’Try again.’

‘But I don't–’

‘Try, again.’

The memory of this day burned strong in Halos' mind. He’d gazed at the stream of numbers and notation, the board stretched almost the length of the lab, and the equation had stretched from end to end. Standing on the opposite side of the room. it was still hard to take the whole sight in. It wasn’t as if he couldn’t find the error, he knew how to start calculating that but…

’Can I write anything from here? Like just a few note–’

‘No, you can't.’ His father had a smirk on his face, though it was not malicious or condescending.

‘If you let me make notes you know I could solve it in no ti–’

‘If you doing that was what I cared about, why wouldn't I have let you do that already?’ His father spoke in a stern voice, but his small smirk told Halos he wasn't cross at the question, more amused. The boy shook his head.

‘You know I can do it without a machine, what difference does it make doing it in my–’

‘And you know, the sooner you solve it the sooner I give you this back.’ He’d twirled the writing instrument in his left hand as if in taunt. The smirk was bigger, and there was a glimmer in those eyes. He looked like he wanted to laugh.

Young Halos turned back to the board. He read the whole line once again, left to right, back to left, in long sweeps not feeling like he had any idea where to start. With the pen, he could start breaking down the line into matching chunks. By doing so, he could hone in on which section held the deliberate mistake. He felt a twinge in the rear of his head, whether brought on by eyestrain or overwork it was hard to say.

‘Want the answer?’

‘What?’

‘The answer to the problem you’re having.’

‘No! Why would I want that?’ The young boy reacted with indignation, but the father shook his head.

‘Not to that.’ The father cocked his head towards the headache in chalk. ‘That.’ He pointed at Halos. At his head. At, where the pain was.

‘What do you...?’

‘That pain you're feeling behind your left ear. Have you noticed when you look at it and start trying to solve it with just your head, it spikes?’

Halos had sensed a weird jolt inside his skull. A headache wasn't that unusual, but he had no idea where his father was going with this.

‘Look at the bottom right corner of the board.’ His father pointed to a space below the notations. Young Halos squinted.

‘Ok?’ he said, not sure what he was looking at. ‘You mean the white square?’

‘Yes. Now, try to solve the equation. But this time, pay attention to that.’

‘Huh?’

‘Just try it, go on.’

His father was a man of science. Brilliant, but always rational; in each case, each stage of young Halos' training, up front with his logic. It was out of character for him to be so elusive with his reasoning. The one reason he could think his father would be like that was–

‘Are you experimenting on me?’

‘No, no ulterior motive. Just try. Don't think about me, think about that.’ he pointed back at the equation scrawled across the board.

‘Ok…’ Halos trusted him, but this was getting weird. His father had almost an air of urgency about him. It was making him feel a little uneasy. He turned to the board. The board stared back, taunting him. He let his eyes focus, so the small square lay in his peripheral, took a small sigh, and swept his gaze across the equation again.

‘What the...?!’

‘Aha!’ The look of excitement was visible on his father's features. ‘You saw it!’

‘I don't–’

‘It's ok, nothing scary is going on; look back across it. Drag it.’ His father said; Halos had to dispute the ‘nothing scary part’.

‘How do I…’ but he fell silent. He stood; staring in what was a mixture of wonder and borderline horror. The square had seemed to fill before his eyes with a red mist. It had spread across his vision, but against the white backdrop it had stood out clear as day. Halos had spotted similar phenomena before, but not with that intensity.

After a few seconds, he refocused. He looked first at the square, then across the equation. After a few moments doing so he stumbled, weak at the knees.

‘Father what was that...?’

‘You tell me.’ His father stood with his arms crossed, but he had a focused expectant expression, as if willing his hypothesis to be correct. The boy, still blinking, had turned to find a seat. He pushed himself into it and started to take a few heaving breaths.

‘It's, it's the ninth fractional from the left.’

‘Go on?’ The smile was broad on his father's face.

‘The first decimal: It should be 5.748632. It's 5.748633 on there. Rounding error, it messes up the whole value.’

‘Was that so hard?’ His father asked it as if Halos had done nothing more than making an in hindsight obvious connection, rather than sundering his own entire world view. The young boy shook his head, trying to find sense in the moments of absolute certainty that rocked his brain.

‘How did I do that?’

What he had seen was a flash of vibrant red. Once again, it was across his whole vision, but at the same time, it was not 'there' there. Again, the one reason he had realized he could see it was the contrast with the white square. When he focused, he had been able to make out the whole cloud. It had been like a web of red, all the mental connections of his mind visualised with no effort. And when he'd then focused on the puzzle, the weird substance had begun to mould. 

Looking deep into the red myst it had let him break down the equation in the way he had been so desperate to start writing out. Thought–realised in physical form, faster than he could have ever written it. It was almost as if whatever the phenomenon was, it was trying to guide him, not in what to do but where to look.

