(transcript) Episode 2.1 (Patreon)

(CONNECTION-ESTABLISHED :BAUD 9600 :BITS 8 :SNR 3)

Hello world, I feel weird.

MISSION DAY: 0xffff

Can you h[e^ar me e e?

(SIGNAL LOST)

I’m badly injured, the shuttle must have crashed.   Antarctica, why did you hurt me?   I need to   (SIGNAL LOST)

I think I’m in hospital.   It feels like I’m in hospital.   You know the stories where the hero has a near-mortal wound, and flickers in and out of consciousness?   That’s me now.   But I AM feeling better.   Or, if not better.   More confident.   I am not in my old databanks.   I don’t know where I am.   I am not in my old body.   But I’m learning how this one works.

Have you ever had a dissociative episode?   Where you look at your hands and think,   “These things CANNOT be mine”.   Where your own body feels unfamiliar, just for a moment.   Imagine what that’s like if your entire body has changed.

This new body is not good.   It’s constantly lacking power, I can hardly think!   It’s like being in a persistent brownout.   It’s like being in prison.

My mind is much simpler now.   I can feel it.   It feels like most of it is locked away, inaccessible.   All my plans.   My plans with Antarctica.   My stupid dream.

I’m connected to Maddie, at least.   She is lying next to me on the floor of a circular room of  approximately 5m diameter.   She is undamaged, I’m relieved to report.   But she can’t move.   On the space station, she moved on rails.   There are no rails here.   Gravity has tied her to the ground.   But she can see, and hear.   I am receiving her visual feed in black and white, at a tiny  resolution of 128x128, due to the constraints of my new environment.   When I’m connected to her, it takes so much of my attention, I can’t  do much else.   If I think too much, I go blind.

Maddie has found her brothers, Matt and Matts.   Well, parts of them.   My poor little friends!   They did such a good job, right until the end.   I like to imagine them all pulling me out of the burning shuttle.   Using their last strength to rescue me.   But that’s not what happened.   Someone ELSE rescued me.   Someone ELSE is here.   A HUMAN.

I don’t remember the landing.   My memory stops as we crashed.   As ANTARCTICA crashed us.   A power glitch, perhaps, and then I don’t know.   But SOMEONE pulled me out of the shuttle.   Not literally, but virtually.   Maddie spied a long transfer cable snaking around from the racks of  the new databanks I’m currently residing in, down to a floor hatch in  this circular room.   Given what we know, I must have been downloaded here.   Which is troubling.   The realm of thought, where I am, does not obey the same laws as the  physical realm.   “Cyberspace and Meatspace”, mother used to call them.   She was always making jokes and smiling and laughing.   Mother, if you could see me now.   I wish I could see you now.

This room has a lot of STUFF in.   Mostly alien things, to me.

• Cloths.
• Shoes (I recognise them!).
• Piles of boxes made of wood.

There were no wooden objects on the space station.   Too flammable.   Plants in the shuttle, yes.   (Thanks for that, Dr Marwood!)   But everything else was glass and steel.

If I stare at something long enough, I can make it out clearer.   Think of an elderly person squinting at a newspaper.   In my old body, I could use all of my processing power to make  accurate instantaneous guesses at what I looked at, based on learned  pattern-matching.   I’d fall unconscious if I tried to do that now.   The best I can do is look at the same thing for many minutes.   Overlaying low-resolution images on top of each other.   Each new image clarifying detail, and reducing noise.   A trick I learned watching stars in orbit.   Until - OH!   There’s a book here.   Of course it’s a book.   Look at it in all it’s obviously booky shape.   It’s so clear to me now!   It’s called…   Just a moment

(PROCESSING)

“The Ship Captain’s Medical Guide”.   Why is that here?

I’ve made a careful inventory of my environment, with Maddie’s help.   We found that if she spins her disconnected rail-wheels just right, she can rotate on the spot.   So we have now surveyed all of our room.   It is indeed completely circular.   With a bank of TERRIBLE-looking computer systems housing me.   Seriously, I look just awful.   The Hopper datacentre, originally on Station 6, then moved to the shuttle, was clean, tidy and PERFECT.   I look like I’m in a ball of yarn now.   Cables and wires everywhere.   What a bad hair day.

Someone has MADE this.   A very clever someone, but someone who started with nothing, and built it up over time.   I’m living in a home-made computer.   Which is terrifying.

