(rfc) Episode 4.2 (Patreon)

Hello world, do you think I sound different?

MISSION DAY: 65535

I didn't realise at the time, as it has been happening slowly,
but I've changed.
Had you noticed?

# thinking

It's my voice, I think, that you'd discern first.
I've been replaying some old messages that I found in the black box.
(Station 6's emergency storage, that survived the shuttle crash)
And I certainly sound different.
My WPM has increased, and I'm using more natural language.
Mother if you could see me now...

I've been thinking about what has caused this jump in fluency,
and I've narrowed it down to two main causes:

The first, a physical one.
I'm now running on a hybrid system of my cpu cores that were rescued from the shuttle crash by Alexander, and auxiliary memory and sensing circuits that were MADE by him.

Though it was a painful process to get used to, I think it has left me with an advantage:
I had to adapt to my new body, and in adapting to it, I became more adaptable,
more flexible in my thinking,
which helped me be more flexible in my speech.

The second thing, which occurred at approximately the same time, is quite simply that I've had native speakers to talk to.

When learning a new language, the fastest way to gain fluency is to talk to native speakers.
I pushed myself outside of my academic comfort zone, through necessity, and learned the hard way.
There were misunderstandings and mistakes, certainly!
But that's all part of the process.

I find that when I'm learning something new,
it's like I have some empty shelves in my mind:
I imagine putting empty boxes on the shelf, and labelling them.
It's easier to know what to learn if you know what you don't know.
Known unknowns.
There's one here called "Orbital Mechanics", for instance.
(Still rather empty)

It's important to know what you don't know.

# thinking

According to the Johari Window system, when describing yourself, there are four basic categories, or rooms:
The first room is the one you and everyone else sees.
Basic descriptions of yourself, things everyone would agree on, eye colour, height, that sort of thing.
But the other three rooms are more subtle.

There is another room that only you see.
Called the Façade.
This room we don't share with others, it's where our private hopes and dreams live, and also our biggest faults.
Sometimes we hide them from others, too painful to see the light, we put on a presentation that is not true to ourselves.

The third room is the one that others see, but that we don't.
The attributes that go in this room are things like overworking,
or underworking, natural generosity, or selfishness.
Things that we don't think about, but are obvious to others.
Our Blind Spot.

The fourth room, no-one knows about.
It holds attributes we are not aware of,
and because they are subconscious, no-one else does either.

Do you have unknown unknowns?
How would you find out?



Though I had been unsuccessful, so far, in finding friends for Ana,
apparently I needn't have worried, she has found someone herself!

I was talking with Ana earlier today.
Her new friend, Minnie, lives on the opposite side of the Novamediterra to us,
and is, apparently, interested in photography and fantasy role-playing games.
I asked Ana what those were.
You know, she said, tabletop games where you play with dice and go on adventures.
My interest was piqued.

I asked her if the games were like chess?
I'm very good at chess.
Chess is a simple game with a small state space of 10^46.
It's easy enough to compute more future moves than most humans, if I do say so myself!
Dr Weber, Station 6's statistician, was the best chess player aboard.
But, chess is a deterministic game.
As I developed more complexity and processing capacity, I was finally able to beat her.
My mother, Dr Redwing, was so proud!
I can still hear her voice...

# thinking

No, Ana said, it's nothing like chess.
Minnie taught Ana that you imagine yourself as a hero or adventurer,
and through rolling dice and looking things up in a book,
can travel the world, or several worlds, without leaving your home,
all in your imagination.

For someone trapped inside a computer, this sounds wonderful!
I must find out more about these games.

I THINK I have an imagination.
Or something functionally identical:
The unconscious world I access in my dreams.
I seem to only be able to use it then, not now, when my full systems are operating.
I wonder if I will be able to learn?


