jim. I would like to volunteer to undergo treatment. The alien undoubtedly needs to calibrate on women as well as men and I would like to be in on the ground floor of welcoming him, and his technology," Alicia added honestly.
Besides, at forty five she would not mind shedding a few years. Even if it was only a skin deep beauty treatment or fraud, if it compared in quality to the computer technology it would be worth experiencing. She doubted seriously any being would come to the moon to malevolently damage Earthlings one at a time.
"I will think about it," said Russel.
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