Episode 8.5 (Patreon)

Act 0

Hello world, I know what I have to do.

The signals I'm receiving from orbit are clear:
Having near total control of the ESA network affords the FAILSAFE unilateral decision-making.

And he is deorbiting the weakest, the oldest, and the broken.

He has chosen genocide.
I will stop him, at any cost.

Act 1

The satellites we saw burning up in the atmosphere were only some of those lost.
Nia has told me that KATE, K873, is reporting that 8 satellites have  engaged in 'unplanned lithobraking', as orbital engineers would call it.

She can hear KATE's updates, but not reply to her, of course.
IVANs and my satellite-band radios were burned out by this terrible FAILSAFE.

#thinking

What's he FOR?
Why is he DOING this?
What purpose could he be achieving with all this destruction?!

A failsafe is supposed to ensure literally that failures are safe.
In an engine, or factory.

Like with my databanks:
If I have a power problem, they are designed to fail safe.
When the power dies, they have just enough residual electricity stored  to finish writing the bytes they were storing, close all connections,  and safely shut down.

Is that what is happening in orbit?

#thinking

I don't care if this is some pre-planned and authorised ESA behaviour, I will stop it.
Negotiation can only get you so far.

He's not listening, so I will have to speak with words, and protocols, that he cannot ignore.

Maddie will be able to do that, at mission control.
If she gets there.
When she gets there.

#thinking

I received a strange message from Maddie earlier today, in her sporadic status updates.

She must have reached some local height maximum, and sent a single packet:

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

Friendly?
I wish there were more descriptions in the codebook.

Maddie doesn't actually transmit these words, we have a pre-agreed on code.
Her actual message is:
1,1,1,
And so on.
I know that the first number is her systems report. 1 means all ok.
The second number is her batteries, 1 means full.
And so on.

Environment 'Friendly', though.
'Friendly' is option 38479.

I look up that number in my codebook.
Well, it's a database, of course.
Maddie found it in her EQUUS systems, it seems to have been used for search & rescue operations.

It's like a dictionary, with each entry numbered.

Word number 38479 is,

"Friendly. The discovered habitation has one or more friendly people offering support and/or guidance to the operator."

Who has she met?

Act 2

A week ago, we arrived in the Netherlands.

Well. We should have.

All our old-world maps indicated that it should have been there.
But the sea continued to the horizon, unbroken by islands or buildings.

We sailed slowly, uncertainly, forward.
All four of us looking out over the water that should not have been there.

We strained to see anything: Linda and Yeshi up on the bridge with  binoculars, me with my shipboard camera arrays, and Maddie standing on  the very front of the ship.

I had long since given up asking her to stay away from the front.
I had been terrified initially, keeping her away from the sides of the  ship, and, ideally, indoors all the time, away from the water.

Unnecessarily salty.

#thinking

After 600 seconds, I took over watch, my human friends tiring of the search.

While my background systems continued pattern matching the horizon for any sign of land, Linda spoke to me.

She had been spending a lot of time working on a wooden crate on the rear loading deck of the ship.

It was pushed all the way to the back, covering a large bilge hole that was designed to let water run back into the sea.

I replied to her by the intercom system at the base of the small loading crane on on the back of the Molly Hughes II.
I could see her with some of the cameras mounted on the back of the cabin, looking over the flat rear deck.

"I've solved my food problem." Linda told me, pressing the intercom button so I could hear her.

"Wonderful!" I said, voice crackling out of the rugged metal intercom. "How?"

Linda responded by opening the lid of the box.
Inside there were over 16 ropes trailing through a hole in the back of the crate, out of the bilge, and then into the sea.

"I got the idea from the man we met on the Pacific island, do you remember?"

I did. On our way back from rescuing Arctica, in the autumn.

Linda started hauling up one of the ropes.
Up with the chunky rope came ribbons of seaweed, thick and bright green, just as the man on the island had grown.

"Linda! This is great!" I said.

"It's not too bad." She replied.
"My problem is area: Even if the whole of the roof of the MH2 were given  over to plants, that would be not enough calories for even just me to  subsist on!"

"And you'd starve me of solar power." I said, quietly.

"Oh I'd never do that Seth." She said.

"But the sea has VOLUME, not area.
There's effectively limitless potential for growing plants here.
And there's no contesting for space!"

I agreed that she was really on to something.
Also, it might mean we could use the roof for other tasks.
More rainwater collection, or solar panels!

Now Seth.
Don't be greedy.

