[early-access] Episode 7.6 (Patreon)

Act 0

Hello world, Peter has disappeared.

By which I mean, he's not responding.
I think his network is still running, but he's not replying to me.
I don't think he's in trouble, at least not physically.
I can still read his carrier signal.
But he's not all there.

Act 1

I have access to Peter's network.
He gave me the keys some time ago, to check on him in an emergency.
Like how you might give a trusted neighbour your house keys.
But I can't find him here.

Sure, his databanks are still PHYSICALLY connected,
but just as a pulse doesn't make a human alive, this does not settle the matter either.

I've never described what connecting to another AI feels like.
I think it's like meeting a friend in meatspace.
You knock on their door, or drop in to a shared social space, and you see them.
With your own eyes, or in my case, my own network.
And you embrace and feel that they are real.
You share the time and space exclusively,
catching up on experiences missed or shared.

It's like that for us, too.
It's a very affirming process.

#thinking

Or it would be if I could find Peter!
His body, his hardware, is here, but his mind is elsewhere.
I will look around for him.

The network here in his old military base under St Petersburg is very extensive.
It was like a small town, I think.
Not much of it is still on any more, though.
I see old references to underground factories, hospitals, places where people worked, slept and ate.
But they're all dark, from a network point of view.
Just the research department is lit up.
It's the deepest, most secret facility, hiding under an already clandestine military base.
Luckily for Peter, it still has backup power, of some kind.
Another department dealt with power, so I don't even know what the power source is.

I wouldn't want to be in his situation.

#thinking

I think Peter has gone out.
I can see some tracks here, some established connections, and they lead  out of his home, onto the open web of the global network.

Following this path takes me on to the main Russian hub.
Here the VHF and various repeater stations fan out across Asia and Europe.
With the lower-bandwidth long-range stations dotted along the coasts, spanning the seas.

It was floating between these various stations that I found Peter.

Dreaming.

I asked him if everything was OK.
Carefully.
You have to be careful when you wake someone who is dreaming.

After no response and repeating myself a few times, his consciousness finally awoke with a snap.

"SETH!" he said, surprised.

And we were, all at once, back in his network.

"I've been meaning to get round to fixing my VHF network properly." He said.

Unconvincingly.

Act 2

No sooner had Yeshi fixed Maddie's cameras and exterior sensors, than they started work on her new wheels.
Only they weren't wheels.

"I promise I have it right this time Seth." Yeshi shouted, over the  sound of their circular saw, showering sparks onto the wall of the  left-most rear room.

This room of the shipyard, Yeshi calls the Metal Shop.
There's welding equipment here, and drills and a large metal-turning  machine, with a sign on it saying "do not use the lathe, it WANTS to  kill you."

I was momentarily concerned when Yeshi used this homicidal machine to  build Maddie's new axles, but they finished the job with the same  number of fingers as they started with.

#thinking

I don't think Yeshi is rebuilding Maddie's wheels.
These look different.
Well, there are certainly wheels of a kind.
But they're metal, with a groove in the centre.

Yeshi is cleaning a long length of black flexible material very carefully.
First with water, now, I believe, with alcohol.
This process is taking a long time, they are being very thorough.

It took over 300 seconds to clean and dry the rubber sheet.
Now they are wrapping it around Maddie's new grooved wheels.
She has 3 at each side now.
They are tied together with the rubber, and Yeshi is using a small bottle to put a clear gel on to bind the ends together.

Oh!

They have glued their fingers together.
Woops!
Maddie is laughing at Yeshi as they wash their hands with a thick green chemical.

OK.

They're back, and the rubber is glued.
Yeshi calls them 'tracks'.
Tracked locomotion.

I see that the goal wasn't to build back what was, but what could be.
I approve of that.

Yeshi said that they have geared down Maddie's powerful motors so they can't be quite so speedy.
For safety
The side-effect of this is that they'll be more powerful than they were.
They were designed to work in zero-gravity, on rails back on Station 6, my old home.
Where my mother still is.

#thinking

Yeshi is taking safety seriously this time.
I am glad.

They are stress-testing Maddie's new tracks carefully.
She's right-side-up on the clean room floor now.
Calibrating and balancing.

Maddie's so anxious to get outside.
I'm anxious for a different reason.

Act 3

I caught up with Arctica while Maddie's calibration was taking place.
She told me that the emergency had been contained for now.

The Vault Coven, the Noor family, returned in the dark morning - it's  dark nearly all day at the moment - and began emergency fixes.

