FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

The next day Jake came to work looking forward with great anticipation to another session with the tiger.

He had some ideas how they could get started trying to communicate more with each other. The emojis combined with math symbols that they'd used just briefly at the end of the last session had proved very effective. It was clear that the big cat's expression for happiness was exactly the same as a human's. Even sleepiness looked the same as they'd found out at the end of the grueling wait for Curiosity to slowly draw out all of the symbols it had done yesterday.

He wondered if the same might be true for other emotions. If the cat used the same sort of expression to convey anger that a human would, or sadness, or puzzlement, then Jake could recreate all of those with simple emojis that Curiosity would have no problem drawing. There was no reason to expect that all of their emotions would look the same, but by the same token there was no reason to expect they'd be any different. The emojis could become the basis of a sort of hieroglyphic language they could use to convey some simple ideas to each other very easily. At the very least they would help the process of communicating by allowing each to show the other that he understands, or is confused by, or maybe even unhappy with what the other is trying to convey so that they can tune their 'conversations' as needed. If they could gain some traction on that front, then they'd be in position to begin translating those hieroglyphs to their equivalent words in each other's language and they'd have the beginnings of an English and cat translation dictionary.

The program he'd written that he'd used to draw all of the previous slides for the mathematical symbols was just as easy to use for something like emojis. It simply acted like a print driver for any drawing program. He was using the Paint program to draw the slides, then printing them to his custom print driver, which converted the images to Cartesian plots that the arm could draw out. It was even easier to do on his laptop than it had been on his desktop and he wasn't sure why he hadn't thought of using it earlier. His laptop had a touch sensitive screen and he could use its stylus to create sketches much more easily, quickly and naturally than using the mouse on his desktop computer.

Now that he was communicating with the alien covertly he would have to always use his laptop all the time anyhow. There was no reason for anyone to suspect there was anything unusual going on as long as he continued to come in to work and sit at his PC, but he would be doing all the real work on his personal laptop. They probably weren't monitoring him very closely anyhow, but simply watching the primary telemetry receiver. So long as the storm was raging on Mars, and it could go on for months easily, there was no reason for anyone to expect contact from Curiosity. That likely wouldn't happen until the dust clears. Jake should be able to make a great deal of headway with the tiger in that time.

The first thing he'd done when he got into his office was to send a script via Curiosity's backup link to command the rover to turn its camera back downward so that it could see the tablet at the bottom of the image again. He wanted to leave plenty of room for the big cat to enter the picture if he needed to so he could reply to Jake using the other tablet that he normally held in his paws.

He had the robot do the usual double loop where it waggled, took a picture, waited twenty seconds and then waggled and took one more picture. He simply needed to see if the tiger was in position and ready to proceed yet. He still knew nothing about the cat so he didn't know how long the alien slept, or really if he slept at all. He assumed he would. He didn't know if the cat would be busy with his terraforming work or not. Maybe he wouldn't have time for Jake today. Right now he just wanted to see if there was anyone at the other end.

It would take six minutes for the first image to arrive, so in the meantime he began to draw up simple emojis that would be easy for the rover to reproduce quickly, and he saved them to files he could call up readily. The basic functionality of the drawing program would allow him to resize them and string them together in any way along with any of the symbols he'd previously drawn and saved.

At last his laptop beeped and the first image came up. Much to his disappointment he saw that the tablet attached to Curiosity's frame was dark, as if it wasn't turned on, and there was no sign of the beautiful tiger. He supposed it made sense that the cat wouldn't be spending all of his time waiting in the hanger for Jake to contact him. He probably had his own work to do.

He did notice though that there was a cable running along the floor that looked like it came from under the robot somewhere. He hadn't seen that cable yesterday. It looked as though the tiger had been busy rigging something new, but Jake had no idea what it might be. He hoped the cat wasn't trying to get the rover's main transmitter going now. That would end their exchange in very short order and would likely land Jake in prison once the government found out he'd been communicating with the alien behind their backs.

He quickly wrote another script to angle the camera to the sides and up a bit to take images from around the rover and then he sent it out. When the first image came back he saw that there was some sort of device on the floor out in front of Curiosity on the left that the new cable connected to. He couldn't tell what it was but it sort of looked like a diagnostic monitor or something. Maybe the tiger was using it to probe the rover's systems further to find out what else it could do.

The other side of the robot had a larger box with a few lights and what looked like a touch display attached that had a cable leading towards the back of the rover. The box had another cable leading away from it that connected to a terminal on the wall of the hangar. That might be the cable that carried the amplified signal from the backup transceiver to the outside radio transmitter dish. The box would likely be the signal amplifier.

The image to the right of the rover also gave him a view of the rest of the hangar. There were a few storage locker-type contraptions along the far wall and there was a door that would lead back into the main base with a computer display next to it, possibly for communication from the hanger to the base or to control the airlock functions and outside doors. Through the small window on the door he could see yet another door not far beyond. There was likely another small airlock for safety purposes to ensure the main building would never be exposed to the near vacuum of Mars's thin atmosphere. There would likely be space suits stored in that room also so they could be dressed and ready in the smaller airlock while they opened the large doors in order to go out.

Parked right next to Curiosity was what looked like a medium sized enclosed buggy with six large, balloon-like wheels with massive treads. It was likely the alien's mode of ground transport when he needed to travel some distance.

