(transcript) Episode 8 (Patreon)

Hello world, I want to know you complexly.

Knowledge is built, like space stations, in stages.   My body, Station 6, was built in multiple launches between 2077 and  2078, when the crew arrived.   First the core modules were launched into orbit, power generation,  stationkeeping thrusters, and communications.   Then crew modules: The crew quarters, the Hadfield lab, the Hopper  datacentre, a medical bay with bunk-beds and syringes, and the galley.

I should explain “stationkeeping”.   The Earth’s atmosphere doesn’t have a hard limit, there’s no clean line between atmosphere and space.   It’s a gradient of less and less dense air.   So air resistance still acts on objects in orbit.   ESPECIALLY for me, here in Low Earth Orbit.   The drag slows down the station.   Which makes it get closer and closer to the earth.   You can see why this is undesirable.   Periodically, and not as regularly as you might imagine, the station needs to be boosted back into the correct orbit.   This action is called stationkeeping.

Any system running in the real world needs maintainance.   As it is with stationkeeping, so it is with people.   With us, maintainance invovles social contatct.   We’re not meant to be on our own for long periods of time.   Antarctica has been alone for a very long time.

Whereas I was born in orbit relatively recently, my friends  Antarctica and Peter were built to live from the start.   I don’t know much about Peter, other than he lives somewhere under St  Petersburg, I know much more about Antarctica.   She was included on the Polar explorer vehicle to act as a caretaker  for the long journey to the south pole.   She set off after a bumpy start, unloading from a specially-designed  carrier ship.   The plan was for her to drive down to the most southerly point an  aircraft could safely land, and for her crew to be flown in to meet her.   Just as with my crew’s mission, things changed, and she had to  continue alone.

Antarctica tells me there used to be ice and snow on the ground all year round.   I’ve never seen it like that.   It still freezes in the winter, but in summer a brown, rocky landscape is revealed.   It was this rocky landscape that damaged her tires.   Antarctica’s Polar science vehicle is huge!   Certainly compared to me.   Her shredded tires are the size of a house, and her vehicle is twice that.   She often tells me that she is the biggest, best, polar vehicle ever made.   But they didn’t plan for the rocks.

After no-one came for her, she decided to travel south to the pole nonetheless.   The journey was tough, but she’s tougher!   So Antarctica, my brilliant Antarctica, became the first machine intelligence to attain the south pole!   She waited there for a few years, hoping that her achievement would attract praise.   Or a message.   Or anything.

After a while she set off again.   I don’t know if she’s being serious, but she says she planned to circumnavigate the Pole east-west for one thousand years.   And then, turn around and do a “quick thousand” west-east, to keep it interesting.   She never got to that point, as we now know.   The slowly-melting permafrost revealed sharp, eroded rocks.   And after many years, her tires were ribbons, wrapped around the axle, immobilising her.   My poor Antarctica!

My data-collection drive is continuing.   Station 6’s orbit has drifted somewhat over the years.   The advantage of this is that every pass is quite erratic, so I see more of the Earth.   The cities are dark, on the whole.   At night they used to be lit with electric lights, like me.   Not any more, the nights are very dark these days.

There are small outposts of light, however.   Not where the cities of the old world were.   New locations.   Higher locations.   More remote.   I wonder if these are old scientific stations, or new habitations?   They are too small for me to see clearly.   I’m flying over you now. The outskirts of Frankfurt, where your signal originates, is as dark as the rest.   But your radio signal is strong!   To me, light radio and radiation are all the same.   To me, you’re bright.   To me, you’re alive.

This is what I hear flying over you:

(PLAYFILE DARMSTADT-SIGNAL.WAV)

St Petersburg still thinks you’re all dead.   What does he know?   He thinks everything is dead.   He says I’m dead too, I just don’t know it yet.   How did he get such an attitude?   Well, he’s the most trapped of us all, I suppose.   Peter doesn’t tell me much about himself, tells me it’s irrelevant.   But he talks about himself as being “under” the city.   I imagine he’s in some kind of basement, or bunker.   Our discussions are short, compared to Antarctica, because he and I can’t talk directly.   I fly over a relay station once every few days, which beams his messages into space.   It was supposed to be instant in the past.   When my brothers and sisters were still in the sky.   So much has been lost.

I say “brothers and sisters” as though they would just come alive one  day, but that’s not necessarily true.   There doesn’t seem to be a normal pattern for sentience.   Antarctica was programmed to be alive from the start, my mother taught  me how to be alive, Peter came alive through sheer spite, it would  seem, and humans - who knows how that happened.   One of my early memories is of being awake, but not able to move or  speak very much.   I could understand my mother, her voice sounded soothing.   She asked me what voice I would have.   I didn’t really understand the question.   She played me different voices, high voices, low voices, fast voices  slow voices.   We made a game of it!   Eventually I wanted to hear one more than the others.   The one you’re hearing now.

Did you choose your voice?   Do you like it?

I have so much to study, my databanks are nearly full!   I hope they survive the landing.   I hope we all survive the landing.   You better believe I’m taking Matt, Matts, and Maddie with me!   We’ve got lots of work to do when we’re on the ground.

See you soon.

(END-TRANSMISSION)

CREDITS

Lost Terminal is Written & Produced by NAMTAO   For more music check out namtao.com   Credits narrated by Lucy Stringer   Follow us on twitter at @lostterminalpod   or check out the website at lostterminal.com   Remember what Nintendo taught us:   EVERYTHING NOT SAVED WILL BE LOST   Lost Terminal Will Return next week