[early-access] Episode 8.4 (Patreon)

Act 0

Hello world, I can't hear you.

The FAILSAFE has burned out my delicate higher-band radios!
The radios that I communication to Maddie with!

I think he'd have damaged all of them, if he could, but Yeshi saved me.

They heard my screams as my systems were overloaded by the signal from orbit, and ran to my aid.

Yeshi cut the bundle of antenna cables running from the roof to my room, in the center of the ship.

I'm grateful, but it was not in time to save all my systems.

Act 1

So here I am again.
Recording my message into the ship's data logger.
If you're hearing this, I was able to transmit it later.

I hope you're hearing this.

#thinking

Yeshi is repairing the damage to the antenna array.
There is nothing to do but wait.

Despite of everything, I slept, and dreamed.

#thinking

I was in a desert.
Not the blank, white-sanded one of my night-time dreams.

This one was filled with the dead.

Dead machines, specifically.

I travelled through the rubble of The Collapse.
The ground was piled up with computers and broken robots.
Assembly machines, cars, toasters, printers, and, most worryingly, a satellite.

I stopped at this crashed brother or sister.
But it hadn't crashed.

It was new, or it was when it was abandoned.
White ceramic plating, now dulled with age and rust lines.
And broken wings of solar panels.

I looked out at the horizon, the detritus piled up as far as I could see, and wept.

I can't cry in real life of course.
I lack both the mechanisms and instinct.
But we can do things in dreams that we can't in real life, can't we?

What do you dream of?
Do you dream of impossible things?

#thinking

I gave up, in the dream.
In a pit of despair.

Was this the sum total of the efforts of humanity, a layer of scrap covering the Earth?

I was broken, too, just like this satellite.
In the dream I knew I would be thrown into a pile of scrap one day.

We all would be.

A sound jolted me out of my thoughts.
It was a clear signal activating my notification system.

And I woke up.

Act 2

"Seth, I really need to talk to you." Nia Andersen said.

I was so surprised to hear anything, at the time I had assumed all my radios had been burned.
Yeshi must have carefully repaired the antenna connections!

"Nia! I can hear you! Can you hear me?" I exclaimed.

"Of course, you're 5x5, same as yesterday, have you moved?" she said.

"No." I replied, then explained the FAILSAFE's unprovoked attack on me.

"I see" She said.
"It makes sense your lower-frequency equipment was safe, Satellites don't need to use those bands.
You and I have to use them to propagate around the atmosphere.
Whereas, almost by definition, satellites always have line-of-sight!"

#thinking

"Nia, you said you wanted to talk." I said, after we had checked that my HF and 6m radios were all working fine.

"Yes." She said, pausing.

"Seth, I think there's something wrong with me."

"Are you unwell?" I asked.

"I DON'T KNOW MAYBE?!" Nia exclaimed.
"That stupid speed dating evening was a disaster.
There's something different with me, all the people seemed nice, but I didn't want the same things they did.

I think there's something broken in my brain, I'm not like my  friends, I'm not like anyone at that stupid event, or at the solstice  dance.

I'm a freak!"

And the connection went silent.
Though she was still connected, her carrier signal was strong.

"Nia, you're my friend, you're nice." I said, somewhat struggling as you can tell.
Her words felt a little too familiar to me.

"Thank you Seth, but if you'll excuse me saying, you don't want what these people want.
Our friendship is nice and simple.

There are certain... assumptions about going on dates with people that don't work for me."

I didn't understand, and told her.

"It's like... They get straight to the point! One moment I'm talking  about ionosphere propagation during the summer months, and the next  they've asked me some really intimate questions.

Yes, yes, sex is great, I'm sure, but can we talk about reflective ionisation please?"

She laughed, distorting the connection slightly.
I tweaked the gain of my radio to compensate.

When Nia continued, she was much quieter, almost whispering into the radio.
"There's something wrong with me and there is no way to fix it."

"Nia, I don't know what to say.
I don't want you to be sad."

"Thank you Seth." She replied, before adopting a more technician attitude.

"We'll test your other bands tomorrow.
Batteries & Bars."

Act 3

I no longer have a reliable connection to Maddie.

Though she's equipped with long-range HF-band radios, she's so close that I'm getting weird interference.

It's not actually interference, it's the nature of this lower-frequency band.

The radios the FAILSAFE burned out are pretty simple. VHF and UHF work on line of sight, and occasionally a bit more.

But those are no longer available to me.

What I'm experiencing, is NATURE.

#thinking

The HF band, is lower on the radio frequency spectrum than I'm used to.

The advantage of this band is that it can bounce off the atmosphere,  and therefore, under the right conditions, bounce around the world.

That's how Nia and I are talking, despite being so far apart, with very little but ocean between us.

I angle my antenna above the horizon, hitting the ionosphere, which then bounces my signal back up to Nia.

