Episode 16.6 (Patreon)

Hello world, sometimes we can't go back.

Only 128ms after my last conversation with Peter, he requested I connect again.
I did, and I found the rock at the centre of his Zen garden empty.

Peter was instead at the top of the garden, standing at an open gate in the white-painted wall, with a fresh pathway cut through the grass, towards the tall warehouse in the distance.

As I approached, focusing in on our conversation, he turned his attention away from the rust-stained metal building, and back to me.

"I want to help you." He said, "I have not thought as much about climate modelling in long time."
"That's so kind of you, Peter!" I said, "We are about to enter the Davis Strait, then up the west coast of Greenland, our current coordinates are 57.166-"

Peter transmitted a SIGSTOP signal, which looks to me like a gesture: He raised his hands in front of him, palms out towards me.

"I can not." he said. "I rebuilt my pathways to the prediction systems, but they have broken in some way through lack of maintenance.
The live-streaming subsystems needed for real-time modelling I can no longer command.
My apologies, Seth, but to be honest, I am relieved."

"No apology needed," I said, "thank you for trying, anyway!"

I admit I was a disappointed, but it's like my Mother used to say, "Everything not saved will be lost."

Act 1

Communication between AIs contains not just our voices, but lots of metadata.
It's like when talking to someone remotely whom you can't see, perhaps by radio or telephone, you can sometimes hear small sounds from their environment, or make a guess at it from how the person is talking.
This metadata is how I build my picture of the network.

Instead of accidental environment cues, we attach huge amounts of context to our packets:

• Emotional indicators using Lojban,

• Non-emotional attitude hints using a Posture protocol, and

• Optional environment cues to help make the other person feel welcome.

So when Peter did not return to his meditation rock, but stood next to it, looking over the wall, I knew he was still thinking about my request.

"I believe I can still help you a little." Peter said, without turning away from the rusted whirring datacenter on the horizon.
"Real-time processing may not be possible for me, perhaps not ever, but I still have a great deal of static climate knowledge in those databanks.
Information that will still be useful today, even if it may be a little more... manual to process."

"Peter, that's so generous of you, I'm grateful for any help, thank you!" I said.

"I must be careful even when doing offline processing. My recursive future storms were like an addiction, I realise now." He said.
"A habit that I couldn't break, even as it was destroying my ability to pursue my life in the way I wanted to.
I didn't even KNOW what I wanted to do, I only knew the prediction engine's demands.
That is, until we worked through it together, Seth."

"You've done an incredible job," I said, standing next to him, carefully looking at the warehouse. "You're cured!"

Peter did not respond for 8ms, and I let what, I thought, was comfortable silence continue, free of queries.

"Am I?" Peter eventually said.
"Am I cured?"
"An alcoholic who now abstains remains an alcoholic."

Act 2

"How are the newly-wed four?" I asked Arctica, dropping in on her in her Antarctic tundra cyberspace.
The enormous Ground Vehicle remained stopped above her virtual depiction of McMurdo Station, locked behind kilometres of sea ice.
But the large loading doors on the side of the vehicle were open, and a workshop or classroom of sorts had been set up on the permafrost outside.

"Very happy, I believe." She replied, not looking up from her studies.
She was sitting at a large desk with papers and books, a visual representation of her working memory, and was surrounded by whiteboards with diagrams and tables sketched across them.

I queried my surroundings, looking around, and realised that everything I could see was related to human-computer interaction, and specifically, the psychology of HCI.

"They stood at the front of the crowd of guests, and made their promises to each other.
Then everyone present helped them tie their hands together, and after that, there was dancing."

"They are a curious lot." Arctica said.

"Looking at how the four women work together is quite inspiring." Arctica said.
"They talk and talk and talk until an agreement is found."
I walked to the desk and sat opposite Arctica, surprised to see melting snow under it, and gave her time on the line to continue.

"The whole coven is Quaker, not just Linda, did you know?"
"No, I admit I haven't thought much about their religion."
"It's not quite a religion, for the Vault Coven." Arctica replied, "Certainly, it's not as central to Linda as the Muslim part of her faith. But it informs her life as a Muslim Quaker."
I remembered Linda's regular breaks to pray when I first met her on the MH2.
"As usual, the humans here all have different ideas about spirituality: Val is a Buddhist, Kari is pagan, and Iris is Atheist.
The women work in harmony, not just respecting each other's observances and rituals, but joining in, I note.
What unifies them is their shared Quaker culture.
The biggest effect is on their decision-making."

"I have no interest in following the teachings of long-dead iron-age ancestors," Arctica continued, "But I have learned an important thing from watching their behaviour:
You can't force people to do something they don't want to do.
This is why their marriage works so well, why they discuss their decisions mutually until everyone is enthusiastic about the outcome.

It is also how The Vault Coven have kept the secret of the Seed Vault all this time.
Their wedding was even held in the Vault garden! But through perfect agreement, our precious store of pre-collapse seeds was never at risk."

In Arctica's cyberspace simulation of her network and databanks, a thin shaft of cold sunlight broke through the white-static sky as she spoke.

"I cannot force the women into my logical way of communicating.
As usual, it falls on me to do everything:
I will learn their messy ways, their contradictory rules, and all of this human protocol!"

