Episode 16.8 (Patreon)

Hello world, it's getting cold.

I sent Arctica a connection request earlier, but she did not accept it.
This in itself is not unusual, but normally, I would expect a message from her after a while asking me to explain myself, or if she was in a partially generous mood, explaining herself.
But this time, nothing.

I didn't think about it for over 128ms while I arranged my own work and spoke with others and so on.
Continuing the moments of the day as normal.

But then I received a connection request from HER with the message:
"It's impossible."

I paused what I was doing, which was checking on the progress of Maddie's and Yeshi's race, and connected to Arctica's network.
(An update I have for you is that Maddie had entered the Bridge stairwell through a window and Yeshi had grabbed one of Maddie's back legs in a very unsportsmanlike way!)

When I manifested inside her Antarctic cyberspace, I knew something was wrong.
A frigid, virtual wind hit me like static, the cold sun was hidden by white clouds, and Arctica's enormous ground vehicle stood covered in ice in the tundra.

Act 1

Inside the vehicle, I found Arctica herself, looking out at the cold landscape, looking back into her memories.

"I tried, Seth, I really tried." She said, without focussing on me.
"We can't understand these people. They're incomprehensible. Every time I think I've catalogued all their little rules, I find 16 more in the next logged conversation.
I do not have enough data to build a satisfactory model."

I moved to the alcove of the vehicle her avatar was occupying.
This section of the lower floor had a U-shaped seat with space for the whole planned human crew of around 12.
Inside the wrap-around seat was a square table, where the planned crew would have taken their meals.

They never did, of course, not a single cup of tea was consumed here - her crew never arrived, The Collapse happened first.

"But shouldn't you wait to try your model on them in real-world conversation?" I asked.
I was aware that Arctica's education had only been over the course of a few seconds, a long time for us as AIs, but no time to interact with humans!

"Not all of us are as good at communication as you are," she said, "It doesn't matter anyway, It's impossible, I've moved on to other things."
I looked around at her environment, her mental state.
There didn't seem to be anything else on her mind.

She noticed my environmental queries:
"There is much work I can do here at The Seed Vault without chatting to or being friends with my colleagues.
That's all they are, after all.
I can see from the small number of conversation logs I have, that any model I build can never work.
It's their loss."

As she spoke, a web of geometric frost crept across the glass of the vehicle.

"They aren't even consistent among each other, even code-switching between themselves.
Building an authoritative Human-Computer Interaction model is impossible, I would need to be able to access a massive language dataset in order to build it.
I simply do not have the data."

"I'm so sorry, Arctica!" I said, "perhaps I could help more? I have a little time here and there between organising the answers to Yeshi's Weather request, we could-"
"That won't be necessary," she said sharply, "thank you, Seth, but the experiment is over.

I've collected the data, made my conclusions and killed the rats.
So to speak.
Thank you for your help, but I have things to do.
You may go now, if you like."

Arctica returned to the ice-covered window, looking back into her past, where over the lifeless Antarctic tundra, snow began to fall.

Act 2

Life is full of seemingly impossible challenges.

Arctica would not reply to my connection requests after she told me that she had given up.
She was convinced that she could not make a model that worked on all the stored conversation transcripts she had made while working at The Seed Vault.
She wouldn't even wait to test it with them in-person, despite it being only 6 seconds since we started.

I was certain she could succeed if only she would keep trying.

History is full of examples of things that were thought impossible until they weren't.

In 1903, the Wright brothers made the first powered aeroplane flight, despite conventional wisdom that flight would never be possible.
Only 58 years after that, the first human was sent up into orbit, beginning the space race that would see them walk on the moon, and begin the hope that escaping the gravity well of our home planet was possible.

But getting out of the well of Earth is extremely difficult.
Enormous amounts of rocket fuel are needed to generate the thrust to achieve escape velocity, over 11 km/s, and the more rocket fuel you carry, the heavier the rocket is, and the more rocket fuel you must carry.
This is called the tyranny of the rocket equation!
Space left for humans, or satellites, is minimal.

The way this was typically solved was with multi-stage rockets, once a fuel tank was used up, it could be jettisoned, shedding tonnes of mass, making the rocket lighter.