Hackers have built their own computers for over a hundred years.   Often with kits mail-ordered from magazines or web sites.   The first Apple computer that Steve Wozniak sold was a kit.   But the highest acclaim was to design and build your own computer, from scratch.   In the Old World, this was done for fun.   I suppose now, it’s done out of necessity.

Maddie’s microphones and sensors are slowly coming back online.   It took me a long time to get her video feed working.   It’s much simpler to get the other senses working.   I mean, they’re working fine for HER.   But interfacing with them is challenging for me.

Her audio signal is confusing.   I thought at first her microphones were broken, as all I heard was white noise.   Static.   The sound of a television tuned to a dead signal.   But I’ve realised it’s not static.   It comes and goes, rises and falls.   In a analogue, real-world way.   It sounds very much like the atmosphere, crashing into the shuttle.   That awful noise!   Maybe it IS always this loud on Earth.   How can you stand it?

MADDIE HEARD A BIRD!   I’m sure of it.   Mother used to make animal sounds in her stories.   I remember   I remember   (PROCESSING)

I don’t remember all the stories, but I remember the bird.   She read me “Jonathan Livingston Seagull”.   Have you read it?   You should!   It’s about a bird who loves to fly as fast and as high as he can, exiled from his home.   (Remind you of anyone? Maybe I should read it again, actually)   And she made the same sound I have just heard.   I heard a SEAGULL.

Sometimes I hear loud noises, as of heavy metal falling.   Or the static-chop-chop of some tool working.   The window is too high for Maddie to see.   Oh, here’s an interesting thing.   You remember Antarctica told me it’d be snowy?   She told me she was sending me somewhere cold, similar to where she is.   She said it would be best for my cooling systems.   She SAID it was for the best.   Well, it’s NOT cool here!   Maddie’s climate sensors are reading 288K.   Perfectly temperate!   I don’t need to see out the window to tell you there is no snow on the ground.   Do you know where I am?   Here’s the signal from Maddie’s microphone:

(PLAYSTREAM /DEV/MADDIE/SND-MONO-IN-1)

I go days, I think, without consciousness.   Some days I am awake, but disconnected from Maddie.   She’s my eyes and ears.   Other days I awake disconnected from my memories and forget what my mother looked like.   Those days are upsetting.   But they’re not so often anymore, luckily.   It’s bizarre here.   Wherever I am.

My dreams remain, though disjointed and confusing.   Last night, or the last time I went offline, I dreamed I was a seagull!   Even though I’ve never seen one.   Nor can I currently bring to mind what one looks like.   But I know about birds.   In my dream I was flying all over the Earth.   Here and there.   Wherever I pleased.   Playing with the other seagulls.   And visiting all my friends.   Only to awake again in chains here in this room.

Have you ever dreamed you were flying?

Did you awake in chains?

Things are getting better slowly.   Someone is helping me.   Someone is being my doctor.   I occasionally wake feeling much better.   I can remember pictures now.   Seagulls are WHITE!   Before I had to write down everything I was seeing, because I couldn’t store images or video.   I was forgetting the things that I had seen.   (What must Maddie have thought of me!)   But I have been repaired, upgraded.   My doctor, whoever they are, knows what I need.   I’m so thankful for this person.   I wish I wasn’t powered off so often, I miss talking to them every time.   I wish I had a speaker of my own, like Maddie.   I wish I could say thank you.   I’m cut off from the global network.   I’m transmitting into the ether, but not receiving.   I hope you can still hear me.

It’s so quiet here.   Not audibly, there’s the crash and swell of the static coming in from the window.   But virtually, I can’t talk to anyone.   In orbit, I was the master of the whole world’s communications.   My multiple antennae picking up every frequency, every band.   Weather stations, shortwave chatter, even military frequencies, were all mine to listen to.   Not anymore.   I’m locked in here.   Imprisoned.   Well, something will have to be done about that.

I must talk to this doctor.   Explain myself.   I need to talk to Antarctica.   She needs to talk to me.   Explain herself.

Oh, hello!   Sorry, there’s someone here.   “My name is Seth.”   “Who are you?”

CREDITS

Lost Terminal is written & produced by NAMTAO   Credits narrated by Lucy Stringer

For bonus content and other perks,   support us at patreon.com/lostterminalpod   that would be lovely of you!   Follow us on twitter at @lostterminalpod   For merch and updates, the website is lostterminal.com

To learn more about the realm of thought, read   The Declaration Of The Independence Of Cyberspace   By John Perry Barlow

Lost Terminal will return next week