One Small Step For Man
| One Small Step For Man | |
|---|---|
| Date of Cutscene: | 14 July 2019 |
| Location: | Unknown |
| Synopsis: | Summary needed |
| Cast of Characters: | Shadowcat |
The banks of flat screen computer monitors in the War Room displayed most of the information pertinent to Kitty Pryde's current investigation. Though the holographic display was such visually stunning technology, unless three dimensions were useful the long-time hacker still preferred old-school flat displays.
Kitty used her fist to try to stifle a yawn, rising in her robe and fuzzy slippers and grabbing a coffee mug to make the recurring trek over to the pot on the other side of the room. "I'm going to wear a path in the floor at this rate," Kitty tells Lockheed before glancing over and realizing her long-time companion is already curled up fast asleep. "Traitor," she murmurs softly to him, though with a smile and no heat in her voice.
A soft pinging sound like a submarine's sonar draws Kitty's attention to an alert window that has popped up. Moving back nearer to the screen, her empty mug is forgotten and left to dangle as Kitty reads that the results are from one of her signals search routines, and sees it is titled Search Pryde-2019-06-21-Cybertronian-Signals.
Kitty slips back into a seat at a keyboard as she pulls up more information. Her foot begins nervously tapping the ground beneath her chair as if from a small release of adrenaline. More windows pop up, detailing the occurrences that fueled the alert. Kitty's brows furrow at what she first reads. "What did you get into?" she asks the computer. "January 15, 1952?" she reads from the screen.
Pulling up her search parameters, Kitty's eyes scan over the settings. "Searching for terrestrial, satellite, and radio telescope signals that matching any of the set waveforms or frequency spectra," she says aloud to herself. A few keystrokes pull up those waveforms, extracted from the partial data dump she'd manage to bring out of the facility before it was leveled in the fight between Megatron and the two dozen Sentinels that came to stop him. The meagerest portion of decades of research into Megatron by government scientists.
"Ah, there it is," Kitty says, spotting that she failed to set a limit for how far back to search for signals on. "So what did you do, dug into a database of radio telescope data from the 1950s, and found a hit?" she asks, shaking her head not so much at the thoroughness of the program, but at herself for having meant to limit the search to recent signals since Megatron was reactivated. Obviously there had been something more out there to find.
The keyboard clacks softly to pull up more information on the signals. "No one back then knew what to look for, didn't realize this was more than random space noise," she says to herself. "Now let's see where you were," she says, pulling up a display of the Earth's positioning from that date and then using geometry to backtrack to a source. Kitty's eyes widen at the result. "Holy crap, this was close. Within a lunar orbit," she says, and then plots it on the other display, watching it track through time until the signal abruptly stopped and never repeated again. "Not just a lunar distance, but near the Moon itself!" she exclaims.
A few bleary-eyed hours pass before Kitty finally leans back, drinking from the mug which has been oft-refilled in the intervening time. "Bingo," she says, rereading an astronomical journal entry from an amateur astronomer of a possible meteor impact on the Moon on January 15, 1952. "Something Cybertronian went down on the Moon. And we're going to go and get it," she says, excitedly hitting the button to alert Professor Xavier, Jean and Scott.
A glance to the time causes Kitty to wince. "Aw crap. 4 AM. This could have really waited until morning," she says. Kitty rises to begin trudging upstairs to make her apologies, leaving behind the display zoomed in showing the meteor impact site on the moon.
And only a few miles away from Tranquility Base, where man first landed on the Moon fifty years ago.
+scene 8316.