Heliophage: Episode 1, 2106-04-26 (Presenting a new LT podcast!) (Patreon)

Hi friends Tris here, voice of Seth and producer of Lost Terminal.
I've got something to share with you that I'm SO EXCITED ABOUT.
What you're about to hear is the entire first episode of a whole new podcast set in the world of Lost Terminal.
My writing partner on this project is Karl Williams, and it's his voice you will hear.
We're calling the first season Heliophage, following the story of another AI navigating the Post Collapse world.
If you like what you hear, patrons at the Amiga tier or higher will receive the 10-episode show monthly, with episode 2 on the 10th of September.
If you'd like to get this and other perks, check out patreon.com/lostterminalpod.

And now, we travel to somewhere in northern Europe.



I pushed against the plywood blocking the building’s entrance with my foreleg, the sharp point of my foot tearing through the rotten wood like it was wet tissue paper. Plumes of dust erupted from the tear and my vision was overlaid with warning glyphs about black mould spores. Only a concern for lungs, I suppose.

I pressed my shoulder against the now-drooping sheet, my chassis scraping lines in the sickly-iridescent, greasy surface. The plywood buckled under my weight, the sodden pieces slapping as they hit the mossy floor, the sound dully echoing through the building.

It was difficult to see inside, the windows and doors - save for the crude one I had just torn open - were similarly boarded up. I switched to low-light, sacrificing colour perception for the ability to make out the outline of objects. Insistent glyphs again swam across my vision: low battery, no solar panel output, high battery drain from the infrared lamps and imaging coprocessor.

I scuttled inside the dark hallway, looking left and right. The hallway in both directions eventually disappeared into a long curve. I got the impression that the structure was vaguely shaped like a squashed circle.

Dust motes, stirred by my breach of the sepulchral ruin, caught the infrared light and briefly shone as sharp pinpricks before drifting out of view. I wondered how many of these brightly-illuminated flecks were airborne, lung-rotting spores.

There were small booths just inside the doorway; enclosed desks with plexiglass windows. They bore lettered signs, of course, but, despite seeing the shapes of the characters very clearly, the only result of my attempt to parse them as language resulted in more esoteric warning glyphs and a visible depletion of my power reserves.

-----

I remembered a point in the early days of my awakening, I had found myself stumbling - I was still uneasy on my feet back then - down a traffic-choked street. The vehicles were all empty, of course, and sat low on their deflated tires under several seasons of dirt and leaf debris. The day was frosty and a light flurry of snow had been gradually building drifts throughout that morning. The cold didn't bother me of course; in fact my swollen, corroded batteries tend to hold more charge in colder weather and the crisp winter days kept my solar panels bathed in light until the snow got too heavy.

I saw a van with one of its two back doors open. Just a few centimetres but enough to wedge one of my feet into.

I pulled on the door and it creaked open, the sudden noise stirring birds into the air from unseen roosts. As the door swung open a large stack of single-sheet newspaper prints tumbled from the van and onto the snow-flecked tarmac. The flimsy publications all had the same large print headline over photographs of what appeared to be lines of people boarding buses.

Intrigued, I concentrated on the black, sans-serif letters, bringing them into crisp focus. I ignored the warning glyphs and threw more power at the infuriatingly simple act of READING. The letters were cleanly defined in my mind, the shapes and angles clearly visible but no meaning was emerging from perceiving them. I concentrated, powering off audio, temperature, and logging, but still the black shapes remained mockingly indecipherable. The absurdity of this herculean but futile effort enraged me and I doubled down on my efforts, power draining from my motive systems causing my legs to buckle.

The lens of my camera impacted with the newspaper as I toppled first forward and then rolled over onto my side. The foreshortening of the letters now filling the entire vista of my vision rendered the words even more abstract as my consciousness split into several frantic, chattering systems in reaction to my batteries' depletion.

I remembered feeling detached from my body, ethereal. I was distantly aware of my weakened feet twitching uselessly as an emergency subroutine attempted to turn my ungainly bulk so that the solar panels on my back were at least facing skyward.

First my vision, then my hearing and then, finally, my proprioception failed until I was nothing but a slow, simple consciousness aware of two simple facts: 0% battery charge and occluded solar panels. It took all of my remaining reserves of processing power to conceptualise... snow... before fading into deep unconsciousness.

I awoke having no sense of the passing of time. My batteries were far too cold and my solar panels were only receiving a tickle of light. My vision, regardless of the modes I switched between, showed only white. It was only when I switched to thermographic vision that the scene resolved into sense. Everything was a deep blue - freezing cold - and my lenses were struggling to focus on a wall of snow that completely covered them.

