[early-access] Episode 6.4 (Patreon)

Hello world, We have found some rockets.

MISSION DAY: 28

Our route has taken us to the very centre of the Pacific Ocean.
I'm closer to Station 6, which at its closes orbit is only about 2000km away, than I am to any human settlements on land, new or old.

I remember when I lived on Station 6, if my trajectory took me through the centre of The Pacific, I could see only ocean.
It was like I was orbiting a water world, no land in sight from horizon to horizon.
In those moments I dreaded to imagine living in such an unnecessarily salty place.

Now look at me.

Act 1

Though there should be nothing here, just water and sun, we have discovered an astonishing habitation.

Before The Collapse, the governments of the world used to send rockets to space all the time.
Here and there.
Up and down.

An unimaginable feat now.
The payloads of the rockets were often satellites, like me.
(wait, am I still a satellite?)
But the rockets were disposable.
Warped and burned from their great exertion.
They hurtled delicately back to earth,
and with their final dregs of fuel they aimed to land at the last place on Earth anyone should be.
The center of the Pacific Ocean.
There, to safely sink forever.

That was the plan anyway.

#thinking

There is a flotilla of spent rockets here, of all different sizes.
All roped and welded together roughly, with what appear to be little houses built on top.
Houses made of curved scrap metal, obviously recovered from further rockets.
All rusted, all empty.

A ghost town, floating in the center of the ocean.

Act 2

I talked to LUNA, which is the name of the AI who lives on the crater station on the dark side of the Moon.

She initially introduced herself as NASA, but I explained that probably couldn't be her name.
"What about LUNA", she suggested?

I had to wait 2 hours her reply.

It's slow going, each of us only speaking during a tiny 7-minute window where we both can see the satellite on our respective horizons, so a burst of conversation can happen then.

I will save you the long pauses between these moments, and summarize.

Luna lives in a NASA moon base set up on the far side of the moon.
She told me that she lives at the top of a large crater telescope that the imaginative scientists who built it call the Very Large Crater Telescope.
The VLCT.
Scientists give things the WORST names.

Her computer systems are inside the telescope's receiver, hung over the centre of the crater.
She is powered by the sun, which she catches in her solar panels, mounted on the top of the receiver, next to her satellite communications array.

#thinking

"Where do you live?" Luna asked me.
"I live on a boat on the Pacific Ocean." I told her.
"That sounds wonderful!" She said.
"I just have two questions."
"Of course!" I replied.
"Great!
1: What is a boat?
2: What is the Pacific Ocean?"

I didn't know where to start explaining that.

I started with the simplest thing:
"I live on Earth." I told her.

The next rotation of the satellite, which contained her answer, also held a dizzily comprehensive map of our galaxy, the Milky Way, and a message saying "Show me."

#thinking

During our conversation, it became obvious that Luna has no concept of the Earth, and assumed I lived out on one of the stars that she has been cataloguing.
I have not yet been successful in explaining to her, she doesn't know about her satellite, and has absolutely no point of reference to understand an entire planet filled with plants and water and humans and AIs.

"I've been searching for a friend for so long" She told me.
"I think that's the meaning of my life, my task since before I can remember".
Her voice was shaking in her messages, I don't understand how someone who has no contact with humans has learned these emotions.
As you know I learned emotions from my Mother and the crew aboard Station 6, my orbital home.
Whereas, my sister MINI learned them from listening to the Earth for her whole life, like watching theatre.

I miss MINI.

#thinking

Our discussion was cut short by a more local discovery.
Amelie, rushing up from the engine room, shouted into every intercom she passed on the way to the bridge,
"THERE'S SOMEONE HERE! SOMEONE LIVING ON THE ROCKETS!"

Act 3

"The forests are a MYTH." Shouted the man as Paweł lifted Maddie onto the large floating platform made of discarded rockets.
He and I walked towards the group at the centre of the platform.

There are lots of little shacks on this enormous floating raft.
I estimated between 4 and 8, it was hard to tell where one ended and another began.
Lean-tos leaning to lean-tos.

The crew had tied up the Molly Hughes II to a flat side of a long rocket, which was covered with odd metal plates and planks of driftwood.

The man was still talking when we arrived,

"I've lived here my whole life, my parents before me too.
I told her she was a fool to leave..."

Yeshi, Amelie, Kamil, Linda, and Paweł were sitting around an old man.
I'm no good with guessing people's age, but even I could see this man was very old indeed.
White hair, unsteady on his feet, with no straight lines anywhere.

We arrived to find Linda Noor, our biologist, giving the man food and water.
He took the food, but refused the water.
He was drinking from a flask of his own, a dirty brown thing.

After eating, Linda and Yeshi helped the man to his feet.
He seemed in a better mood, his voice was quieter and his words were more smoothly joined.
He took us on a tour of his tiny world.

Here there was a shack for food stores, dried fish exclusively, of course.
There was a large domestic hut where his daughter and her family lived.
Now empty.
And even a hurricane shelter, built into the core of one of the large rocket shells.
There was an astonishing amount of utility for one small raft.

"You can't live on fish!" Exclaimed Linda,
"Where are your vegetables?"

The man laughed, and made a strange gesture with his hands.
His voice was quieter, and he said,
"Ah, well, follow me."

He led us, falteringly, over to one side, and pointed down.
There were ropes hanging into the water, over 32.

He pulled one of them up, it was LONG, and slightly weighted.
Up with the chunky rope came ribbons of seaweed, thick and bright green.
The man peeled off a leaf and bit into it, before offering it to my friends.
Only Linda took a piece, examining it carefully, before wrapping it in fabric and pocketing it.

Another rope had animals attached to it.
Some kind of rocky mollusc.
Dark, with white ridges.

The man broke open one of them and ate the contents in one slurp.
He offered around many more, and this time, all of the crew ate.

#thinking

We left the next day, without the old man.
We gave him as much food as we could spare, and he gave us his diary, which he said would prove to his daughter we had spoken to him.

We could not make him believe that life continued on the land.
He said that his grandparents told stories of fleeing a lifeless desert,
sand and burning sun everywhere they went.
It's all in the diary, he said.
They had sailed the ocean, looking for the Fabled Forests
The family found no habitable land, and one day a hurricane shipwrecked them here.

His daughter did not believe these stories, and took her children to find the forests.

He told us to look out for her.
"I am sure you will meet her" he shouted after us:

"How big can the world be?"

(PLAYSTREAM /DEV/HP/HYDROPHONE7)

Act 4

The rocket raft disappeared over the southerly horizon, as our Iron Engine and its perfect closed-loop fuel sailed us on.

The next time we would strike land would be due north, at Mexico.
At present, we were approximately equidistant between New Zealand and the south tip of Argentina.

#thinking

The land mass of the Earth is predominantly in the Northern Hemisphere.
So much so that often maps show the equator being 2/3rds down the map, and missing Antarctica altogether.
Rude.

This fact was a catastrophe during The Collapse.
While the richer nations in the Northern Hemisphere migrated north, away from the encroaching sands, and the expansion of the equatorial deserts, those who were south of them had to travel south, unable to traverse the continent-sized badlands.

The populations of South America poured into Argentina, and those in Africa south of the Sahara travelled to South Africa.
But the lands stop there.
There is no Novamediterra of the Southern Hemisphere, as far as I could see.

Only Ocean.

#thinking

We can only rebuild.
I have started that in a small way here.
I am building a workshop!

Looking around my cluttered datacentre with all this discarded electronics and raw materials, I will build... something that will help the crew.
Help us.

It's what my father, Alexander, would do.
If her were here.

I will see him soon.

(END-TRANSMISSION)