Commence data transfer

"It's ready," announced Specs. "We can begin whenever you're ready."

It probably would have been wise to run some tests first, but time was critical. "Let's do it!" you declared. You handed the visor to Specs and he connected a small cable to it before handing it back. You hoped he might say something like, "Good luck", but then you realized that Greys probably don't believe in luck. Instead you prodded him, "At times like this, observers from my race try say something encouraging. Do you have any words of wisdom?"

"If you need me to break the connection, send a signal through the visor," Specs offered. "Otherwise, try not to damage your brain. I can't fix that."

It wasn't exactly the rah-rah send-off you were hoping for, but it was better than nothing. Slowly you lifted the visor up to your eyes and put it on. "Start it up, MPAD-24."

Instantly, a barrage of psychedelic colors blasted your retinas and began overloading your brain. It was all you could do to focus on pulling the visor off before it did any permanent damage. "STOP!" you shouted. "That's too much data. I can't process that much at once."

Specs stood silent giving you what felt like an 'I told you so' expression. "MPAD-24, let's try using a sampling frame," you suggested. "Start with a frame size of one nanosecond and just show that frame of data." Most of the data was probably just repeated status messages from the nodes, and sampling the data would likely be able to confirm that. Specs seemed amused at your idea.

With the visor in place, you asked MPAD-24 to start again, and you braced yourself for another blast of visual data. This time the objects in the image weren't moving but the visual data was still too dense to comprehend. However, you could begin to see patterns, and it wasn't overloading your visual cortex. "MPAD-24, let's reduce the frame size even further. Show me data from a sampling at frame size of one picosecond." Immediately, the image changed and you could now detect some definite patterns. The settings that Specs had provided earlier were capturing and organizing some of the data into structures and types, but it wasn't clear yet what they were or how to interpret them. One type of structure was appearing very frequently so it was an obvious starting point. "Can you interpret any of the data within this item?" you asked.

After a short delay, MPAD-24 announced, "This is a status message from a functional node indicating it is operating with default parameters and is awaiting further instructions. The message also includes the unique node identifier."

Your hunch was confirmed that these were status message being broadcast by the functional nodes. "MPAD-24, organize these objects by their node identifier. Each time you receive a new status message that matches one of these, discard the new copy, and instead increment a count associated for that version." From this you would be able to determine how often the messages were being broadcast by each of the functional nodes. Based on the unique node identifiers, any gaps in the sequence should identify which nodes weren't reporting.

After several more samples, you began increasing the frame size until you stopped receiving any new status messages. Thus it was likely you had identified all of the functioning nodes. After adding a filter to mask these status messages, the incoming data was reduced to about ten percent of the previous amount. Whatever data was still getting sent was potentially interesting and useful, but you'd need to examine it further.