unstable expedition 8

start: https://pastebin.com/j81r9nCF
pt. 6: https://pastebin.com/ah9B6Syr
pt. 7: https://pastebin.com/ujEEtj05

"Warning: Battery at 4%. Thirty-seven hours remaining."

"What?" Sara said, waking up in a dark room. "Hello?"

She heard a grating squawking sound.

"Hello Sara," said the computerized voice, "This is the Exploration-OS." Sara realized the voice was coming from a tablet computer. She tried to stand up, but hit her head on the roof of a cage. Her eyes adjusted and she could see the faint glow of the tablet computer lighting up the creature who had abducted her. Or at least, one of their kind.

"Where am I?" Sara said.

"Details unknown," the computer said, "Marty left this device on the ground near the castle, but the cameras are disabled."

"DESHAYULZ NUN-NOWNE" a twisted, creaking voice said back. It was the abductor.

"Did the aliens take you?" Sara said.

"Working...," the computer said, "That seems likely. They seem to have been trying to ascertain the use of this device. They seem to try to speak to the device, and I have been gathering data on their speech patterns."

"Do... do you think you could translate?" Sara said.

"Computerized translation is an incredibly difficult task," the computer said, "however I have picked up a few of their words."

"Can you... ask who they are?" Sara said.

"I will attempt this," the computer said, before emitting some awful sounding creaks and squawks. The alien made more such sounds.

"Working... With a certainty of 43% I believe the alien has said something to the effect of 'how does this work?' to you, Sara."

The alien stood up and walked towards Sara, then offered the tablet computer to her.

"Do you know their word for speak?" Sara said.

The computer made an alien vocalization. The alien made some more vocalizations.

"Try to tell it we can use you to translate," Sara said.

The computer tried to vocalize again, attempting to say "speak. You speak, I speak more," and the alien seemed to take this as an opportunity to tell his life story, for all Sara could tell.

The computer went back and forth with the alien, using frequency analysis and direct questioning to learn more about the alien's language. As the alien spoke, the computer would try to build a language model, and test it by speaking back at the alien using some twist on what the alien had said. It is not possible to directly transliterate the alien's language, so to explain what the computer is actually doing, we must use an analogy:

If I said that I ate a cheeseburger one day, and I ate a hot dog the next day, the computer might say "cheeseburger and hotdog are ate" and I might say "yes, they are food." But if it said, "cheesburger and hotdog are day," I would say "no." The computer still would not know that "food" and "eat" mean what the words mean, but it does now know that they are correlated, and eventually there may be enough other context to begin to understand the true meanings of the words.

Through this kind of language model building, the computer learned enough of the language over a few hours for Sara to start talking to the alien.

"Why did you bring me here?" She asked.

"You attacked the leader," the alien said (indirectly, through the computer's voice)

"I didn't attack anyone!" Sara said.

"One of your kind," the alien said, "and you left this device we speak with."

"Marty left the device," Sara said.

"You are not Marty?" The alien asked.

"I am Sara," Sara said, "They didn't tell me about you. Who are you?"

The computer told Sara that a phonetic translation of his name was impossible, and that it was beyond the range of human phonemes.

"Who are you? Where do you come from?" The alien asked.

"We're humans from the planet Earth." Sara said. The computer had a tough time explaining 'planet,' but settled for something like 'the land called Earth.' Sara didn't go into detail about that all the crew came from different colony planets, and that she herself was born en route to this planet.

"Why did your people come?" The alien asked.

"We wanted to explore this world. It is in an unstable orbit around the Suns, and we wanted to see what it was like before it was too late," Sara said. The computer worked on the translation for a bit.

"It may be the device, but I don't understand your meaning," the alien said.

"My people come from a place in the sky very far away. It took almost 200 years to get here at the fastest speed anything can go," Sara said.

"You come from a world which is also doomed?" The alien asked. Sara was surprised.

"No, no," Sara said.

"Then why do you come here?" The alien demanded.

"Because we wanted to learn about this world," Sara said, "to see what happens to a world that is doomed. How do you know your world is doomed?"

"Everyone knows the fate of the world. For millions of days we've known that our world will end in fire or ice very soon," the alien said.