Episode 17.6 (Patreon)

Hello world, Maddie has been exploring.

She couldn't find Lyosha after his breakfast today, so she is wondering around the floating town of Thule searching for her friend.
She walked over a large, flat boat where over 8 chickens and goats live. Maddie is well-practiced at being slow and quiet around them, due to her experience with Henrietta, Henmione, Jehennifer, the chickens who live on the MH2.
Another houseboat had a train of two smaller boats tied close behind it. These two boats were only large enough for two people to sit in, but were not used for transport.
Each was partly filled with earth and was covered with plants! The closest had fruit and vegetables growing in, and the one behind it was full of wild flowers.
After completing her 64-minute search, and not finding her friend, Maddie turned back to the MH2.
On her return journey she saw, between two larger boats, a tiny shed of a houseboat - only enough space for one person to sleep and cook.
But it was half sunk, the boat sitting at 45 degrees, most of the living part of it submerged, and the front jutting out of the water by a meter.
Maddie did not find her friend there, thankfully.

From the Gallery at the back of the Quiet Signet, Samik waved to Maddie as she jumped onto the large, flat back deck of the MH2.
"Your friend is inside," he shouted up to her, "Come on in!"
Maddie landed next to Samik gently, the leg actuators of her EQUUS systems compensating for her weight.
"I think he needs a little cheering up." Samik whispered to Maddie as she squeezed through the rear door into the Salon.

"Oh hey you." Lyosha whispered as Maddie entered the room. "Samik says we have to be quiet in the Office."
Maddie closed the compact door to the bathroom that separated the Salon from the Office behind her and sat next to her friend, at a small desk.
The office was far less cluttered than the other parts of the boat that I have seen so far.
The walls were panelled with dark wood, without the paintings and prints and porcelain figures that covered the Salon.
This was a calmer space.
Maddie put her head on the desk, next to a piece of paper that Lyosha was writing on, surrounded by discarded half-written pages.
"A good boyfriend writes to his girlfriend when he is away." He told Maddie.
"Paweł Wayda and Linda Noor are doing me a big favour:
He's going to take some flowers from Linda's beautiful garden on the hill above Longyearbyen and deliver them to Hester when he next visits Ny Ålesund!
Maddie bumped Lyosha's arm encouragingly.
"That's right! And so I'm writing the perfect letter to go with it.
I'm not very good with saying how I feel - Hester is so in touch with her emotions, we can talk through anything!
Or at least... We used to."
Lyosha wiped his eyes on his coat sleeve, then picked up the paper, showing it to Maddie.
Maddie did not understand what she was seeing, exactly, but beeped encouragement to him in Lojban.
"It's all here," Lyosha said, "my feelings for her, my hopes for our future, my plans for when I return to her.
We'll walk by the sea in the evenings eating rice porridge together, like we used to.
Like we always will!"

Act 2

"I am not discouraged." LUNA said to me at a quiet time earlier today.
Her slow signal is transported over the remains of the pre-collapse Lunar network, and then bridged via satellite relay KATE, K873, to me.
"I simply have much more to learn: Read lots of fantasy books, absorb the patterns, and synthesise my own stories."
"That's exactly what I would recommend!" I said. "It's hard enough for a human with a lifetime of experience living in the real world to write such a story.
For us, living in Cyberspace, it's an extra challenge!"
"Will you help me Seth?" She asked.
"Of course LUNA, as much as I can! Where would you like to start?"
"What is a story?" she asked.
That was an excellent question.

I told LUNA my understanding of stories, based on everything I had learned so far:
From my experience of the stories my Mother, Dr Redwing, first told me, back on Station 6, my orbital home, to IVAN's sermons to his radio congregation.
There is a thread that links all good stories, I have noticed.
According to my databanks, story and song and language evolved together, at the start of pre-history, around 50,000 years ago.
Writing would not be invented for another 45,000 years, and so information could only be stored in memory, the memory of the early humans.
This early modern human was very good at remembering where food is, where the dangerous animals are, and, by this time, the intricacies of the complex society they were in.
The humans found that they could remember information better if it hooked into these prime behaviours.
We call this, "Story".

