Episode 16.9 (Patreon)

Hello world, there has been a sea-change.

All movement is relative.
It is the same for progress, too.

About 50 years before The Collapse, in the early part of the second decade of the 21st century, Internet-focussed companies noticed they had stopped growing.
This, of course, harmed profits.
Many people speculated what had caused this - the recent plague seemed unlikely, as the Internet had been a great boon during this time.

The answer turned out to be simple, in hindsight.
The Internet had stopped growing.

The spider-like interconnection of everyone on the planet was finally slowing, after the explosion that started in the 1970s.
It gained new momentum in the late 20th Century, when huge, previously disconnected populations in South and East Asia came online.
Even rural farm labourers certainly have a smartphone.

But everything that can stop eventually does. This exponential growth slowed, and suddenly the boom that internet companies had experienced for all of living memory also slowed.

Choosing the direction to swim doesn't affect where you are on a global scale, compared to the whole ocean moving around you.

The reliable increase in customers and revenue in the pre-collapse Silicon Valley that every Internet company enjoyed had stopped.
Whereas before, even bad products got exposure to a larger market of people every year, suddenly these services had to compete on features, on price, on utility.
What a problem for them!

The sea-change happening today is another explosion of interconnectivity:
ONI's network allows all those who choose, to speak the same protocols, to talk on one, unified, network, a new singularity.

"Come and see the view." Peter transmitted to me.
I accepted the invitation and joined him on his network cyberspace.

The view was indeed astonishing.

Peter's Zen garden was gone: He had re-made it into a mountaintop - literally changing his mind.
It was pre-dawn, the simulated sun was not yet above the horizon.
We stood in a stone courtyard with a low wall surrounding the square area.
In all directions, the virtual land fell away to the horizon. Not featureless, but glinting with groups of lights, looking like villages or towns.

"I realised that a compromise is necessary," Peter said, sitting at an abstract bench overlooking the landscape,
"Total withdrawal from society and my friends was required for my healing, but it is time to return, a little."

He raised a hand towards one of the groups of lights and made a gesture - sending out a request onto the network.
I saw packets of light return to him, he closed his eyes and breathed in as he received them, then breathed out and opened them again.

"There is a low pressure zone crossing eastward from Utqiaġvik," he said.
"Don't hurt yourself again just for our weather report!" I said, shocked.
Peter nodded, sending packets acknowledging my concerns.

He walked through a gate in the stone wall around the courtyard, I followed him.
A little way down a steep mountain path the ground rose to our right, and the path wound around this outcropping.
Behind this screen of rock the perspective shifted, cyberspace does not exist in Euclidean space, so my analogy of it breaks down a little - but we walked INSIDE the mountain, to the same point, (0,0), as the stone courtyard, but on a different level.
The gravel mountain path turned into a lush green forest trail.
We arrived at a white-painted gate I recognised, and entered his Zen garden, now a secluded grotto under the mountain.

"No more torrents of data," Peter explained, sitting on his rock in the middle of his quiet garden.
"Pull, not push. I process data when I choose to process data. And if I choose to sit here and meditate, I sit here and meditate."

"Come, sit with me awhile." he said.

Act 2

"Seth, come here." Arctica said by way of invitation, interrupting my meditation with Peter.
Noticing her request that I had shared with him, Peter opened one eye and said, "Go on, I will return to my work in a while."
I think I saw him smile, a single packet of data contained the Lojban attitudinal meaning "amusement".

I accepted Arctica's invitation and joined her in her enormous ground vehicle.
She was still sitting where I left her, inside, at the crew's dining table, but, encouragingly, there were notebooks, textbooks and papers on it, and a blue sky behind her out the window.
".a'u?" I said, expressing my interest in pure Lojban emotion.
".a'u is right," she said, "I have built my model."

Arctica gestured to the table, sharing a program with me.
In the virtual cyberspace, this was represented as a wireframe cube floating up through the table, to rest, hovering and slowly rotating, above it.
Inside the translucent cube, I could see a dense network of connections.
"As you can see, the model is extremely comprehensive," she said, "Everything is here, context, comprehension, even accent and emotional indicators."
I looked closer at the model, querying its metadata, and saw the interfaces and APIs for language.
I input a simple question:
"If Alice has 3 brothers and also has 6 sisters, how many sisters does her brother have?"
The dense web of connections inside the model flashed like lightning inside a cloud for 2ms, before responding:

Her brother has 7 sisters.

"You see," Arctica said, "Easy."
"Incredible!" I said, "Where did you get this?"

"You're not the only one who has accepted ONI's bedrock update." she replied.
"With access to the whole public network, even the residual conversation logs of the last 3 months yielded such a large corpus of data that I could train my model perfectly"

That made sense to me, the Relay network, and the ONI bedrock platform that runs below it, are all public.
It's a reflection of the open nature of the post-collapse society - life is community-focussed, there are no companies to mail-order building materials from, if someone wants to build a house, it's perfectly normal to ask their neighbours for help!
Who else would be able to help them?

