Duncan and Shell were on a transport tube train heading back into town from the observatory.
"I suppose we just can't avoid these missions," commented Duncan.
"It's just the kind of thing we're suited for," replied Shell.
"Well, it is fairly important to the entire world, so I guess if they need people like us, I can't just turn Firewall down," said Duncan.
The train stopped at the station and the two of them exited. Duncan started walking in the direction of his house.
"I guess I'll see you and everyone at the Velvet Room at 19:00, then," said Duncan.
Duncan made his way back to his house and sat down in his office. He reviewed the beacon signal recording once more, playing it back in a loop.
There's something more familiar about this than just the sphere's data from NEA726, he thought. This seems... older... somehow.
Duncan thought about the past. He remembered his days as a non-augmented human, before he was a cyborg. His wife, Rosetta, was constantly busy with politically-motivated hacking operations whenever she wasn't working her regular job. Duncan was a network security technician in his former life.
Duncan knew that he had heard the sound of that beacon before, from around that time. He didn't remember exactly when but there was a feeling of deja vu whenever he listened to it.
Suddenly, he remembered.
The year was 2054. Duncan was with a team, investigating a major wireless outage. Duncan and another climber had reached the top of an old cellular tower, which was one of several towers that provided the city with its wireless Internet service.
The equipment on the tower seemed to be in working order but the company had suspected that hackers had placed some kind of additional hardware on the tower. As they investigated the tower's antennas, they couldn't find anything. One of the technicians was testing the 20 GHz band for signal quality with a device that would make the raw signals audible, just like an ancient analog radio. As the technician tuned to 22.147 GHz, a noise... a noise identical to the beacon... was heard.
Duncan shot up out of his seat. "That's the same sound!" exclaimed Duncan. He remembered something the other tower climber had said. The other tower climber was one of the last old-style amateur radio operators alive and was familiar with archaic digital modulation protocols. Duncan remembered the name of the mode that the technician uttered upon hearing the noise.
MT63, remembered Duncan. It was a long-outdated protocol that was slow, yet obsessively redundant in order to preserve data over very weak signals.
"Holy cow," Duncan said to himself. "That sphere, whatever it is... it could be centuries old!"
Duncan accessed a terminal in his field of vision and started frantically searching for information about the old MT63 mode.