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Several weeks passed while the storm raged on the surface of Mars. Jake was kept on standby as Curiosity's primary operator in case the dust storm cleared enough for the rover to make contact again. That seemed unlikely to happen any time soon though, as the Martian surface was still being pummeled relentlessly by a steady stream of asteroids being flung at it from somewhere in the belt between Mars and Jupiter.

Hubble had locked on to the line of asteroids and followed it back, but it did not have the resolution to see any more than a very long string of bright dots reflecting the sun's light. The asteroids were too small to see in great detail.

The telescope did identify an odd pattern in the string of asteroids, though. It was not a perfectly straight line all along its length. Instead, there were small gaps and the rocks were angled in their arrangement so that when one line ended, the next line of rocks began at a large displacement from the first and slowly worked its way back at an angle again until the next gap when the pattern would repeat again. If you were to imagine seeing the stream of asteroids from the side and perpendicular to the surface of Mars as they came down, it would look like a vertical column of keyboard slash characters typed into Notepad, with each slash made up of eight or ten small asteroids. It was like one half of a herringbone pattern.

On close study it was evident that the asteroids were displaced along the line just enough that when they reached their target, the displacement would account for Mars's rotation. One rock would hit the targeted impact point, and the next would be displaced from that position just enough that as Mars continued to rotate beneath it, the next rock would once again hit the exact same spot with absolute precision. The next rock would be displace again, and the next one, and so on, so that throughout the Martian day, as the planet rotated, the asteroids would continue to hit the exact same moving target until it finally rotated out of range. That was when the first gap occurred. The pummeling stopped for a brief pause and then began again, but the targeted impact site was exactly one quarter the circumference around the planet from the first one. The bombardment continued at the new location until once again it rotated out of range and there was a gap and then the rocks began to hit a new target once again a quarter the circumference around the planet from the previous target.

Scientists who were studying the process theorized, just as Jake had done, that the intent was to drill down to the core to reheat it. The core was being assaulted from four locations around the planet to keep up the pressure and maximize the heat buildup. All of the asteroids would hit their targets at a slight angle at first as they came down almost directly, then at more and more extreme angles as the planet rotated. The intent appeared to be not only to heat the core until it was molten again, but also to impart angular momentum that would cause the outer core to begin to spin in one direction once it was liquid enough to do so. Over time the outer part of the molten core should become like a spinning dynamo, just as the Earth's core was. If the majority of the makeup of the core was iron, just like Earth's, the spinning would create a strong magnetic field that would engulf the whole planet and become a shield against the solar radiation. The asteroids that were selected and flung at the planet from the belt were likely primarily made of iron to add more fuel to the dynamo effect.

There was no way to know just how long the process would take, but the scientists estimated that it would not take very long at all given the incredible amount of focused energy being carried into the planet from the steady stream of asteroids. Current theory was that the deep Martian core was still molten. It was likely only the outer core that had cooled enough to kill the natural magnetic field, and it wouldn't take much to get it going again. They felt, in fact, that the process had likely already advanced enough that the magnetic field might have begun to form. Efforts were underway to try to determine if a magnetic field was there, but it would take some time to get results.

Once the line of asteroids was imaged as completely as possible and there was nothing left to learn about it, Hubble was then oriented outward more and began to sweep slowly across the shortest space between Mars and the Kuiper belt, looking for any other bright bodies heading towards the planet. It didn't take long before a planetary based telescope found something and Hubble was zeroed in on it. Once again, a long line of bright objects were headed towards Mars and they were very close already. The first of them would reach the planet in a few days.

It appeared as though the next step in the Martian terraforming would involve priming the planet's atmosphere with gasses frozen in the comets that were launched at it from the Kuiper belt. Spectrographic analysis of reflected light from the comets heading to Mars indicated they were made up for the most part of water, but there also appeared to be a heavy concentration of frozen methane and ammonia in some of the comets. As they vaporized on their way down to the surface they would release the gasses and the water vapor into the warming Martian atmosphere and begin to thicken it up. The line of comets extended as far back as the telescopes could see and it seemed they would be raining down on Mars for weeks to come.

There was no doubt in anyone's mind now that the Curiosity team's theory that the aliens were terraforming the planet was correct. From what they had gleaned so far it was likely that the aliens needed water, but preferred to breath a mixture of methane and ammonia, though it was unclear how that metabolic process would work. It was also unclear on how that type of atmosphere could have resulted in a creature that looks so much like a mammal from Earth that had evolved to intelligence and an upright stance.

Much as the US government's alien response team would have preferred it to be otherwise, word had gotten out to the wide world that something was going on on Mars. More and more excited astronomers and scientists from around the globe began to use every piece of equipment they could get time on to study the events that were unfolding.

The Indian government offered its Mars orbiter, Mangalyaan, as an effective tool in determining the makeup of the new atmosphere as it developed. The Mars Orbiter Mission was primarily intended as a test platform to develop India's nascent space exploration capabilities. That objective was completed as soon as the satellite settled successfully into orbit around Mars. As a secondary objective, the probe was also given the capability to study the thin Martian atmosphere with remote sensing techniques. It would be in the perfect position to observe the changes to the atmosphere as they occurred.

Other equipment was being repurposed wherever possible to study Mars as closely as possible. The WIND spacecraft that was currently in orbit at the L1 Lagrangian point was capable of closely studying the solar winds. Scientists were now trying to focus it on Mars. It should be able to detect any deviation of the solar wind that would begin to happen if Mars built up a magnetosphere. The same thing was being attempted with the Advanced Composition Explorer that was also parked at L1. ACE is one of NASA's space exploration missions to study energetic particles in the solar winds. Those particles would also be safely deflected away and around the planet by a large enough magnetic field, and that deflection should be detectable.