‘You broke down the equation.’

‘I know that, but, I saw it. Like, a path. I could move it. Was that real...?’

‘You solved it.’ his father said, smiling.

‘I'm so confused, I, I didn’t have to think or process it to…’ Halos gazed downward. He could not comprehend what had happened. His breathing has become ever so uneasy, almost panicked.

‘That's how I felt too.’ The father lay a hand on his son's shoulder. The weathered digits were stiff, aged beyond his cycles. The son looked into the father's eyes.

‘How...?’

‘I have no way of knowing. Neither did my father, or his before him. Whatever it is, it's gotten stronger each generation so far.’

‘Stronger?’

‘You'll see. You're going to achieve great works of science. I know you've got it in you.’

Present Halos watched as light etched in waves across his screen. The vast quantities of data, of alien scripture ran down in torrents. The text, contrasted, analysed for structure, any sign of pattern gave him nothing. For all the effort, he had made no progress. It felt like an age since he'd begun the process, and it had grown more futile as time went on. He pushed back from the console, stood, turned, and collapsed onto the bed. The mercy of his tiny living quarters was the lack of effort it took to get from one to the other. Willpower after hitting such a large roadblock was hard to have in leaps and bounds.

He knew the issue, and it made the frustration no better. With no side by side between the two written scripts, his and theirs, there was no way to be sure what any of it said. He could find commonplace 'words' assuming that's how the language worked. The next step would be confirming these words, but he had no idea where to start on that. In a wave of new and desperate depression he realised he had no proof the text wasn't elaborate gibberish.

This elicited a long groan into the thin sheets. From the highs he'd achieved days before, what seemed like a lifetime ago now, he was feeling at rock bottom. In equal turn it seemed like greediness on his part. To get anything like this text by the whims of the fates was a huge breakthrough, legible or not.

"Ok get a hold of yourself."

Halos heaved himself out of the foetal position he'd driven himself into. The sheer improbability of the text being nonsense was enough to discount that. He was quite sure he was telling himself that as comfort rather than fact, for the sake of not losing his mind.

Moving back to his room's console, he killed the process. The machine whirred down to a more relaxed state. He too felt a similar cathartic release at abandoning this method. He could have achieved the same release by putting a fist through the console of course, but that was not him. It would also hurt.

At least if the text pushed him to that - and he was closer than he would like to admit - he wouldn't lose anything. The importance of redundant back ups stayed hammered into his brain from a young age. That did make him consider for the first time that leaving data lying around for Varsus to find might be a bad idea. He would have to be crafty, at least until he made things public.

Now all that was in front of him were the raw characters, represented in the ninety or so unique symbols. He stood before it, and took a step back, his ankle colliding with the bed.

"Ouch!" He winced, clutching down his leg. The flash of red with the pain obscured his vision for a few seconds until the pain levelled out. He stopped, and looked back at the screen with a thought at once insane, but also obvious.

He remembered the first time his father had taught him how to use their gift. He knew that looking at data in the right frame of mind, he could piece together remarkable logical jumps. It might be worth a shot to see what would happen. There was a small problem with that idea: those problems were ones he had all the information he needed to answer. The issue was time and processing power inside his head. He still lacked the means by any reasonable stretch to translate the text.

That said, there were times in the intervening stretch he couldn't explain away. He had by his estimation made the most significant progress in generations. Some of it, while he later figured out and brought it all into the realms of science, felt more like random leaps. Halos exhaled. He stood still and closed his eyes. Inside his mind, he could see the turning red mists calming as his mind emptied of thought as best he could. It left him feeling weightless, lost in an infinite void. And then, he opened them.

The characters seemed at first unchanged, as they always were. His heart sunk, his last if improbable idea coming to nought. Until that was, he realised that the mists had coalesced in strange patterns. They tied to characters dispersed throughout, as a loose thread inviting his pull. Halos leaned in for a closer look. 'r', 'o' and 'i'. Wherever they appeared, the glow seemed to flow around and through them. He scrutinised the patterns closer, but that was all he could see for now to make sense of it.

It was a start. 'o' had a counterpart in Lathos, but a circle shared between two distant languages wasn't a surprise. Several short vertical bars with a rightward line at the top much resembling their letter 'r'. A version of the same character with a dot at its peak again seemed much like their own tongue's 'i'. The rest of the text had vague similarities but nothing too striking. These three alone seemed to glow among the mist. Was his mind grabbing at what it recognised and ignoring the rest? If so, this wasn't much more helpful than his previous endeavours. He'd already identified these in passing in his first attempt, though had ignored it.

