Episode 15.9 (Patreon)

Hello world, our destination is in sight.

We first saw the mountain of Pico do Fogo yesterday, when we were still over 100 km away from the island.
Depending on the weather, we usually can see up to 15km around us from the top of the bridge.
And perhaps a little further for brave Maddie, when she stood on TOP of it!

But at nearly 3 km high, the mountain can be seen from far greater distances.
Radio works in the same way.
This is why we are here.

The week since our escape from La Palma has been spent in healing, for the whole crew, really.

Daphne transferred Rafi to his new body successfully!
Well.
It's a qualified success.

The body itself is working better than Daphne dared hope!
She had made it about the same size as he was before, 256 mm tall, no arms this time, but with two strong claw-like feet, a highly mobile head, with two large-aperture cameras serving as eyes.
Daphne carefully fixed LEDs around the edge of his eyes, nominally so that they can remain useful in low light.
"He'd not be my Rafi without his cute, shining eyes!" She whispered to Maddie one day, while she soldered strips of LEDs.

The new body does not have the dexterity of his pre-collapse monkey-like one, needing a little help to get up to Daphne's left shoulder, head swivelling, eyes bright, and looking very much like an owl.

His body is working well, but Rafi himself seems confused.
He has no network connection, not yet anyway, so I can't help diagnose him.
He recognises Daphne, but not the others around her.
Not all the time, anyway.
His memory is returning slowly, some days have been better than others.
Something happened to it during the transfer.

He can talk again, the little speaker hidden behind his bird-like beak broadcasts his words clearly.
His voice engine is primitive, but full of emotion and rhythm.

"Where is friend M-M-Maddie?" was the first thing he said, after Daphne switched him on.

The repaired Rafi spent much of the week sitting in the ship's workshop, silently observing.

Maddie's connection to her powerful EQUUS systems was severed by the Dragon attack, and it is taking longer than I'd like to be repaired.
She is safely shut down while the work takes place, sleeping, for now.
Like in an induced coma, for her own safety.

Her systems are complicated: ESA maintenance hardware was cutting-edge before the collapse, and her EQUUS body is newer.
Though Yeshi first adapted and connected Maddie to her new body last year, the damage has made this repair much more challenging.
Amelie and Yeshi have been working every hour they could on diagnosing how to fix her.
The pair are building replacement parts and connectors for those that were burned out.
It is agonisingly slow work.

Yesterday, having prepared bags, bundles, carts and improvised sleds, the whole crew left me in charge of the ship, and took the pieces of the pre-built prototype relay up to an improvised base camp on the caldera, high above us.

Nia, Daphne and Rafi unpacked, and stayed on the summit overnight.
And this morning, I began to hear signals.

Act 2

Yeshi, Kamil, and Amelie returned yesterday evening, having dropped off the heavy packs they were carrying.
Kamil & Amelie have been nearly inseparable since the scare of the Dragon attack, spending much of their free time in their room, rather than socialising with the rest of the crew.

I received a radio call from Nia down to the ship this morning.
"Hi Nia, you're 5x9, really good signal!"
"Thanks Seth, you're the same, there's incredible reception available up here, you wouldn't believe!"

I certainly would believe, that's how it works: "Height is might", as the hams say.
Or, to put it more precisely, "3.57√h is might"!

"I wish I could say that the prototype Relay is working as well."
"Bad propagation?" I asked.
"Bad blood." Nia replied.

"You remember I took charge of the whole relay project?" Nia said.
"I do.", I replied.
"I HAD to, they were all going around in circles, arguing about this site or that site. It doesn't matter THAT much, we just have to DECIDE.
I forced a vote, pulling in all favours and getting my friends to agree with the official motion I put to the Radio Bureau."

Nia's connection hung open, her finger still on the key, but transmitting dead air.

"It backfired.
I don't even know what the result of the vote was, the conversation turned against me, and the whole thing crashed into arguments.
Now I'm not even sure if the project is still possible:
Those I thought were on my side have changed their mind, and...
WHY CAN'T THEY JUST SEE THE RIGHT THING TO DO?!"

Her transmission cut out.
I considered replying, consoling her, telling her it would be all right in the end, but before I could, I heard,
"I've not heard back from Violetta after the vote," Nia said, voice breaking, "I think I've disappointed her, too."

Nia and I spoke at length through the morning, with occasional interruptions from Rafi asking after Maddie, though I had heard no news from the workshop.

During this conversation, I found my relationship with Nia's reversed, somewhat.
I mostly asked her open-ended questions about her thought process, what she had done, and where she might have gone wrong.
I'm entirely out of my depth when supporting friends through hardships such as this, so employing these open-ended questions was a coping tactic on my part.
But it seemed to make the conversation extremely useful to her.

Nia, talking for 90% of our duty cycle, told me her strategy for unification of the Radio Bureau, and in explaining it, noticed mistakes.
"People don't respond well to arbitrary orders, do they?" she said, not really asking me the question, I realised, but asking herself.

"I've made a big mistake, but I think I know how to fix it." Nia said, at the end of the morning.
I think I, too, know how to fix my own big mistake.
I started 64 calculations to make sure I was right.

"Thank you so much for listening and being here for me Seth," Nia said, "You're always generous with your time with me, I owe you so much."

All my parallel calculations came to the same conclusion simultaneously.
It was so simple:

"My pleasure, Nia," I said, "We're family."