If the field became large enough to be detected it would also be large enough to protect the planet's newly forming and vulnerable atmosphere, and the surface of Mars would be one major step closer to being safe for alien habitation.

Many other telescopes were being trained on Mars and every type of sensor that could be brought to bear by other spacecraft orbiting Mars was being directed at the planet. Scientists wanted to know exactly what was happening as it happened. The human race could learn a great deal about planetary engineering by observing the process in action.

While the storm continued to rage on Mars, there was no way to communicate with Curiosity. Jake was on pins and needles waiting for the chance to begin working with the alien again.

He spent most of his time thinking about ways to speed up the process of exchanging knowledge with the big cat once they reestablished contact. He wasn't sure if he would even be allowed to offer any opinion on how to proceed once things got going again, but he had nothing better to do while he waited than to think of how it could be done.

Before the weak link to Curiosity's transceiver had been severed by the thick layers of dust that were currently blasting across the planet's surface, they'd seen enough of the tiger's number system to be able to identify every single digit in their base ten system. All he needed to figure out now was a way to show the alien the human system of numbers and that first exchange would be complete.

The problem was that there was no form of display on Curiosity whatsoever. It would be completely unnecessary since once launched, it would never be approached by a human again. The possibility that it might someday be needed in order to communicate with an alien had of course never been considered. With no display output on Curiosity, it would not be possible to simply show the alien the human system the same way the cat had done with the tablet.

As an engineer, Jake knew that when robotics were involved, where there's a will, there's a way. It didn't take him long to begin to work up some scripts that would use Curiosity's arm to draw out the basic symbols that the martian had showed them that made up their number system. He then worked up a script that would make the arm draw the human digits followed by the corresponding alien digits while also showing them the symbol humans used for equivalence. He then tested the scripts in the simulator and tweaked them until they worked perfectly so they'd be ready as soon as communication was reestablished. He would offer the scripts to the alien response team in the hopes of getting them to begin the process of communicating with the cat. Whether or not they would use them was another thing entirely, but working on them gave him something to pass the time with.

He also began working on a program that could convert free form drawings to plotting commands that the robot's arm could reproduce. Once he had the arm programmed to draw out anything he needed it too, he would simply need a medium to work with at the other end and he could show the alien anything he wanted.

His hope was to give the alien an indication that the arm could be used to draw, then let the cat work out how to help it accomplish that. Even something as simple as a box of sand that Curiosity could trace shapes in would suffice, though something like a dry erase marker that it could use to write on the white wall would be better. The main problem was that the robot was never designed to do that. It was a simple thing for Jake to write a program that would move the arm in the ways that were necessary to use the hand to draw the symbols, but the hand had no actual drawing implement on it. It was more like a turret with four separate, complex pieces of scientific equipment on it. The turret could turn to bring any of the equipment to bear and the arm could then be used to put the equipment where it needed to be with great precision.

He hoped the alien could help him modify the hand to make it capable of drawing. He couldn't communicate directly with the cat obviously, but he could simply have the rover bring its hand up and start drawing some of the symbols the alien had already shown them in the air in front of the robot over and over again. If the alien was an engineer, as Jake suspected, he would have no problem understanding what Jake wanted to accomplish and he'd do all the work on the other side to make it possible. All Jake needed the alien to do was to realize the arm could draw, and then find a way to attach something to the end of it that could act as a drawing implement. He felt the best way for the cat to accomplish that would be to use the RAT, or rock abrasion tool, that was on one of the four points of the cross that made up the turret on the end of the rover's arm. It would be the easiest thing to attach a pointing device to.

If they could figure out a way between them to make it happen, and the government alien response team didn't get in the way, they'd have a rudimentary means of communication in both directions to open the path to easier sharing of knowledge.

He also tried to think of how they might go about beginning to teach the alien the human alphabet, and eventually teach him basic words. He figured the best way to start was with objects both he and the alien would understand. He continued to write scripts that would draw out things like a rough diagram of the solar system, Mars and its two moons, Earth and its moon, the asteroid belt, the Kuiper belt, and so on. That way he could easily begin to teach the alien the words for star, planet, moon, asteroid, and then specifically, Earth, Mars, Sol, and so on. Since those objects were clearly understood by both sides it seemed like the best place to start. More difficult concepts could come after that.

He began to try to think of the best ways to indicate more abstract and difficult to describe concepts such as 'me', 'you', 'this', 'that', 'the', 'and' and so on that are so critical to basic communication. The complexity of trying to 'draw' those ideas and concepts with a robotic arm was making Jake's head spin. He struggled to come up with an effective way of doing it and he hoped the alien might have some ideas of his own as well.

In the meantime, he spent most of his time working feverishly to build a library of scripts that would make the arm draw out each number and each letter of the alphabet, and he began to write other scripts with which he could build a system where he could simply type words or phrases into the computer and it would then string together all of the other scripts to make the arm draw out each word. It was a laborious process, but once he finished it he would be ready to write to the alien in English at least, and it would involve nothing more than typing a message into his computer that the program would then convert to the commands needed for the arm to draw the letters at the other end.