Beyond the buggy he could see what almost looked like a flight capable vehicle of some sort. He couldn't see much of it because it was obscured by the buggy, but he could definitely see what looked like very large wings that were almost parachute shaped attached to a very small pod. There wasn't much atmosphere on Mars, but there was some. It was primarily carbon dioxide and there was so little of it that it had less than one percent of the atmospheric pressure Earth had at sea level. If the vehicle was light enough, and the wings large enough in proportion to its weight, it could use them aerodynamically to fly around Mars more efficiently than using something that used pure retro-rocket power, but most likely only after Mars's new atmosphere began to get a bit thicker. It was likely some sort of aerial reconnaissance scout plane so they could go out and observe things from the air as they progressed through the terraforming process.

Other than the two vehicles and the equipment that was tethered to Curiosity, he could see nothing else unusual in either image. There was no sign of the cat.

He sent another script to aim the main camera back down at the tablet and ordered the robot to begin taking images in a loop with a sixty second delay between each and send them until further notice. If the cat came into the hangar and saw the camera waggling, he'd know Jake was at the other end and ready to continue.

He went out to get some coffee from the break room and came back and sat at his desk.

He was about to go back to working on more emojis when the laptop beeped and the first of the images came in. He was pleased to see the muscular grinning cat right there crouched down next to the tablet and indicating that it was turned on, blank, and ready to go. The tiger must be enjoying the process as much as Jake was and he'd likely been keeping an eye on the rover and waiting for its camera to move back into position so they could get started again. It had simply taken him a few moments to get into the hangar and get things ready.

He immediately sent a command to Curiosity to tell it to halt the running script and wait for another command. It would take a few minutes before the rover would get the message and stop its loop of taking pictures and sending them back, then they could begin to communicate.

Once again Jake was struck by the strength of the affection he was already feeling for the big cat. As soon as the tiger had popped up on his screen with the usual warm smile on his face, Jake felt an immediate warmth and camaraderie right back for the cat. He thought of the alien as a friend already. He was extremely happy to see him again and he was glad they were at the point where at least he could tell the cat that one simple thing.

He pulled up the emoji equation from yesterday that showed Jake + tiger = an extremely happy Jake, and he sent it off.

Almost immediately after he hit send his laptop beeped. It was simply another of the images it had been taking in a loop from the previous script. He'd get a couple more over the next few minutes as it would have taken three minutes before the rover got the command to stop the previous loop. After that he would receive the images from his latest script that showed he was happy to be back working with the cat again.

He took a moment to look over the image that had just come in. He noticed that the cat had moved off screen in the direction of the new box that Jake had seen in the earlier photo. He could see the cat's big feet right next to the box, but couldn't see what he was doing there. The rest was cropped out at the top edge of the picture.

The big cat was wearing what appeared to be wide, black leather, lace up boots on his feet along with thick socks. It struck him as an entirely human thing to be wearing and it really brought home the fact that the person he was watching was almost exactly like him, even though he was a gorgeous, muscular, upright furry cat in some sort of terraforming operations base on Mars. He smiled as he thought of how much he'd love to peel those boots off of the big cat's feet. Jake had always been a bit crazy about the scent of a hard working man's feet when they come out of a big pair of boots at the end of the day. He found himself wondering how the big cat's feet would smell to him.

His mind began to wander to more intimate thoughts about the beautiful tiger when the laptop beeped and the next image came in. The cat was caught in the act of crouching down in front of the camera with his tablet in hand again, but he wasn't quite in position yet. Jake waited for the next image to come in. There would still be at least a couple more before Curiosity got the command to stop the loop and then draw the emojis he'd sent.

The laptop beeped again and this time the cat was smiling up at the camera and holding the tablet at arms length to get it closer so it would take a bigger part of the picture. It was clear he wanted Jake to look closely at whatever it showed.

He zoomed in on the tablet in the image and studied it closer, but he saw that it was completely covered in densely packed alien gibberish. He couldn't make head nor tails of it. It sort of looked like an endless sequence of random alien numbers. They seemed as if they were in groups of three digits, but each group looked different in a seemingly random way. There was no pattern that he could immediately see.

The laptop beeped again and the big cat was still holding up the tablet, and it was still covered in gibberish, but on close examination it was slightly different. It looked as though the tiger had turned the page and was showing Jake more of a very long sequence of numbers. He had no clue what the alien was trying to show him and he was completely puzzled. They'd already covered the prime numbers and established that they knew each other's number system perfectly. They'd covered all of the symbols for the various types of mathematics already. Whatever he was seeing now must not be mathematical in nature. He didn't see any sort of mathematical symbols anywhere on the page. It was all just numbers.

By now Curiosity had already stopped taking pictures and had begun to draw Jake's emojis, so the cat's slide show would likely be interrupted. He'd have to study the images more closely later on to try to make sense of them. There had to be some sort of message hidden in them that the tiger expected him to be able to figure out. For now he was anxious to get back to communicating with the alien again to see if they could make some real progress.

Just as he'd expected, the flow of images had stopped so he received no more slides of the alien numbers. Curiosity would have got the command to draw his formula that showed Jake + cat = happy Jake. There would be a longer delay before the first of the images would come back.

Finally the laptop beeped and the first of the two images came up and he saw that the robot had successfully drawn his slide, but the cat wasn't quite ready to show him anything back. He could see in the image that the tiger was grinning broadly as he busily drew on his own tablet with a claw. It must be nice not to even need to use a stylus to accurately draw on the tablet.