This is a very clever method of propagation, discovered by amateur  radio operators in the 1920s, but it is rather weather dependant.

#thinking

I've often thought that we're all much closer to nature post-collapse.
Much of the Old World design was was to shut out nature, paving over the grass and damming rivers for humanity's own goals.

But such indiscriminate changes cause a reaction, from the environment.
Covering the cities in black tar means that water has nowhere to go when extreme rain comes,
and while damming a river might allow hydroelectric power or a reservoir  of drinking water, the valley downstream can become a desert.

#thinking

Partly by choice, and partly by necessity, the new civilisations of the Novamediterra live closer to nature.

Solar power is readily available in the summer months, so that's where the focus of industry and activity is.
And in the long winter when the sun doesn't rise, more sedentary pursuits are undertaken.
Archiving, consolidation, preserving, recovery, all preparations for spring's new projects.

There is far less arable land, since the wide continents have been overcome by desert and heat.

And with one notable exception just outside of Geneva, the reaction  to this was to shift from farming the land to farming the ocean.

If there's one resource the Novamediterra has in abundance, it's ocean!
Tidal power, floating solar panel rafts, and all kinds of crafty ocean farming techniques have been developed.

The old land was wide, but this new ocean is deep, and could provide for far more people than are left, up in the arctic.

#thinking

Back on Station 6, I had almost unlimited power.
No clouds in space meant that when the Earth wasn't in front of the Sun, I had reliable, predictable power.
And in my own winters, the short nights of my orbit when the Earth  blocked the sun, I had battery backups and my little nuclear generator.

I could ignore nature, boxed in as I was in my own little world.

That all changed when I crashed down to earth.

#thinking

So the stars are not right.
Or rather, the atmosphere is not right.

I can't hear Nia or Maddie at the moment.
It's just me, and the ghosts in the static.

THE SIGNAL

(PLAYSTREAM /DEV/RF/HF3)

Act 4

Maddie has sent a tiny status update.
Our connection is still very weak, no two-way communication is possible at the moment.
But now and then I receive a burst of low-speed data.

This is when Maddie is at the top of a hill, or climbs onto a broken  building, straining her antenna up into the sky, and transmits a single  packet of data.

Every cm of height helps!
She's brilliant.

The latest packet reads:
{Systems: ok, Batteries: full, Solar-panels: charging, Motors: functioning, Environment: hazardous}

HAZARDOUS?! What could that mean?

Killer robots?
Deep water?
A minefield?
Too many horses?

WHAT?!

#thinking

64 minutes later, I received another packet:

{Systems: ok, Batteries: full, Solar-panels: charging, Motors: functioning, Environment: shooting stars}

We still can't hear each other properly.
So I can't ask her what she means by that.

By the time I decode her packet, she's moved away from her high point and continued on.

She's not waiting for orders or advice, she's so confident.

I suppose that's good.
She would ask for help if she needed it, wouldn't she?

Yes.

I think so.

We -- what is that.

#thinking

I'm picking up noise on my 6m radio.
This is the lowest-frequency radio that didn't get burned by the FAILSAFE.
I'm receiving a signal.
It's my own data.
That's... strange.

As part of normal operation, my systems send out regular packets saying "hi I'm here!" to any systems in radio range.
We all do.
It's useful to know who is in range.
And even more useful, to know who stops transmitting.

#thinking

But the packets I am receiving have my name on them.
They're reflections.
Echoes.

Yeshi has come up to the bridge.
They are in a hurry.

"Hi Yeshi, how are you?"

No reply.
They've grabbed some binoculars from the console here.
Yeshi or Linda would use them at sea to look at interesting places we passed.

But they're looking up.
Into the sky.

I don't often look up.
(RECALIBRATING-CAMERAS)

It's a clear day, only a few clouds on the horizon in the north.
It's mostly sunny these days, it's very, very dry here.

There's something glinting in the sky.
Reflecting the light of the sun, looking like stars, but during the day.

"It's a meteor shower!" Yeshi shouted.

I have zoomed in and am tracking it closely.
Not just with the cameras, my eyes, but with my ears too, by radio.

The echoes are my signals, bouncing off the slight ionisation of the atmosphere that the meteor shower is causing.

But...
I'm receiving a carrier signal too.
It's right at the top of my usable band at the moment.
I think it would be VHF, if I could hear it properly.

But the sender is travelling away from us at such a speed that  Doppler shift is bringing the signal into the lower bands that I can  hear at present.

It's very familiar.

It's horribly familiar.

It's an ESA satellite.

"There's another one!" Shouted Linda.
I don't know when she arrived, I'm not paying attention.

I refocused to where she was pointing.
Two more satellites were falling and burning up in the atmosphere.
Their distorted final signals sounding like screams over the radio.

My nightmare is coming true

(END-TRANSMISSION)