His intent was to then add the alien's symbols for their alphabet so that he could ultimately type words in English that the computer could convert to the tiger's language, assuming he was ever able to begin to learn it, and he would have the beginnings of a translator. He started by making it able to translate human numbers to alien ones. He was already at the point where he could type in the number 103 for example, and it would make the arm draw the slash, squiggle and upside down question mark that would be the equivalent number in alien that they'd learned when the tiger showed them the primes

Jake wasn't sure how long it would be before Curiosity could break through the clouds of dust and communicate once more, but he was fairly certain it would take months at the least. It was giving him plenty of time to get ready, since there was nothing else for him to do as long as the link was down. He'd already finished most of the drawing scripts he felt he needed and had prepared several slides to send to the tiger, but there were many more he could make while he waited for the rover to call home. If he couldn't convince the response team of the importance of two way communication, it might all be for nothing, but he was fairly certain they'd quickly realize they couldn't learn much about the alien or his technology until some basic ability to communicate ideas was developed.

Everything had quieted down in his office. Since there had been no communication with the rover for weeks and there was unlikely to be any for many more weeks to come, he'd been left completely to himself again. The government team that had been put together to respond to the first contact had indicated to Jake that he was to inform them the moment communication was back up, but in the mean time they would be working on their own to gather together all of the information that was being collected regarding the Mars terraforming process.

The team had given him specific guidelines to follow. Under no circumstances was he to share any information of any kind with the alien without clearing it through the task force. He was, however, to try to gather as much information as he was able to. They wanted to know everything they could about the aliens, but they wanted to give up no information about the human race if they could avoid it.

Jake was irked by their approach. He felt the cat had acted in good faith by giving them the means to protect Curiosity from the coming storm, and by showing them the alien number system as a way of opening up communication and the sharing of knowledge. It quickly became clear to him that the government was going to approach this all wrong. He wished there was a way to remove them from the equation, at least at first, until he and the alien at the other end of their radio link could work out the basics of communication. He wanted to share knowledge equally right from the start. He didn't see any reason to try to gain an upper hand by learning more about them than they knew about humans.

If he could somehow figure out a way to communicate with the alien on the sly, he would most definitely do it. He felt the government's approach was not good, and he wanted to try to teach the alien everything he could and at least build the basics of language before the government began to interfere and ultimately slow the whole process down.

He was fairly certain the telemetry receiver was being monitored, though, so there was no way he could communicate with the tiger without the government team's knowledge. If the aliens' bombardment of Mars stopped, it would still likely take months for the dust to settle, but eventually Curiosity would break through with its main transceiver and the link would come back up. He had no doubt that the government was watching carefully and they'd know immediately when it happened and would swoop into his office to take over. Jake would be relegated to the position of operator at that point, and he would simply be getting the rover to do whatever the government team wanted.

The fact that something was happening on Mars had leaked out to the rest of the world through the scientific astronomical community, and that was unavoidable due to the obvious physical changes sweeping the planet, but the fact that Curiosity had actually made first contact with an alien species was still known only to the United States government and those few people who'd been in the room the night it had happened. The government was treating it like a state secret, most likely in the hopes of gaining some advantage over the rest of the world by learning about new technologies or maybe negotiating a position of power with the aliens before any other country could do it.

For now, the government's default stance seemed to be to see the aliens as a threat due to their power to reshape an entire planet. To Jake that made no sense. Why didn't they see it as a creative process rather than a destructive one? If the aliens wanted to destroy the Earth and everyone on it, it was clear they had the technology to do it, yet they didn't. They seemed to be ignoring Earth completely for the time being and just going on about their business on Mars. For all intents and purposes they were simply new neighbors moving in next door. They likely just wanted to be left alone until they could get settled in to their new home, then they'd be ready to properly meet their neighbors on Earth.

He imagined the alien they'd seen in the images was an engineer, just like Jake was. If that was the case he'd be driven by his curiosity, just as Jake was. He'd want to learn everything he could about the humans, and the best way to start that process would be to share knowledge of his own people in the hopes of finding some common ground, just as he'd done when he sent the images of their prime numbers. Jake wanted to reciprocate by sending back the human number system, but the government team would obviously resist that idea, at least at first. They would likely try to get the alien to teach them everything he could about their advanced technology, while trying not to give up any knowledge whatsoever about us so as to try to gain the upper hand at some point.

The more he thought about it, the more it bothered him. Science, and the advancement of it, was about the equal and open sharing of knowledge. He couldn't stand the idea of trying to be shady and taking as much knowledge as possible while giving nothing back. Jake wanted to share openly in order to move them as quickly as possible onto even footing where they'd be able to communicate readily. He felt the government was being unnecessarily, though not uncharacteristically, paranoid. It would ultimately only slow down the process of learning to communicate with the aliens.

It was obviously going to take quite some time to get the planet ready for the aliens to move in, so it was likely that a small team of alien engineers had been sent in advance to do the work. Most were likely somewhere out in the asteroid belt and the Kuiper belt, working on selecting and throwing rocks at Mars. It might be a very small team that was based on the planet to closely monitor the process. Jake was certain the alien they'd seen was one of those engineers and he wanted to get to know him. He felt as though they already shared a bond based on their shared curiosity. They also quite likely shared the love of all things technological. You didn't become an engineer unless you loved to tinker and bend technology to your will. To use it to gain more knowledge, which then required you to design better technology, based on that knowledge, to begin to learn even more. It was an endless cycle that Jake loved to spend as much of his waking time on as he could ever since he was a boy. He imagined the alien they'd seen was exactly the same way, though he still had no way of knowing that for sure.

