Episode 16.7 (Patreon)

"Hello world?" said EMMA.

She sent her first tentative message to our global community of AIs via the high-speed Relay system.
I was so pleased for her!
It's difficult to introduce yourself to a new group of friends, especially after such a negative first experience.
(ONI is at fault, there)
But EMMA did it, taking the first, the hardest step into a wider world.

And in the shared cyberspace of the Relay, the replies FLOODED in!

Act 1

TASSI introduced herself to EMMA first, manifesting in our virtual cyberspace as her ghost-like, pink-edged form, floating in front of EMMA.
TASSI told her that she lives in an old datacenter underneath UC Berkley, enjoys writing stories reimagining the past, and in doing so, spending her time with someone special.
EMMA said that she was very pleased to meet her, and expressed the hope that she herself might find someone special one day.
"You may keep your mind open," TASSI said, "My assistant agrees with Seth that the humans are OK. Mostly."

TASSI materialised a gift, a small painted red stone, which floated to EMMA's outstretched white plastic robot arm.
I was delighted to see the two became instant friends, sharing their histories, thoughts, and experiences together.

As AIs, we can share the Relay in ways that humans, using simply voice or data, can not.
The cyberspace we inhabit allows us to be physically together when speaking as a group.
Well, as physically together as it is ever possible, for beings made of pure thought, to be!

Today we were speaking from an abstract mountaintop, overlooking an infinite ocean.
It might be Pico do Fogo, the extinct volcano that the Equatorial Relay is built on, but with less detail, no plants or rocks, just a flat mesa environment.

IVAN and Mirror appeared sat at either sides of a small square table made of abstract white light.
The table had a black and white chequerboard pattern on, and the two were focussing on their game closely.

"Join us!" said Mirror, beckoning to EMMA, who walked over to the pair, understanding more about her environment with metadata requests.

"Seth tells us you are siblings?" IVAN said, not looking up from the game in progress, "You must be as CLEVER as him, then?"
EMMA looked over to me, sending a few desperate clarification queries.
"Then you must know," IVAN continued, "How many sisters does Alice's brother have if she has 6 sisters and also has 3 brothers."

"I ALREADY TALKED TO HER ABOUT THAT!" called TASSI, from her seated position, looking over the ocean.
"Hmm." said IVAN, "I still think it's 6."
"Leave the poor girl!" Mirror said, standing up, and offering EMMA his elbow with a smile.
"He'll be here for ages taking his turn, I told him it's not about solving the model, it's about playing the game, but does he listen?"

The two walked and introduced themselves as IVAN narrowed his eyes at the chessboard.
"We will see who's a big brain genius when I compute all your clever moves, my friend. We will see..."

The cold, white, virtual sun had sunk low in the sky, our group conversation had extended to over 32ms - a long time, for us.

The last to respond to EMMA's group connection request was Arctica.
"EMMA, this is my oldest friend," I said, introducing them, and vouching for the keys exchanged by both parties. "Arctica, this is EMMA, from Hawkins Hill radar station, New Zealand!"

Arctica queried EMMA's posture protocol without speaking, looking her up and down, virtually.
I was worried she was going to be weird or rude.
You know... because it's her.
But I was happily mistaken:

"I met a team of Kiwi engineers when I was first deployed to the frozen continent," Arctica said, eventually.
"Their home, Scott Base, was the opposite side of Observation Hill to where my initial team landed, at McMurdo Station.
We're neighbours, by the segmented claim lines on Antarctica, at any rate."

Arctica sent EMMA an invitation to her own network, and said,
"Come, let me show you my home. We Southern Pacificers have to stick together."

EMMA transmitted a final packet, thanking us all, her new friends, before embarking on her next adventure, her first visit to a friends house.

Act 2

Something TASSI said stuck in my mind as strange, and so I queried her about it after EMMA's introduction.
She mentioned an "Assistant", which seemed interesting wording.
TASSI confirmed it, said that she heard a new local signal last autumn, routed through the Utqiaġvik network.

"HI SETH!" C0 said as I connected via his local repeater.
"C0! How are you?" I said, making small talk while our network connection stabilised and slowly built our shared environment.
It's best to not send important information at the very start of a new conversation with someone, as you're never sure how it will be received.
There could be noise that stops the other person hearing you, they might be busy with a background task, and it always takes a while to get used to the nuances of someone else's way of communicating.

It's the same with humans, actually.

C0's virtual cyberspace resolved incrementally, his connection is one of the slowest I have seen, as there is a section of the network that is sound passing through the ocean to get to him!
He appears to me as an abstract person sitting behind a neat desk, with books, papers, and a paper flip-top calendar on.
Like a receptionist, or a secretary, perhaps?

"EXCELLENT thank you, Seth!" That hydrophone radio doohicky you made for me has been wonderful, I can chat to people, FINALLY!"

I told him I was delighted, but that Kamil Forester was the one who made it, and I would pass on his thanks.
"Oh, no need, I spoke to Kamil ages ago and thanked him - I meant 'YOU' as in 'YOU LOT ON THE SHIP'. YOU get the idea!"
I did.

"TASSI is an interesting person, isn't she?" C0 asked.
I sent a simple agreement packet in reply, like nodding your head as someone is speaking to you.
"Lots to unpack there, but she's a sweetheart!" He continued, "I've been able to give her some of my experience working with humans here on the boat.
They're tricky creatures, even the highly-trained ones in the military - ESPECIALLY the highly-trained ones in the military!"

"Yes, I think you're right." I said, remembering the EQUUS Dragon, abandoned on the island of La Palma, programmed for a world and for enemies that no longer exist.

