Mind Bits › Info › Sailors of the Heavens
Signal Filtration
The radio array has caught something, and the ship's general position on such things is that it wishes it had not. Buried under layers of interstellar hiss is a transmission, shredded into bands of colour scattered across the spectrum, and the only way to read it is to sweep the whole display into one clean frequency before the window closes. You work outward from your own corner of the band, absorbing one colour at a time, and the signal engineers repeat the same two rules every shift: take the colour that touches the most of what you already hold, and steer toward the largest patch of noise rather than the nearest one. The sweeps are limited. The static is not. Spend your early moves on scraps and the hiss simply closes back over the message like water.
When the last band snaps clean, the message turns out to be short. Coordinates. Coordinates to a planet that, according to every chart aboard, does not exist, transmitted patiently, on repeat, as though something out there has been waiting a very long time for somebody to tune in.
Thirty seconds later, Central Command forwards the day's destination. It is the same coordinates. The attached note says proceed as planned, which raises, at some speed, the question of whose plan. The crew's theory about the person upstairs quietly collapses: the orders were never being written up there. They were being received, stamped, and passed along.
The ship banks toward a world the charts insist is empty. The charts, you now suspect, were told to say that.
How to play
- The frequency display is a mess of noise. Your mission: tune it all to one clean signal.
- You control the top-left frequency band. Pick a colour to absorb all adjacent bands of that colour.
- Your signal grows with each sweep. Think of it as reclaiming the airwaves.
- You have a limited number of sweeps. Use them wisely, or the static wins.
- Fewer sweeps means a higher score. Efficiency is next to godliness.