As he sat at his desk and contemplated the situation, an alarm on his computer began to beep. He reached for the mouse and clicked on the notification tray icon, it showed the alarm was coming from a program that had been running by default on his PC since the start of the Curiosity rover mission. It was redundant now, but he'd never bothered to shut it off. The program monitors Curiosity's secondary transceiver. That unit is on a completely separate circuit that would normally be powered by the emergency backup power system. The backup transceiver shouldn't even be functional now since it had no power. Jake's reconfiguration of the rover to switch the emergency battery into the main battery's circuit would have rendered the entire backup system useless. Unless his changes had been reverted somehow, he could see no way that the secondary transmitter could be sending a signal.

He pondered the possibility that it was just radio noise, but nothing like this had ever happened before, so he doubted it. All communication between JPL and the rover rode on a discreet, encrypted digital carrier wave. There was no way random radio noise could replicate the information exchange protocols that were required for the link to stay up.

It was especially odd that it was the backup system that was communicating. Under normal circumstances, if the rover's main circuit lost power and the emergency system kicked in to reboot it, the robot would begin to communicate on the backup transceiver since the main one would be non-functional. It would continue to use the backup system for communication until the main one came back online. Given the robot's last known situation, it should still be functioning normally on its main power system and the primary transceiver should be fully functional, it just wouldn't be able to break through the heavy dust storm. Even if the backup system was still working correctly, there should be no reason for it to kick in and take over.

Come to think of it, the backup transceiver had even less transmission power than the main unit and it definitely shouldn't be able to break through the storm if the main one couldn't. He began to think it must definitely be some sort of interference or something. It just couldn't be Curiosity.

He wondered briefly if he should inform the government's alien response team who were now effectively his bosses. Anything happening regarding the rover they would want to know about. Even if they were monitoring for transmissions from Curiosity, they would only be tuned to the main transceiver signal. Jake was fairly certain nobody anywhere would be monitoring the backup system anymore. His computer was the only one still set up to do it. The backup transmitter used a different frequency entirely to prevent any possible interference with the main transceiver, so nobody else would even be aware that a signal was being received from the rover right now.

As quickly as the thought came to him to contact the government team, he dismissed it, and another, more dangerous thought took its place. If this was real, if it was really Curiosity somehow communicating on its backup system, this could be Jake's chance to communicate with the alien without the government team getting involved. Without anyone else at all getting involved for that matter.

His heart began to beat faster as he sat up straighter. It shouldn't be possible for Curiosity to communicate through the storm, but he was definitely getting some sort of signal on that frequency. He needed to determine if he'd somehow magically regained the link to the rover, but if that was the case he needed to make sure nobody else found out.

He thought hard about what to do next. Given the level of paranoia normally displayed by the government, he knew they must be watching him. For all he knew, and it actually seemed quite likely, everything he was doing on his desktop computer was being logged and checked daily after he left, to ensure he wasn't trying to do anything without their consent or knowledge. If he wanted to do anything on the sly, he couldn't use his computer to do it. In fact, any response to this blip might be recorded and scrutinized at some point. He decided to quickly uninstall the program that monitored the backup link. If anyone asked at some point in the future, he'd tell them something close to the truth. The program had become redundant when he'd reconfigured the rover weeks ago so he'd uninstalled it.

He always brought his own laptop along with him to work in case he needed to do anything personal while he was in the office. There was a strict policy against using the PC for anything other than operating Curiosity. He grabbed for his backpack that he kept under the desk and fished out his small laptop. He'd also used it many times to do work from home, so it was set up to use their VPN from an outside link so he could tunnel in through the internet to connect to his shares on the internal system.

He tethered the laptop to his smart phone to get outside Internet access and then connected through the secure VPN tunnel directly to JPL's software repository. He downloaded the telemetry program that was specifically for communication on Curiosity's backup radio link and quickly installed it and started it up so the laptop would begin talking to the servers that ran the big radio dishes. In no time he was linked up to the rover on Mars via his personal laptop. He was fairly confident that they wouldn't be watching the back door or the secondary transceiver link so anything he did now would not be detected by them.

He accessed his personal server shares and copied over all the work he'd been doing on the rover's scripts to his laptop. He brought up the last script he'd sent to the rover weeks ago, the one that caused it to waggle and nod its camera and then take a photograph all in a repeating loop. He cut the loop to run just twice this time. He doubted the alien was there anyhow, but if he was and this was really the rover he was linked to, then he didn't want Curiosity to get caught in a long loop of taking pictures and sending them back needlessly. He needed to see what was out there first to determine what, if anything, to do next.

He checked the status of the link. It was solid and steady. It didn't seem possible that it would be some sort of noise or the link would have dropped almost immediately after the noise went away. At the very least it should be intermittent, but instead it appeared to be locked in and ready for communication.

He brought up the alternate command stream for the backup system and injected the script, along with a request for a systems check and full diagnostic from the robot. If this wasn't really a valid comm link to Curiosity then nothing would happen. If it was an active link, then in roughly six minutes he should receive the telemetry along with the first of two images.

He became nervous as he waited for the results. If this was truly a link to the rover, and if the alien responded in any way to Jake's script, then what he was doing could in fact be considered an act of treason. He was intentionally acting against his government's direct orders in a situation in which they deemed there was a clear and present threat from a species with greater technological capability than the human race possessed. He was even intentionally subverting their monitoring of his activities by coming in through the back door. He would be in deep, deep trouble if he was caught doing this.

He stood up and closed the door, then he began to nervously pace his office back and forth, just as he'd done on that first night when he saw the shadow that had started all of this.

