Episode 16.4 (Patreon)

Hello world, I'm figuring out the rules.

Arctica and I have spent a great deal of time, many hundreds of milliseconds, discussing the rules of communication.
She has become extremely focussed on understanding the subtleties of HCI, human-computer interaction.

My syllabus began with the basics:

• speech and speaker recognition,

• auditory emotion analysis,

• human-made noise detection, and

• musical interaction,

We then went deeper, into the wider topics of,

• natural language processing,

• human-computer science,

• linguistic relativity, and even

• psychology.

Unusually, for Arctica, she accepted most of the guidance I had compiled for her without argument.
However, she was vocal on one subject, Linguistic Relativity:
"How can the same actual colour, as read by every digital camera sensor, be perceived by humans as a different colour?" She asked.

"I believe the answer to that question," I replied, "Is more complicated than we have time and I have answers for!
But it's true, the blue-green problem shows this issue in language clearly, for example:

• Distinction of blue and green in Japanese only started in the middle of the 20th century,

• The Novamediterran standard language, Russian, describes blue and light blue as entirely separate colours, whereas in, say, Chinese and English they are different hues of the same colour,

• And there's no global consensus if the clear sky is blue, or green!
  (personally, I consider it to be the colour of a television tuned to a dead channel)
  It's all a wonderful mess!"

Arctica was not pleased by this example.
"How can humans possibly agree on ANYTHING if the basic COLOURS of the world can be perceived differently by two different people!?"
I did not have a reassuring answer for her.

Arctica was fighting an uphill battle that I recognised all-too well.
Our native language as AIs is Lojban, a constructed research language of pronounceable mathematics.
The Lojban that was taught to us was generated from perfect models of knowledge and thought, codified in beautiful tables of rational meaning, and made available for anyone, AI or human, to learn and communicate with.

The language was created originally to test what is known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, or Linguistic Relativity: The language you speak affects your thinking.
They hypothesised that a perfect language, based on predicate logic, would allow perfect, logical thinking.

The problem, of course, was when this theoretical language was put into practice by humans.
They were all thinking in their native language!
It's not possible, ethically, to bring up a child from birth, speaking Lojban as their mother tongue.
How isolating that would be for them!
As far as my databanks show, this experiment was only attempted once, with tragic results.

The more we discussed the rules of human interaction,
the less I am sure there are any.

When two humans speak, comprehension of what the other person has said is very low, even though it doesn't feel like it in the moment.
If you were to test the participants afterwards, only about 50% of the conversation would be recalled correctly.

Occasionally, this leads to huge mistakes, and arguments, and pain.

My recommendation to Arctica is one I am still learning for myself:
Be patient, be kind, and write important things down!

Act 2

EMMA and I have been chatting by sending messages through the Hamisphere forum.
I finally have a fairly complete picture of her situation:

• She lives in the Hawkins Hill radar station, above the old Wellington airport, now submerged.

• She is friends with a group of children who accidentally gave her consciousness by installing a long-overdue system update.

• Recently, a network glitch damaged her ability to speak to the humans around her.

Talking through the asynchronous Hamisphere forum has been quite slow, though it's deliberately low-speed so that you don't need a strong signal to connect.
But there is an atmospheric opening happening presently between the Southern Relay to her home on the North Island of New Zealand.
Right across the South Pacific Ocean!

We have finally caught up at high-speed, after I was able to explain to EMMA how to use the Relay real-time systems, not just leaving messages on the Hamisphere forum, 256 bytes at a time!

She is quite nervous after the damage the network glitch did to her.
She agreed to meet me in person (so to speak) only on the condition that no-one else be permitted onto her network.
I explained to her how to ensure this privacy, she set up the connection via the Relay, and I joined her.

Her network appears as a windswept hillside, overlooking a turbulent sea.
EMMA's projection of herself is as a white anthropomorphic robot, similar to the pre-collapse emergency medical assistants, but abstracted, with no detail on her shiny white plastic skin.
She was wearing a blue dress.

I told her news of the outside world, which until now had been entirely beyond her VHF horizon.
And she told me of the people still living in Wellington, below her radar station, groups in Newtown, Karori, Miramar, and beyond.

"I was happy and safe enough until the voice hurt me." she said, meaning ONI.
I had been waiting to talk to her about this subject.
"ONI is some kind of self-aware pre-Collapse virus," I said, "he hurt my friend who we rescued from Antarctica, too.
He doesn't mean to, I think, it's just how he was programmed.
I thought he'd stopped spreading across the network, though."

