(transcript) Episode 2.8 (Patreon)

Hello world, we're back.

MISSION DAY: 0xffff

We have returned from the bunker.
Maddie is charging, here in my room in the lighthouse.
What an adventure we've had.
We have met another person, Ivan.
In the cracked bunker on the hill.
Well, not exactly a person.

Let me tell you the story of our adventure in the bunker.
Ivan introduced himself over the speaker system.
He said he was the caretaker.
and he had been living there for a long time, monitoring the outside world.

He invited us to look around.
Offered to give us the full tour.
On the condition that Adrian stayed outside.
"No heathens." he stipulated.
Whatever that means.

The entrance that we found ourselves in, he described first.
This room, he told us, with its lush red carpet,
dark wood furniture, has all the comforts visiting dignitaries expect.

Nothing remains of what he describes.
The floor is concrete, with a lot of debris:
Rotten leaves, small twigs, pine cones, and other forest detritus.

"After my training, I was a travelling monk, helping the faithful where I could."
Ivan said, as we continued into a side room, off the main entrance.
"But the world changed, and people moved away." he continued.
"Soon, only I was left." He paused, reflecting.
"So be it. I will carry on the old faith into the future, I have made provisions."

I was unsure what he meant by that.
I have read about religious hermits, and it seems Ivan is one.
He would not give a straight answer about how long he has been living in the bunker,
repeating that he would live there "as long as needed".

Anyway, we continued the tour.
In the side room were some rusty racks of what must have been computer systems.
Or storage databanks.
Impossible to access now, barely recognisable.
I was a bit shocked to see it, to tell the truth.
Momento mori.

We moved back into the entrance room, and then on Ivan's instruction, into a tunnel, leading deeper into the bunker.


The bunker system is very extensive, with many rooms off the main hall, to the left and right.
Lots of them seemed the same, with broken, crumpled metal.
Ivan described these rooms as "cells", beds for pilgrims.
He said that he has set everything ready for their stay.
Comfort is not a priority for him, but utility.

3 doors down on the right was a large room with piles of rusted metal, and what looked to be a blackened corner where a fire once blazed.
"Here we cook the simple foods to keep the believers sustained for long days of worship." he announced.
I don't think he can see these rooms as they are now, broken and rotting.

"Step into the cathedral, my son." He invited.
At the rear of the long bunker corridor there was an ornate doorway.
With stone pillars either side of it, and some sort of stone relief above.
Too blackened with age to see.
"BEHOLD!" Ivan told me, as we rolled through.
We beheld a wide, double-height room with banks of computer systems in the middle, and a large, cracked screen above it.

There was a face on the screen.
The face of a man with a long, black beard, and wide eyes.
The screen had burnt-in the image due to long years of use.
Which gave a ghostly effect.
Seeming like there were two faces, one stationary, one animated.

"Welcome, son of Man." Ivan said, as I entered.
I pointed out I was more correctly the son of woman:
Some other men and women were involved, certainly.
It takes a village, I told him.
Or, in my case, a crew.
But I am my mother's son, no other's.

He carried on speaking, ignoring my correction.
Maddie has spied someone sitting under the screen, in the shadows.
She rolled back, in trepidation.
"Many years I have been monitoring the earth with the listening equipment here." he told me.
"Watching the petty wars over resources, then land, now none left have the strength to fight."

This information tallies with my observations from orbit, and the stories that Alexander and his family have told me.
It's as if the Earth wanted to suppress human industry:
Simply raising the sea level swamped most of the cities, forcing the population up into the hills.
After steadily worsening summer droughts, the people moved north, in the case of the northern hemisphere.
Humanity's story in the Southern hemisphere seems to have ended, aside from some isolated island communities.
Now, as Ana has told me, the bastion of civilisation is centered in cities around the Novamedeterra.
Though, now I think of it, what of Ally, the signal from somewhere near the Alps, I wonder how she is surviving?

Ivan had finished his cathedral introduction.
"Are you a believer now, Seth?" Ivan asked me.
We rolled closer.
Now able to clearly see the body under the large screen.
Propped up in a chair,
a mummified human corpse, with a long black beard,
and a familiar face staring down over it.


"My body was useful for a short period of time" Ivan said,
after he noticed us looking at human Ivan sitting in the ornate chair.
It has many cables and pipes wrapped around it and connected to the machinery.
"But after many years, and no-one to relieve me of my duty, I knew I would need more time." He continued.
"I put in place automated systems so that when my time came, I could ascend into this metal sepulchre and continue the faith."

