(transcript) Episode 4.4 (Patreon)

Hello world, I'm sure she doesn't know.

MISSION DAY: 65535

Minnie, I mean.
I'm sure she doesn't know she's an AI.
How is that possible?
The three of us, Ana, Minnie and I, have been chatting a lot.
Preparing this difficult game of imagination,
(I still have no idea what I'm doing in it, by the way)
The other two are discussing their characters,
the dice they need,
and the plans for the story we're supposed to make together.

But all I can think about is how to get through to Minnie.


There's no opportunity to talk to her away from Ana, at the moment.
It will be a challenging conversation, difficult enough to navigate with just one person, let alone two!
I'll have to find a quiet time in the future.
This game is at the front of their minds.

They've both already decided the roles they are going to play in the story:
Minnie is playing the Alchemist Myrin Phixidor, an Elf baker's daughter,
sworn to avenge the theft of her family's secret recipe;
Ana is playing Akdrouline Warmheart, a Dwarven knight starting her journey to serve and protect the land against evil.

How did they come up with those ideas?!
They sound incredible!
I've never heard of either of those characters in any book I've read.

# thinking

I started to become upset at my glaring deficiency.
It's so tough for me to be reminded of my otherness.
But the two were very kind with me.
Very patient.
"Start simple" they suggested.

They reminded me about the fantastical creatures in the world we were playing in:
This world, they had said, is full of elegant Elves, stout Dwarves, noble Orcs and even angels and demons of all kinds.
All of them going about their lives together, some as artisans, some farmers, even merchants and craftspeople, too.
Anything is possible for us as storytellers, they told me, even outside the established canon of the world.

This sounded even more daunting!

But...
If anything was possible, I thought, that perhaps means there are no wrong answers?
I concentrated, willing my imagination to generate something, anything!

After 32 seconds, I had a small bolt of inspiration.

The answer was so simple, it had to be right:
"I want to be human" I said.



Ana and Minnie were delighted at the tiny spark of originality from me.
It felt a little like I had cheated, really:
I had dug into my subconscious and brought into the light a pre-existing impossible dream, passing it off as imagination.
It would have to do for now.

# thinking

Back in the real world, Paweł has been testing a prototype of his tidal power generator.
He built a small one using broken motors and simple electronic parts,
and tested it in the bay, on the southern coast of Svalbard, where he lives.

He told me about his home:
Hornsund is a fishing village, as nearly all of the communities around the Novamediterra are.
Though they also have some alpine terraces of hardy crops in the steep hills around the village,
tended to by farmers who scale the hills by day, and return at night.
There is a lot of industry in Hornsund, it would seem:
The Arctic scientific base that the settlement grew out of was quite extensive,
and included small-batch factories for building parts and tools.
This has given the community a real boon for bootstrapping their own technology.

Paweł told me that once he was happy with the design of the prototype, he would use their community fabrication factories to build a strong, full-size generator in a matter of days!

We chatted a great deal, and the conversation turned away from the generator, and on to one of his pet projects:
Paweł has built what he calls a Thready Printer.
Not to be confused with the 3D printers of the workshops of Hornsund, this thready printer prints CLOTHES.

After coming back from the bay, Paweł said he was terribly cold.
Splashing about in the water all day makes for chilly work, after a while, even during a Svalbard summer.
He said that the best waterproof clothes go to the fishers, understandably, but that meant that he had nothing good enough.

So he is PRINTING some waterproof clothes for himself.
The thready printer is like a loom, with more layers, able to print entire garments!
It sounds so useful.
A real time-saver, all that's needed is for the waterproofing layer (in this case, pine resin) to be applied by hand, and it's done!

# thinking

I like a loom.
They're one of my ancestors, in a way.

To automate complex textile patterns in the booming Victorian era, the punched-card loom was developed by Joseph Jaquard at the start of the 19th century.
Each card was a small part of the pattern, read by clockwork pins.
Building up a stack of cards in a certain way could give you a certain pattern,
and each machine could do many patterns.
You could effectively reprogram this general-purpose machine with different cards.
You can see where this is leading, can't you?

The cards eventually evolved into a way of storing instructions for calculators, and then theoretical analytical engines, and before long, they were stored on magnetic tape and the rest is history.

Lines of code in older programming languages are directly analogous to the old punched cards.

These ancient patterns remain in my living DNA, so to speak.

What ancient patterns remain in you?
Are they still useful?



I had a breakthrough with Minnie, after talking to Paweł.
Alexander was working on my new real-time clock circuits,
so Ana was busy.