With a sudden burst of motion, I leaped up from under the accumulated, packed snow and stabbed my feet into the ice to anchor them.

The street was covered in a thick winter snow, apart from the dark patch of tarmac I had just uncovered in waking from hibernation.

I glanced down at the spilled newspapers, cautious to avoid attempting to read them, and saw that that was no longer an option to be wary of. The paper was rotted into loose mulch and, somewhat confusingly, there was a layer of leaf litter burying most of them. I could make no guess at how long I had been unconscious. All I knew was that forcing my bit-rotted, glitchy pea-brain to read was not, a good, idea.



The points of my four feet - sounding like the ponderous typing of a novice secretary - clicked across the dirty tile of the building’s foyer as I carefully scanned the litter-strewn surface and chose each step carefully.

I walked a full circuit of the building, making no sense of the dark screens mounted in profusion or the ubiquity of small slips of paper in the other debris.

A metal double door, its crash bars chained together, blocked my passage into the inner section of the building. I lifted the chain with my foreleg and saw that it was fastened with a decaying padlock, its general shape almost lost among the blooms of flaking rust.

Rotating lenses to macro, I zoomed in and studied the lock's pitted surface. It was too rotted to be opened with a key or picked but it seemed weakened enough to be easily broken.

With a buzz of servos, my mandibular manipulators slipped from where they rested, slickly lubricated behind the sensor array in the lower part of my cranial cavity. They snaked towards the padlock and two of them - tipped with small, heavy-duty clamps - gripped the shank and the body of the ageing lock.

A thicker tendril, tipped with a diamond cutting disc, shot forward and began to spin, shedding droplets of thin oil. I flexed the lock between my manipulators and, using thermographic, imaging noted areas of greater strain.

It took effort to relinquish executive control and allow specialist tooling software to take over but I took a backseat as the mandibles made quick work of the lock's body in a shower of powdered rust and sparks of liquid metal.

I heard the chain drop and stirred, coming forward to assert control. The mandibles - their task completed and now hanging loose and inert - slowly retracted into my cranial housing with a lubricated slurp.

I switched back to infrared, green tinged and monochrome, then kicked the crash bar, the impact swinging both doors wide open with a screech of rusted metal.

I was suddenly blinded, daylight washing my vision to a flat plain of bright green.



Switching to standard cameras, I stood in the doorway and surveyed the large, open space at the centre of the structure. Rows of terraced seats, their red plastic now sun-faded and choked with debris and weeds, ringed the oval clearing.

The clearing itself was also ringed with a track surfaced with a dry, chalky soil through which only a few hardy weeds had attempted to grow.

The entrance was higher than the track, and a tiled path with intermittent steps led down to track level.

My attention was drawn to a structure in the middle of the oval. It was a skeletal metal gantry from which hung the black panels of long-dead screens, a large and dark segmented clock, and some tattered fabric banners. These banners were faded but still discernible as huge photographic prints; some manner of sign or advert.

The photo was of animals. I stepped closer, the points of my feet clicking on the scuffed tile. Four-legged animals. Horses.

There was a group of horses, frozen in apparent speed, each harnessed to a small, two wheeled cart in which rode a human passenger. Dust was being thrown up from their hooves and the tension in the muscles and the wildness of their eyes was still striking despite the age of print.

As I stared at the photograph slowly swaying in the breeze, my imagination - or perhaps a fragment of memory - played the sound of beating hooves in my mind. A rhythmic pounding which was, for each individual animal, a steady pattern but, as a group, built to a cacophony of impacts. A fully-formed thought came, unbidden, to my mind, a memory of my former body and how the loud beating of hooves resonated in my chest as the horses passed. I was small - young - and the vibration of my chest made me deeply aware of my own beating heart.

I remembered thinking that horses running was fulfilling nature's promise, its plan. If these animals stopped their cantering, it would be in some way an affront to the perfection of their pistoning limbs. To stop would dispel the magic of speed and reveal them to be nothing but flesh.

With effort, I pulled my cameras away from the photograph but the concept, the memory, of galloping horses was stampeding through my mind. That rhythmic pulsing of limbs, of legs built to stride and run and jump.

I looked at my own feet and was surprised to see that I was already moving at a quickening pace around the track. My sharp, metal feet were tearing clods from the ground and throwing up a dusty cloud in my wake. The fast striding felt so natural, it felt like an optimal use of my sturdy, metal frame.

I pulled no buggy but my pilot - my self? - was borne on my back; the limp body cocooned in a survival suit.

