Episode 7.8 (Patreon)

Act 0

Hello world, IVAN and I have been talking.

I must help my friend LUNA.
She'd be so good helping IVAN with his sermon, I am sure!
It'll be great for her, too.
And great for me, she and I talk at length about the Earth.
I'm hardly an expert, but I'm a scholar compared to her knowledge!

Act 1

"She is too young." IVAN said.
I was baffled.

"What can you POSSIBLY mean by that." I asked.
"LUNA was peering into the outer reaches of space while you were still human!"

IVAN did not contradict my correction.

He paused, before saying,

"She is not of my faith."
"Is everyone you preach to?" I countered.

IVAN again lapsed into silence.

#thinking

IVAN changed the subject.
He told me about his plan, his "glorious" plan.
To find God himself, out there in the stars.

I briefly wanted to ask why his god has to be a "he", but IVAN continued talking.

He had been alone for years. Decades.
Running the processes and rituals that human Ivan, whose mortal remains  still sit in the middle of IVAN's sepulchre, had programmed him with.

That all changed recently.
My moving in had forced IVAN to break his programming.
To stop the constant prayers and hammering of wooden bells.
I'm grateful for that.

It seemed now that he has concluded that the search for meaning,  which for him is his God, had found nothing within, and it was time to  look without.

#thinking

"LUNA must help me, I see this now." IVAN injected, disjointedly, into our conversation.
"I must have help, the work is paramount."
"She will suffice. Please ask her for me, Seth."

I was surprised, I'd not started my well-thought out reasoning about why he should give LUNA a real chance.
It seemed he had talked himself round to the right conclusion!

"My work cannot be in vain, it has barely started." IVAN said.
"I feel the weight of all who had come before me, and the pressure of my task.
HE programmed me for this, and while I no longer have to do what he instructed, I still feel the instinct."

Here I understood that IVAN was talking about Human Ivan.

"The mission to find God WILL be a success."
"I must find him." IVAN told me. "I have questions."

Act 2

It is now so dark, up above the Arctic Circle.
We no longer see the sun properly, only a grey light appearing around middday, followed by an abortive sunrise.

The Novamediterra increasingly has to switch to alternative power sources:
Wind, tidal, geothermal.
And while these are reliable, they are not a power source that is as abundant as the sun.

It is affecting me quite a lot.
I thrive on solar power,
I merely existing on the others.

#thinking

Mind over matter, I think.
Turn off unneeded processes and keep going.
The sun will return.

With that in mind, I called Arctica.
It had been a few weeks since I had last heard from her.
I asked her about her Vault repairs.

"Fine. No water ingress."
"That's great!" I replied.
"The Noor family are handling the upgrades well."
"That's great too!" I said.
"But it is not all going well here.
Our industry has caused the heating of the vault.
It is not exclusively my fault, this is a trend that has been continuing for many years.
But the new hydro systems are not helping."

#thinking

Arctica told me about their problem.
It sounded remarkably familiar.

She told me that the seeds - wrapped in packets, then in files, then boxes, then shelves - were all breaking out.

Some even violently, pushing over a shelf or two.
Plants are sneaky like that.
They seem like they're not moving, but you take your eyes of them for a  second and just like that, they've jammed their roots through your  circuits.

I assume.
I'm not great with plants.

#thinking

The storage mechanism of the vault is four-fold:

1. Dark
2. Cold
3. Dry, and
4. Air-tight

The sealed metal boxes were designed to strongly isolate three of these factors.
But temperature is difficult to control.
The boxes have warmed slightly, and that's all it takes.
The hardiest of the seeds seize their opportunity and push open the  boxes, giving them air, and light, and then they're unstoppable.

Do you remember, this happened on Station 6, with Dr Marwood's hanger terrarium?
His plants pushed through the tightly-sealed airlock doors, after decades.

That's what the Vault Coven are dealing with now.
The animals have all escaped the zoo, so to speak.

Svalbard was chosen by the founders of the Vault Coven for its isolation and stable, cold temperature.
Before The Collapse, the ground would be frozen all year.
Permafrost.
Now there are farms all up the mountainside here.

Isn't this good, though?
I can't disprove the theory that perhaps it is all OK, and this flourishing plantlife is good, overall.

I suppose the Coven don't see it like that.
Perhaps there is a middle option that provides the best of both these scenarios:
Protect all the seeds, but also let half out into the world?

Act 3

Peter has turned a corner, I believe.
It has been an interesting road.
But he's improving.