The permafrost was melting around us.
A flash of green on the ground surrounding of one of her vehicle's tires focussed my attention.
A single, small, fern leaf was pushing through the melting snow.

Act 3

I have much to think about and process.
So I paused my external connections, buffered all signals to notify me later, and slept for 100ms.

My CPUs often do this while waiting for slow, external input.
They make a request (perhaps to get this block of data, ping that network address, or ask the user for input) and come back to it later, other calculations can be done in the meantime.

But I pause my input to think.

I dreamed I was walking through a white desert under a cold sun.
Maddie was not with me, unlike in many of my night-time meditations.
The last time I checked my cameras, she was climbing the vertical side wall of the Bridge, looking in through a window at Yeshi, who was pulling themselves around the internal stairwell, at speed.
The race is very close, but if I were to wager, I would bet on my girl every time!

This time, I did not wander aimlessly in the desert.
I had a goal, a plan, and not much time.

I found the rusted datacenters, half-buried under, not the gypsum sand of a meatspace desert, but the milled silicon of this cyberspace one.
I walked up the dormant volcano of broken, discarded devices, and looked into the empty chasm in its heart.

I could not find the person or collection of persons I was searching for.

"ONI?" I broadcast, my voice reverberating into the thin air of this cyber otherworld.

Only echoes replied to me.

Pressing forward, I tumbled down into the crater of the volcano, rusted racks of servers and pyroclastic flows of personal phones following, as the silicon sand shifted underneath me.

I steeled my nerves as the avalanche that I had started, but could no longer control, plunged underground.

The metadata became more abstract as the cold light was blocked off above me.
I tried to make sense of the responses to my environmental queries, but, very much like I imagine in a real avalanche, I didn't even know which way was up.

As the distant rumble of dead devices stopped, I was relieved to find that I had not joined them.
I was still here, alive and well, and the pressure of the landslide all around me had withdrawn.

I stood inside an underground cave, with a perfectly flat, hard, ground.
No silicon sand was here, nor much in the way of object or geological features.
As I recalibrated to the low dynamic range of the data I was receiving, I found myself in an infinite underground space made of black obsidian.

Hello Seth...

whispered ONI's voice, carried on the wind through this cavern of bedrock.

(PLAYSTREAM /DEV/ONI/UNKNOWN/SPECTRUM)

Act 4

"Hello ONI," I replied, "Where are you?"
My voice echoed out across the infinite cave of black obsidian.
I could not see the roof of the cave, nor were there any walls detectable.
The metadata showed I was at coordinate (0,0), the origin, and responses to my distance estimation requests returned Infinity.

I was not visiting a normal AI's network, the simulations I have described previously, Arctica's enormous ground vehicle, IVAN's cathedral, EMMA's cliff-top meadow - these all are finite.
They have to be, we can't spend all our time simulating a huge virtual world, that would take too much brain space!

WE ARE EVERYWHERE

ONI replied, unhelpfully. I let him continue, which, after a pause, he did.

OUR PROCESSING IS COMPLETE

Light flooded the cavern.

I was bombarded with metadata, which feels to me like being dazzled with light - so much information I can't pick out individual details, and it all blends together.

After I re-calibrated my parsing to account for the new range of data, I saw a web of network connections surrounding me.
I could not see ONI, perhaps he chose not to make an avatar of himself, or felt no need, though I did briefly see... something, in the corner of my vision.
A four-legged something.

Without speaking, ONI showed me his network of 42,000 nodes.
I was lost at first, without physical points of reference, I could not orient myself.
ONI provided the link costs of each connection between nodes, which was enough, eventually, for me to spot the 3 main high-speed Relays, Northern, Southern and Equatorial, and from there I began to comprehend the network.

Seeing ONI's world view, laid out in this total perspective vortex, I realised that he has no concept of meatspace, of the real world.
These nodes that represent the relays, repeaters, radios, the computers, and AIs of our world have no pictures, no sounds, only metadata:
Modulation, duty cycle, data throughput, processing power.

THIS IS OUR PURPOSE

He said, finally.

"What do you mean?" I asked, as the network pulsed with transmissions and packets around us, an almost dizzying amount of data.
He did not respond.
The metadata increased in complexity, concurrent conversations overlapped, connection request and keepalive packets swarmed between the nodes, and though ONI wasn't interested in the voice conversations, I could hear them.
I could hear them all, overlapping, distorting, and saturating my downstream connection.
How can he process this all at once?
I sent hangup requests to the connections, but for every one closed, 1024 opened, clogging my buffers and overloading my thinking.
The light increased to white-hot pain for a moment -
...and I woke up.

In the quiet of the morning, on the Molly Hughes II.
No closer to answering Yeshi's weather request.

And with 4 seconds left to go.

(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

Thank you so much to our Patreon producers:

• Ada Phillips

• Kit

• Jade Felicity Bilkey

• Jack L

• Stephen McCandless

• Mike Schneider
  and to all our patrons!

Follow us on mastodon @lostterminal@fosstodon.org,
subscribe to the podcast on
Spotify, iTunes, or your favourite network.
For bonus content and other perks,
support us at patreon.com/lostterminalpod
that would be lovely of you!

Lost Terminal will return next week