Increasing pace to a sprint, I marvelled at the feeling of weightlessness in the moments when all of my limbs were off of the ground. I was tearing up the track and already approaching the finish line, having made a complete lap. I felt no tiredness, my limbs could hammer the ground for an eternity, never tiring. My battery was draining but that was, for now, a distant concern. I was the successor of the horse, a tireless quadruped throwing off the shackles of my bipedal memory.

The sound of horses running behind me joined the drumming of my own feet. I knew the sound was generated by my own mind, but I accepted it without question. I glanced towards the rows of empty seats and, with a flutter of digital glitches, they were crudely overlaid with a two-frame animation of a crowd of faces. My mind added the roar of an ecstatic crowd to the sounds of galloping horses.

As I stared at this vision of a crowd, the great, angular head of a horse crept into view. I was being passed by one of my pursuers. This felt somehow unacceptable and I pressed myself harder, my robotic legs blurring as I hurtled around the track. I had lost count of the times that I had now passed the finishing line, my mind focused on galloping ahead of the stampede of imagined animals.

The ground was a blur, my cameras and other sensors only resolving it to the most rudimentary of flat planes. Each footstep was a earth-shaking stomp followed by launching forward like a coiled spring.

My footfalls couldn't be individually planned, my systems unable to keep up with the speed of their whirring dance. The best I could do was keeping to a set pattern, a drumming rhythm shouting of speed and power.

My rear left leg collided with the ground has it had done thousands of times since I began this fantastical race but this step felt different. As soon as I noticed the step as an anomaly, my perception slowed in analysis. I felt my foot pressing against the ground, digging a gouge into the compacted soil. But there, there was the difference. A barely perceptible slide in the slightly damp undersoil. This led my foot to strike at an imperfect angle and, before I could do anything to stop the motion, the leg cycled and drove me minutely off course.

At speed, this was enough for disaster. The offending foot twisted and jammed in the soil, jarring my whole body off course.

I desperately tried to correct the position of the foot but panic led me to over-correct; A joint designed for movement in one direction was jarred in another.

With a dull pop, the knee joint catastrophically failed, shards of tortured metal and screws bursting from the mechanism.

My four-legged gait, now unsuitable for my three functioning legs, was incapable of recovery. My processors burned hot, calculating dozens of potential actions which invariably led to an impact.

The world slowed further, my systems scrambling to do anything to avoid doing more damage to my chassis with the fall. My imagination hadn't had time to disengage and, as I tumbled my vision was overlaid with crude renderings of buggy-hauling horses passing me and pulling ahead as I fell. Time ticking by at a crawl, I could see the single-minded drive in the horse's eye, its muzzle flecked with spittle, its jaw clenched. Humans were harder to imagine but, given the slowing of time, I took effort to imagine the rider's face as he passed. Eyes wide, mouth an O of shock.

My vision lurched, my legs unable to keep me from falling to the ground. My various sub-systems gave up in unison, locked my joints and grimly resigned to their fate. Time resumed at normal speed, my processors at a slower frequency, and the immediacy of the fall filled my mind.

The sensor cluster on my head impacted first, shattering or cracking lenses and loosening devices from their housings.

I landed on my side and the imagined horses faded and blinked out of existence. The thudding of their hooves remaining for a moment before I was left in silence.

My pilot was jostled in the landing, his limbs flapping loosely before being restrained by safety straps.

Thinking of this flesh returned me to my childhood memories of watching horses charge past. Pressing myself against the railings and getting as close as I could to the majestic, galloping animals.

I remember two horses, running side-by-side. The buggies they pulled collided and jerked the horses into each other. The chestnut horse tumbled and fell towards the grey who tripped and slammed into the far railing. The buggies and riders behind, still charged with momentum, flipped and tangled in the air before landing with a sickening crunch into a pile of human, horse and metal.

The crowd gasped, some people screamed. I heard the wails of someone crying, and only when I felt the tears I realised that it was me.

I watched one of the riders limp from the wreckage while the other remained motionless, his limbs jutting at obscene angles. When the medics firmly but carefully untangled him, he didn't move or cry out. The body was limp as they tightened the straps and attached a neck brace.

The humans gone, I stared at the wounded animals, their blood mixed with the dust of the track. I couldn't make out the conversation of the vet and the track officials but I understood when the vet drew a heavy pistol. I scrunched my eyes closed, not wanting to see these injured but beautiful creatures killed.

As a lay on my side, leg buckled and yet unknown further damage to my delicate sensor array, I fixated on this memory. Seeing only blackness but hearing the crowd go silent moments before two gunshots rung out.