Jake waited for the second image, hoping the cat would be showing him what he was drawing. Sure enough, when the laptop beeped again, the second image came up and it showed a grinning cat holding up a tablet with a different version of what Jake had drawn. The picture the cat drew simply reversed the faces and it showed that tiger + Jake = extremely happy, grinning tiger with mouth open and teeth showing. He clearly got the message and the feeling was reciprocated. He was very happy to be communicating again.

Jake realized when he thought of the image with the cat drawing furiously on his tablet that it might be better to extend the delay between the images to a minute. He didn't want to put too much pressure on the tiger to try to get his response ready for the second picture. They were going to be talking in drawings for a while now and it would take time for the cat to get his reply ready.

He also added one more image into the loop so that he'd get three back instead of the usual two. It occurred to him that if the cat ever wanted to ask Jake something back in return, he might need a third image to do it The cat would catch on quickly that he was getting more time to reply and that he could also send a question back on the third picture if he wanted to.

Jake wasn't quite sure how to proceed from here. He thought it would be best if they could establish the meaning of more emojis such as confusion or displeasure in case either wanted to convey those feelings, but he couldn't think of any easy way to do it. It had been easy to do happiness since both of them had been feeling it at the time they'd drawn the image so the context had been firmly established.

He thought of how important it was to understand the context of what was being displayed in order to understand the meaning. The images the cat had sent him earlier with the jumble of alien numbers tightly crowded across the face of the tablet had no context, and thus no meaning to Jake. He was completely puzzled by them. Puzzlement was a sort of emotion and it would have been seen on his face had the cat been looking. He could then have drawn a confused emoji to show the cat that this symbol would from now on mean "confused Jake" and the cat would have likely understood. If he simply sent a confused emoji right now with no context, the cat would have no idea what it meant.

He smiled as he realized he could get the cat to help him setup a context simply by coaxing him to show Jake what it would look like on the cat's face, then he could replicate it in an emoji and send it back to the tiger.

He scribbled a few lines of random garbage into the Paint program that clearly wouldn't be mistaken for anything meaningful and he sent the command for the robot to replicate the drawing.

Six minutes later he was greeted with a puzzled looking cat staring at garbage drawn on the tablet by Curiosity. Jake waited the extra minute until the next image came, hoping he'd see what he was trying to get the cat to show him.

The laptop beeped and Jake grinned as he saw the big cat looking up at the camera with a more exaggerated version of the same puzzled look on his face. His shoulders were up and his hands were up on either side of his head with the palms up just above his shoulders and his head was slightly cocked to the side. He was clearly trying to show that he didn't understand the last slide. To Jake he looked almost exactly like any person he'd ever seen who was basically showing how confused he was. Maybe all of their expressions really were the same.

He started to draw his next slide, but before he could finish, the laptop beeped and the third image came in. It showed a startled looking cat staring up at the camera and wondering why it had waggled a third time. This time the cat had one eyebrow raised in a more subtle "huh?" pose. Jake chuckled and smiled and continued to draw the next slide as best he could.

He drew the cat emoji modified to show the same sort of puzzlement with the head slightly cocked to the side and one eyebrow raised, then he added the equal sign, then an emoji of himself showing the same puzzlement with the head slightly cocked and one eyebrow raised, then the equal sign again, then a question mark. The question mark would mean nothing to the cat yet since he'd never seen it before so he'd know that Jake was trying to show him something new. He knew it would be a bit of a leap, but the cat had shown he was very clever. Jake hoped he would get that he was trying to show the cat that their expressions for confusion were the same and, more importantly, that the English symbol for questioning anything was the question mark. Once again it was sort of a math formula in which he showed that "confused tiger" = "confused Jake" = "?".

He hit send and waited to see what the cat would make of that.

When the laptop beeped it showed the cat grinning from ear to ear. He was pointing at his temple and straight at the camera as if to again say that whoever was behind it was really clever. Jake smiled and waited for the next image. When it came up Jake was thrilled to see that the cat had drawn the same thing, but he'd added another equal sign followed by a sort of vertical squiggle. That must be their symbol for a question mark! He waited a minute for the third image to see if the cat had anything more to show him. He wasn't sure if the alien had figured out that there would be a third image taken from now on to enable a bit more of a back and forth communication.

The laptop beeped and Jake was once again thrilled by what he saw. The cat truly was brilliant. He'd caught on and taken it to the next step. He'd drawn on his tablet an image of a scowling version of the cat emoji followed by the equal sign, followed by the question mark. In the picture the cat himself looked angry and was shaking his big fist at the camera in rage while he held up the tablet with the drawing on it. It was obvious that the tiger had already caught on from the last slide that Jake wanted to compare expressions with emojis, and that he'd started out with the question mark so they could ask questions back and forth. The cat was now clearly demonstrating what an angry tiger looked like and was asking what an angry human expression looked like.

Jake drew his response. It was simply the angry cat emoji the tiger had shown him followed by the equal sign and then an angry human emoji to show the cat their expressions were the same. He sent the image and waited for the three that would come back.

The next image showed the cat smiling once more while he drew on his tablet. He looked happy that Jake had understood what he was asking. The next image came in and it now showed the cat looking very sad. His mouth was turned down in a pout and his eyes drooped a bit and he was even holding one paw up to his cheek like he was wiping away a tear. Jake was amazed! Was it really possible that a completely alien species showed all of the same emotions as humans in exactly the same way? The cat was holding up the tablet and it showed a whiskered cat emoji with a down turned mouth and eyes, and a single tear falling from one eye followed by the equal sign and the question mark again.