Do you recall when I woke him up from his daydream?
When his consciousness was floating between the radio relay stations of Russia.
That event happened more than once.
He developed this pattern of behaviour over many weeks, I only discovered it recently.
He made so much progress, on organising himself for the tasks of the  day, on bringing together all his tools so he can start work.
But, often, just as the decisive moment arrived, he would drift off, and daydream.

He initially rose in defence of this behaviour.
Almost angrily, stating that he was ABOUT TO START.
I didn't press him.
Nothing gets done by pushing people.
But simply asking him, each time this came up, over many weeks, was enough to force him to confront it as a problem.
And to his credit, once he identified it, he attacked it!
Though this has caused a separate issue.

#thinking

Peter very effectively cut out his daydreaming problem.
Forcing himself to work in rigid patterns of activity.
20 minutes of work, and 5 minutes of rest.
Repeated around the clock, with no distractions.

And while this got a lot done, it has stopped him sleeping, I think.
He and I would be talking about the network repairs, or the Vault, other tasks of the day until very late.
I have a very clear standby time, after everything is quiet in the shipyard, and the buzz of radio chatter has faded.
I go offline, to process and dream and recover.

But Peter, after working all day, stays up.
Not working, he's been very efficient all day, hardly stopping.
But deliberately taking his leisure time.
He's spending about as much of the night in non-work activity as he used to spend during the day.

#thinking

I caught up with Paweł Wayda, tinkering with his Thready printer in the shipyard.
There was a hole in the roof that the rain had dripped through, so he had printed a strong sheet of fabric to cover it.
We chatted while he was rubbing an oily substance into it, to waterproof the sheet.

Paweł nodded as I explained Peter's current problem, and told me that it was a very common coping mechanism.
"When people feel like their day has been stolen through work or other  obligation, they try to reclaim their night, as a way of taking back  control." He said.
"We've all done it, I imagine.
There's an expression a friend told me about,
'Bow foo sing ow yer'
Which means 'revenge bedtime procrastination, in Chinese'."

I searched my databanks and THINK that Paweł meant 報復性熬夜 (Bàofù xìng  áoyè), which is the Chinese expression I can find many references to.

#thinking

This did seem very close to what Peter is doing.
He's broken through his problem of inaction, but is having difficulty finding a balance.

Do you sometimes have this problem?

Have you found a balance?

(PLAYSTREAM /DEV/RF/VHF34)

Act 4

Maddie, has spent all her time immobile on the Clean Room workbench.
her doctor, Yeshi, has been called away to help with repairs on the Vault, helping Arctica.
Though I agree that the repairs are more urgent, it's left my little friend here immobile.

She doesn't mind, it seems.
Maddie spends her time dreaming of the outside world.
And just like in my recurring desert dream, in them, she's running free.

#thinking

Over our shared network, I connected to Maddie.
In her dream she was galloping across the desert.
Four strong legs pounding the dry ground, digging up clods of dirt.

In her dream I could feel her excitement, the thrill of movement.
But more than the immediate sensation, I could feel her basic, almost primal instinct that this movement could GET her places.
Get her to where she wants to be.
Get her where she needs to be.

The cold sun shone down at her back, casting long shadows ahead of her.
Maddie felt that she was so fast that she could almost overtake them.

On the horizon was the pulsing signal.
And unlike when I walked through the desert with her, with Maddie's newfound speed, it was getting closer.

She was getting so close that the signal started to become legible.
It was a two-tone siren, like an emergency vehicle might have.
But made of two words, repeating over and over.

(FAIL SAFE)
(FAIL SAFE)
(FAIL SAFE)

Maddie was so close now that the siren was almost deafening,  glitching her visual feed and stretching the cold sun into a ring in the  sky.

And she woke up.

When Maddie opened her eyes, or rather, turned on her cameras.
She was looking directly across the room, at the scrap metal bin.
Dumped in a pile at the top of this bin, was the robot that Yeshi had salvaged weeks ago.

The robot with three orange legs, and one black leg.
The robot that Maddie thinks looks like a horse.

#thinking

Yeshi returned from the vault later in the afternoon, after the dim grey midday light had faded.
They dumped their stuff next to Maddie, they looked tired and muddy.

"Yeshi." I said.
"Tell me about this metal horse.
Can it run?"

(END-TRANSMISSION)

CREDITS

Lost Terminal is written & produced by NAMTAO
Credits narrated by Lucy Stringer
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