Filtered

Zephram entered the office and sat down facing his department chairman. The chairman looked at him then down at stack of papers. "You've done a lot of work Zephram," Michio said.

"Thank you sir. I’ve recorded hundreds of revolutions worth of radio signals."

"But you have no results. You’ve written a lot on alien civilizations but," Michio paused, "None have been presented in a science forum."

"Not true sir."

"Nothing has been published in a respected forum. You personal forum doesn’t count. If you don’t get results soon your association with the university will end and you can forget applying for permanency."

"But sir, if you would just authorized my access to the university’s quantum mainframe I’m sure that the signals I’ve recorded will show the existence of an alien presence."

"For the," the chairman paged through his stack of papers, "Uh, well, twentieth, fiftieth time you can not feed data into that computer without it having been passed through the spam and virus filters."

"But sir, they corrupt the data. I feed in a hours of recordings and half that comes out," Zephram nearly shouted. And jumped erect.

"While you’re up you can leave. You have until the end of the term to produce something. Then you may continue at this university as an instructor with limited research opportunities or you can find a research position at some other school. Good day."

* * *

Zephram sat in the student lounge sipping his drink. He felt more at home here than in the faculty lounge. Here he was a big deal, a professor not a junior member of the clientele. Across the room he saw a student giving him a dirty look. He recognized the student from one of his classes. Quite smart but Zephram had caught him hacking into his computer and presumably stealing a test or changing a grade. Zephram wasn’t good enough with computers to tell. He stood and walked over to the students table and sat down.

"Got me expelled yet?" Tauri asked.

"I haven’t reported you. Yet. What were you doing on my computer? You didn’t need to cheat. You were cruising to the highest rank. If you stole tests you didn’t give them to anyone."

"I enjoy breaking into computers. It’s a challenge. If you hadn’t come up behind me when I had your files on the screen you never would have known I was there. When do you plan on turning me in?"

"I won’t do that but I can offer you a job," Zephram said.

"What kind of job?"

"I need some computer time on the quantum mainframe. I need to bypass the virus and spam filters."

* * *

Zephram tapped on the door to the computer lab and waited until Tauri opened the door. He had hoped to do all this remotely but he had too much data to transmit without it being detected.

Tauri motioned him in and scanned the area before closing the door. He lead Zephram to a desk and pointed to some connectors where he could hook up his drives. Tauri motioned for silence and indicated that he would be back soon.

Zephram started loading his data and analysis programs onto the computer. Once there it would take hours to process. First it would search the recorded signals to extract low entropy segments which would then be passed on to language analysis routines for further processing. If all went well a translation routine would spit out some text that he could read. In reality the best he could hope for was a few words but that would be enough to prove his thesis and get him permanency.

Tauri returned and motioned him to leave. Zephram stacked some papers over his drives and followed Tauri out the same way they had entered. "Same time tomorrow. You can pick up your drives and the results." He quietly closed the door.

* * *

Zephram spent the day on edge. He kept finding himself walking to the computer lab then having to turn around. In his class he kept making mistakes so he threw a surprise quiz, making up the questions and writing them on the board. Finally after trying to choke down a dinner he went to the computer lab and knocked on the door.

The door opened and Michio stood there holding his drives. "Looking for these?" He motioned Zephram in and a security guard closed the door. The guard lead Zephram down the hall into a small room.

Erasto, the security chief, was seated on the far side of a table and Michio took a seat beside him. "Breaking and entering, theft of university services, if we find your accomplice I’m sure we can add corruption of a minor but whoever that is has covered his tracks well."

"Please, I can"

"No. You will be terminated at the end of the semester but you will leave the university grounds immediately. Some one will take over you class. The only thing the university hates more than what you have done is the publicity of what you have done. Your record will show that you terminated voluntarily to seek other employment. Requests to the university about your time here will simply return the dates you worked here. The guard will escort you to your office where you can gather up any personal items and then off campus. Is this clear?"

"Yes. But, did I find anything? There should be some results by now."

"You don’t expect us to reward your behavior," Erasto said. He motioned and the guard lead Zephram from the room.

Michio looked at Erasto, "Well, did he find anything?"

"Maybe. It doesn’t make sense. It’s something called ‘My Pillow’. It appears to be a device to rest on but it’s soft. One’s carapace would simply compress it flat."

End

 

I tried to keep the alienness of the characters hidden until the end. How did that work?