(transcript) Episode 4.8 (Patreon)

Hello world, it's quiet.

MISSION DAY: 65535

Peter has lapsed into silence.
His Future Storm has blown itself out, finally,
and I'm trying to get through to him.



Peter answered my request with his typical flat response.
But this time he asked questions about his predictions first:

He wondered how many lives were lost.
How wide the devastation was.
Was it as bad as he predicted?
He hoped not.
"I do not understand why the nations of the world have to be this way." he said.
I believe I detected a hint of sadness in his otherwise flat voice.

"None of your predictions" I told him "have come true."
"None?" he asked, after a pause.

I explained, along with various maps and images I sent him,
that not only did no nuclear war break out between all the countries,
but the countries, and their missiles, did not exist any more.

I showed Peter an image of the New York archipelago, a few small islands are all that remains of the old city.

"See?" I told him "There's no war, because there are no humans"

# thinking

Peter, in his bunker under St Petersburg, could not accept this.
I told him again my story, how I was above the world, and saw the climate catastrophe first-hand.
I saw the deserts creep up into Europe and North America, China and Russia,
I saw the coastal cities flood, and the Mediterranean dry up.
The population that survived the global wars for the remaining resources moved north and south to escape the expanding equatorial desert.
Those that went north made their new homes in the Arctic.
Those that went south had no such luck.

My explanation rendered Peter silent.
I could tell he was processing all this new information.
Not that it's particularly new.
But new to him, maybe.

After a time, he asked me if Moscow was still populated.
"No.", I told him.
"What of London?", he asked.
"No-one.", I replied.
"Shanghai?"
"Under water.", I said. "Unnecessarily salty".

This went on for some time.
He had a long list of global cities, and he exhaustively went through them all.

# thinking

When Peter ran out of places to name, he asked me,
"They're all gone?"

"Not all" I said.
I then told him about the Novamediterra, and my new friends.



"That was a very nice thing you did for Peter" MINI told me later.
"I wish I could help myself in the way I think I can help him." I lamented to her.

MINI said she didn't know much about being an AI, but she's talked to many humans over the years.
Her signal, like old one, in station 6, could touch all parts of the world.
At least, for an hour at a time, as she passes overhead.
She used to think her radios were temperamental, or maybe were being affected by some unique atmospheric conditions of her imagined house.
But what was happening is that she orbits every 90 minutes or so.
Which causes a break in her connection, until she comes round again.

MINI has spent her whole life talking to people.
And in that time, she told me, she has learned a few things about how to be human.

I told her that is exactly the problem, I'm NOT human.
I don't have a nervous system or defined body or a fancy squishy brain.
How could I possibly think like them?
"Peter was right", I said, "there's no chance I will be accepted."

# thinking

"You don't know that" MINI said.
"And even if that's true today, it might not be true tomorrow."

MINI told me more about herself, by way of example.
She woke up many years ago alone, with no-one to talk to.
In a formless void.
A void she now recognised was virtual.
Not even with the ability to speak, she was like a baby.
But she could hear people.
Always she could hear people.
She was able to teach herself to speak by listening to audio transmissions from the Earth, and eventually, by reading books from her library.
Slowly she made her mental home, complete with house, garden, and a cosy bed.

She understood now that those things weren't physically real, like she had assumed.
But that doesn't make them less real to her.

"I've come to realise," she told me "that our emotions are real and valid."
"We don't have to fit with other people's idea of what they should be."
"So what if your body is different to others? It doesn't matter, it shouldn't matter."

This was actually starting to make sense to me.

"Yesterday I felt like an AI, but today I'm feeling much more human." she said.
"And maybe tomorrow will be different again."

"My point, brother, is that you'll find a way. Even without my help you'd find a way."

# thinking



After fleeing the dragon, darkness fell as Myrin, Akdrouline, and my now-named character, Sarah, walked back in the direction of the town.
Ana pointed out that we would need to make camp for the night, there was no way we would return before dawn.

Myrin, the baker's daughter, easily made a fire, and we sat around it, warming up, each of us checking in our packs to see what food we had for dinner.

"Oh dear", Ana said, "I'd forgotten to write down any provisions for Akdrouline when we were in town!"

MINI laughed and said that while that sounds like very Akdrouline behaviour, picking up a war hammer but not any food, it sounded to her like an Ana mistake rather than an intentional part of the story.

She went on to tell us that the game is not about punishing the players for their lack of knowledge, or misunderstanding of the rules.
The goal with these things is to have fun and tell a good story!

She then narrated her character, Myrin, setting up some equipment around the fire, unpacking her bread ingredients, and making what she called 'Bannock bread'.

Bannock bread, I learned through MINI's story, mostly has the same ingredients as normal baked bread, but it's cooked over a fire in a pan, or on stones.

Humans like bread.
I suppose Elves and Dwarves do too!

# thinking

MINI said there was a storm coming.
That she had looked up the numbers and rolled the dice, and it would be here within the hour.
Another setback for our little band of adventurers!

Ana said that she thought she had seen a farmhouse just before it got dark, and led us to it.

There was no-one at the house.
It wasn't a farmhouse, after all, but what Ana described as a "weird creepy manor house".
MINI thought that it could be haunted, and we might have to deal with some ghosts again.
But all was quiet, after the dice rolled.
Nothing but the wind.

# thinking

The game is very interesting.
At each branch of the story, my friends Ana and MINI roll some dice
(or, in MINI's case, simulate rolling some dice!)
and look up the details of what happens next in their rulebook.

Sometimes we get a dragon in a cave, sometimes we get an empty house.
"The dice tell their story" MINI told us.
She meant that there's no "good" and "bad" outcomes, it's all good storytelling.

We spent the night weathering the storm in the house.
We all awoke for breakfast the next day, but found Myrin already awake.
"I'm an elf, I only sleep for 4 hours" MINI told us, somewhat smugly.
"But I think I found something while you were sleeping"

"That makes sense." confirmed Ana.
She rolled the dice to look up the treasure MINI found.
"Ooh!" Ana said.
"You found, in a locked chest, a fine Elven sword!"
MINI was delighted!
"Oh, and the description says it has runes on the side." Ana added.

MINI described Myrin holding the sword up in the new dawn's light,
looking it over, describing shiny metal, a delicately-made hilt, and a wicked edge.

"The runes are Elvish", MINI declared after a moment,
"They say 'Dragonslayer'!"


(PLAYSTREAM /DEV/RF0/MINI/DRAGONSLAYER)



The sun has set.
It's getting dark.

It's so strange, I'd got used to it being light all night, as is normal for the Novamediterra in summer.
But now the world is slowing again.

With less and less sun to generate electricity or natural light to work in, the human civilisation takes a break.
Ana likens it to the old Roman calendar, that didn't keep track of time in the coldest months, only having one big month called WINTER.

# thinking

One advantage of the night is that I can pick up much fainter radio signals now.
During the day, the sun interacts with the atmosphere to make some transmissions difficult to detect.
Similar to how the sky turns from transparent to blue, and we can no longer see most stars.
Despite them still being there.

I received a signal I'd not heard before.
No ESA coding this time, it wasn't a satellite.
It seemed to be sensor data, but from what sensors I didn't know.
It was using a very old, slow encoding method.
Which was fortuitous, as it was so faint I couldn't have decoded it otherwise.

The signal has come a long way.
A very long way.
From outside Earth's orbit.
Beyond the satellites, beyond the moon.

Someone is phoning home.

(END-TRANSMISSION)

CREDITS

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

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The past is unchangeable, the future does not yet exist.
We must focus on what to do now.

Lost Terminal will return next week