First Contact

Chapter 3

Gob stood in the meeting room, waiting for rest of the council. There was a lot to discuss, it had been some time since the last time the entire council had gathered. Drak was busy setting up the room, they prepared briefings for everyone to refer to and was setting up refreshments. It was going to be a long session.

The first to enter the room was Watcher Kar, one of the core memes of the Watcher group. Gob had always had respect for the Watchers, their ability to take theoretical thought experiments and turn them into practical equipment design had helped make leaps in technology. The mining equipment the Rock Hoppers used were inspired by designs for hunting weapons one of the Watchers had designed. Kar was a pessimist at their core, pointing out flaws and potential threats before they occurred to anyone else. Perhaps this is why Kar was such a core member for the Watchers, thinking about security and potential threats must require a cautious mind. There were other representatives from the Watchers that joined Kar, but they were not familiar to Gob.

Next came the Elders, unsurprisingly late for an important meeting. Gob expected more Elders to be present, annoyingly only younger members had been sent to attend accompanied by Elder Kadd. Kadd had been an Elder for a couple cycles now but their reputation made it hard for them to be considered wise. Often asking obvious questions, Gob and Kadd had a history of getting in each others way. Kadd wore the Elder's delegation badge which meant one of the senior members had personally sent him to attend this meeting, but this just made the whole situation more frustrating for Gob.

Majority of the Observers were assigned to constantly monitor communications from the belt and to keep watch on the automated systems in case of another anomaly. Drak was the only member present in the meeting, not that anyone took issue with this since Gob was originally an Observer before being promoted to Overseer.

The Book Keepers were not included in this meeting, it was very clear during the early sessions that they were not very interested and only required a report about equipment used and funds required at the end of these sessions.

Once everyone settled down, Gob began.

"Thank you for attending this meeting everyone, we are here to discuss our ongoing communication with the Kom as they approach Seb. It has been 5 cycles since we made the information about the Kom's journey public and since then we have sent and received several signals from them. I will cover only the major moments from these communications but the information placed on your seats by Observer Drak provides a detailed timeline of all signals sent and received."

Gob waited, giving everyone a chance to find and glance at the reading material provided to them. Some of them seemed surprised and some of them simply did not seem to care. Gob had asked Drak to setup the meeting room in a very specific way so that all the members of the council would be seated directly in front of the podium, it was very important for Gob to be able to see everyones reaction as this meeting went on. The situation called for an important decision, one that required everyone's input. Gob already had a chance to go over the series of events in the last few cycles multiple times, and had his own conclusions. But it was important to see if there were others that came to the same conclusions without being prompted.

"5 cycles ago, we received another signal from the Kom explaining their trajectory towards Kom and that they would reach us in 10 cycles. This would have left us with another 5 cycles from today to prepare for their arrival. Along with this communication they requested information about our region of space, information about objects outside the belt, space rocks and so on. The council had agreed to defer to the Observers and my opinion on matters of communication which is why we had not consulted everyone here at the time. We provided this information to them and inquired about what they hoped to gain by travelling to us along with information on what the two objects we received were. This exchanged is highlighted in the material provided to you."