video + text + action

[mucked]

Who: Peggy Carter & YOU
Broadcast: Y, fleetwide.
Action: Aboard the Starstruck, if you like.
When: Today.

[ a video feed flickers to life, and fights for a moment to adequately focus on its subject. peggy carter sits in the kitchen aboard the starstruck, cup of tea and her elbow and half a biscuit in her hand. dabbing at crumbs, she sets her food aside and offers the network a bright smile. ]

That message -- the ominous one, in the bizarre language? It put me in mind of the sort of cryptograms and puzzles you might see in the Sunday paper. [ her expression is cheery enough, although she's not being wholly honest about her interest in such games. she won't be the one to say the words bletchley and park.] I loved them. Them, and crosswords. I thought maybe some of you might like them, too. [ ... ] We could do a few together. I'm not saying we all join a club, exactly, but back home they were always better solved in good company.

Let's start you off with one that's easy enough. But there's no shame in needing a hint, if needed. For what it's worth, the text I'm attaching is, in its deciphered form, English -- not yet certain how the augments' translation will handle it. We'll see.

BLSTKBC YLBSFKGISRX XL QIYT SL SFVBWIKAKJR STR QKBZ VX V XSRVZU EIFELXR — V ELKBS LB OTKYT STR XLIA QVU NKM KSX KBSRAARYSIVA RUR.

[ -- and then an afterthought: ]

...By chance, has anyone been brewing their own beer?

Comments

Video - private;

[winn]

It's basically the more fun you have doing it - the quicker and better you learn. So, tonight -- what time should I come by?

Video - private;

[mucked]

Half seven works for me, if it works for you.

Video - private;

[winn]

Sounds good, I'll see you then.

[mucked]

[ -- their stage is set in the kitchen, not long after the dinner mess is cleared away. peggy's already had more than her fairer share of cuppas. the latest steams gently at her elbow when winn walks into the starstruck's kitchen. she, half-smiling, finds her feet and ushers him warmly into the room. welcome, her body language suggests.

peggy has at least left the coffee grounds out on the counter. it's the most she's willing to do. ]

Make as much as you like. [ maybe steve'll run out. ]

[winn]

Thanks.

[ he smiles warmly, and puts down his pens and paper on the table before heading straight for them. if anyone can drink them out, it's him, but he's a little too nice to run them dry. ]

Any luck with finding a phone?

[mucked]

[ she falls back to the well-set table, and grabs a small device. she waggles the phone (weird though she finds it) with a smile. ]

Steve was quite obliging.

[ clearly, this had made her at least a little happy. ]

[winn]

[ while the machine does its thing, he walks up to her to grab the phone and examine it. ]

That never happens, you must be pretty special.

[ with a bemused smile, steve is possibly more obliging than he is, he wouldn't so easily give up his phone. he hands her back the device and goes back to the coffeemaker. ]

We can definitely work with that, I'll just transfer you some apps.

[mucked]

[ pretty special? she manages not to laugh -- just earlier today, she and steve had been discussing what, exactly, they were to each other. pretty special might be the closest either of them will come to a well-defined label. other labels paled in comparison.

she wraps her fingers tightly around the phone. holds it like a talisman, almost. ]

Odd, really, because I've been surrounded by all this future technology for a year now -- but it's belonged to the fleet. This is the first piece I've truly held that's come from my future.

[ it's humbling. ]

[winn]

Humanity manages some pretty badass feats.

[ he smiles as he sugars his coffee. it's so easy back home, to take these things for granted, but smartphones are amazing. ]

[mucked]

Now, of that I have no doubt. [ although you'll find she'd never use the word 'badass' all on her own. ]

[winn]

[ taking his cup with him, he puts it down on the table and sits by her side, digging out his own phone. ]

Here, let me see it for a sec?

[ he'll start the transfer while they do their work. ]

[mucked]

[ she takes a seat -- next to her mug of tea, of course -- and places steve's phone on the table between them. ]

What exactly will you be doing to it? [ not doubtful, merely curious. ]

[winn]

I'm transferring software from my phone to his that will enable you to write your own code and test it out.

[ and he does just that, putting both phones down on the table to allow the transfer to take place. ]

[mucked]

[ curious, really. peggy watches him with an always-critical eye. wondering, perhaps, how it is that a genius should come so far without an ego the size of howard stark's? she sips her tea, considers the man across the table, and hums a single note. ]

What sorts of things can these...codes do, by the way?

[winn]

[ easy, a lifetime of abject humiliation, bullying, and misplaced guilt that led him to bring himself down in every way and trapped him in a dead-end job. ]

Practically everything, it's a way to transmit, receive, and process data. Back home everything is computerized - banking, media, intelligence, you name it. And if you're really good - you can hack all those things. Our network, these ships - they're controlled by a code, it's just not one I can figure out [ he irritably rubs at his augment ] but it's there. It's calculating our trajectory, monitoring our life support systems, comms, code is how we're still alive.