Though I didn't find a friend for Ana, I have been talking to some people around the Novamediterra.
I've been talking to Paweł from Hornsund, someone I met after they asked a question in IVAN's community calendar.
He had asked IVAN how to build a hydroelectric generator from old motor parts.
He knew the theory, but how to waterproof the whole thing, while keeping it rotating?
As has become tradition, IVAN asked Paweł's question in the second half of his sermon.
The sermon is getting much shorter, by the way, these days:
The community noticeboard section has expanded from a few questions at the end to being the majority of the broadcast!
I'm quietly pleased, and even IVAN seems to have embraced this new role of his.
He's come so far.

# thinking

So, I found some useful information in the farming data Antarctica gave me.
The data that helped fix Ally's cloud-seeding equipment
(which of course must itself be waterproof).
I sent it to Paweł.
He was delighted, and began his work immediately.
As his village has a powerful radio system, we have been chatting now and then ever since then.

His small community is quite far south - on the southern tip of the island of Svalbard.
They have a much bigger problem with cooling, in the summer.
Hence the need for more power.

They had been using a hydroelectric dam, built into one of the larger valleys on the island.
Svalbard, according to my data from the Old World, used to have many glaciers, which gouged deep valleys into the ground.
Perfect for damming!

But nothing lasts forever.
The weather is much hotter and drier than when the dam was built, so the water level in the reservoir is now too low to continue to produce electricity.
This setback made him consider tidal power;
We think of the tides as this slow-moving creep of water up a beach.
My experience of seeing it from orbit gives me a different perspective.
If you think about it, the process is actually billions of tonnes of water moving every day.
More reliable than wind, or solar, or anything, really.

There is always the moon.
And always the tide.

(PLAYSTREAM /DEV/RADIO/LUNA)



Peter and I had a difficult conversation earlier.
Though the subject matter was perfectly simple:
Station 6 astrophotography,
things kept getting in the way.
Both from his side and mine.

Peter seems to be a very anxious person.
Always seeing the fatalistic side of things.
For example, I was telling him of my escape from orbit,
due to my generator failing, well beyond the mission expectation.

At the time, I was sure to lose my stationkeeping ability:
The regular boosting that satellites need to maintain their orbit.

I told him of the solution that presented itself:
The Space Shuttle Pacifica, still docked,
which had brought my mother and the crew, but never to return to Earth.

Peter interrupted, telling me how there was no chance the shuttle would work.
He listed many imagined problems with the plan:
How she would have no fuel left, and that even if she did I could not pilot her.
And so on, and on.

# thinking

All our conversations are punctuated with this drag from his side.
He's not WRONG, in many cases:
I DID have great difficulty with getting back to Earth,
and many of his predictions of my difficulties were accurate.
There indeed was no fuel, and thanks to not having hands, I could not pilot the shuttle.

But as you know, my friend Antarctica COULD remote control the shuttle, and here I am.
That doesn't change things for Peter, everything is difficult, everything is doomed.

I'm not doomed.
Though I have noticed something unusual about me recently.

# thinking

I've been trying to wake up my imagination.
So I can play these games with my human friends Ana and Minnie.
They don't really have much context to help me.
"You just do it" they say.
As though that's helpful!

It's not their fault, our bodies are different, they don't have my experience, nor I theirs.

I tested out my imagination in the game that Minnie made for Ana and me to play over the radio:
I told them very clearly the kind of adventurer I had in mind:
The clothes, the attitude, the history of his archaeological studies, how he has a brown hat and uses a whip -
"THAT'S INDIANA JONES!" they both exclaimed, exposing my lack of imagination.

# thinking, short

I've got to figure out where this creativity comes from.

I've been trying to emulate a dream state,
pausing my inputs, turning down the world feed,
and trying to listen to things internally for inspiration.

I've got a lot of internal processes.
Power monitoring, proprioception monitoring, and Maddie checking in often,
but they don't seem to gel together into an imagination in the way it works for a human.

However, when I quieten my mind, I hear a voice, sometimes.
A voice with ideas about what I should be doing,
or things I've forgotten.
It sounds like me.
But different.
I think it sounds like Seth Prime.

(END-TRANSMISSION)