It shows a location in the world, in a reachable part of the forest a few hours from where Pemy lives. They put the message together into a kind of binary image, after several extremely confusing false starts in which they get it very wrong. Pemy and their crew of online friends are not without some resources and some science fiction experience. It's a comical blurp-blorp sound but it has structure and cadence. Then, at 6:55am, while connected to a random number which Pemy makes a careful note of in their sparkly notebook, they pick up a call from an alien. The chip doesn't need or accept power, so Pemy leaves it on during the night. There was no way to send cat pictures, though. Eventually the other person played a recording run through an automated translator, saying "Hindi", and Pemy found a similar translator, and they communicated in broken, ridiculous words through several pointless levels of indirection about the loveliness of ginger cats.
They achieve very little, other than one confusing conversation with a person speaking a language nobody listening could understand at first. They do it on stream, with friends from the rest of the world yakking in chat. So Pemy explores their favourite numbers, anything which is a long string of sevens, anything which is digits of e, anything which is six and nine alternating for a long while. Gaps start to show up in the hundreds, but there's always someone going to barge through. Channel 0 is usually just noise, because lots of people start there. Pemy starts at the bottom of the channels, as most people do, and surfs upwards. It's a magenta chip, decorated with spiral gold and silver whorls, with a pleasing floral texture. They thought it looked pretty and cool and wanted to try some stuff. Pemy - it's their screen name, they don't really have much truck with their birth name these days - bought the fifteenth or sixteenth of the MagentaChips, almost purely at random, failing to understand the incalculable value of the things. Where are they from? They have apparently unbounded bandwidth.
it has now, in fact, shut down, and is proving to be totally untraceable. They're sold through a weeny little Etsy store front, which is almost perpetually sold out, and has seemingly sold only a few dozen of the MagentaChips total, and.
The problem is that these things are small enough to mail in a basic envelope, around forty-five bucks to buy, impossible to crack open, and violate significant physical laws. It kind of doesn't, which is one of the major problems. You can encrypt the data on the wire too, if you care, but you don't need to care. You tune both your chips to that same channel, and as long as nobody else, against highly calculable but remote odds, guesses your number, nobody can listen in. Then you share it with someone else, by post or some other trusted method of interchange. Ethical hackers take issue with this assertion in MagentaChip's documentation, but the fact remains that it could not be simpler: there are apparently an infinite number of discrete channels on which MagentaChip operates, so all you do is pick a titanically large, three-hundred-digit number - not even a semiprime, it's just got to be unguessably random. Security? It can be argued that even the strongest encryption is security by obscurity: obscurity of some 1024-bit semiprime or thereabouts. The signal travels at the speed of light, but does not appear to be any formally detectable form of electromagnetic radiation. The signal passes directly through the Earth. The signal comes out of the chip and is picked up by the other chip. MagentaChip lets you send data to any other MagentaChip anywhere. A backdoor at every layer in the OSI model, a stack of slices of Swiss cheese. You have your phone handset, in your hand, or your laptop computer, but beyond that there are network adapters, and ethernet cabling, and thousands and thousands of cellular communications towers, and government-owned routing hardware, and the physical layer of switching networks, and fibre optic trunk lines, and lightspeed delay and NSA splicer submarines and generic, industrial-scale untrustworthiness. But that's kind of the point, the marketing says. There's a lot of equipment which lets anybody do that. Which is, the marketing admits, something which you can already do. It's a little circuit board you can buy on Etsy and it lets you talk to anybody. There's a rumour going around that it's called MagentaChip to avoid rapid uptake, because it's intentionally going for an unpopular, crafted, garish look. These are the very earliest days of a radical new telecommunications technology called MagentaChip.