A Little Knowledge... (Alex Kaidan S01E02)

By Darren Hoyland

Landing on a hostile planet is generally regarded as being a bad idea, let alone raiding one. Planets usually have lots of inhabitants who would probably notice the large fireball in the sky and let’s not get into the possibility of sensor arrays, orbital defences and the potentially limitless supply of security forces. Alex Kaidan and his crew know this, but they are convinced that it is worth the risk by a genius called Christian Islam. The prize is the font of Humanity's collective knowledge and some better food that might just make the inhabitants of The Village reconsider resorting to high-tech cannibalism. But Alex stands to learn more than he bargained for when he uncovers a plot to destroy them all.

“A Little Knowledge...” is the second episode in season 1 of the science fiction series “Alex Kaidan”.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Darren Hoyland
• Release date: Dec 17, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301651672

Darren Hoyland

Darren Hoyland (1980-Still Going) was born and raised in the town of Grimsby on the north-east coast of England and is only slightly traumatised from the experience. He first realised he wanted to be an author when he was told off by his English teacher for writing too much. He still gets a buzz from other people reading his work and is not, it would seem, above walking into Tesco and loading Episode 1 up on the e-readers. Having spent the best part of ten years at seemingly every university the country had to offer, he has acquired a BSc in Biological Sciences, a MSc in Informatics and a PhD in Computational Neuroscience, as well as a love for all things sciencey and an unmanageably large student loan. He currently lives in County Durham in the UK with his wife, son and collection of small, annoying animals.

Book preview

Episode 2 of Alex Kaidan (Series 1)

A LITTLE KNOWLEDGE...

By Darren Hoyland

Episode 2 of Alex Kaidan (Series 1)

Episode 2 of Alex Kaidan (Series 1)

Previously in Alex Kaidan:

About the author:

Episode 2 of Alex Kaidan (Series 1)

Alex Kaidan S01E02 A Little Knowledge... Smashwords Edition (Version 2)

Copyright © 2014 by Darren Hoyland

Discover more about the author and other titles at http://www.darrenhoyland.info

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For Ethan.

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This is a work of fiction. Persons, living or dead, places or events are productions of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance is purely coincidental, which is probably for the best as it is set in the future, on several other planets and is about aliens trying to wipe out humanity. Your support and respect for the copyright of the author is appreciated.

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Previously in Alex Kaidan:

Being completely unable to think of a sensible name for your space ship tends to be less of a problem when there's only one ship in the whole Human 'fleet', besides Alex Kaidan only ever really borrowed it. What could be more of a problem is Earth having been paved and only a few Humans surviving, and that was only thanks to the actions of a benevolent alien race known as the Un. Alex and his crew have made it their mission to find and rescue however many Humans they can that are being held captive by any of the alien races. A mission made all the more difficult by the sad truth that a catastrophically decimated population is not an employers' market.

Their last mission, to save a large group of Nedic-imprisoned Humans from being slightly too comfortable went horribly wrong when Sara Heath, a member of his crew, shot and killed a man. Aided by another crew member, Matthias Cho, she escaped before she could face trial. While not actually managing to rescue anyone from anything, and destroying a rather nice space station in the process, Alex did manage to recruit a new crew member called Reza, so it was not all bad...

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What kind of a name is 'Wikipedia'? asked Alex.

It's a cross between something called a 'Wiki' and an encyclopedia, replied the scientist.

Well, thanks for clearing that one up for me.

Juliana, the only other person at the table, leaned forward to explain, An encyclopedia was a book containing facts and information in alphabetical order.

Book! exclaimed Alex, I know that one: Words drawn onto sheets of stuff made from plants.

That's it, only this one wasn't really a book. It was displayed on a console.

Alex was astounded, We used to have consoles too? I thought we got those from the Un?

Yes, he replied, They were called 'computers'. Lots of rich people owned one. Our society was actually pretty far along, considering. The technology was there and we'd just started to get them communicating with each other. We called this network of computers 'the interweb'.

And Christian here - said Juliana, gesturing overzealously at the man who had just spoken, - believes that he's managed to crack the code.

She blatantly had assumed that Alex would have forgotten his name already, despite them only having been introduced a matter of minutes ago. She knew him too well.

Juliana was Alex's link to the Human government and the joint Human-Un scientific establishment. It was she who had been slipping him information on rumoured locations of alien scientific facilities that kept and/or experimented on Humans. It was also Juliana who had first introduced him to Yona Stevs, the Un Significant who had helped him borrow the ship. It would be safe to say that they went way back.

Alex felt that he may have missed something in the conversation, What code?

Hypertext Transfer Mark-up Language.

Eh?

HTML. The code used to transfer data around the interweb.

Code as in secret code?

No, code as in program code.

Oh, said Alex, suddenly far less impressed.

I'm sure it was still quite difficult, Alex, chided Juliana.

Actually, reverse engineering the HTML it was surprisingly simple really once I had managed to understand the underlying protocols and emulate them on Un hardware, said Christian. There was no hint of pride in his voice, just a straightforward summary of what has been done.

Alex was a little taken back by the man’s total lack of arrogance for what he would most likely consider to be an incredible accomplishment, had he understood a word of it. He still managed to slip in a dig at Juliana, however, See? Told you.

Juliana stuck her tongue out at him in reply while Christian was talking to him and not looking at her, The tricky part was reconstructing the data into a meaningful format. You see, the interweb was a collection of pages requested by each person who accessed it, and so we can only ever see what they asked for - we have no access to the databases that generated those pages.

I have no idea what any of that means, but it sounds nice.

Juliana intervened, Think of it like this: It’s like eavesdropping on a conversation - you can’t learn everything that that person knows, only what they happen to be talking about at the time. There’s no way of steering the conversation to what you want to hear.

Good analogy, Juliana, said Christian.

Thank you, she said, followed with a broad smile that made Alex suddenly very jealous of the scientist.

Fortunately, I then came across Wikipedia. These pages were frequently accessed and in a structured format that made it easy to automate data recovery, enabling me to populate a new Un-console compatible database that we can interrogate any time we want to.

Oh. Good. Well done, said Alex, Um, but why are you telling me all of this?

The scientist narrowed his eyes, Well, we thought you'd be interested.

Alex tilted his head and looked at him, then over at Juliana who said nothing, and then back to Christian. He was having difficulty ascertaining whether they were being deliberately obtuse, or if he was just being dumb. Either way, he still had no idea why Juliana had asked him to meet them in this café on New Earth.

Small-talk, he felt, would be the best way out of his predicament, So, er, where did this data you have come from?

Well, Earth of course, originally, said Christian.

Yes, but you said it was eavesdropped, so who did the eavesdropping?

The Nedic, we assume. Who else?

Alex had heard rumours that back on Earth, there were certain stones that bled. He imagined obtaining the blood from