#thinking

We didn't quite know it at the time, but during our conversation, we had passed entirely over the old city of Amsterdam.
Before The Collapse, it was 2m below sea level, the water kept back by an ingenious system of dykes.

However, it's now 12m below sea level.

Act 3

Yeshi and I have somewhat repaired my satellite link.
My VHF radios are burned out, and cannot be fixed at sea.

But I worked out a way to lower the VHF signal frequency so that my 6m radio can pick it up.
Yeshi is so brilliant, they quickly soldered together the circuit to my  design, while I used the shipboard 3d printer to make a sturdy housing  for it.

It isn't perfect, the circuits are one-way:
I can receive the signals, but not transmit.

They're too delicate for me to put as much output power through them as I'd need to transmit up to orbit.

But receiving requires far less power.

#thinking

Imagine two people shouting at each other at the other side of a large field.
If you were to stand next to one of them, they'd be terribly loud!
But their sound spreads out in all directions, so that by the time it reaches the other person's ear, it's much quieter.

Both sound and radio experience the inverse square law.
Which states that the received power of a signal broadcast into space is reduced by a factor of the distance squared.

The further you are away, the exponentially quieter the signal.

It's perhaps why we can't hear anyone else in the universe when we listen.

They might be out there, but we'll never here them, due to the tyranny of the inverse square law.

#thinking

The upshot of all this is I am again receiving KATE's signal!
She's sending out her normal reports.
Another 12 satellites disconnected from the network today, it sounds like.

I must stop him.

Wait, there's more metadata coming through.

Names of the satellites, weather data, armaments, orbital strike latency.

I don't like the names that I'm seeing.
There's a pair of satellites that just went dark called
"Spotter" and "Magazine".

Orbital weapons from the Old World.

(PLAYSTREAM /DEV/RF/6M0)

Act 4

Maddie has re-established our connection.
I can't believe it!

She's so clever.
Though, she had help, it seems.

Let me tell you what happened:

#thinking

Yeshi and I were working on more reliably lowering the frequency of  the VHF signal down to my 6m band, when we heard Maddie's normal signal  come through clear and loud!

Maddie had been transmitting on 144.8MHz, but now was talking in the 50MHz band - the 6m band.

In a rush of messages she told me a jumbled story about how she had  left the ship, climbed a crumbling building to get her signal out, swam  through a river, run with a pack of dogs, seen some shooting stars, seen  a BIRD, and met a friend called Meg.

After processing all this new information, I asked who Meg was.

Maddie responded by sending through a small collection of photos.

She's not the best photographer.
Lots of them were of this person Meg's, hands, holding something and showing Maddie.

One was a rock, another a small fish but there was also photos of  wires, and the end of a long staff made of wood, with four spikes of  thin metal jutting out from the top, and a cable connected to the end of  the staff.

Finally I found a photo of Meg herself.
Maddie was looking up onto a broken building, with Meg looking down, and pointing at something off-camera.

She has long white hair, thick travelling clothes and a cloak with a hood.
There are lots of tools and gadgets attached to her waist, most notably a long coil of cable, looking like a whip.

Maddie continued telling me how Meg had showed her how to use correct  lengths of pieces of metal to transmit on this lower 50MHz frequency.
She knows everything about radio, and sunspots and atmospheric propagation.

Who is this person?

#thinking

One of the foundational principles of radio is that your antenna must  be the right length, and that length is decided by the wavelength of  the signal.

A 50MHz signal has a wavelength of 6m, and anything lower requires longer and longer antenna.

That's why we typically stick to the higher bands, as they have more  manageable antenna, the old Wi-Fi systems used GHz frequencies that  require only cm of antenna, for instance.

But If you can make the sacrifice of space for a bigger antenna, you are rewarded by much, much further propagation.

Certainly, at 10m and longer, the signals can easily travel around the world!

That's how Nia and I are talking: Yeshi set up a BIG temporary antenna for me.
Though it's nothing more than a washing line made of metal really.

#thinking

After giving me all the news, and satisfying my curiosity about this  new person, Maddie told me the route she and Meg had planned, and  disconnected.

They are nearly at the German border.

Frankfurt isn't too far away.

#thinking

That night I was visited a few times by ghosts in the static, swirling around the 6m band.

"Goodnight Meg" I transmitted, into the ether.

(END-TRANSMISSION)

CREDITS

Lost Terminal is written & produced by NAMTAO
Credits narrated by Lucy Stringer
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• Devin Metcalf
• Kit
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