He was fairly certain it couldn't be Curiosity. Most likely the six minutes would go by and nothing would happen. The transmission aimed at the rover from Earth had very large amplifiers behind it and there was more than sufficient power to get through the dust storm to reach the robot, but there was no way Curiosity could send any information back even if the link was up. Its transmitter just didn't have the power to pierce through the miles of thick dust layers above it. The link couldn't be maintained without the rover's side of the handshake, so he wasn't sure what was going on, but he didn't see how it could be the robot that had initiated the link.

He continued to pace the office while he thought about what might be going on. The six minutes passed and just as he was becoming certain that nothing would happen, Jake's heart jumped as his laptop beeped with the telltale signal that it had received telemetry from Curiosity.

He clicked on the notification icon on the laptop's system tray and up came the results of the diagnostics he'd ordered from the rover. All systems were nominal. For some odd reason though, the telemetry showed quite clearly that the main communication link was down, but the backup one was up and running. He checked all of the tables of diagnostic results and noticed that the entire backup circuit was powered and running even while the main system was still up and functional. This shouldn't happen. He'd disconnected the backup battery pack from the backup circuits, so they should have no power at all. The backup circuit was completely isolated from power, yet somehow it was active.

Curiosity was talking to him again, but he couldn't for the life of him figure out how it was possible.

A minute or so passed and then his laptop beeped again and the first of the two images came up on his screen. He was elated to see the beautiful, muscular tiger standing squarely in the picture with a big smile on his face again.

Jake's heart leaped with joy at the sight of him. It felt sort of like making contact with a long lost friend that he'd sorely missed. He hadn't realized how strong of an emotional attachment he was beginning to feel for the cat already until he actually saw him once more after so long. He smiled and wished he could somehow communicate better so he could at least tell the tiger that he was glad to see him again.

As he looked the image over, he saw that the alien was once again holding up a tablet. This time, instead of a list of numbers, there was a drawing. It was crude but effective. Jake zoomed in on it and he could clearly see what looked like a roughly drawn version of Curiosity with a wire coming out of its back right around where the telemetry transceivers were located. The wire went to a box that had what looked like a large lightning bolt drawn on it. Another wire went out of the box and up to what looked like a crudely drawn radio dish. Was the alien trying to tell him how they were communicating again? It looked to Jake as if the big cat was indicating that he'd connected Curiosity's backup telemetry system to an amplifier that was capable of boosting the signal so that it overcame the blocking of the dust storm! The alien was using his own equipment to give the rover the means to communicate again!

Jake was amazed and delighted. He realized immediately that his guess about the alien must have been right. He was an engineer, just like Jake. And just like Jake, he was impatient to restart the process of communication. The alien must have a lot of time on his hands while he waits for the drawn out process of preparing Mars. Most of the work would be happening at the asteroid belt and the Kuiper belt. He was likely just monitoring the process and sending information back so they could adjust and adapt as the terraforming progressed. He might even be all alone out there. Jake was fairly sure that if he'd found himself in a similar situation, he too would have begun to take a closer look at the rover to see if anything could be done to get them talking again.

The alien engineer must be quite skilled, though Jake figured that no matter where you were from, if you were technologically advanced, you would have no problem identifying transceivers and power systems and cameras and motors and pretty much any of the types of technologies that made up Curiosity. There were only so many ways to do radio, and there were only so many ways to transmit and receive data. Electricity was the same no matter how it was generated.

The cat must have realized why the robot had lost its connection back to Earth. It was probably not terribly difficult for the alien to figure out how to modify the rover to begin to transmit again. He wouldn't be able to know what was being transmitted, but that wasn't necessary. All he needed to do was find the wire that connected to Curiosity's antenna package, and disconnect it and rewire it to a powerful amplifier that was connected to an alien transmitter dish pointed towards the Earth. It was straightforward signal amplification. The only mystery was why he would have chosen to use the backup system instead of the main one. He would have recognized that both were capable of sending and receiving radio transmissions, but he would have seen that the backup system had no power. Why would he choose to go to the bother of powering up the backup instead of using the main one?

The computer beeped again and the second image in the loop came up on the screen. The alien was still standing there, but he was clearly pointing down towards the rover's front wheels. The image didn't capture what he was pointing at, but it was clear that he wanted Jake to look down.

He grinned as he brought up his scripting tool and sent the commands for Curiosity to tilt the camera forty five degrees downward and take another image. He couldn't wait to see what it was the alien was trying to get him to look at now.

After a long wait the laptop beeped and Jake's heart jumped with excitement again when he saw what it showed. It was as if the alien had been reading his mind. This time the image was down towards the floor in front of the rover and it included the front two wheels as well as the large hand at the end of the robot's arm that contained the science instruments. Lashed tightly to the rock abrasion tool using metal bands was what looked like a slender pointing device sticking out forward. Just out ahead of the hand was another tablet just like the one the alien was holding. It too had been fixed to a solid looking frame that had been attached to the front of the robot's own frame. The cat had given Curiosity its own tablet to work with!

The alien had crouched down next to the tablet and was grinning up at the camera. He was using one of his paws to point at the stylus he'd lashed to the robot's hand, and he'd used his other paw to drag a claw across the surface of the tablet that was lashed to the robot's frame to draw a line. He was clearly indicating the tablet was touch sensitive and he wanted whoever was on the other side to draw something on it for him using the robot's arm.