[mucked]

[ she catches his irritation. and she suspects it's something similar to what she feels when her augment -- communications -- fails to take her far enough to muck with the ship's frequency. but to her, it's like a branch she just can't quite reach. only she doesn't know why.

but something winn says catches her attention. ]

Intelligence, hm? [ a stiff clearing of her throat. this, at least, should by now be no secret to a clever mind like winn's. ] That sort of work must become rather different in an age of little telephones in everyone's pocket. Good Lord.

[ she'd be a fossil, indeed. and maybe that's why she's so curious about upgrading this skill. ]

[winn]

Oh, yeah. You have no idea. People basically spy on themselves. These phones come equipped with GPS so you can find people anywhere, they got cameras that can be remotely activated, a microphone of course...some people post their likes, their dislikes, their family, their history, their medical issues - basically their entire life to social media. When something goes down, people take video and post it online so you get footage of incidents within minutes. Nothing is private, and nothing's forgotten, the internet's pretty unforgiving that way. Of course all this also means the sheer amount of data available is mind boggling and it can still be falsified but - all in all it's a pretty exciting time.

[mucked]

[ bit worrisome, if you ask her. she eyes the phones again -- is she endangering steve, she wonders, by being so cavalier with his? no, she insists. he can't be so foolhardy as to keep anything sensitive on a personal telephone. right?

she resolves to ask him, later. ]

I hope you don't feel offended when I say it sounds absolutely horrid. [ she values her privacy almost to the exclusion of friendships; letting just anyone know her legitimate likes, beyond the superficial story that appeases surface curiousity?

makes her stomach churn. ]

[winn]

[ he shakes his head ]

Nah, I get it. The implications can be terrifying, but if you know what you're doing and you're smart about your personal info, you can stay safe. I've had to sit through a lot of data security lectures and they all come down to the same basic points - don't share private information online, keep your camera covered, back-up your files, don't open unverified files from people you know or anything from people you don't, and have some sort of basic firewall and anti virus program installed, that's enough for most private people. You just get used to it.

[mucked]

[ honestly? it gives her a new found respect for someone like natasha romanoff -- butting heads with a system bent towards information collection. the 'modern' spy must be outfitted with a complement of different tools and skills: something beyond selling a wig, and selling a story. she tries not to frown too severely as she considers the wider implications.

oh so dryly: ] Well, if I didn't feel like a fossil before...

[ no offense, winn. but that's quite a lot to swallow. ]

[winn]

[ she gets an apologetic smile, sorry peggy but this is his world and he tends to get carried away in it. he hasn't realized just how much he's been missing it until he started talking. ]

Don't worry, you'll get the hang of it and it's not really like that here anyway.

[mucked]

No. Not like that, at all -- here, our information is less than willingly harvested. [ the atroma have ways of accessing even their minds. their dreams. she doesn't easily forget those awkward calibrations, not so long ago. ]

But we're getting ahead ourselves. You promised me a basic lesson.

[winn]

Yeah, still haven't figured out how to firewall a brain.

[ but it's on the to-do list! ]

Right, yeah. [ sitting down to a sheet of paper, he begins with the basic flow chart of how programming works. ]

Okay so basically machines speak in numbers only. The language they use is called 'binary' and it's pretty impossible to program in, it's just endless sequences of 0s and 1s. So we use either a high level or assembly language - high level is closer to the way we speak, assembly is closer to the way machines speak - and the computer translates our commands into binary - processes them in what's called the CPU - Central Processing Unit - and performs the task. It's a simple input-work-output flow chart. So far so simple, right?

[mucked]

So far, so disarmingly simple. [ she can only imagine that its difficulty ramps up considerably beyond the quote-unquote 'basics'. peggy leans in, thoughtless of either of their personal bubbles when she gets tucked into a lesson.

it's clear she's studying what he's putting down -- mapping it to memory, like she might blueprints. ]

A CPU is like a brain, isn't it?

[winn]

[ he's too invested in the lesson to care for personal space anyway, and it's not like he's got a blackboard or a projector here - that's back on the iskaulit in the lecture hall, and feels kinda stupid to turn on for one person. ]

Yeah, pretty much. [ he nods. ] There are a lot of programming languages out there - some are case specific - like internet only, app only - some are more universal. Since we don't have a network we can work on here, I'm gonna teach you one called C# it's pretty handy for most uses and the app I'm giving you is geared for it. Ok - a few simple base rules. Making notes is important - notes start with a double forward slash - any line that doesn't start with two of those will be considered code and if it's not code - your program won't work. In code, if so much as one semicolon is missing or redundant - it won't work. Okay so - this is pretty much the first exercise they teach you in any programming class ever.

[ he starts writing ]

public class Hello1
{

explaining this line is something I'll do later or it'll get confusing but what you need to know now is that Hello1 is the name of our class, and our class is the program we're writing now. The curly brackets have to open and close every segment of code.

[ he continues writing, speaking as he does ]

public static void Main()
{
System.Console.WriteLine("Hello, World!");
}
}

Main is the main body of our program, we can write sub sections, which we'll talk about some other time. System.Console - is the name of the output portal we're asking the action to appear in - write line is the action - and hello world is the content. Every action has to end with a semicolon. So basically, when we input this into our app --

[ he demonstrates. and hits execute - the screen now says 'Hello, World!' ]

Voila. A basic program. Input commend - output result.