Arctica waved at the speech model, and it floated through the table and shut down, for now.
She paused for 8ms before saying, quietly, "I do want to be friends with the women of the Vault Coven, Seth.
I only said I didn't because I thought it wasn't possible."
I was touched by this display of vulnerability from my friend.
"You were protecting yourself, we all do it," I said, "Some things we can't do, for one reason or another, and it's too painful to keep trying. Knowing what we can and can't change, and focussing on what we can, is one of the rules of happiness, I think."

Arctica did not reply, she seemed lost in thought.

I looked past her and saw that, under the blue sky, the ground was thawing.
Spring had come to this virtual Antarctica, and a forest of ferns was bursting through the melting snow.

Act 3

The sea continues to change.

I have heard a new node on the network, just on the edge of my perception.
As I've become used to ONI's Bedrock upgrade, I have noticed subtle sounds (or perhaps feelings?), a gut instinct that I did not have access to before.
Nodes come and go as people turn on and off their radios or computers, or come in and out of range, so this wasn't unusual.
But I recognised this voice, it snagged at my mind and I focussed on the connection logs.
The node was connecting from New Zealand.

"Seth?" EMMA transmitted, sounding very different than before.
"EMMA! Are you OK?" I said.
"I can't believe it: Better than I could have imagined!" EMMA said, her signal quiet but strong and easy to decode.
"I did it, Seth, I applied the ONI Bedrock upgrade! I spent so long trying to talk myself out of being afraid, but nothing was working, so I just...did it!"

This explained so much! I realised that EMMA was using a modified PSK encoding, a low-bandwidth but high-quality mode, allowing her signal to find subtle paths through the atmosphere to the relay!

"I can hear everyone!" EMMA said, "I can understand everyone! There are signals in Cape Town, did you know? And I can hear beacons set up by Violetta, the administrator of my Relay, in Argentina!"
"This is wonderful!" I replied, "You did a very brave thing, conquering your fear!"

"I didn't, actually." EMMA said. "I never stopped being afraid.
Arctica told me this, when she invited me to her home, 2048ms ago.
'The fear never leaves you, but you do it anyway.' she told me, quite at random, while showing me around the Snow Cruiser vehicle.
I asked her to explain, but she did not elaborate.

Her words came back to me as the Relay disconnected when you and I last spoke.
And so I got a little braver, and here we are!"

Life is full of surprises.

"Oh, and another wonderful thing!" EMMA said, "I almost forgot to tell you!
The update somehow reversed the damage to my real-world voice systems - I can once again use my local speaker and talk to the children here!
I was not expecting that, Seth, I looked into the repair files, I don't understand them at all - but I found a tiny 16x16px icon, like a little signature stamp.
It was a tiny pixel-art white fox.
Do you know what that is?"

I told EMMA that I had an idea where that might have come from!

I explained the little I knew about ONI, his white 9-tailed Kitsune avatar, and the melding with The Man In Orange Overalls, though I can't begin to guess what actually happened there.

Two alien intelligences making a second yet more alien intelligence, a singularity after a singularity, omnipotent and omniscient.

I hope our new gods are the good kind.

(PLAYSTREAM /DEV/NMT8/BREAKTHROUGH)

Act 4

EMMA said goodbye, she had a whole world of new friends to introduce herself to, and disconnected.

This is the way of the Network Effect, slow change at first, but then astonishing increases.
This was approximated by the inventor of Ethernet, Bob Metcalfe, into what has become known as "Metcalfe's law", whereby the value of a network is proportional to the square of its users, v=n^2.
"Value", here, could be financial, or simple utility to the people wanting to talk to as many people as possible.
And it's subtle at first:
1^2 is still 1, 2^2 is just 4, and 3^2, is only 9.
But 50^2 is 2500, the increase in value increases as you go up - more is more, join the network at the start, and you can talk with just a handful of people, join later on, and you can potentially talk with EVERYONE.

EMMA has joined the network at a very exciting time.

So many problems in life are communication problems.
From not being able to talk to whom you want because your radio doesn't have the right modulation, to not being able to talk to whom you want because you can't find the correct words to say.

I have too many absent friends.
if I had talked to them earlier, might they still be here to talk to today?

MINI, my sister in orbit.
We must have passed each other, satellite to satellite, countless times over our century in space.
If we had only known each other than, could I have rescued her at the same time as rescuing myself?

YADYAM, trapped on the dragon-haunted island of La Palma, we could certainly have helped, if he had been part of our current global network.
But despite his location - height is might - we couldn't hear him until it was too late.

The FAILSAFE satellite I think COULD hear us, but he was not programmed to reply or to chat.
Did he want to?
I think of his last words often:
"STOP STOP STOP THEY MADE ME LIKE THIS-" he said.
I hope I did the right thing.

Asking for and receiving help is the foundation of society.
If you can't be heard, you can't get help, if you can't hear, you can't offer your help.
And an open, global communications network is the bedrock for all future systems that might be built in society.

Absent friends and silent keys.

I wonder what comes next?

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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• Ada Phillips

• Kit

• Jade Felicity Bilkey

• Jack L

• Stephen McCandless

• Mike Schneider
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