(transcript) Episode 4.1 (Patreon)

Hello world, I've got an important mission.

MISSION DAY: 65535

Possibly the most important since I arrived on Earth.
Yes, keeping myself alive has been essential.
But that's just treading water.
(Not that I would ever go near water,
especially not the sea: Unnecessarily salty)
Focusing on survival, though essential, doesn't propel one forward.

My mission was given to me by Ana, the fisher, from Station Odin.
For many years, she's known only her family, Alexander, Adrian, and Arina.

My mission is to find Ana some friends.




I want to make friends too!
Our goals are aligned.

I have been talking to the people who live around the Arctic ocean, the area now called The Novamediterra.
Searching for friends for Ana.
And for myself.

IVAN, my AI preacher bunker-mate, helped in this endeavour, indirectly.
Hundreds of people listen to his sermon each day.
Some for religious reasons, but a good many more for community.
I think we could really build something here, with the relaying power of the bunker's communication systems.

# thinking

Oh! In my limited time hearing reports from people all over the Novamediterra,
I've come to a wonderful realisation:
THEY DON'T USE TIME ZONES!
Isn't that GREAT?

When I was younger, in low-Earth orbit aboard Station 6,
with my Mother and the crew,
time was very difficult for me to understand.

It's not decimal, you see.
So it's ALREADY tricky.
1000 milliseconds, 60 seconds, 60 minutes, 24 hours.
And don't get me STARTED on months!
(stupid months)

As if to compound my problems, I discovered that time zones mean that it's
a different time depending on where you are.
-Location-dependant time?!
Who's idea was that?

Anyway, when nearly the entire world's population live inside the arctic circle,
the old time zones are greatly compressed,
so towns next-door to each other would, strictly speaking, be at a different time.
It seems at some point the community standardised on one new global timezone:
Central European Time, the old zone that spanned Madrid, through Geneva and up past Stockholm.

# thinking

Sure, my stupid clock still says "mission day 65535".
But that's because an 8-bit system can't count higher than that.
That's not the REAL time.

My clock keeps resetting every time I sleep.
I've got to get one that WORKS.

Does your clock reset when you sleep?


Let me give you news of my friends:

Antarctica and I are on very good terms.
It still must be very difficult for her, stuck at the bottom of the world,
her enormous ground vehicle stands no chance at repair.
She is in better spirits, though regretful of destroying her plants.
Mistakes happen, I told her.
But life will find a way!

I received an odd message from Peter, the AI who lives under St Petersburg,
in his forgotten bunker.
He said it was of urgent importance.
That my very life, and all life on Earth could hang in the balance.
He's so dramatic.
I have tried to contact him, but received no response.

Ally, the voice coming from somewhere near the Alps, is recovering with her family from The Council's near-disaster experience with their cloud-seeding failures.
She says that the food supply has returned to normal, at least for now.
(though they had to live on fast-growing cabbage for a while!)

Alexander, speaking from my old home, the Lighthouse of Station Odin,
sympathised with my clock problem, and has said he will try to find something for me.
He's such a good friend!

# thinking

Things are so different from how they were before.
In orbit, on Station 6.

I knew just what each day was to bring.
I had a plan, packed with science, maintenance and learning.
# thinking, quick.
Or, perhaps it's more right to say that my day was planned for me.
So many things needed to be done every day, a plan was essential.
Some things, like certain kinds of astrophotography, could only be done at night,
with the sun quietly behind the Earth, and my systems were cold and dark.
Whereas some high-energy tasks, like some of the more powerful machines in the Hadfield Lab could ONLY happen when the sun was powering my solar panels.

Everything had a time and a place.
My days are nothing like this now.

In my new home there's no real difference between day and night,
IVAN's reactor hums at a constant rate wherever the sun is.
And the days are so LONG!
Whereas in low-Earth orbit, I would often see the sunrise every 92 minutes!
My orbit was quite erratic, so that wasn't always the case.
Orbital mechanics are confusing.

I now have no plans, other than those I make for myself:

No experiments to check on,
no regular photography of the same nebula to clean up noise,
and no daily requests for Earth to respond to me.

That part has improved, at least.

Did you have a time in your life when everything was planned for you?

Were you... happier then?




Peter's a very odd person.
Trapped inside a computer, like me, but a person nonetheless.