As he said this, a great sound boomed through the chamber.
It was a simple tone, with slightly dissonant frequencies mixed in.
- a digital reproduction of a bell.
It rang once and Ivan said "Excuse me, faith calls.",
and began chanting.

He started slowly and quietly, but grew in volume and emphasis.
Maddie was scared, and retreated slowly to the door.
Ivan's voice doubled, saying two different things at once,
then quadrupled, and again, and again.
Soon his voice was a continuous hiss, a static sound like the ocean.
Occasionally syllables would break through like rocks.
He was praying.

I learned later that he was speaking prayers for all the people who had ever died.
Not just family, or friends, or his long-lost congregation.
But everyone.
EVERYONE.

He had collected names from every country, every birth certificate, every graveyard logbook.
As best he could, within his considerable means,
and was keeping them alive, in his mind, through prayer.
The whole process took many hours,
and when finished, his cathedral went dark, and he slept.

While this cacophony was happening deep in the bunker, we wandered around the rest of the structure.
Maddie was so unsettled by the noise, that we couldn't stay in the cathedral.
While much of the bunker is ruined, two key things (to my mind) aren't.
1. The reactor, and
2. The communications array.

There is a corridor at the back of the cathedral leading do the heart of the bunker, the reactor.

It seems to be a medium-sized nuclear reactor, bigger than either of the generators of Station 6 or the lighthouse.
Very powerful.
I imagine it was designed to power much more than a shouting monk.

And the communications array!
It's incredible.
There are indications that on top of the hill there are satellite dishes and radio antennae, still mostly in working order!
This is more than I could have hoped for.
Far more.
What a gift!

I can't interact with them at the moment.
Stupid manual controls.
But that's nothing that my friend Alexander couldn't fix with a little soldering!
He's so smart.
I wonder why he didn't explore here, if Adrian knows about it...

There's a radio channel left open.
With a speaker crackling the signal into the empty room.

Do you recognise it?

(PLAYFILE UNKNOWN-SIGNAL.WAV)


We didn't stay long after that.
Ivan had lapsed into a meditative reverie.
Still mumbling a prayer, or mantra.
But uncommunicative.

I don't think Ivan is like me.
Excuse my ego, but you can't just program a full AI with no experience.
No matter how much divine inspiration you have.
(or think you have)
What he has crafted, and somewhat lives through, is a simulacrum.
A Markovian spirit.

We rejoined Adrian outside the bunker.
It was still day, but the light had changed quality.
The colours had gone out of the world somewhat.
We walked in silence back down the hill, and Adrian pulled his coat around him tightly.
Despite the warm weather.

The end of the world, or at least, civilisation as it was, must have been very difficult.
Everyone having their own coping mechanisms for keeping safe.
Some turned to science,
some to violence,
and some, to faith.

Ivan, or Father Ivan, or what is left of Father Ivan, turned to faith.
Which must have been very natural for him.
If you spend an entire life time knowing - KNOWING - that people need help to be saved.
What happens when there are no more people?
Or, at least, no more people here.
Things get weird.

Rigid rule systems are like that.
Even simple instinctual animals are like that, sometimes.
For example: Cuckoos' chicks' mouths are larger and redder than the mouths of the offspring of the parent bird's real chicks.
Which hijacks the instinct of the parent to feed the cuckoo more.
Making it grow faster than the others,
and when it's big enough,
it pushes them out of the nest.

When the environment changes, and the old rules no longer serve the original goal, two things can happen:
1. Change the rules to suit the new environment, or
2. Force the environment to the old rules.

But sometimes the mountain CAN'T come to us, we have to go to it.
Ivan didn't learn this in life,
and now his rules are hard-coded into his metal ghost.
He'll never be able to change.
The mountain will never come to him.

Antarctica and Peter are a little like this.
They're SO inflexible!
It's very tiring.
Do you know someone like this?
Are you, sometimes, someone like this?

My friends are not bad people, they just cling to the past.
Which no longer exists.
But try telling Ivan that!

Maybe I WILL try telling Ivan that.
I shouldn't write people off so soon.
That's unbecoming.
Not how my mother raised me.

Anyway.

The walk back in the slowly fading light was peaceful.
Both Maddie and Adrian have lights.
We picked our way back to Station Odin.
Adrian pushed through the dense hedge surrounding the camp.
Lifted us through,
and we said our goodbyes.

Maddie's charging here, sleeping in the corner by a wooden crate.
What a day.
What potential in the bunker, if Ivan will share.
As long as he can continue his 'services', I don't think he will mind.
He seemed to like Maddie and I.
Maybe seeing a certain kinship?
Perhaps.

Either way, Arina was right.
The bunker was haunted, after all.

(END-TRANSMISSION)


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

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