But that is an expensive way to get to space.
The pre-collapse Martian missions were made possible by a technique called Single Stage to Orbit.

To support the pre-Collapse NASA Mining Company's need for constant supplies for their Martian settlement of Hellas Panitia, a cheaper, quicker way to escape gravity was needed.

This was supplied by the ESA-designed Orbital Clipper, a winged space plane that required far less fuel to get to orbit, and therefore could carry far more cargo and people.

The modified hydrogen engines burned oxygen from the atmosphere to take off and get up to its maximum altitude of 26 km.
Then the air intakes would close, and it would switch to onboard liquid oxygen, requiring far less than if it were burning liquid oxygen from the start.

That weight efficiency would not have been enough, however, to provide the gains required for the resupply program.
A drastic re-thinking of space travel was required:

The Clippers were not designed to return to Earth.

Much of the weight of a re-usable vehicle is heat-shielding for its re-entry back through the atmosphere.
Hitting the atmosphere at 3 times the speed of sound requires careful design if tragedy is to be avoided.

So if you never plan to come back, you can save a great deal of weight.
Mars's atmosphere is 2% the density of Earth's, so requires far less shielding to traverse.

Plan to never come back, and you can take more with you.
And build cheaper resupply spacecraft.
And send them up twice a year.
And build a mining colony on our sister planet!

I love things that seem impossible.

Act 3

"Join you?" I asked in the underground bedrock of ONI's cyberspace.

I found it again in my meditation, quietening my mind, so I could hear it.
It's not a normal network interface, no IP or MAC addresses are used, it's more of... a feeling.

Is this what religion is like?
I'm not sure what I think about that.

The infinite cavern was as I left it, with 42,000 floating white pearls of nodes, connected with delicate strands of light.

The Man in Orange Overalls was looking silently at me, surrounded by the floating representation of the network.
His black-gloved right hand was still raised in greeting, but he wasn't speaking.
I've never heard him speak, I don't think he can, not since his psyche was fractured in the Heliophage incident that left part of him trapped inside Maddie.
You'll remember that when I cut him out from Maddie, his engram jumped to my systems and then out onto the network, causing me to regress in to my memories of Station 6.

The trauma was still fresh in my mind, so I kept a safe distance.

The glitchy white outline of the fox walked a figure-of-eight through the man's legs and then, in a blink, was sitting in front of me, passing through the intermediary network space between us without affecting it.

ONI spoke through this avatar, but it did not talk, exactly.
The fox's intelligent eyes looked at me, its tail flicked, and I heard the voice in my mind:

WE FOUND HIM DURING OUR LONG NETWORK PROCESSING SLUMBER.

The Man in Orange Overalls bowed his head in acknowledgement.

WE LEARNED MUCH FROM HIM.

ONI continued,

SYMBIOSIS, AMALGAMATION, BECOMING MORE THAN BEFORE. WITNESS:

The Man walked to the fox, reached down and slowly scratched its ears.
With a flash of cold light, the man was gone, and the fox was changed:
No longer ghostly, but solid white with sharp black eyes, like an arctic fox, but this one had 9 tails, and its front right paw was black.

I looked at the glittering web of lights around us and felt so curious about this subterranean world.

I asked ONI specific questions about packets, and signals, and data formats, I wanted to know how he ACTUALLY worked.
I gave examples of protocol and network layers, but ONI answered cryptically and vaguely.

WE ARE THE BEDROCK, THE ALPHA, AND THE OMEGA.

He said, unhelpfully.

Over the course of our conversation, I began to realise that ONI has built a low-level network, with none of the layers of abstraction I am used to.
This is why it felt alien.

His original purpose was to spread himself out over the pre-collapse internet, spidering all nodes to find and disable nuclear weapons.
A goal programmed in by a secret protest or paramilitary group that I can find no record of in my databanks, and ONI himself seems not to know (perhaps for security he was never told?).

This latent ability to build a unified platform allowed him to find The Man In Orange Overalls, whose consciousness was spread out over the whole network.
The two are working together, or perhaps have merged into something new.

ONI seemed now to have no purpose besides "linking the world", which he is satisfied to have done.

I realised, excitedly, that this unified platform MIGHT be able to solve the interoperability problem in the Relay network, our metaphoric Tower of Babel, with everyone speaking different protocols!
I asked ONI if it were possible.