Jake grinned as he drew the reply showing once again that their expressions were the same. Even as he was drawing the picture, the laptop beeped with the third image. He brought it up and it showed the cat this time looking completely startled. His paw was up at the side of his face and his eyes were open wide and his mouth made a round "O" like he was completely surprised or shocked. The tablet he held in his other paw showed the same expression drawn in cat emoji with the question mark showing he wanted to know if humans used the same expression.

It was going to go much faster now. He shrank what he'd been drawing with the sad cat equals sad human emoji and another equation underneath to show that shocked cat equals shocked human and at the end he added the exclamation mark, which he felt was the closest symbol they had for that emotion. He sent the drawing out and waited.

The next image showed the cat smiling and holding up his tablet again. It simply showed that exclamation mark was equal to an angled slash with a short vertical mark through it. That must be the alien equivalent of an exclamation mark!

With the next several exchanges they established that pretty much every emotion was shown in the same way by both of their species. They now had a collection of emojis that included all the previous ones along with fear, mischievousness, disdain, joking, hurt, bashfulness, and others, and they had them all in both human and tiger versions so they could differentiate between who is who in any future equations. It would enable them to better communicate from this point forward by letting them show their emotions to each other.

One emoji that had really surprised Jake was that of a cat with a wink and pursed lips, like it was kissing, and a small heart drawn near the lips. The next image had showed the cat mimicking that pose with his left paw over his heart and his right paw blowing a kiss at the camera. Clearly, love in the cats generated the same physiological response as it did in humans in the form of an elevated heart rate. They had adopted the heart as a symbol of love too!

Jake smiled as he drew the next slide. He simply drew the Jake smiley followed by the heart symbol, followed by the cat smiley. He wondered if the cat would get that Jake was showing that he liked him very much.

The next image that came back showed that the cat was grinning widely and he was drawing furiously on his tablet again.

Jake waited impatiently for the next image. When it came it still showed the cat drawing on the tablet. He wasn't done yet. He waited for the third image in the sequence to come and when it did he was surprised by the question it displayed.

It showed the cat emoji again, followed by the equal sign, followed by what was clearly a thick penis hanging down over two large testicles in a sack. Underneath that was the emoji of Jake, followed by the equal sign, followed by a question mark. The cat was clearly showing that he was male, which Jake already knew since he could see his magnificent package outlined in his snug shorts in the images, and the tiger was curious what gender Jake was.

He drew the answer showing the human Jake emoji with the equal sign and the same penis and testicles to let the cat know he was male as well.

The image that came back showed the cat grinning and drawing away on his tablet again. A minute later the next image showed the cat holding up the tablet and on it he'd drawn the cat emoji followed by the heart followed by the penis and testicles again. The tiger was telling Jake he liked males! He was gay!

Jake's heart beat faster as he drew the same thing, but with the already established Jake emoji followed by the heart and the male genitals. He wanted the cat to know he was gay too.

He found it odd that the cat was taking the "conversation" in this direction already, but he supposed since neither one of them was acting in any sort of official capacity, they were in effect simply two guys talking in a graphical version of an Internet chat room and they were getting caught up in the fun of it.

He found himself wondering if the beautiful, muscular tiger could possibly ever find a human to be attractive. By human standards he was certainly attractive to some men. Jake was six feet five inches tall and physically fit with broad shoulders and a fairly narrow waist with fairly muscular legs. He weighed around two hundred and fifty pounds, but almost none of that was fat. He was extremely furry, but only by human standards, certainly not by a tiger's. Lots of men loved the thick, soft, dark hair that covered his arms and legs, and especially his chest, and he had a goatee that he kept trimmed and neat, but he doubted he was quite furry enough to make a cat happy. He was fairly well endowed, though nothing extreme, but again, many men who'd seen it and handled it thought it looked great. In short, he had nothing to complain about in the looks department, but he would most likely look extremely alien to the tiger.

Now that he knew the big cat was gay he really wished he was over there in that hanger with him so they could explore the possible attraction they might share. It was too bad he couldn't at least send the cat an image of himself. Obviously he could never draw a reasonable facsimile using the rover's arm. It just couldn't draw enough detail or the necessary nuance and shades.

The laptop beeped and it showed a beaming tiger winking and blowing a kiss at the camera now that he knew that Jake was gay too. Jake chuckled to himself as he wondered what the government alien response team would think of this. He'd turned alien first contact into a chance to flirt remotely with the most amazingly attractive male he'd ever seen in his life through a two and a half billion dollar piece of government equipment. If they ever found out what he was doing, he'd be up the creek for sure.

He decided it was best to turn it back into a knowledge exchange again. He drew the male penis and testicles followed by a heart followed by another set of penis and testicles with an equal sign and the English word 'gay' to show the cat what English speaking humans called males who liked males.

The cat was grinning again when the next image came back and he held up his laptop on which he'd copied the word 'gay' as best he could with the equal sign and then a series of alien symbols that must be their word for homosexuality. He filed the image away in a new folder where he would collect any symbols that were likely part of their alphabet. He wasn't sure yet how they might proceed to begin to truly learn each other's languages, but it would likely be a slow and difficult process. One thing for certain was that he never would have imagined that the first word ever exchanged between alien and human, the first one to go into the translation dictionary that might be used by millions of people from both species over the years to come, would be the word 'gay'. It somehow felt quite satisfying to him.

