[early-access] Episode 5.3 (Patreon)

Hi friends! Sorry the early episode is a bit late this week, and that it comes with placeholder music. Everything will be correct in tomorrow's posting, and I'll post on twitter the soundcloud link to the new music, as normal, so if you want you can just listen to that.

The music in tomorrow's episode will be called Void Behind. Thank you! <3

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Hello world, I hate this ship.

MISSION DAY: 26

My mother wouldn't like my strong language.
She would tell me that you can't hate something you don't understand.

I should never have come on this adventure.
We found Amelie Kotov, injured, and unconscious, this morning.



She wasn't even working on anything dangerous!
Or, rather, it wasn't supposed to be dangerous.
I am reconsidering my ideas of safety aboard this rusty vessel.

# thinking, Short

She has not woken up yet, so we have to piece together what happened.
What we do know is that late last night she finished working on the steam engine, and made her way up to the galley at around midnight.
There she chatted with captain Yeshi about the completed repairs, and mentioned how excited she was to start work on the newly-discovered secondary engine.

The captain told us that Amelie wanted to talk to Kamil about re-using some of the sonar equipment to help understand this new engine.
And then she left.

That was the last time she was seen until morning.

# thinking

Kamil Forester found her in the sonar room, which is at the bottom of a 2-story metal frame stairway, below the waterline.
The stairway is original to the ship.
It's rusty, and the captain knew it was dangerous.
A portion of the upper stair platform sheared off, presumably when Amelie was running, excitedly, to talk to Kamil.
She fell the full height of the ship onto the steel hull, where we discovered her this morning.
Barely breathing, and having lost a lot of blood.

Kamil wasn't in the sonar lab.
He was in his bunk, sleeping, at the time.
Amelie wouldn't have been able to talk to him.

It's dangerous being alone.



I have found my place on this awful ship.
Not in the way I would like.
But through what ocean-going people used to call "dead man's boots".
I have stepped into Amelie's currently-vacant position of pilot.

# thinking

The job is trivial, as the ship mostly pilots itself.
The only tricky part is monitoring the wind and trimming the sails.
The cables attached to Paweł's sails are all connected to an electrical winching mechanism, which Captain Yeshi wired me in to, and taught me to use.
I'm glad to help.
Especially at this time.

# thinking

I hope Amelie wakes up soon.
I'm at such a loss of what to think about her injuries.
The ship's biologist and doctor, Linda Noor, came into the small datacentre at the heart of the ship that serves as my room.
She is a tall human with long brown hair.
She also wears loose clothing that reminds me of Adrian.
I miss Adrian.

I kept an eye on the cameras around the ship to continue piloting safely while we talked.

She gave me an update on Amelie's condition.
I didn't understand any of it.
I'm bad with plants and worse with humans.
I explained that to her.
She summarised simply that Amelie was not getting worse, but also not yet getting better.
"Kamil is by her bedside for much of the day." she said,
"He cares about her a lot."

# thinking

After exhausting the topic of her patient, I told her of my own:
I told Linda that I am hoping to rescue my friend Antarctica, and that she might need our help when we arrive.
This is why I came aboard.

She asked me about my history, so I told her all about my life on a satellite, the shuttle Antarctica piloted me down to Earth in, and my time with Alexander and his family.

Linda said it sounded so exciting to her, she had never left her little island of Svalbard before this voyage.
"Well, only for fishing." she clarified, with a laugh, and continued:
"My friends left one by one for the mainland, and at the time I didn't feel the same need to explore that they did.
I'm very happy working in Yeshi's co-op, though I do miss them often.
That's why I'm here, actually, to see if I can awaken in me the same sense of adventure that they had!"
She looked down at Amelie's medical notes in her hand and said, in a much less confidant voice,
"I want to make sure I'm not missing anything, you know?"

I did not know, but I told her I did, which is what she wanted.
I think a quiet life sounds pretty great actually.

# thinking

We talked all morning.
Just after mid-day, she left to pray, which she does five times a day, she told me.
I thanked her for the company, and she was gone.

As the door closed behind her, a notification system pinged me, clawing at my attention:
The satellite uplink was finally ready, one of my brothers or sisters in orbit was passing overhead.

I called Antarctica.



My conversation with Antarctica started similarly to last time:
She told me about sample 45-77 again.
I made no comment, to save time.

After her repeated update, I told her about Amelie's accident.
That she had injured herself falling, and was unconscious, being looked after by our doctor, Linda.