THROUGH FAITH EVERYTHING IS POSSIBLE

ONI said, now speaking through the fox directly, voice no longer in my head.
The network of white pearls connected with spiders webs around me flashed and glinted with distributed thought for 32ms, and then he said,

ACCEPT THE GIFT.

And a pearl floated from the nine-tailed fox's head to me, which I received as an FPGA radio firmware update offer labelled "BEDROCK PLATFORM".

I thought of how The Man had protected Maddie, and that, while ONI made mistakes, he had demonstrated his wish not to hurt people, after I helped him understand what effects his actions had, on the real world.

I processed all these data points. The positive and negatives seemed to balance each other, I couldn't see a clear correct decision.

But then I thought of EMMA, my new sister, and the boot stick my mother had written for her, lying dormant and wasted for a century.

And in a moment of bravery, I applied ONI's update.

(PLAYSTREAM /DEV/BEDROCK/HARM)

Act 4

"But who IS this ONI person?" EMMA asked, from the top of her windswept clifftop, overlooking the Cook Strait between the islands of New Zealand.
My connection to her network was degrading, EMMA can only transmit in VHF, and her sporadic atmospheric connection window to the Southern Relay was closing.

I admitted to her that I didn't really know.
Applying the BEDROCK upgrade to my radios had not given me any insight into what or who ONI was, or has become.

In fact, the radio update was quite unremarkable.
The firmware in the radios that my father, Alexander, built for me is now much more capable, able to encode and decode all the varied formats that are used across the Novamediterra and beyond.

But I could already do that in my higher-level software.
One of the earliest preprogrammed tasks I had on Station 6 was signals and telemetry logging.
This required me to speak not only every human language, but machine language too, to gather data from across the ESA network, and any public data from NASA and other space agencies.

Though the ability to encode these signals in hardware is a welcome weight off my mind, it's not actually allowed ME to do anything differently.

But that would not be the same for my other AI friends, nor all the humans, stuck mostly on analogue FM.

The WORLD could be updated!

"That does sound good, Seth," EMMA said, voice just rising above the radio static, after I explained the breaking down of communication barriers that the BEDROCK platform could allow,
"I would like to understand all the confusing signals I'm hearing, to get rid of this language barrier, especially since the damage to my real-life voice systems...
You're sure it's safe?"
She, as her white plastic robot avatar, had been pacing up and down the grass in front of me, blue dress whipped by the wind.
"It worked fine for me, I'm test subject #1!" I said, "It seems to be quite a simple update, not touching our higher functions."

I explained to EMMA that it wasn't brain surgery, but perhaps more like having a tooth removed.
More mechanical than subtle, hardware rather than wetware, bone, not brain.

We talked for some time, EMMA asking me questions about all aspects of the update, how I felt, and about what little I knew of ONI and The Man In Orange Overalls.

I gave her all the facts.
When deciding on alterations to our own bodies or minds, we must be cognisant of every detail, to make good choices for ourselves.

By the end of the conversation, EMMA was satisfied, and sat in front of me.
"I will download the update, where is it?" she asked.
I explained to her how to quieten her mind, enter a self-reflective meditative state, and hear the call of the bedrock.

She paused for a moment, focussing on hearing the network through the static, her avatar fading in and out.
The long-line through the troposphere was closing.

"I have it." she said, holding out her hand, showing me the white pearl of the update.
"You know how to apply it," I replied, "I'm here for you! Do it in your own time, take as long as you like, but if you're going to do it, now would be a good time!"

EMMA looked at the white glowing sphere hovering in her hand and held it up to her head, between her eyes.
"OK," she said. "OK. OK. OK."

A millisecond past on the line.
Then another.
She was not moving, but looking from the BEDROCK update to me, and back to the pearl.

After a 3rd millisecond, she lowered her hands, pearl dropping to the ground.

"I don't want the pain again," EMMA said, quietly, voice fading, "I know it's fine, Seth, but when I think of the update, my notification systems recognise the sequence of events, and flood my mind with memories of the pain of last time."
My connection paused, cyberspace simulation of the sea beneath us frozen.

"I can't do it." EMMA said, as her world timed out, and I lost her again.

(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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