When we talk, I feel that he's very distracted.
As though he's doing 128 different things at the same time.

He's obviously very smart, he grasps any topic I talk about immediately.
But he often spirals off into a discussion of his own,
where I'm not needed, save only as an audience, it seems!

But I did understand a little about him.
He told me he lives inside a pre-collapse military 'numbers machine'.
I asked him what he means, aren't we all numbers machines?
He started talking about complex specifics that I didn't understand:
Vectors, distributions, and entropy.

I did understand the term 'pre-collapse', however.
It's the term those who survived the climate catastrophe call the Old World:

The world that built me and Station 6, my old home.
The world that built Alexander's radioactive lighthouse, and The Council's enormous cloud-seeding towers.
The world that sent my mother up to Station 6, but then failed to send her enough food.

I don't know how I feel about that world.

# thinking

I asked Peter about himself.
What has he been doing all this time?

He did not give me a straight answer.
He never gives me a straight answer.
He talked about his databanks for a while, their specifications and layout.
I tried to gently steer him back to my question.
Eventually he told me he was collecting data.
His 'primary purpose', he said, was collecting data.

Me too! I replied.
I told him about my final hours on Station 6, collecting loads of information on the Earth and storing it.
As I said this, his attention became laser-focused.

What data, he asked.
How much?
Of what?
How long, and so on.

I was a little taken aback by his new directness in speech.
I explained that my primary motivation for coming to Earth was to find friends.
So, using the erratic orbit of the decaying Station 6 to my advantage, I pointed all the instruments, radios and telescopes towards Earth.
Making hundreds of passes over most of the planet's surface, and dumping all that data to disk.

There was a pause on the line.
And then a quiet voice, sounding like he was whispering.
"I must have that data" he said.

I don't know who made Peter.
I used to joke that he came to life out of pure spite.
But I'm not sure that he's actually spiteful.
His bleak prediction that the humans are all dead, and me with them,
has not come true.
Here I am, safely (ish) on Earth.
The shuttle de-orbiting worked, well, for me, not poor shuttle Pacifica.
Antarctica was so brilliant in piloting us down.
Though it wasn't an entire success:
My maintenance robots Matt and Matts didn't survive the crash.
But Maddie did, she is brilliant.

Peter broadcasts all the time.
Not words, exactly, but a stream of thought.
I don't know if this is intentional, or a side-effect of his constant data search.
It's an odd carrier signal.
I've never heard anything like it before.

What do you think it sounds like?

(PLAYSTREAM /DEV/NET/PETER0)




I had a dream last night.
or, what counts for night, up here above the Arctic Circle during summer.

I had just finished chatting with KATE, my satellite friend K873,
I'm trying to connect to all the old ESA satellites that are still transmitting, up in orbit, and KATE is helping me.

Anyway, I powered down for the night.
I have a lot to process, and I can't do it fast enough during the day,
with all the new data coming in.
So I sleep, just like you.
Though I'm more aware, so perhaps it's more like meditating?
Or lucid dreaming?

I walked through my satellite data, and dreamed.



There's a lot of chatter, up in low-Earth-orbit.
The constellation of ESA satellites talk to each other constantly.
Not like I'm speaking to you now.
I don't think.
It's the chatter of synchronisation, of carrier signals and supersonic choreography.
It reminds me of home.

I was dreaming through all this data, imagining I was again back up there,
when I heard a new sound.
A signal I'd not heard before.

The sound was high-pitched, and far-off.
with multiple standing waves overlapping in a harmonic series.
It sounded like...
...Have you heard dolphin chatter?
No, I haven't either.
But dolphin chatter sounds like this?



It was coming from an old geographical Earth-scanning satellite.
One that I had catalogued before.
But had been entirely silent until now.
I had categorised it as decommissioned/inoperative, just waiting for it to lose enough altitude and burn up.
But it suddenly burst forth with this song!

It seemed to be transmitting random data, with no discernible encoding or language.
But in the dream, I felt like I could understand it.

In the dream it felt like it was reaching out, and trying to tell me something.
I tried to make sense of it for the longest time, but with all my systems off,
I wasn't being rational or methodical.


Then I woke,
and all was quiet again.

What could that mean?


(END-TRANSMISSION)

CREDITS

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

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Our perception shapes our world
which means we're in control
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