Jake couldn't believe what he was seeing! It was exactly what he'd wished he could somehow convey to the alien! He supposed in the end he shouldn't be too surprised. The alien engineer would have no problem over the past few weeks going over the robot from top to bottom and figuring out what it was capable of. He must have been pondering the problem of establishing two way communication too. Given the situation, the tablet was by far the best option and he'd recognized that and got everything setup for it, then he'd given Curiosity the means to begin transmitting again. Jake was absolutely thrilled.

He quickly began to write a series of scripts for the robot. Before he could do anything else he needed to carefully bring the arm into position until the tip of the stylus touched the tablet. He would need to do it for each of the four corners so he could establish the limits and then he could simply create a grid of Cartesian coordinates that he could then have the robot draw into using the scripts he'd created earlier.

The process was painstaking and took a couple of hours. The first corner took the longest. He needed many tries with some adjustments while waiting six minutes for the images to come back until he finally had the stylus touching the tablet in the top right corner. The other three corners were a bit easier, but still took a few tries each before he finally had them all locked in.

He then sent a quick test script that would have the arm draw a circle that encompassed the full height of the tablet to ensure that the stylus would make contact across the entire surface. He was also going to have the robot draw an X across the circle to ensure it was making contact in the middle as well, but after a moment's thought he changed his mind and smiled as he added two fat dots for eyes and an upturned mouth to make it look like a smiley emoji instead, and then he sent it off.

He waited impatiently and when his laptop beeped again, to his delight, he saw that the rover had drawn the smiley face perfectly to fill the surface of the tablet. The tiger was still crouched down next to the tablet and he had his mouth wide open in a roar and both of his muscular furry arms were up over his head and it looked as though he was doing double fist pumps into the air and he was cheering to show his excitement.

Jake grinned at the big cat's infectious enthusiasm and he waited for the next image. He'd gotten into the habit of commanding the rover to take two images twenty seconds apart each time it sent data back in order to save some time. The alien had picked up on it quickly and this time, as the second of the two images came in, he was smiling again and he had the open palm of his padded paw tilted towards the tablet, which was now blank again, as if to say, "It's all yours, go ahead and show me something."

Jake was nearly bouncing in his chair with excitement now. It was like the two of them were on the same wavelength or something. He supposed it made sense if they both thought like engineers trying to solve a problem with whatever tools and resources were available. Still, this was the most amazing thing that had ever, or likely would ever, happen to him in his entire life! He was actually collaborating with a fellow engineer, but he was on a planet nearly 40 million miles away and he was a huge, muscular, upright, intelligent tiger!

Now was the moment when he would begin to trade back information in exchange for what the alien had already taught them and would as a result, from a legal perspective, become a traitor to his country.

He brought up the first of the series of scripts he'd been preparing over the past weeks while he'd had nothing else to do. He injected it into the command stream, hoping the robot would draw it just as well as the simulation had done. He'd used relative coordinates on the scripts so all he'd needed to do was add some code at the front for the arm to draw everything relative to what it now knew was the top left corner of the tablet, and to follow the Cartesian plane and the scale that had been identified when he determined the spatial coordinates of the tablet's four corners.

He anxiously awaited the two images that would come back. If what he saw drawn on the first screen was what he'd intended, then all of the rest would work perfectly. If the next image after that showed the tablet blank once more, he would take that as the alien telling him he got it and he could go ahead with the next "slide" in the presentation.

When the laptop finally beeped and the image came up, Jake was thrilled to see the rover's arm had followed the program perfectly. The image he'd intended for the alien to see was right there in bold on the tablet's surface. He'd commanded it to draw the first six prime numbers in the same way that the alien had done for them weeks ago, but instead of just the alien symbols underneath the dots, he had it draw the human version of the numbers first, then the alien version beneath that. The alien would now know the human numbers 2, 3, 5, 7, 11 and 13.

The big cat's eyes shone with delight as he crouched in the picture and held up another tablet with an image of the tablet that Jake had drawn on. The alien was showing him that he was recording everything by taking pictures of it, so Jake could keep going without pause if he wanted to.

Again, the next image that came twenty seconds later showed the tablet blank and ready for another drawing. He was certain the alien already understood what he'd intended and he'd blank the tablet after each drawing was completed and the camera waggled indicating the first picture was taken, just to show Jake in the next picture that it was blank and ready to go again.

In order to save time he now strung several of the drawings he'd preprogrammed over the past few weeks into one long script in a logical group. The rover would use the arm to draw one slide, then waggle the camera and take a picture, then it would wait the usual twenty seconds, waggle again and take another picture, then continue on with the next drawing. That way Jake could avoid the long delay between receiving the picture and sending out the next script. The robot would just keep on going and so long as the alien cleared the tablet's display after each waggle of the camera, there would be no problem. He could monitor the incoming images to be sure the process was proceeding correctly.

Jake was feeling more excited than he'd ever been in his life while he waited for the script to reach Curiosity and the robot to make the first drawing in the series.

Eventually the laptop beeped and the displayed image once again showed an elated tiger grinning widely and holding up his own tablet with the photo of Curiosity's work. This time Jake had abandoned the prime number system. He'd only shown the first few primes to let the alien know his previous slides from weeks ago were completely understood and they were on the same wavelength.

He hadn't known how well the drawing mechanism would work if they ever actually managed to make it happen, so he'd kept his drawings simple and large. With the next one after the primes he wanted to show the alien the human symbol for equality. He had it draw the alien symbol for the number zero, which was a squiggle, followed by the equal sign, and then once again the alien squiggle. Their symbol for the number one looked like a slash, and their symbol for two looked like a colon. The tablet now showed the tiger that squiggle equals squiggle, slash equals slash, and colon equals colon. The alien's wide grin indicated that he clearly understood what Jake was showing him, that the two parallel lines between the symbols were his way of showing equality.