He realized they'd missed a bit of an opportunity to start building a vocabulary earlier so he went back and revisited all of the emojis they'd covered before. He brought up each one and added an equal sign followed by the English word that best described the state. Smiley equals 'happy', scowling face equals 'angry', and so on. The words wouldn't be very useful at first, but they needed to somehow begin building a collection for their new dictionary.

As the images came back, he expanded his collection of alien words with all of those that described the various emojis they'd already exchanged that were drawn by the tiger on his tablet. He now knew the alien words for confused, happy, sad, angry, and so on. It was a good start.

In one of the last images he saw that the cat was distracted and looking off to the side. The next image showed the big cat looking a bit sad and holding one paw up as if to say goodbye, then in the next image he was gone and the tablet was once again dark as if it had been shut off to let Jake know nobody would be at the other end for a while. He realized the tiger must have been called off by some pressing matter and they would have to take a break. He was disappointed, but he realized the alien was there on Mars to do important work for his people and he wouldn't always have the time to engage with Jake.

He once again sent the script to get Curiosity to waggle its camera and take a picture every minute in a loop until given the command to stop. That would let the tiger know that Jake was still here at this end and was ready to continue at any time.

While he waited for the images to start coming back, he pulled up the puzzling pictures he'd gotten at the beginning of the session. He had no idea what the cat was trying to show him. It had something to do with that new box that was somehow wired into Curiosity because the cat had gone over to the box first, then came back with the tablet and held it up to show the mass of numbers it displayed.

Jake set to work converting the alien numbers one by one since he had nothing else to do at the moment. There were thousands of them so he would probably need to write a program to do some sort of optical character recognition or it might take him days to convert them all, but at least he could start with a few and see if anything popped out at him.

As he converted more of them he saw that they were all recognizable digits, but they were just a seemingly endless string that really made no sense to him. They were all in short groups of three digits. There were no mathematical symbols mixed in or anything, only numbers.

After he'd converted a long string of them to the human version of the numbers he began to notice something. All of the numbers fell in a limited range. He started to become excited as he scanned the numbers he'd converted more closely. He saw none that were smaller than 32 and try as he might he could find none higher than 127. Was he looking at sequences of ASCII codes? Could it be what he thought it was?

He pulled up an ASCII table on his laptop and started converting the numbers to letters and symbols by hand. The first part of the sequence he'd converted spelled out "Loop until interrupt 48; Activate sensor_image; Send to telem_37; Wait 60; End loop;" It was a part of the script he'd sent the robot earlier to take images in a loop with a one minute delay until interrupted by another command! That's the script that was still in the command processor memory the moment the big tiger walked out of the picture to the new box with his tablet, and then came back to show Jake what it contained! The cat was showing Jake that he was able to dump the rover's memory onto his tablet! That's what the new box did! It must be wired to Curiosity's memory system and could read it all out!

Jake was thrilled. This was an important step. If they could somehow get on to the same wavelength in terms of data formatting, they could begin to communicate more efficiently using Curiosity's memory bank. Most importantly, Jake could send more detailed data. He could treat the memory bank like a display device! He could ultimately send the tiger a picture of himself! All they needed to do was establish some sort of standard of numbers to represent image pixel values and the alien could dump the memory and convert it to an image.

The cat was incredibly clever! He'd actually figured out a way that they might be able to communicate without the clunky robot arm drawing pictures! He really loved that cat! It would take some time to figure out a way to make it useful, but between two engineers they should eventually work something out.

As Jake thought about it and scanned over more of the alien numbers in the image, he realized there were far too many there to be just his script. The command processor area of memory where his script would reside was mostly empty space and those numbers should all be zeros, but the list of numbers the alien sent was extremely long and contained a lot more than just zeros. He clearly saw where the numbers representing his script ended, then he saw a very long string of zeros that should have continued right to the end of the rover's command memory, but instead he saw another long sequence of numbers start up after the string of zeros. Could the cat have already written something in there for him to find? Maybe he appended it after the script, knowing that Jake would eventually figure out it was a dump of memory when he saw his own script in the numbers, and hoping he'd probe further to see what else was in there. The cat would recognize that the empty space of memory would be available to be written into without causing any problems to the rover so long as he kept his own data separate from whatever script was currently loaded.

He quickly cobbled a script for Curiosity that would tell the rover to send him a dump of its own command memory. It would take some time, but he would get a byte by byte image of whatever the memory currently contained so he wouldn't have to do any further conversion by hand. Whatever was written there by the cat earlier should still be in there since it was well past the space Jake had been using for his scripts.

It took a while, but eventually his laptop beeped to indicate the end of a transmission from the rover.

He pulled it up in a raw hex editor and looked at the numbers. At the top he could clearly see the few lines of the code he'd just sent that commanded the robot to dump its memory. Beyond that was a long list of zeros, but then there were suddenly numbers again where there should be none. This could be a message from the cat! The problem was that he had no means of interpreting what it might contain.

He looked at the numbers and saw they were groups of larger sixteen bit numbers. They weren't following any code he recognized.

He thought hard for a moment. He and the cat thought so much alike that it seemed like they were analogs of each other. They were most definitely on the same wavelength most of the time and it was making things a lot easier than they might otherwise be. He was sure he could figure this out. He only needed to put himself in the big tiger's position. If he were the cat, what would he send? Was it an image? That wouldn't really make sense, since the tiger could already show Jake any image he wanted to by putting it on his tablet's display and holding it up to Curiosity's camera.

