[early-access] Episode 5.4 (Patreon)

Hello world, I saw a ghost.

MISSION DAY: 35

A ghost ship, actually.
We have been at sea for over a month now,
The Molly Hughes II's route from Svalbard took her to Alexander's lighthouse, south of Severney Island, then across the northern Siberian coast, and finally we have come to the Pacific Ocean through the Bering Strait.

The narrow strait between Eurasia and America is unusual.
The sea is only 90m deep here, according to my pre-Collapse charts.
(though I suppose it is a few meters higher these days)

We sailed between enormous, broken, concrete pillars.
Each towering over the ship, more than 50m high, though some are worn down to stumps, barely above the water line.
They are the remnants of a bridge, connecting the world together.

That's not the strangest thing, though.
There's a ghost here.


The crew were celebrating arriving in the Pacific, at first.
Captain Svoboda proposed a toast, on the balcony at the front of the ship.
This is the best location for viewing the ocean.
Maddie likes it here, I think.
When not performing their duties or undertaking repairs, the crew often visit here in their downtime.
Sometimes holding a drink, sometimes with binoculars in their hands.
I can see them through the ship's cameras.

But as we passed the row of concrete sentinels into the Pacific Ocean, we started to notice objects in the water:
Pieces of wood, broken metal barrels sloshing with water, and other detritus.
"Flotsam" the captain called it, "pay no attention, but steer round the larger pieces".

The Pacific empties north into the Novamediterra through the strait due to enormous ocean currents.

Linda and Kamil tried to fish out some of the rubbish from the water with long nets from the back of the ship, where the deck is lower to the water.
What they found was mostly broken and unidentifiable.
They did find a small yellow plastic duck, however.
"I wonder if Amelie would like it?" Kamil said, winking at Maddie who had accompanied them in their fishing.

When I spotted the ghost ship I called them back to the bow.

# thinking

The ship was big, about the same size as the Molly Hughes II, but painted blue, in the parts of it that were still painted, it was mostly rusted, with holes in the hull.
It was lying very low in the water, clearly with very little time left.
The crew watched in stunned silence as this ghost slipped past.

# thinking

The similarity with our own ship was striking:
Judging by the cracked window lines, it had two levels below deck, and another smaller two below the bridge.
There were bent and broken aerials at the very top, even a toppled-over satellite dish.

As we watched the ship drift further north, pulled by the currents back towards the Strait, doctor Linda said,
"There but for the grace of God go we."



The crew were subdued for the rest of that day.
Their work proceeded quite quickly, in a break with tradition.
I initially thought the lack of conversation was helping productivity.
But I realised later that perhaps the sight of this broken ship was motivating in and of itself.

# thinking

I called Antarctica to give her the update.
I do this most days, and have done since I forgave her for crashing me down to Earth in the space shuttle, Pacifica.

She began telling me about her "new" sample, 45-77.
I talked over her, repeating the words that I knew she was going to say:
That it's new to her, and therefore new to science.


She paused, confused, and then said I was very clever.
But to please let her finish her report.
I obliged.
I felt guilty about what I had said.
Even in just teasing her, it didn't feel good to take advantage of our information asymmetry.

# thinking

I apologised, but couldn't explain to her why I was apologising.
I let it go, and we talked about my updates, how we're now in the Pacific Ocean, and the ghost ship.

Antarctica suddenly stopped talking mid-sentence.
I asked he what was wrong, and I heard processing from her side.
After four seconds she asked,
"How did I get here?"

"What do you mean?" I asked.
"Why are my wheels not working, where are my samples and whERE ARE MY COLLEAGUES!" she shouted.


It took me an hour to help her through this total memory loss.
As we were speaking, some of her memory banks had degraded further, that much is clear to me.
She has already switched away from her magnetic storage drives, so they can't be the problem.
Something else is wrong with my poor friend, Antarctica.

# thinking

She's no longer talking to me - says I am not authorised.

I can't help but think that the lack of work and activity is partly to blame for her condition.
She used to have an unlimited amount of work to do, cataloguing the new antarctic flora around her.
This kept her systems busy, that way errors could be discovered and corrected early, instead of whole systems slowly rusting through inactivity.

It's like a story my mother told me once, back in orbit, on Station 6.
There was a computer in a university department.
A very old computer.
Not a big one, just a small one, quietly running under a professor's desk.
It didn't do much, perhaps a bit of email or some small network tasks.
But it did its job very well.
New computers came and went at the university.
And Still the little computer carried on its task, year after year.