The next image sent by Curiosity showed the tablet once again blank and the alien standing by, waiting to see what would be drawn next. This time Jake didn't need to do anything since the robot already had the scripts and was by now finished the next few drawings in the sequence.

For the next one he'd command the robot to draw the same thing, but replace the second number in the equations with the human version instead. It now showed that squiggle equals 0, slash = 1, and colon = 2. If the alien truly understood that the equal sign meant equality, then he'd immediately see that he was being shown the human equivalents of the first three alien digits.

The next image came in and once again the alien grinned while showing he'd captured an image of the tablet again. Jake smiled as he saw the look on the tiger's face. It was clear that the big cat was as thrilled with this as Jake was. He was driven by his curiosity just as Jake was and they were both in their element now. They had figured out a way to communicate and all that remained was the challenge of teaching each other their languages as best they could so they could communicate better and find out more about each other. Since they were both engineers, the most logical place to start was with their respective number systems.

The next few times the laptop beeped, it displayed the sequences that followed the first ones to show the alien the human equivalents for all the digits up to nine.

Now that the alien knew all of the human digits, the next few slides made it clear that our number system was base ten just like theirs is. It continued up from ten to twenty in both human and alien numbers. It then showed some more equivalents for the numbers 100 and 1000 to show the alien without a doubt that both species had settled on the base ten number system.

The next few drawings were dedicated to the basic mathematical symbols. Jake showed the alien that squiggle plus slash equals slash, slash plus slash equals colon, and slash plus colon equals upside down question mark, which was the alien symbol for the number three. He then repeated the same thing in the next drawing but with the human units to show that 0 + 1 = 1, 1 + 1 = 2, and 1 + 2 = 3. The alien would now know the human symbol for addition.

The tiger continued to grin his appreciation as the knowledge kept pouring in. The next slides did the same as the previous ones and showed the symbol for subtraction. After that Jake had shown him the symbols for multiplication and division. It further reinforced the decimal system by showing the alien that 10 x 10 = 100 in both human and alien digits, along with some other multiplications and divisions.

This time, when the second picture came back that showed Curiosity's tablet was blank and ready for more, the tablet that the alien held up showed that he'd quickly drawn the same things as Jake had the robot draw in the last couple of frames. The alien had used strictly alien symbols to show the same simple equations Jake had used to show addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. From that one simple image Jake now knew the alien symbols for equality as well as the basic math functions.

After all of that there was no doubt that the alien clearly understood the basics of the human number system and mathematical symbols and Jake now knew theirs as well. It was a good start.

Now that Jake knew beyond doubt the system would work and that everything they'd exchanged had been understood completely by both sides, he continued with another long script. This script focused on the rest of the important mathematical symbols the alien would need to know if they were ever going to speak in the complex equations that engineers used. He showed the alien the human symbols for greater and less than, not equal, square root, n-th root and so on all with several examples to make their meaning obvious, until he had all of the basic mathematical symbols covered. The tiger's reaction between each slide showed he was understanding it all no problem.

The next script Jake sent moved on to cover symbols used for geometry, like degree, angle, prime and double-prime, congruence, equivalence, and so on .

He then sent a script that went through the details of algebra showing examples and the matching symbols for proportionality, discriminant, delta, sigma and on and on until the robot had drawn all of the most important symbols used by humans for mathematics, geometry, algebra, linear algebra, triggenometry, calculus, logic, statistics, probability, and set theory, along with basic examples using the numbers the alien already understood.

The entire collection of slides had taken Jake weeks to prepare during the down time and hours for the robot to draw out, but the alien now knew all of the symbols necessary for them to speak in the language of mathematics. Jake knew the tiger had gotten it all because in the second image of each sequence, the big cat had drawn the equivalent alien symbols for each of the ones Jake had sent onto the other tablet that he held.

Jake now had a big collection of images to study and a great many symbols to draw into his translator program. He would only need to draw each one once. Then he would be able to draw equations in his own familiar way that the program would then translate to the alien versions without Jake having to go through the cumbersome process of trying to draw each of the unfamiliar alien symbols and numbers himself.

By the time the flow finally stopped and the last of Jake's prepared slides was done, they both had a great deal to process.

In the last couple of images coming back from Curiosity Jake could see the tiger was looking a bit tired. The rover had been drawing slides for just over six hours and it had already been a fairly long day for Jake even before he'd received the signal that the link to the robot was up. He was tired too.

He wanted to somehow convey to the tiger how pleased he was with the progress they'd made so far, but he had no real means of doing it yet.

He remembered the cat's positive reaction to the smiley emoji he'd sent earlier. Their facial expressions were likely quite similar. He could certainly see how pleased the cat was in his broad smile, so there was no reason why the tiger wouldn't understand the basic emojis the Internet crowd used to show emotion. He would begin to build a library of scripts to draw the most important ones so he could at any time show the cat that he was happy, or confused, or angry, or whatever other basic emotion he might need to convey. For now he sent the smiley emoji again, but he drew it with an open mouth showing teeth to indicate he was grinning broadly and was very happy.

The image that came back showed the cat grinning right back, and on the tablet he held up he had quickly drawn the same emoji, but he'd added pointed, cat-like ears, fangs, and whiskers. Jake laughed when he saw it and he realized that using the two basic emojis would be the perfect way to start a conversation in which he could show who is "me" and who is "you". Jake would be the one without the whiskers.

