Mission Orion: The Travel through Time

Chapter 10 | Operation Delta

The robot could not do much other than walk around. Leo told me that the robot had shut down most of its processing units due to the lack of power and was days away from dying. I walked to the back of the robot and opened its' access panel. It had an Indian Flag engraved on it. It was decades since I saw an Indian flag. There was one which belonged to the United States of America as well. Both these countries did not exist anymore. In fact, the whole of Earth was one country. Nobody could afford to identify themselves to be different than the other. "Is this Indian?" I asked Leo. "It was a joint partnership between the Indian Amry and the US Army." He replied. "The Indians had the ideas and the US had the technology and the resources to make it happen." He replied. "Try bringing it back to life." I instructed Leo. "I will get it charged up and make some minor repairs." Leo said. "While you are at it, check its' video logs. There probably is something which would be of help for us." I said. "Okay, boss." He replied.

After an hour Leo came running into my cabin. "RITHVIK! You have to check this." He exclaimed. Leo and I rushed to the bridge to find that the rest of the crew were already assembled there. Leo stood near the controls and looked like he was about to brief all of us. "Go on. Spill the beans" I said. " Sure, I was going through the video logs as you asked me to, when I noticed something strange" he started. "Approximately three weeks ago, a strange object connected itself to Dave's system. They hacked into his system and stole all the info present in his system. But fortunately, we didn't sync him with our onboard computer yet, so none of the sensitive information is out. But what I saw was a new file which was added when they hacked into the system. What I'm guessing is that, when they stole our info via their little toy, a bug in their system caused the info of their robot into ours. But here is the catch point. The file was heavily encrypted and it would take me days to de-encrypt it. So, I'll start now and you can have Konrad here start the syncing of Dave to the computer mainframe ". "But what if they're monitoring the robot? What if they have a way to remotely control it?" I asked. "Well, I'm about to clean the whole system out. That ought to remove any virus they inserted into Dave's system" he replied. "You sure?" I asked. "One hundred percent, captain!" he replied. "Good. We have an opportunity now, guys! We have an opportunity to know more about them. So, Leo and Konrad, please spend your whole time in decrypting and syncing respectively. I need results as soon as possible."

That night, I was all alone in my cabin with my eyes closed, but my body refused to sleep. My mind wandered from one topic to another until it settled on one. The files Leo found on Dave's system. For once, it seemed like we had the chance of knowing something about the species we were up against. I just hoped that it would be enough to find a chink in their armour. I slowly drifted to sleep, with a sense of optimism.