It wasn't likely to be text either. They had no means of converting alien text to human. The aliens likely had something akin to an ASCII table to convert letters to numbers since they clearly used computers, but Jake would have no access to that table and no way to make sense of it even if he did. This was likely not that, since he could see that the numbers were sixteen bits each, so unless their language contained 65536 letters and symbols, sixteen bits was wastefully large for a table that converted text characters to numbers. Sending simple text didn't really make sense either anyhow, since if the tiger wanted to show him any sort of text, he would once again simply display it on his tablet and hold it up to the camera.

Suddenly it came to him. He should have got it earlier when he'd thought of "analog" and "wavelength". It had to be audio! That was the one thing the cat couldn't share with him over the camera. That was the only thing that made sense, and would be simple enough for Jake to be able to decipher readily.

He quickly saved the long list of numbers to a separate file right up to the point where the numbers ended and there was nothing but zeros again beyond. He had to do some searching on the Internet to figure out how to format the file so that the header would tell his computer that it was a raw audio wave file, but Jake assumed that was exactly what it was. It must simply be a conversion of analog amplitudes in an audio waveform into digital numbers. The only thing he would need to figure out was the frequency that was being used to record it in order to be able to hear the same sound when he played it back.

He decided to start with something close to what humans used. If the alien's hearing was similar to humans, he would hear sounds in the range of around 20Hz to 20kHz. In order to get a relatively accurate sounding audio file, the cat would have to sample at least at double the highest frequency. Human's use 41kHz as a standard, but the cats might use something else. It should be close though. Higher would give a much better quality, but the resulting file would be much bigger and thus less efficient to send. The cat couldn't use compression of any sort because without Jake knowing the algorithm he could never decompress it successfully. It would just look like garbage to him. He had to be looking at a raw, uncompressed waveform.

Jake plugged the file into a simple program that would let him vary the frequency at which the numbers would be converted to an audio signal and he hit the play button.

To his extreme delight he was greeted with what was clearly the sound of a cat meowing and growling in a complex pattern of sounds that was fairly short. The voice seemed to drag quite a bit and was low and muddy and seemed like it was being played back at far too slow a speed, but he recognized it as the sound a big cat might make.

He quickly went onto the Internet again and searched for the frequency range of cats. Maybe that would be a better place to start. He was surprised to discover that cats could detect sounds to nearly 80kHz, and could likely easily differentiate meaningful sound up to a frequency of 70kHz. He cranked his playback program up to 140kHz and tried again.

This time the sound was much louder and played in a voice that sounded almost exactly like a very large tiger might sound, but possibly was just a bit too high pitched. He adjusted the frequency downward a bit until it sounded right to him. He had no way to know if he'd got it exactly right, but that wasn't terribly important. He only needed to get close. He liked where he currently had it set because to him the cat's voice sounded deep, throaty and powerful. It suited the imposing, muscular tiger he was seeing in the images.

He was grinning from ear to ear as he played the sound file over and over again. It was likely nothing more than a simple greeting, but he was the first human ever to hear the sound of an intelligent alien's voice. He was absolutely thrilled!

He quickly switched his program to record audio, and he set it to the same frequency it had been playing the cat's voice at. If the cat read the data back and converted it to audio, that's the most likely frequency he would use and Jake wanted him to hear his voice as it would normally sound, or as close as possible given the circumstances.

He recorded a short message in which he said, "Hello, my name is Jake Smith. I'm extremely pleased to be working with you. I wish I could be there to greet you in person. You are easily the most beautiful person I've ever seen."

He knew the cat wouldn't understand a word of it of course, but that wasn't important at this point. They simply needed to establish that they were able to send audio back and forth successfully.

He stripped the headers from the file to leave nothing but the raw audio data the same as the cat had sent, and he wrote a script to write it into Curiosity's memory starting exactly where the cat's audio message had started, then he sent the program off.

He then wrote another script that commanded the arm to draw an arrow on the tablet pointing towards the new box he'd seen the cat go to when he'd dumped the rover's memory earlier. After the arrow he had the arm draw the first dozen numbers from the raw audio waveform that the big cat had stored there. It should be a clear enough message to the tiger that Jake had received his data and was sending something back. He commanded the rover to draw that message out, then waggle the camera and take an image, then draw the message out again over and over in a loop until he interrupted it with another command.

The tiger had shut off the tablet that Curiosity was drawing on, so it couldn't actually put the message there yet, but it could certainly go through the motions. The cat would realize when he came back that a message was incoming and he'd turn the tablet back on and see the message once the rover was done drawing it.

Jake settled in for the wait and every time the laptop beeped he glanced over at the image that it displayed. The tablet was still turned off and the drawing had not yet materialized.

He gave more thought to the brilliant cat's method of sending him an audio file. He was clearly using his head even more than Jake was. He was impressed with the cat. He deeply wished they were already further along with their communicating so he could have a real conversation with him.

He thought about what else they could send to each other with this method. The sky was the limit really. Anything that could be digitized could be sent. He began to wonder how hard it would be to send an entire digital version of an English dictionary to the rover. It wouldn't be very difficult really since it could be sent in simple ASCII and formatted as a flat table. The difficult part would be for the cat to make any sense of it. It was a possibility to consider though. The tiger was clearly a genius. Perhaps he could make something of it. They might only need to build a smaller base of words that they understood, and the cat's computers might be able to analyze the English dictionary and begin to pick out the meanings of more and more words as it searched for commonalities and relationships in the data.

