A few minutes of walking later, Ludo reached the end of the trail where his truck was parked.
As this was way out in the wilderness, his truck was probably the only vehicle around for miles.
The truck was unscathed from the impact of the meteor last night, much to Ludo's relief.
Without wasting any time, he hopped into the driver's seat and grabbed his laptop from the passenger seat and booted it up.
'How do I connect it?'
He was immediately presented with a problem that he had failed to consider earlier due to his excitement, but his doubts were quelled almost instantly.
The laptop's screen started changing by itself, and all sorts of command prompts and programs all flashed across the screen at speeds his brain couldn't keep up with.
"Ha, right, it's a piece of Alien tech… How could I forget?"
The Galactic Terminal was clearly superior to Earth's technology in every way, if it couldn't even connect to a laptop without any medium, Ludo would start to develop doubts about its capabilities.
[5 unknown languages detected, do you wish to upload them to the database?]
"Only five? I guess that makes sense. There's no internet connection out here, so it can only copy what's installed into the laptop's own system. Though I only remember selecting English when installing them… Where did these other four come from?"
It was a work laptop given to him by the higher ups at his job, so his first suspicions were pinned on them.
Had they installed the other four languages? If so, what else had they installed onto it without him knowing?
'Meh, whatever. Its technically not my laptop anyway, I'm not stupid enough to store personal information on it.'
The one thing he was sad about was that his phone was completely obliterated by the meteor. That thing had thousands of photos and memories from the last 10 years stored on it, with no backups on the cloud to save them to…
'My proof of bowling a perfect 300 is gone now… Tsk, guess I can't brag about that anymore.'
Ludo accepted the Galactic Terminal's request, and all the languages were soon uploaded to it.
[Upload completed… Estimated total value of the languages 'English', 'Mandarin', 'Russian', 'French' and 'Urdu' comes to 11 credits. Would you like to see a breakdown of prices and factors affecting value?]
Seeing a breakdown of each of the language's worth? Ludo wasn't interested in that, and instead changed the language setting from Automatic to English, ending his venture into that section of the Galactic Terminal.
Though he knew that when he returned back to civilisation and finally gained an internet connection, he might have a treasure trove waiting for him…
If just five languages gave him 11 credits, what about the thousands of recorded languages collated over the tens of thousands of years human civilisation had developed on Earth?
He was looking forward to that already!
'What if I upload all of the data on the entire internet to it?'
Ludo shook his head. That was something for him to think about at a later point.
Right now, he had one final option to gloss over before he gained access to the full functionality of the Galactic Terminal.
[Set Location / Set Civilisation.]
He chose this immediately.
Compared to the other two options, there was no follow up prompt. Instead, the Galactic terminal revealed its appearance on his wrist, looking like an unassuming glossy silver bracelet this time, since he'd chosen stealth mode.
[Scanning current location…]
[Location not recorded, adding to the databank.]
[Determining civilisation's level…
['Earth' civilisation detected to be basic Level 1 civilisation… adjusting accordingly.]
A bunch of prompts flashed by, with Ludo inspecting each one closely
In particular, the last one about Earth being called a level 1 civilisation caught his eye. From his own perspective, Earth and the numerous countries inhabiting it were quite advanced in their progress.
After all, today's technology allows for people on two opposite sides of the globe to have a real time video call with each other. How magical is that?
Not to mention that even a common person could hop on a plane and soar tens of thousands of feet into the sky and travel to anywhere on the planet in less than 24 hours…
And they had even put humans on the moon at one point!
All that was so far beyond Ludo, he failed to even understand how all those scientists came up with these discoveries and inventions.
Yet, in the face of the Galactic Terminal, this just prompted for Earth to be called the most basic, lowest level civilisation?
Ludo was quite shocked, and actually a little frightened.
One's perception of the world around them could reveal a lot about how intelligent they were.
For Earth to be rated so low, it could only mean that there must be much, much more powerful and unfathomable civilisations out there in the universe, which Earth pales in comparison to.
This was where his slight feeling of terror came from.
What if one of those civilisations discovered Earth one day, and decided to come take a visit with not so friendly intentions…
Before, something like this was something he never would have considered, and he'd even joked about it in the past.
After all, it was something that only happened in sci-fi movies, right?
Well, considering that just last night Ludo was struck by a piece of advanced extraterrestrial technology that had fused with him, his perception had changed.
It wasn't a joking matter anymore and could very well be a real possibility.
Ludo started to feel a little paranoid.
Of course, if others knew his fears, they would laugh at him and clown him for being so paranoid of something that would never happen.
But is it really paranoia if the fear it stems from is real?
Many people who face stalkers in the real world sit in the same situation as him, being branded as just paranoid by their peers, only for them to end up shocked when one day they see their close friend, coworker or family member's face on TV as the victim of a murder.
[Localisation complete. Current permissions set as Level 1 Basic, providing access to only Level 1 Middle trading hubs and below.]
[Civilisation level: Basic Level 1]
[Personal level: Basic Level 1]
However, despite his fears, Ludo was brought back down to earth by the Galactic Terminal informing him that everything had been completed.
In fact, even he started to believe that he was being slightly paranoid at best.
After all, the existence of the Galactic Terminal proved that there was at least an interstellar society out there consisting of more than one race or civilisation, proving that they could at least co-exist with each other.