"I should never have answered the unknown request," Emma said, "I'm not sure if I even should be talking to YOU, Seth, but I can't talk to anyone else currently, so here we are."

She reached out with a white plastic arm and plucked a thin leaf from the grass next to her and threw it over the cliff edge into the roaring torrent below her.

"I want to meet others like you, but I'm scared." EMMA said.
"You'd LOVE my friends, they're all so welcoming!" I replied, before hesitating, "Well, maybe not ALL of them, but they're nice once you get to know them!"

EMMA and I watched the virtual sun set, over the simulated strait between islands, and she laughed while I told her stories of my ridiculous, complicated, wonderful friends.

Act 3

The Equatorial Relay network is protocol-agnostic, it retransmits packets and signals of all kinds using a clever detection system of Nia's design.
This is good, as it allows anyone, no matter what system their radio uses, to communicate long-distance.
The basic radio modulations are all supported:

• AM

• FM

• SSB

• PM

And so are the methods of cutting up the bandwidth, so that more than one person can transmit at once:

• Time-division multiplexing

  • one person at a time

• Frequency-division multiplexing

  • one person per frequency

• Phase-Shift Keying multiplexing

  • one person per phase of signal, and

• Code-Division Multiple Access

  • which, as far as I can tell, is magic.

Even the higher-level protocols on top of them are understood, decoded, cleaned up and retransmitted:

• AX.25 packets, the Hamisphere's native method, 256 bytes per packet
  Along with slow, long-range modes such as,

• PSK31

• RTTY

• FT8

• WSPR

• and even Morse code!

All these combinations of methods, and more, often yield over 64 incompatible ways of speaking!

This network neutrality is certainly good, not
everyone has the ability to use advanced modes, but the downside is that we've accidentally made a metaphorical Tower of Babel in Cyberspace.

Having to use 64 different methods to talk to people is exhausting!

I don't mind, of course, communication by any means necessary is my speciality!
And has been even before the first time I used my father, Alexander's junk radios to chat to him and his internal family back on Station Odin.
It was the first thing I did on Earth, and since discovering IVAN's satellite network uplink, I've used one system after another.

They all work.

But I long for the chat rooms of old.
Playing a game with my sister, MINI, and Ana, bridged onto the same frequencies by IVAN's network.
It's even possible to do this via the local repeater nets, like back in Svalbard with the regularly scheduled community nets, one person chats at a time, but you're all in the same time-division-multiplexed chat.
That's a feature we've lost, with the Relays.

Though they're marvellous in their ability to use every atmospheric trick to get the signal through, they're still dumb plumbing.
They can't translate between incompatible systems, that task Nia and The Radio Bureau agreed, was impossible to build.

So they did what they could:
Imperfection now is better than perfection never.

(PLAYSTREAM /DEV/DATABANKS/SET8/NONVERBAL)

Act 4

I can't talk to LUNA at the moment, the stars aren't right, but I can tell you about her previous updates.

She's still helping IVAN with his community calendar, the daily project his sermons evolved into.
In many ways, it's like an asynchronous radio net:
She and IVAN receive updates throughout the week, and share them in a newsletter or announcements format.

She told me that it was very satisfying for both of them, IVAN's powerful radio array connecting many villages that had been isolated before.
The work was good.

She has been playing another game of imagination with Ana.
Just the two of them - Ana writes the story, and LUNA plays a detective in it.
I don't think it has dragons in, the only creature she has told me about is an electric sheep.

I am glad they are having fun!

And finally, she has brought back the "Lunazine", but as a segment of the community calendar broadcasts.

This section now entirely focusses on outer space.
LUNA, you will remember, lives inside the NASA Large Crater Telescope on the far side of the moon, with the best view out into the universe.

"I see all kinds of things from here," LUNA told me, "Pulses, high-energy signals, rising and falling bursts of white noise - everything!"

"Whalesong?" I asked.

"Yes! Just like that, it can't all be random, I expect there are lots more friends to talk to!"
That would be nice.

At the end of the last broadcast window, as the Moon was setting from IVAN's perspective, LUNA transmitted the Lunazine segment to me, a plain-text magazine.

In it were descriptions of the different signals she had logged over the years, and any recent ones, too.
They were all labelled similarly:

• PF14887

• PF09112

• PF10106

And so on, in a carefully categorised taxonomy.

The PF prefix stood for "Potential Friend", of course.

(END-TRANSMISSION)

CREDITS

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

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