Since the tiger's species was clearly far more advanced than humans, it would make more sense for the cat to do the heavy lifting when it came to using computers to try to decipher the human language, rather than both sides trying to learn each other's. Their machines would likely be far more capable than human computers and they might more easily begin to make sense of the human language once fed enough of the basic words to begin to decipher the meaning of more and more of the others. If, for example, somehow in their exchanges the cat learned what the word "dig" meant, and the word "tool" and added those to a program that scanned through the English dictionary, it might find the definition of the word "shovel" contained those words and would then know that a shovel is tool for digging. It could then scan for the word "shovel" in addition to all the other words it knows and find definitions that contained the word "shovel". It might then be able to make sense of those and add them to the library of words it searches for, which would eventually lead it to more and more in a rapid expansion that could begin to decipher most of the English language while simply leaving several holes in the end that would need to be filled in manually.

The more he thought about it, the more he realized it would be important to send a copy of a complete English dictionary and he should do it as soon as possible, but they would need to work out some sort of compression scheme in order to fit something that large into the rover's limited command memory.

With proper compression he could easily send images through Curiosity's memory too. Maybe he should look into doing that next. It would make no sense for the cat to send him an image, but since the rover had no display device, it would make a great deal of sense for Jake to send images into the robot's memory for the cat to download and display on his tablet.

The laptop beeped yet again and Jake glanced at the image and this time he saw the tablet had been turned back on, the drawing he'd sent of the arrow and the first bit of the cat's audio waveform had been drawn on its surface, and he could clearly see the cat's booted feet as he walked out of the image toward the box that had been connected to Curiosity.

Jake grinned. Clearly the clever tiger had got the message and he was going over to dump the rover's memory into his tablet to see what was there.

He sent the rover the command to stop drawing the message on the tablet and switched it to simply taking pictures every minute in a loop and he waited for the cat to come back into the picture.

It took a while, but finally the cat appeared in one of the images again. This time he was grinning widely and was pointing at his ear with one paw, and at the camera with another as if to say, "I hear you!" Clearly he was telling Jake that he was listening to his message! Jake grinned as he waited to see what the next image might show.

When it came, he saw the cat roaring at his tablet with one fist in the air and a big grin on his face like he was cheering. The next image that came once again showed only the cat's feet moving out of frame towards the box that was attached to the rover.

Jake smiled as he realized the cat was sending him another audio message back. He sent out the script that commanded Curiosity to send the contents of its command memory again. When he got it he saved the waveform and then played it back. He laughed as the laptop's speaker roared at him and then growled and meowled excitedly. He could hear the cat's delight and excitement that they were able to hear each other's voices.

He quickly recorded one more sample of himself cheering into the microphone and he shouted "We're talking to each other!" in as excited and happy a voice as he could muster. He sent it back to the rover and once again had it draw the arrow pointing to the box that was interfaced to the rover's memory.

Again the first image that came back showed the cat's feet as he walked off to get Jake's message. In time he eventually saw the tiger reappear in the one of the images Curiosity sent back and once again he was grinning widely while pointing at his ear with one paw and at the camera with the other as if saying "I hear you loud and clear."

Jake could not believe the breakthrough they'd made! They were actually talking to each other! Each had no idea what the other was saying, but at this early stage that wasn't really important, it was just the fact that they could do it at all that was so exciting. In movies it always seems so simple for aliens to suddenly be "hailing on our frequency", but in reality that sort of thing would be impossible. Even the simplest communications by radio were done digitally with handshaking, formatting, compression, encryption and all sorts of data exchange protocols that would render the signal absolute garbage to anyone trying to use it who didn't share all of the same protocols. The tiger had found a way, though, and Jake was thrilled.

His mind quickly raced ahead to what else they could accomplish today following this breakthrough. He wondered if somehow they could work out at least a simple compression algorithm. He could likely describe one to the cat with a few simple mathematical formulas, and they already had mathematics in common. Now that they were exchanging audio data, the context had once again been established. If the cat was half as much the genius he appeared to be, he'd understand. If they could compress the data, Jake saw no reason why they couldn't send multiple low resolution images along with audio in a compressed file. They could actually send video back and forth so each could see and hear the other speaking to them! Curiosity's memory could easily hold at least thirty seconds of low resolution video with accompanying audio with even just a basic level of compression. The messages would need to be short, but it would be a major leap forward even from where they currently were. It would essentially be a two-way video phone with a six minute delay.

He quickly pulled up the Paint program and picked up his stylus and drew the equations for a basic compression algorithm that should be effective enough to allow them to fit a great deal more data into Curiosity's command buffer. Given the context of the audio they'd been sending back and forth, the cat was likely to quickly pick up the meaning. He then applied the algorithm to the program he'd been using to record his voice and he said, "Can you hear me now?" into the microphone.

He sent the compressed recording to Curiosity's memory along with the commands to draw the compression algorithm on the tablet and then once again commanded the rover to begin taking images in a loop so he could watch what unfolds at the other end. If the tiger couldn't figure out what Jake was trying to tell him, he would only hear garbage if he tried to play back the data. If he got the compression algorithm right, he'd hear Jake's voice again.

He waited impatiently for the images to begin to come back. The first one showed that the rover had drawn out the mathematical algorithms on the tablet and the cat was studying them closely.

The next image showed the cat working at his tablet. He would need to laboriously convert the English math formulas into the alien version using the collection of mathematical symbols and numbers they'd exchanged the day before. The formulas were fairly short, so it wouldn't take long for the tiger to convert Jake's equations to the alien equivalent.