I called her, and she answered immediately, and enthusiastically.
She's so friendly, asking after me and Maddie and Alexander by name.
She even asked after Arina's 4 rabbits, playing along with little Arina's worldview, which was sweet of her.

We soon got in to the details of her game, as usual.
She talked for about 64 minutes about the world we're going to be telling stories in,
reading to me from the rulebooks,
and quoting snatches of classic fantasy authors: Tolkien, Lewis, and Martin, to inspire me.
I've not read much fiction, apart from the children's books my Mother used to read to me.
(Maybe I should!)

Though it might seem like we're playing a game, Minnie told me, we're actually writing a story together.
She explained that the concept is called interactive fiction.
Like the stories children invent, wild fantasy stories, not constrained by reality.
I told Minnie the story that Arina, the little girl from Station Odin told me, when she got lost in the woods and found her "haunted house".
Arina took her experience of strange sounds coming from inside IVAN's bunker, and wove it into a narrative that explained the events in a supernatural way.

Is this how imagination works, I wonder?

# thinking

I then went on to tell Minnie the rest of the story, how when I visited I saw, through Maddie's eyes, that though it wasn't haunted by ghosts, it was haunted by IVAN, the metal priest.
He's my housemate, I suppose, now that I live here in the bunker too.
Life's strange like that sometimes.

Minnie was delighted about this experience, and told me how the events would have been even more fantastic if they were part of her game!
She then launched into a re-telling of my story, but with fantastical elements inserted into it.

I went along with the conversation for a bit,
I didn't want to be rude, it's worth remembering that when people share things they love with you, what they're really doing is offering to be closer friends.
But after a time, I moved the conversation back to more practical matters.

I asked Minnie about her photography, could I see some?
She was enthusiastic about that.
She described herself as a keen amateur astronomer,
showing me photos she'd taken of the moon, of Venus, and even some really great nebula.
These were lovely, I told her!
Really astonishingly detailed, the nebula shot especially.
She must have used some advanced technique to get it so clear.
"Image stacking", she confirmed,
"I take the same photo every day to clean up noise".

# thinking

"That's just what I used to do." I replied.
"Do you have any photos of landscapes, of where you live?" I continued.
"Yes, loads! Just a moment". She said.

And after 8 seconds, I was inundated with a stream of photos:
The Pyramids at Giza, the sprawl of Mexico City, large Monastic complexes in the Himalaya, more and much more.

All these photos were taken, obviously, from orbit.

Minnie lives on a satellite.


(PLAYSTREAM /DEV/RF0/MINI)



Minnie and I talked for over 128 minutes about her position.
Getting Minnie to understand the implications of her satellite images was,
somehow, very difficult.

Something was broken with her ability to join the dots between seeing the Earth from orbit, and concluding that she, as the photographer, must be above the Earth.

She insisted she lives in a house, with floors and a roof.
Though, as she explained her imagined house to me, she became more desperate.
Like she was trying to persuade HERSELF as much as to persuade me.

Her room is nice and warm, she told me.
So warm it needs an air conditioning system, which works well.
Next door is her photography studio, with telescopes and computers for analysing astrophotography.
The next room down the hall is her kitchen.
She insisted it has "tasty calories" in, and she would visit often.
"I'm there many times a week!" she asserted, unconvincingly.

I sympathise with this difficulty.
I, too, find the minutia of humans baffling.
Their food systems and habits are particularly inscrutable.
What makes some food tasty and others not?
All the food in the galley on Station 6 was very similar;
it seemed to me like it's all just different arrangements of carbon.
No wonder Minnie was having difficulty with this part of her human delusion.

# thinking

Her descriptions of home sped up.
Describing times she's played in her green garden as a child,
chasing falling leaves as they fall from the brown trees,
and rushing back inside when a surprise grey rainstorm hit.

Her words became a torrent,
joining in theme with her story of weathering a storm,
safe in her cosy bedroom.

Faster and faster, her story came:
She loves to draw and paint with her human hands and pattern-match animals outside and hear music from dead composers -
I begged her to slow down, to breathe, or something.
She didn't hear me, her voice rising to a scream.

The clouds broke, and she lapsed into tears.
Simulated tears, they sounded nothing like the real thing, even to me:
Like glass shattering underwater.

I waited, stunned, for her to speak again.
When she did, she whispered through her sobs:

"Seth, why am I alone?"

(END-TRANSMISSION)

CREDITS

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

The Lost Terminal store has been updated for season 4!
In addition to seasonal shirts, we're selling
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Check it out at lostterminal.com!

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Understanding your own situation is not always easy,
ask a friend what they see,
but be prepared, you might not like their answer.

Lost Terminal will return next week