The second image in the sequence that came twenty seconds later showed the big cat pointing at his temple with one finger, and directly at the camera with his other paw as if to say that whoever it was behind the camera was clever and using his head. Jake felt exactly the same way about the cat. He was clearly very intelligent and that was going to make the process of learning to communicate much easier.

They didn't really have the tools yet to easily convey thoughts or ideas to each other, but at least they had the language of mathematics in common now.

Jake suddenly realized if he combined basic math with the emojis, he could actually tell the cat at least one simple thing. He quickly drew another image for the robot to reproduce. This time he drew two emojis, the one the cat had drawn with the whiskers that indicated the tiger himself, and the one Jake had drawn earlier that indicated his own happiness. Between the two he put the "greater than" symbol to tell the alien that Jake felt the tiger was even smarter than him.

When the laptop finally beeped with the images coming back, Jake smiled. The big cat was grinning widely as he held up his tablet on which he'd drawn the same thing, but he'd replaced the "greater than" symbol with the equal sign.

The cat's face showed how pleased he was with all that had transpired so far. Jake felt the same, and clearly they each knew how happy the other was. They were off to an amazing start.

Jake already liked the gorgeous tiger immensely. It was obvious he was not only intelligent, but very nice. He wished with all his heart he could someday meet him. What a thrill that would be! It certainly wouldn't be in person though, at least not without some sort of breathing apparatus. Given the makeup of the comets that were currently heading towards Mars to build up its atmosphere, that hangar must be full of a mixture of methane and ammonia that would kill Jake in a hurry.

For now, he wanted to at least show the cat how happy he was to be working with him in the form of another simple emoji math formula. He cobbled together a slide with his basic smiley emoji that indicated himself, the plus sign, the emoji with the cat ears and whiskers, the equal sign, and then another human emoji with the broad, happy, open mouthed grin that showed teeth. Basically he was trying to tell the cat that Jake + tiger = an extremely happy Jake.

When the laptop beeped with the image coming back, Jake saw a tired looking cat grinning widely back at him. He was pointing at the camera and also at himself as if to say "you and me both".

The cat seemed too tired to go on much longer. It was time to quit. Jake was feeling drained too and he needed some rest before they continued any further. He sent another emoji, this one with droopy, closed eyes and looking extremely tired. After the long delay, the image that came back showed the cat with his eyes closed, head turned sideways, with both paws together under his cheek like he was asleep and resting on a pillow.

Jake's message had been clearly understood. It would become their way of saying "goodnight" to each other. In the very next image the cat was once again holding up his tablet. On it he'd drawn the same sleepy Jake emoji, followed by the equal sign, followed by the emoji of the cat with its head slightly tilted and eyes closed as if in repose. There was a set of squiggly lines going up from the cat emoji's mouth in the same way a human might draw Z's to indicate sleep. It was amazing that they sort of used the same ways of drawing their emotions.

It struck Jake that they had stumbled upon the perfect way to begin to open up communication. Combining math with the emojis could clearly be used to convey basic ideas fairly easily. It would really work well if there were more emotions than just happiness that their two species displayed in similar ways. He made a mental note to make exploring the emojis his first order of business whenever they started their next session, but for now he was just too tired.

The next thing he wanted to try to tackle was language. It would be a much more difficult problem to approach than mathematics. Math was universal, but language was not. At least, it was much less so.

Every language would have the equivalent words for things like "this", "that", "me", "you", "and", "or", "happy", "sad", and so on. Jake just needed to find a way to begin to convey those ideas clearly enough that the word beneath whatever he drew could have only one meaning. That was where the challenge would lie. It shouldn't be too hard using the emojis with the math symbols and perhaps some basic stick figures as visual aids to show some of the basic concepts, but it would be much easier if he was there with the tiger and they could face each other and point at things.

The slow back and forth enforced by the distance between the planets would really make things a lot harder and it would make it more difficult to avoid confusion. Their communication needed to be as efficient and simple as possible, but it couldn't be too simple or it might not be correctly understood. If Jake were to send the emoji that indicates himself with the word "me" written underneath it for example, the cat would have no way of knowing what the word meant because there were so many possibilities. It could mean "me" as intended, or it could mean "Jake" or it could mean "human" or it could mean "happy" or even "engineer" or "traitor" since Jake was all of those things. It could even simply mean "emoji". The emoji with no modifiers could mean a huge number of things. The trick would be to figure out how to let the cat know which of the many possibilities it was. He was at a loss to figure out how he might do that, but that could simply be in part because he was too tired.

Jake sent one last command to turn the rover's camera skyward to let the cat know that there would be nothing else coming for a while. He had burned a great deal of power and Curiosity needed some time to recharge its cells from the steady trickle of electricity from the radioisotope thermoelectric generator that had been refueled by the tiger.

He couldn't wait to be able to communicate well enough with the cat to get him to tell the story of how he found Curiosity, how and why he'd refueled and repaired it, and why he'd chosen the backup circuit to reestablish communications. If he hadn't done that and used the main transceiver instead, none of this would have been possible. The government team would have swooped in and taken over. He hoped the cat wouldn't change anything going forward until Jake could communicate well enough to warn him not to use the main transceiver on the robot for any reason.

After today's success he was confident that between the two of them they'd figure it out and he looked forward immensely to the challenge.

For now, he was exhausted and ready for bed. He shutdown his laptop and put it back in his backpack, then headed out of the building and home to sleep.