One day the department needed to move to a new building.
The professor didn't know why, the old building had worked fine throughout her whole tenure there.
But she packed up and carefully powered down the old computer.

When she set up again in her new shiny office, the computer would not start.
IT told her that it was broken, and various bits of it were rusted, or inoperative.
They were surprised it had been working at all, all these years.

The professor knew the little computer had been hanging on, carefully doing its job right up until the end.



Antarctica is doing a little better now.
She still doesn't remember large parts of her history, they've fallen out of her memory seemingly at random.
But I've tried to filled in the gaps.
We told each other stories all afternoon.

# thinking

Captain Yeshi Svoboda called an all-hands meeting on the back deck between the afternoon and evening shift.
The sun was setting over Asia to the right of our ship, as we continued our Southerly voyage, with North America on our left.
The sky was red, Maddie had to compensate for the warmer light and long shadows being cast by the large crane here at the back of the ship.

"I need to say something." Yeshi began, standing on the winch mechanism, putting them slightly higher than the rest of the crew.
They waited for longer than seemed usual before continuing:
"Doc Linda has just told me that Amelie is awake."
There was an immediate cheer from the crew, with smiles on every face.
But the captain put up their hands, calling for quiet.
"Next time we might not be so lucky." The smiles vanished.
Yeshi was frowning, and their voice was slower and more hesitant than normal.
"The accident was no-ones fault, but I have decided that makes it MY fault.
It helps no-one if we ignore problems and work on our own.
We have to work TOGETHER.
I would volunteer to be responsible for this effort , if you'll let me."

Most of the crew nodded their agreement, some even vocalising it.
But Kamil remained silent, and after a moment, everyone turned to him, waiting.

# thinking

Kamil approached the captain, his hands balled in fists by his side.
As he approached, Yeshi sat down on the winch mechanism, and looked up at Kamil, who was now standing over them.

The two people said nothing for 25 seconds.
I could only wonder what was happening.
I know that Kamil feels very protective of Amelie, and was openly furious with Yeshi for the holes in the ship.
Perhaps he was redirecting his anger over Amelie onto a more concrete problem.

# thinking

Kamil finally spoke:
"No more mistakes, Captain."

Without waiting for acknowledgement, he turned and walked back in the direction of the ship's medical room.


(PLAYSTREAM /DEV/RF0/VHF0)



There has been much work on the ship since then.
Kamil has used his underwater breathing apparatus to weld a repair patch to the outside of the ship.
The ship's arc welding equipment is versatile enough to be used both in and out of the ocean, though care must be taken when in the water.

The pumps are finally off, and the compartment is dry.
Dry but empty.
We will stop and the crew will gather wood from the lush alpine forests of the Yukon and then set off again with a full hold of fuel to burn in the ultra-high-temperature steam engine.

We're taking too long, I think.
Oh Antarctica...

# thinking

We passed a repeater station, on St Lawrence island off the coast of Alaska.
I've never seen one first-hand.
Or, second hand (Maddie is looking at it).
They are the mechanism allowing radio to still work in a post-satellite world.
Each station relays a message from one to the other, until it reaches its destination.
They were build in the final years of the Old World, before The Collapse.
As a backup, in case the satellite network were offline.

These repeater stations are all over the world, and are mostly self-contained, though if there are people close to them, they can be repaired when they fail.
It looks like this one has a small habitation on it!
An obviously post-collapse house, built with driftwood and washed-up metal.

The captain sounded the ship's horn loudly, blasting echoes off the island.
But no-one signalled back.

I offered to use Maddie's advanced optics to look closely at the house.
The crew carefully balanced Maddie on the very top platform, next to the radio antennae.
After compensating for the motion of the ship, she began searching for signs of life.
There was a small house, a metal plant room next to the large antennae array.
But no people.
She looked in more detail, there were tools used for forestry, axes and the like, and a pile of wood near the house.
Maddie strained to look closer.
The roof had given way in a small section, making an accidental skylight.
This light showed the inside of the house through one of the windows, just for a second.
The house was in ruin, with everything covered in layers of dust and detritus.
There was no movement, but Maddie found the people.

# thinking

Later that day, as the island dropped below the northern horizon behind us, I told the captain that I wished we were back home.

Yeshi patted Maddie on her largest camera, registering as positive vibrations on the signal.
They smiled and said,
"A ship is safe in harbour, but that's not what ships are for."

I thought I understood.

(END-TRANSMISSION)