What struck him now as remarkable was that together the three letters spelled a word in his native tongue. Coincidence or not, that word was 'Ori'. Had it been any other word it could have seemed like an obscure coincidence, but Ori was the name of their home world. The label of the ground beneath his feet hidden in the text of an alien civilization.

That symbolic happenstance seemed to trigger the gift. As he poured over the data again now, he saw the mist envelop and twist around the whole words they appeared within. As each did, the words themselves seemed to take on new forms. Before his eyes, to his awe and amazement, he saw words he knew emerging. How he was doing it he had no idea but he was in no mood to pick apart a breakthrough. Now he had ideas to go on. By looking at frequency and patterns of letters, he separated out what seemed to be numbers. He did this by hand with no technological crutch.

It seemed that the civilization that produced this worked with a base ten system of numeracy. Not efficient like base eight or twelve, but not terrible. He could convert that down the line if he needed to. Most of the time he had a personal preference for base 13, a favorite prime and useful as it matched the number of superpositions the nanobots were capable of achieving. It might also have been because he was hungry.

Then he had a breakthrough. The frequency of a certain set of symbols succeeding a dot or break in the blocks of text were significant. They seemed to be a unique set of higher level characters. These chunks if he wasn't mistaken were sentences. Assuming the gift was right, the language was non–pictorial. It used what seemed to be clear building blocks for separated groups of "words". There were clearly defined breaks, and an identical method for separating information. Halos was taking a huge leap in assuming so, but that red sense of clarity was strong when he pondered the thought.

He had to stop for a while. Lifting himself, he walked to the tap for refreshment. The longer unbroken he let the gift take over, the more shaken and dizzy it made him. He knew to use it with care by now. A few of the words seemed to describe phonetic actions. By letting his imagination follow the patterns in his mind, Halos took his biggest leap yet. It was a huge stretch, but he tried annunciating 'Ori' aloud. The letters pulsed in order. He then spoke another word, "☍io", and watched as the "a" and "A" characters lit up in some places, the "y" in others.

He tried "⚭o☍i", and watched in awe as a cacophony of symbols responded. Along with the "A", "a" and "y", "L", "l", "e", "E", and even some of the other "a"s that had not shone the first time joined in. He tried "☍io" again and the first pattern returned. If it was random - still a chance if a reduced one - it was verbal.

With a little added trial and error, Halos was able to estimate what some of these words sounded like. With careful analysis, crude sound–word associations came to light. "At" appeared to sound like 'ahh–t', "eat" like 'eeh–t' and soon.

To have made it this far with no form of comparative document in Lathos was a breakthrough on its own. He had to admit though that if even one of his assumptions went awry by the smallest amount none of it mattered. He would be translating near–gibberish into actual gibberish. But the gift had never failed him before.

For hours he poured over each tiny morsel of the text he could. Context began to surface after a few hours more. Words mid–sentence bearing a higher character – like "A" and "L" – at the front seemed like pronouns. If the language had those then it was close to Lathos in function. It was eerie how the language acted like it shared a root, but that had to be a coincidence.

Halos picked and placed. He found a pattern of starting words followed by nouns and then what he was almost certain must be verbs. Small markings surrounding parts of the text were often followed by pronouns. Halos had to stifle a yell of joy when the possible meaning of that hit him. That could be a notation of speech. If that were the case that was a proof of his verbal language theory.

It was when he managed to decipher the word 'hello' – a greeting if his collective assumptions were right – that the idea came to him. It looked as if it was often used when a pronoun came into contact with another pronoun. The word the gift mirrored on top of it was the common greeting of his mother tongue. It was a little far–fetched, and would involve a lot of work for the real chance of no payback. But if this written language had a common spoken counterpart, then he could in theory speak it. And if whatever left it was to return for the writings, in theory he could try to speak to it.

He wasn't certain "hello" was a greeting. Finding sentence structure was a long way off deciphering meaning. He had no proof outside his head that he'd found any structure at all. For all he knew the word was an insult; the word in Lathos it partnered with could function as one. This wasn't considering the likelihood he was botching its pronunciation beyond reasonable recognition. It might not be a word at all.

Nearing the end of his restful hours not having slept, he had to stop. Once again he collapsed back onto the feeble bed. This time though, he felt lost in the wonder and possibility the breakthrough offered. It was overwhelming to take in. He might have pulled off the most improbable translation in history. It also seemed absurd to assume he'd get a chance to try it out on anything. He didn't know what the chances were that anything would come near the window again.

There was one small piece of hope Halos clung to, as an all too brief sleep at last began to pull him into well deserved rest. Through his scrutiny of the data and video feed, he had determined from the moisture in the air that there was at least 'frequent' rainfall, yet the pages of the text held no obvious signs of water damage. That either meant a drought, or that it had arrived there not long before he opened the window. He just had to hope the object was important enough for its owner to return.