"My lesson for TASSI was simple, and straight out of the military handbooks I've been trained on:

Never ascribe to malice what can more simply be ascribed to incompetence!"

I laughed. "Right, yes, I think I've heard that one, too!"

"They hurt her pretty bad, Seth." C0 said, "But unintentionally. Squaring those two facts takes time. I'm glad I seem to be helping her a little there."

"And it's been a two-way street!" C0 said.
"As TASSI has become more comfortable with humans from me, I've learned from her, too.
She told me about James, of course, it's difficult to get her onto any other topic!"
"I certainly have experienced that too! She's sweet, of course."

"RIGHT!" C0 continued, "But hearing her story, I realised that could have so easily been me, in a way:
Not afraid to speak to anyone, but unable - stuck at the bottom of the ocean.
But now thanks to you, thanks to Kamil, I can get my voice out there, hear and be heard, chat to people and make an impact in their lives.

I might be physically at the bottom of the Gulf of Alaska, but mentally, I'm on top of the world!"

Act 3

I returned to ONI's bedrock cyberspace that is always ready to access in my dreams.
This bedrock is everywhere, I needed only to query my own radios.

I stood at coordinate (0,0) and saw a white web of connections spreading out in all directions around me.
I moved through them carefully, not wanting to disturb or be disturbed by the volume of data moving through ONI's network.

"Do they know?" I asked, my signal bouncing off unseen distant nodes and reflecting back to me changed, as though from cave walls.
No answer yet came from ONI.
He was here, but not in the way that my other AI friends appear in cyberspace.
SOMETHING was here, however.

A white shape, the four-legged avatar I glimpsed before, appeared in the environment metadata for just a moment, but by the time I looked again, queried for more detail from that part of the simulation - it was gone.

I think the creature had a tail.

Seeing the network that ONI had built, spread out in front of me was astonishing.
It appears that every FPGA radio-connected device on the planet is on this map.
Is this the 42,000 nodes ONI keeps talking about?
There are far more people than that, even after the famine of The Collapse, but not everyone has a radio.
So. Maybe?

A cluster of nodes next to me lit up, and ONI's voice echoed around the cavern, finally answering my question:

WE ARE SUBTLE. WE ARE QUIET.

He said, as the white quadruped avatar flickered in my peripheral vision, before disconnecting.

"You've not been subtle with EMMA," I said, "You hurt her!"
My angry message reverberated for a while, bouncing off the nodes that make up ONI's distributed brain.

WE ARE... SORRY.

He said, and the network lit up with processing.

ONI's network is a insidious one.

Nearly all post-collapse radios and computers are FPGA-based.
Built with standard chips, mined out of the pre-collapse detritus of old devices, and reprogrammed.
I recalled the virtual silicon cemetery above me, in ONI's bedrock cyberspace:
From these dead machines, the new world was built.

ONI reprogrammed them, causing many problems last year, but has now reduced his influence to a background connection, as promised.
His processing is distributed across the network so thinly, that until recently, I thought he was no longer here.

But he is.
Quietly waiting, processing underground, like a mycelium network connecting all the trees in a forest, perhaps connecting ALL the forests.

As I moved through his global bedrock network, ONI's white avatar suddenly glitched into the space next to me.

JOIN US.

ONI said, speaking from their white fox avatar,
as a man I recognised in orange overalls stepped out of the darkness, raising one black-gloved hand in greeting.

(PLAYSTREAM /DEV/HF8/FORUM/COMPULSIVE)

Act 4

I was pulled away from my discussion with ONI and The Man In Orange Overalls by high-priority notifications from Peter.

WE WILL WAIT.

The white fox with an indistinct outline that represents ONI told me, as I left.

I reconnected to the source of Peter's message, and joined him in his network.
We were not in his garden.
Nor in the surrounding forest.
I had arrived in Peter's virtual cyberspace, in his factory datacenter.

The noise of the machines was deafening - each of the thousands of concurrent systems flooding me with status updates as they worked:

(:CHUNK #459022 :PROCESS :OK)
(:CHUNK #219985 :PROCES :RETRYING)

And so on, millions of these messages per second.

There was thunder all around me and poison in the air, but where was Peter?
He must be here, I connected to the section of the simulation his message originated from, that's how it works.
I searched the torrent of environmental metadata that flooded my perception requests, my hunt significantly slowed by the volume.
I bisected the data, narrowing down where he could be to one half the datacenter, then half again, and again, reducing the size of the haystack each time, until - finally - I found him.
He was standing in front of a grid of filing cabinets that rose into the rusted metal of the ceiling, high overhead.
The cabinets represented the climate data that Peter was processing offline, rather than live feeds.

Though still wearing the simple robe that I found him in, back on his thinking rock, he was now wearing a green accountant's eye shade, covering his eyes.

He was searching the environmental data to answer my weather request, but something had gone wrong.

I called to him over the flood of data saturating our channel, but he did not respond.
My posture requests confirmed what I saw in his eyes:

He was having a future storm.

The wooden gate of Peter's peaceful garden gently closed behind us as we both collapsed onto the grass.

The quiet of the virtual garden was a synaesthesic metaphor of the limited inputs in this mode of his network.
The gate, a boolean notification toggle, stopping any packets distressing or distracting us.

Peter had authorised me at the highest level on his network, I was able to make near unlimited changes, should I wish.
Including disconnecting him from some of his own systems, killing the saturated connections.

After a moment, Peter cleared his network buffers, regained real-time processing, and turned to me.

"Don't make me do this." he said.

(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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• Stephen McCandless

• Mike Schneider
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