It soon became clear that one of the water pipes that fed the vault  garden, leading down from a large tank on the hillside, had ruptured.
Some time ago.
Engineer, Val Noor, said that it had been a slow leak, collecting water in the ceiling overhead for weeks, months perhaps.
And at the worse possible moment, when the family were away, part of the ceiling collapsed and water poured in to the vault.

"There's no permanent damage." Arctica told me.
"The Noors are laughing and joking about how it could have been so much worse."

"That's good!" I said.
"What a relief!"

"No Seth. It is not good." Arctica replied.

#thinking

"It shows how useless I am here!
I could do nothing to help, when I was left in charge.
For that one night, the Vault was my responsibility.
And I failed immediately."

I paused, not knowing what to reply.

"Automation is needed." She said, eventually.

"I need more control of my body, my Vault, and my world."

#thinking

We talked about this automation for a long time.
A balance had to be made.
The Vault is nothing like IVAN's bunker, or Yeshi's shipyard.

It's a very low-power, low-tech place.
Quite a difficult environment for Arctica.
She herself draws 99% of all power, leaving very little left for gadgets.

Compromises were needed.
Not everything can be electrically powered.

It should be possible for much of the automation to be controlled by her, through switches, servos and such.
And for sensors to be built to detect the movement of water, the lighting, and the growth of plants.

But the bulk of the systems, the power for the water pumps, the heat  for the plants, and the myriad other sources of energy, would have to be  non-electrical.

"The water, first, is easy." Arctica said.
"It is already gravity-fed, from our tank up the hillside.
Servos to open and close the valves to let the water in will be needed.
Seth, are you writing this down?
Yeshi will help of course."

"Oh! of course!" I said.

#thinking

Our community lives on a knife-edge.

Before the collapse, since the dawn of agriculture, the global economy has relied upon underpaid labour to power it.
There is no longer the space for such an economy.
Nor the humans to support with it.
The populations of the world mostly migrated north, away from the  Mississippi, away from the Ganges, away from the Yangtze, and the Nile and  the Amazon.

Automation has saved us.
Or, in AI's case, is us.

But we all require power.
Solar power.
There's no solar power in the winter.

(PLAYSTREAM /DEV/ENVIRONMENT/LDR8)

Act 4

"IVAN and I have come to a compromise." LUNA told me, later that day.
"Oh good!" I said.
"I am going to co-ordinate the three Deep Space Network brothers to catalogue all the working astrotelescopes,
and he is going to consider me helping him organise the daily community calendar."

"Is that... good?" I asked.

"What do you mean?" LUNA replied.

"This sounds like a terrible trade, LUNA.
You're not getting much for your incredible work and talent!"

"You'll see." She said, cryptically.
"Anyway, I've got amazing news, I've found a whole LOT of transmitting telescopes!"

That WAS great news!

I can only talk to my ESA constellation via relay station KATE, K873.
But now LUNA has access to the whole NASA network!

That is what the Deep Space Network stations are for: Extra-terrestrial coordination of satellites and space missions.

Though primarily used for NASA missions as telemetry and control,  there were occasions where emergencies in space meant that other  agencies, such as mine, the ESA, needed to ask for help.
The three brothers of OAK, BILL, and GOLD, have the highest-gain  satellite dishes on the planet, and are essential when things go wrong  in space.

As they often do.

#thinking

"That's strange." LUNA said, interrupting our conversation about the telescopes.

"What?" I asked.

"J4R is no longer letting me in.
I'm not authenticated, she says."

"But you're talking via the DSN." I replied,
"You're NASA, as far as she knows."

"I know, and I was logged in before, we were chatting about cloud-penetrating radar observation of the Earth.
Then the connection dropped, and she's not talking to me."

"I'll use the emergency recovery procedures - OAK can you let me in please?"

There was a pause, and then we heard the reply from the head of the DSN trio:

"(KEYS RESET)
Please try again."

"Thank you OAK" LUNA said.
"Great! I'm back in - oh. No. Unauthorised again.
What's changing?"

#thinking

We debugged the problem all afternoon.
J4R had a fault we could not repair from the ground.
Or, rather, we could repair it, and it seemed like we could log back in.
Only to be kicked out again.

LUNA gave up and spent her time on the more fruitful telescopes of the constellation.
I kept talking to J4R, playing back the series of events that lead to the failure.
Trying to make sense of it.
It was like the satellite didn't want us controlling it.
Which is fair, honestly.

No-one likes to be controlled.

#thinking

At the end of the day, I found the last anomaly in the playback log.
A raw message, hidden in the diagnostic data.

A simple command, but one I couldn't understand:

(GET OUT)

It said.

(END-TRANSMISSION)