Jake grinned when he saw the next image that came in after that. Once again, as he'd done before, the cat was pointing at his temple with one paw and directly at the camera with the other and had a look of respect on his face as if to tell Jake again that he was really using his head.

Jake quickly sent one of the slides he'd sent before and had the robot draw the cat > Jake emoji equation to tell him he thought the cat was really much smarter than himself. He was the one who'd thought of the brilliant idea of communicating through the rover's memory buffer in the first place.

Curiosity continued to send images back in a loop. Jake could see in the first few that the cat was sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the rover and was working on his tablet. He was likely programming the simple algorithm into it so it could decompress the file Jake had sent.

A later image once again showed only the back of the cat's booted feet as he went over to the box to download the latest audio file.

The next image that came back once again showed the tiger grinning broadly and pointing at one ear while pointing at the camera. He'd done it! He'd clearly decompressed the audio file and could hear Jake's voice coming from his tablet.

Jake then took the next logical step and he took a quick image of himself. He smiled broadly for the camera and waved. He converted the image from color to sixteen bit grey scale and then cropped it to be perfectly square. He saved the image as raw data and stripped it of all formatting and then ran it through his compression algorithm and sent it to Curiosity's memory. This one would once again require a bit of a leap for the cat to make, but Jake was certain he'd get it. The tiger was clearly incredibly bright.

First he needed to somehow indicate to the cat that he was sending him a picture this time instead of audio. He brought up Paint again and quickly drew a rough drawing of Curiosity's main camera, but it was pointed at the Jake smiley. He then drew an arrow that pointed from the Jake smiley to a line of raw data, then another arrow that pointed from the data in the direction of the box to show the cat that Jake had taken an image of himself, converted it to raw data, and then compressed it and sent it to the memory buffer for the cat to download. He sent it and waited for the rover to start sending images back to him in a loop again.

This one might take a bit longer for the cat to figure out, but Jake was confident he could do it. He hadn't told the cat anything about the size of the image he'd sent. The tiger would have to make certain assumptions about it and telling him nothing at all actually made it easier for him to figure out. The only thing that would make sense was for Jake to send the image in grey scale, with one number equaling one pixel's brightness. They could develop a more sophisticated system afterward that would have each pixel use three numbers to indicate the intensity of each of the three primary colors to get a full color image, but for now it was easiest to use grey. Since the cat wouldn't know the resolution or dimensions of the image, it would make the most sense to assume it was perfectly square, because then he simply needed to take the square root of the total number of pixels that Jake had sent, and that would give him the length of one row of pixels and the total number of rows. He could then arrange the pixels into a square, grey scale image of Jake. Since this was by far the simplest way to do an image, it was likely the first thing the cat would try when attempting to decode it.

He got up and paced again while he waited for the images to start coming in from the rover showing what was happening at the other end. The first showed the cat already walking off to the box to download what Jake had sent him. The tablet clearly showed the drawing Jake had made that indicated there was a picture of him stored in the rover's memory now.

The next image showed the cat once again sitting on the floor in front of the rover, legs crossed, and working away on his tablet with a grin on his face. The cat must know that Jake had sent him an image and he was anxious to figure out how to see it.

A few more of the incoming images looked the same with the big cat still working on his tablet, trying to make sense of the data Jake had sent.

Finally an image came in that had the cat holding up the tablet to the camera and right in the center of it was a square, black and white image of Jake smiling back at him and waving.

Jake grinned. The cat had once again showed how brilliant he was and had figured it out in no time. He wanted to see the look on the tiger's face but he was holding up the tablet too high and too close to the camera so it blocked the cat's head. Jake imagined he must be really grinning now.

He was excited that he could actually send the cat images from Earth and the exchange of information would now be equal in all ways. The next logical step would be to send multiple frames along with audio so that either of them could send video messages back and forth. It was an incredible breakthrough! The big tiger was likely as thrilled about it as Jake was.

He anxiously awaited the next image to come in from the rover. When the laptop finally beeped he excitedly brought up the image, but was puzzled by what he saw. The cat was looking down at his own tablet that had the image of Jake on it. He had a very unhappy look on his face. Had the beautiful cat been expecting to see someone who looked closer to himself? Was Jake that ugly to him that it made the cat sad?

Jake waited for the next image to come back, and when it did he saw that the tablet that Curiosity had been using to draw on was turned off to indicate the tiger was no longer interested in communicating. He also saw the big cat walking away out of the picture, but this time it wasn't to the left where the interface box was, it was off to the right following the cable that connected the rover's backup transmitter to the amplifier. Just then an alarm came up on Jake's laptop from the program that monitors the backup transceiver link. The link had dropped. The cat must have pulled the plug.

Jake was nonplussed. He didn't know what to think or what to do. Clearly the cat was somehow upset by the image of Jake, but he didn't know exactly why. Perhaps he was in fact quite hideous to the alien and, since the alien was gay, he might have been envisioning someone on the other side of the rover that he might find attractive. He might have been building up some fantasy about Jake, just as Jake had been doing about the gorgeous cat, and seeing what Jake really looked like had completely burst that bubble.

He didn't know what to make of it or what he should do next. Had he fucked everything up? Surely, whatever it was that was upsetting the alien, he would eventually get over it and contact Jake again. He wouldn't let physical looks get in the way of this exciting development, would he? If not, if the cat simply never came back, then Jake would have single-handedly ended the human first contact with an alien species and made it so there was no longer any way to communicate.

He might really be up the creek now, but only time would tell.