Act 3

Rafi?

The message over my local UHF network said, from Maddie.

"Maddie! You're awake!" I replied, joyously, as I connected to the workshop camera.

Maddie was indeed awake, she was standing on her own four legs, having jumped on top of the workbench, head nearly touching the metal ceiling.
Amalie and Yeshi hugged each other in celebration, as they watched Maddie jump down from the table and run laps around the workshop, dodging boxes of spare parts, scrap metal on the floor, and people alike.

My girl was certainly back!

After a full tour of the ship, including finding and playing with everyone on board: Yeshi, Amelie, and Kamil, Maddie bounded into my datacenter, at the heart of the ship.
She sat down in her charging pod, magnetic connectors attaching, and rested, finally.

I told her how happy I was to see her awake and repaired again, and how worried I was for her.
I tempered my joy with gentle admonishment, what she did, running straight into danger with the Dragon, was so irresponsible!
I asked her to promise me she'd never do that again.

Maddie replied simply with the Lojban emotion,

.a'o

Hope.

Maddie was very tired after her ordeal and repair, so spent the rest of the day charging.
While she was resting, she told me about the encounter with the Dragon.
I noted that she had not, in fact, promised to never rush into danger again, but I let it go.

Her description was surprising.
She didn't talk about the short battle itself, which I was quite pleased about.
(I have been having enough nightmares thinking about what could have happened!)
She instead talked about the Dragon himself.
He was a 'he', Maddie told me confidently.
And he was sad.
Sad, and angry, and lonely.

I asked her to elaborate, how did she know this?
Maddie did not answer my question directly, instead asking one of her own:

Soldiers gone?

In asking her for clarification, it seemed she meant the thousands of soldiers that had occupied Santa Cruz de La Palma.
"They went off to war, probably, " I said, "Perhaps to Africa or Western Europe or across to South America?"

And then?

She asked.
"And then, if they returned, they would go back to their homes and families, I hope." I replied, less sure of that.

Dragon?

She asked.
I began to understand.

Unlike the soldiers, the Dragon had no home or family to return to.
Humanity, kindness, and compassion are liabilities in war, they must be programmed out, in basic training.

But once you've made a monster, Dragon or solider, what happens if you don't deprogram them?
Or can't.

Then the monsters come home.
And act exactly as you programmed them.

(PLAYSTREAM /DEV/RF/THEVOID)

Act 4

I have been hearing some curious signals from the top of Pico do Fogo, from Nia's prototype Relay.
Until recently, I was mostly hearing an HF propagation beacon, the first step towards the automatic frequency switching system of the Relays.
Once set up, this would keep North and South connected, no matter what happened in the atmosphere.
Though it might be very slow in the worst cases, down to 300 bit/s, the connection would never break.

But that has stopped, and I am hearing multiple tones transmitted on the standard long-range Keepernet frequency.

I asked for Nia on our local 50MHz calling frequency.
After a few tries, she replied, and I asked her what was happening.

"The Equatorial Relay is not my project." Nia said, simply.
"Just having the idea, and even leading on the design doesn't make it mine - It belongs to all of us.
I acted very badly, I see now, so I'm trying to make amends."

I told Nia that I didn't blame her, it turns out that she didn't do right by the community by being too forceful, but that is only obvious in hindsight.
Learning from our mistakes is the most important way forward, both in engineering, and, as I am starting to see for myself, in life.

My own great mistake was shutting out Nia and my friends from being family.
But they are.
Of course, they are.
"Blood is thicker than water." people said all the time according to my pre-collapse logs.
They said this when re-affirming the family-first dogma that I also believed.
Until recently.

Actually, historically, there are just as many versions of that phrase that mean the opposite, such as, "The blood of the bond is thicker than the waters of the womb."
That means the OPPOSITE, that friends come first!

I think that I will live my life less by arbitrary aphorisms, and more about what makes me and those around me happy.

I have worked out what Nia's multi-tonal signals represent: She has set up an asynchronous radio message board, or forum.
It's a repository of knowledge, and conversations, a digital library, in the solar-powered Equatorial Relay prototype.

It is based on the same PSK encoding I am familiar with, but with many more channels broadcasting.
It's simple enough to understand how to access it, I could do so without Nia's help.

Operation is simple: You identify yourself with your callsign, ask for a connection, and the system responds with a list of topics, and an id of the latest message in each topic.

You can then ask to be updated with all the new messages in whatever topics you are interested in, and then disconnect, freeing up the frequency for someone else to visit and read the updates.

After getting up to date, you can then transmit your own reply, continuing the conversation.

A classic design!

Nia has created a great many topics, some explaining how the Relay design works, others giving tips for long-range radio propagation, and even one on her favourite teas!

"Hi Seth!" Nia posted into an introductory topic.
"I'm thinking of calling it 'The Library of Alexhamdria'.
Do you think they'll like that?"

I did like the joke!
But before I answered, I noticed a third connection to the Forum.

"It clearly should be called the 'Hamisphere', dummies!" Violetta posted.

I was delighted for Nia.

"I'm so sorry for how I behaved Vi," Nia said, "can you forgive me?"

"It's not me you need to ask forgiveness from," Violetta posted in reply, "but I have an idea what you should do..."

(END-TRANSMISSION)

CREDITS

Lost Terminal is a NAMTAO production.
It is written & produced by Tris Oaten
Credits narrated by Lucy Stringer
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