The antennas had locked in a southwesterly direction and stopped moving. Donner figured that the signal came from a region of geosynchronous orbit that was above and slightly off the coast of equatorial South America. He made an estimate of the satellite's orbital elements and consulted a database of orbiting satellites but found no match.
Donner soon came to realize that the signal was not aimed at him but was spillover from a signal that was probably aimed directly below the satellite. The signal strength was such that Donner’s antennas had to be almost exactly on target to attain lock. Donner thought he must be in a zone where the signal reinforced but that zone couldn’t be too wide or surely someone else would have already identified this anomaly. The signal also seemed to use a spread spectrum technique but his Annie easily accounted for that.
Anyway, receiving the signal was one thing, making sense of it was something else. He was sure it was encrypted and cracking the encryption would be challenging. Donner set his Annie up decrypting the signal but made no progress. He didn't know at the time that it would take several weeks.
After school was out for the year, Donner became serious about decrypting the strange signal. He had quite a large amount of data stored which had been collecting for several weeks. He decided that the best approach to decryption would be to farm out portions to his friends and let them set their ANI devices to work. He would edit the snippets, keeping them short, to keep from giving away too much information if someone did decrypt it.
Donner prepared several different samples. His Annie sent the samples to his friend's Annies. They immediately put their Annies to the task of decoding the samples. Decryption algorithms on their devices would run in the background during the day and evening, taking over all the CPU cycles when the owners didn't need them.
Donner then setup the Annies to run as a wide area network over the internet. He wrote supervisory software that allowed them to exchange algorithms, trade samples and build a common, shared database of results. It took hundreds of CPU hours before the first sample was decrypted and exchanged among all the devices. Further results came quickly as the Annies developed a voting system to choose the most probable decrypt. But the decrypted signal only led to another mystery.
The samples were in a language that Donner nor any of his friends or their Annies recognized. Donner found an online translation website and scanned in the language samples. He then set the website to translate the samples into English. The translation database identified the samples as a dialect of Japanese but gave no other information and served up a very incomplete translation.
After much research and false leads, Donner found the solution to the unusual Japanese. It turned out to be a dialect spoken on Hachijojima and Aogashima, islands south of Tokyo. It was the Hachijo dialect and it was quite divergent from primary Japanese, retaining many features inherited from ancient Eastern Japanese.
Donner, with the help of his Annie, labored several days to complete a manual translation of the snippets. The importance of his discovery slowly dawned on him, he realized he would have to show his dad.
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