"Then what makes a story?" LUNA asked. "Must our games only revolve around bread and beer and... KISSING!?"
"No!" I said, then, "Well, not ENTIRELY?"
I told her my research came to two concrete conclusions. Good stories teach us behaviours that work well in the fictional narrative of the story, but also those that work poorly:
Here's a story about someone who learns to stand up for themselves against a bully, there's a story about a lazy hare who learns only too late to put the work in, even if it's easy work.
It doesn't matter if the story has a positive or negative outcome for the people IN it, it is what we learn as readers, as listeners, as the audience that keeps us hooked.
"Does that make sense?" I asked LUNA, after explaining my theory.
"Yes!" She said, "I've got JUST THE IDEA, thank you, thank you, please excuse me, I must RESEARCH!".
I was pleased for her.
I was also relieved to be able to pause our conversation, as 50Meg was transmitting a mayday request.

Act 3

"Seth if you hear this, I did not die."
Meg's recorded, looped message was preceded by her hawk, Exu's, call.
A very recognisable pattern, cutting through the static quite distinctly.
I listened to her message as it looped, each time filling in the parts of the signal that I hadn't quite caught the last time.
Building up the picture, painting by numbers, so to speak, until her whole vivid story came in to focus.

Her message was composed of many days' recordings, log entries chronicling her journey through the desert of the Old Mediterranean.
"I can't abide the weakness in me now:
Walking kilometres out my way, hiding in the darkness like a rat, fleeing from the machines that claim this land, when it is I who should rule them as queen!
My power is waning, literal power: My household gods of, Ampère, Volta, and Watt are playing their games with me.
The power that flowed so easily before is failing me. With it, I could command these lost souls with a single modulated mutter, but without it, I can't live. Not in the way that befits robonautic royalty!"

"Easy prey is becoming hard to find." Meg's update continued, journaling a different day.
I could hear the sound of a strong wind buffeting her in the background of this update.
"I am a hunter. My stomach is easy to fill, my batteries, not so.
Even the weakest of the walking dead machines had sealed inside them the best of the Old World batteries.
But once those eggs were cracked and my radios drank deep of their power, they began decomposing.
I hunger for new batteries, but as the wheel spins and the seasons have changed, an entropic evolution has culled the weak and kept the strong.
And I have not kept pace.
When fleeing from a dragon, you do not have to outrun it, only outrun the slowest of those around you.
But now I have become the slowest, the lowest hanging of the fruits. A precarious position to be in with dragons at my heels.
Maddie knows the truth of this."

Meg's message contained many daily updates like this. Her last journal entry was short, the signal almost buried under the static:
"I am living now on direct solar, like our mutual friend Ally, and those that hide underground with her.
I have become a Heliophage! How low to fall when once I ruled the night.
But there are levels of survival I am prepared to accept.
This will have to do for now, Exu has spied danger to the East, and I must hide again.
Batteries and Bars, Seth."
(PLAYSTREAM /DEV/HF11/HELIOPHAGES)

Act 4

I have been browsing the Seaspace web around me here in Thule.
It is a delightful mess of unorganised information, stories, and advice.
Though superficially similar to the World Wide Web, the Internet of the pre-collapse, there is something very different happening here.
It's hard to explain, it's more of a FEELING.

Each ship has their own node, and in addition to providing dry technical information, the homepages almost always have a whole dump of data about whatever the family are interested in!
Food, as usual, is a big topic for many of these pages on the Seaspace:
From elaborate family recipes, some claiming to be passed down from pre-collapse ancestors, to simple utilitarian advice for surviving at sea for a long period of time, much is available.
I will ask if Samik would like to put Lyosha's favourite recipe, hønsekødssuppe, on the Molly Hughes II's homepage!
Though my databanks, or even paper records, would store that information perfectly well, there is something very friendly about working on these things in the open.
And it's not just for recipes, many of the families' Seaspace gardens have pages for each member of the family, parents, guardians, children, relatives, and friends.
And a common section in these pages is manual4me.

Especially common with the students, the manual4me is a guide to interacting with the person in the best way possible.
This is often quite high-level:

• "Languages I speak",

• "My disability and how to help me if I need it",

• "Food I'm allergic to, please help me avoid!".
  But in many cases, it's much more nuanced:

• "How I like to work with others"

• "Situations that might overwhelm me", and

• "How to help me with a panic attack".

Nothing is finished in these digital gardens, and that seems to be the point.
Half-written musings and half-baked ideas are the norm here, in a lovely way:
Laughing at perfection makes the whole Seaspace quite approachable to everyone - old and young, timid or brave alike.
There is a culture of feedback and acceptance running through much of what I have read.
Many pages thank people by name for suggesting feedback or corrections, often coming with callsign links to THEIR Seaspace gardens.
Like life, everything seems to be under construction!

(END-TRANSMISSION)

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