"You've got a doctor on your satellite?" Antarctica asked me, surprised.
"No, on our ship." I explained.
"You remember, we're on a ocean ship coming to rescue you!"

"Oh yes, of course" she replied, uncertainly.

# thinking

She's getting worse, I think.
Her memory banks have taken damage, or have otherwise started to degrade.
We are still many months away from her.
Though, at least we're now travelling at top speed, with the repaired steam engine.
We have large stores of wood for the boiler, so we don't need to make too many stops to recharge it.

I hope we arrive in time.

# thinking

I talked to Antarctica all afternoon, to try to understand what is happening.
She was annoyed at the probing questioning, but I insisted.
I used diagnostic techniques similar to those I had used to try to help my sister, MINI.
Only, this time it was even more difficult, because I had to build my model of Antarctica's systems first, from her descriptions of them.

My friend Antarctica lives in an enormous ground vehicle with wheels taller than houses.
It was created for polar exploration, and she was installed to guide it from the ship's landing site south to the pole, where scientists and crew would be brought in by plane.
That was the plan, anyway.
As with so many things, something went wrong with the world and she was left alone.
No one came to join her.

We now know it was The Collapse:
The catastrophic change in the global climate, followed by the wars over the resources that were left.
Supply chains broke and what was once so easy to do became unattainable dreams.
These all happened quickly, and simultaneously, and meant that at first there was no incentive for polar science, and then soon enough, no possibility.
You can't fly in scientists if there is no aviation fuel left in the world.

Fossil fuels spoil in time, did you know that?
Like an apple.
Even the most stable fuel mixtures start to oxidise and degrade after 2 years.

Magnetic storage media loses integrity and degrades after a while too.
I think that is what is happening with Antarctica.
While I have no magnetic storage, she does have a small number of these.
For long-term data recollection.
Spinning disks are a liability in space.

# thinking

I asked Antarctica to move her long-term memory banks to solid-state chips.
This was an essential repair to stop the damage getting worse.
She didn't want to at first.
It's an annoying job.
I raised my voice and pleaded with her.
I couldn't make her understand, but she did it eventually, humouring me.
Which was a relief.

Has it made a difference?
I don't yet know.

I hope so.

She's reporting sample 45-77 again.
Listen:

(PLAYSTREAM /DEV/RF12/ANTARCTICA)



I woke up the crew before dawn.
Something was wrong.

Maddie had fallen into a corner of our room during the night.
She was confused when she woke up.
She found her small wheels that Alexander had given her were not able to move as well as before.
I couldn't understand the problem, the cries of her sensor data were not making sense.
Then I looked outside with the ship's cameras.

The horizon was 30 degrees off level.
The ship was on its side.
# thinking, short
I sounded the alarm.
# thinking, short

Though the system told me the alarm was on, I could hear nothing through Maddie's microphones.
The alarm was also broken.

Maddie, now understanding how to balance, made it out of the datacentre and into the crew quarters and began screaming.
She has her own alarm, and because Alexander, my father, built it, it WORKS.

# thinking

The crew scrambled to diagnose the problem.
It was clear there was an ingress of seawater on one side, pulling the ship off-centre.
But I could not follow what the crew were doing.
There are no working cameras in the lower deck of the ship, they were considered low-priority, and have yet to be repaired.

# thinking

The emergency pumps righted the ship in less than 32 minutes,
and when all was done the crew sat around the table in the galley, with Maddie looking on from a corner.

The captain summarised the situation:
Some of the hull repairs that had been finished before they left Svalbard had failed.
The whole storage compartment on the left of the ship had filled with water and pulled us over on one side.
The pumps should keep the balance for now, but another repair needs to be made, and from the outside.

"Paweł, you welded that section, what happened?" the captain said, pointing at Paweł, who was wringing out his wet socks.

He did not have a chance to reply before Kamil interrupted, addressing the captain directly,
"You checked the hull before we left, why don't you answer your own question?"

They argued for over an hour.
Back and forth, about fault and blame, rather than fixes and building.

Maddie left, she was scared.

# thinking

Tensions were particularly high because the flooded section had contained the stores of wood for the steam engine.
Though the compartment was sealed, so the water didn't flood the whole ship,
the whole wood store had been lost during the night.
This means we will need to stop and harvest some more before we travelled into the Pacific Ocean.
Delaying us further.
Putting Antarctica at more risk.

# thinking

I hate this ship.

(END-TRANSMISSION)