Chapter 2

Despite the low lighting not doing much to change the entrance room’s barren nature, Yuna’s face was positively glowing as she walked along its walls, taking her sweet time all the while. Though she’d always found it odd how spotless the ship was, this effect was particularly striking when evenly lit; the mild shine of almost mono-color surroundings only added to the feeling of emptiness. Nevertheless, Yuna remained here far longer than necessary, doing naught but running her hand along the walls and appreciating the moment. After wandering the room at a crawling pace Yuna finally came to enter the bridge once again. The same adjacent screens that turned on before – along with the overhead lights – were the only things powered, everything else looking just as dead as before. The console appeared the same as when it first turned on, though now the input between the screens had something glowing on each of its keys. Resting her arms on a small ledge below the displays, Yuna closely inspected each of what she now saw were glyphs on the upper half and symbols on the lower.

Taking them by row on the four-by-four keypad, Yuna silently mouthed, “‘Yes, no, you, we, goal, what, offer, repeat’.” Doing so comparatively quickly, she was able to read and understand every glyph on the keypad. As she’d seen some of them before, Yuna realized that the symbols – mostly composed of straight lines and simplistic shapes – on the lower half correlated with the glyphs above them. Separate from these were two more keys below that resembled left and right parentheses. Looking towards the alternating dots and then back to the keyboard, she wasn’t quite sure what to do.

I don’t want to break anything, but I think this was meant for me. Well, I suppose there could be thousands of reasons for things happening this way, but that really seems like the case. The screen hasn’t shown anything since I got here, so ... maybe I’m supposed to ask it something? If so, ‘you’ would probably be a good place to start, right? Yeah.

Placing her index over the glyph, she could feel even through her suit that it was warm. Just the glyph itself, though, as the key was otherwise noticeably cold. Wincing as she placed some light pressure on it, her action was interrupted by the display changing beside her – the left screen matching it as it had before. Her attention fully averting to this, she saw two diagonal lines in the center of the screen. After ten seconds or so of Yuna being fixed to the screen, the symbol was replaced by a glyph. Yuna recognized it as the one meaning, “Understand.” Interpreting this as a question, Yuna moved to press the glyph for, “yes.” Shortly after was a symbol representing, “you,” which was followed by the same question and the same answer. The next display being three glyphs, Yuna’s face was that of complete focus.

“‘You, understand... ‘“

Unable to read the last, she searched for a way to convey what needed clarifying. With none of her options being particularly nuanced, Yuna didn’t have much of a choice other than hoping the computer would understand what she meant.

“Yes, yes, no,” is what she typed, an unsure and slightly pained look on her face as she did so. The gap was, very unpleasantly, several seconds longer than it was before. Once it passed, her eyes were met by the glyph she couldn’t understand on the right, followed by the symbol from the middle column of the writing she found near the entrance – the one she thought was their version of an equal sign, that is. On the far left were hundreds of glyphs in smaller print that were being replaced every second or so. Yuna was again asked if she understands. Though her first assumption was that the unknown character represented glyphs in their entirety, that was far from a safe bet. It could easily represent a grouping she isn’t aware of or any number of other ideas she couldn’t possibly intuit. Every second worrying if there was some kind of invisible time limit to this as she rapped her fingers against the ledge she was resting against, Yuna forced herself to answer with, “Yes, no.”

It took two additional tries of Yuna specifying which glyphs she understood and the computer switching up the sentence to better accommodate her before its next statement was readable.

“Goal, we, understand, you, language, with, you.”

Thoroughly confused as to what exactly that means, Yuna tries to form a question with her available options. She runs into the same problem again, with none of her options being especially useful for what she wants. After a while of looking helplessly at the keypad, she sees the display change to two alternating parentheses. She couldn’t recall how long it had been since she started trying to come up with an answer, but assumed this was a direction due to her lack of input. Pressing one of the keys sharing the same symbol, she saw the characters on the keypad fade out and get replaced. Yuna could still read more of the glyphs than she couldn’t in the four total sets, though noticed that they were more complicated than the first grouping. The time she took to sift through all of them was rewarded with a glyph exactly matching what she needed.

“How.”

The response was quick and entirely understandable, saying, “See, you, mind.”