Once the message was created, the alien tentacle looked at the holographic screen with a fluttering glee.
It had been fantasizing about this very thing for who knows how long! And now it had finally come true.
It was filled with untold joy!
But still, even though it was completed, 'it' refrained from simply tapping on that flashing blue button and being on its merry way.
This was because this was still a military vessel of the enemy, filled with state of the art secure encryption and data links.
So whatever signal it transmitted could really only be accessible to its allies, not the enemy Proteas.
Hence the alien being had to first 'taint' the signal, letting 'its' brethren read it instead.
And this was with this intention that it suddenly began to let its 'limbs' ooze into the command module, stealthily infiltrating its insides even though the entire structure appeared to have no seam or joining.
Because 'did not appear' did not mean it was not there. The entire thing was simply very well machined to make it 'appear' it was one whole solid.
However by using some psionic trickery and a bit of brute force, the tentacle quickly managed to get through the panels, then began to wrap its fleshy tendrils around the heart of what it was looking for- an oscillating time quartz antenna.
This was the command module's main signal transmitter- the one responsible for actually sending the message 'it' had written on the screen.
The quartz worked just like an antenna, transforming the words into a series of oscillating electrical pulses and sending it to the ship's main communication antennae, which then amplified the signal many, many times over and then broadcasted for the whole wide world to listen.
While on the other side, there existed a receiving antenna with the algorithm to recognise and decode those unique pulses, letting it revert back the 'mysterious' signals into specific letters and numbers once again.
It was very similar to reading 'Morse code'.
Of course it was an extremely simplistic overview of how 'radio signals' worked, as in practice there was a lot of fixing, smoothing out, amplifying, filtering noise, and amplifying once again before the signal was ready to be sent out into the air waves.
But for the purposes of what the alien being wanted to do, infiltrating here was enough.
The various signal correction protocols would not be able to detect its mark if it was 'created' here.
This was exactly why the alien being also could not simply hack the broadcasting antenna which was located in a far less secure part of the ship.
'It' feared its added 'tracker' being filtered out by the ship's mechanism, thus forcing it to come up with this dangerous plan of infiltrating the source of the transmission.
The ship's signal circuitry, as intricate and sophisticated as it was, could only detect something was off if something was added or subtracted after the signal had been generated.
It could not verify the generated signal itself. There was nothing to verify this against.
This might sound a bit confusing, so to make it easier, let us imagine someone gives you a 100 dollar bill.
You can verify this by comparing it with your memory of all the other 100 dollar bills you have seen in the market.
And this was exactly what the signal circuitry did- they compared the characteristics of the original signal created with the signal it received, looking for things like loss of information during transmission, addition of noise, and distortion of the signal, all things that could have changed the signal.
Then with the aid of very sophisticated algorithms, it made very good guesses as to what these changes might have been and by how much, before cutting them out or adding more to the original signal, thus restoring the intended message to its true form.
Now imagine the same example as before, but here the government announces a new 75 dollar bill. You have never seen this note before, so if someone gives this bill to you, you will have nothing to compare this to.
Of course, in real life a person could simply go on the internet or ask the people around to check this.
But for a computer, every email, text, audio or video created in it was like this, a brand new bill. And it had nothing to check this against.
Hence it was told to simply take each signal created in it to be gospel.
In fact this was a necessary feature because otherwise, if a computer started to verify the generated data itself, it would surely end up deleting all kinds of things without context.
For example- it is due to this restriction that we can send our email and login password to someone we like, giving them access to our personal information in case of emergencies such as going into a long surgery.
Else, a computer with verifying capabilities would have surely detected the potential security breach and flagged the mail as spam, thus promptly deleting the 'sensitive information'.
The receiver would then only get a blank page.
Hence, please do not mistakenly think that the alien being was taking advantage of some kind of design flaw, this was simply how the whole thing worked.
Now, even with all this said, it was still not easy to tamper with the signal to be generated, especially when trying to add a unique Proteas tracker.
Just leaving the imprint in the first place was a great hassle, and on top of that, it still needed to be sufficiently hidden, because if it was too obvious, the signal circuitry might still flag it as a virus and stop the broadcast.
The tentacle was not sure if the ship had any hidden fail safes regarding this. Most of the things it knew about the place came from the fragmented memories of the ship's captain it had eaten and it was missing this information.
However given the importance of the mission, it was not willing to risk it.
In the same way, the tentacle was also not sure if its own special imprint was going to get amplified by the system like the rest of the signal.
So just to be on the safe side, it decided to give all the 'fuel' right here from the word go.
The hurdle with all this was that such double insurance would require a lot of energy.
However the tentacle was not too bothered by this.
Because this was where poor old Adonis and his mana pool came in.
The alien being intended to denote it, thus fueling its terrifying 'psychic scream'!