Episode 8.9 (Patreon)

Act 0

Hello world, the end is near

Maddie arrived in Frankfurt by water in the early morning.
She kept moving even at night, against the slow current.
The sun was hot, the sky was beautiful and no clouds passed overhead while we both pretended we weren't scared.

Act 1

Maddie has been swimming up the Rhine.
It must be the Rhine.

The only navigation she needed to do was when the river was joined by a tributary to the left, and she turned right.

The broken skyline of Frankfurt was that way.
She was now heading to the city on the outskirts of Frankfurt to find mission control.

#thinking

The river was faster past the fork.
Maddie finally scrambled up a steep metal bank onto dry land.
I can't tell you how relieved I am!

The area around the river seemed to have once been farmland.
Wide, flat stretches of ground separated by boundaries.
All brown, dusty and dead.
The fences are rusted, and any shrubs marking the lines wilted and crumbled in the droughts of the mid 21C.

But the river is still here, low and muddy.
Clearly much smaller than what it once was, the original banks are very clear.
They are defined in corrugated metal, that used to kept the river along its course.

Not needed now.

#thinking

Maddie has found a road alongside the old riverbed, and resumed her fast trot, water and mud shaking from her body.
Her lenses are remarkably clear, they must be made with some clever oleophobic layer on them.

There are no SIGNALS here, Maddie reports, using her radios in the way that Meg showed her.

Maddie transmitted the log of the radio.
Absolute silence, other than the hiss of background noise, even that very quiet.

Don't worry Maddie, we will find it.
I have approximate plans of the site, pulled from Station 6's databanks.

We just have to get closer

#thinking

This habitation is huge.
Far from being the small industrial site on the outskirts of Frankfurt, it's a city in it's own right.
There's so much here.

Broken supermarkets, restaurants, a few bent skyscrapers on the skyline, and rows and rows of tumble-down houses.
So many people lived here, once.

It's totally silent.
The only sound, Maddie's feet clicking on the cracked tarmac.

Ooh, there's a railway.
Maddie let's take a look.

#thinking

Though the tracks were indeed very interesting, neat lines all organised into platforms for transporting people and goods.

We made a discovery.

Right next to the station is an industrial park.
And one of the buildings has a very familiar logo on it.
And a weak radio signal broadcasting.

We've found it.

Act 2

We stood in front of the large metal and broken glass building.
Well, Maddie did.
I don't know why I said "we".
Maybe Nia's right, maybe the lines between Maddie and I are blurred.

As though she heard my thoughts of her, Nia's voice crackled on the radio.

"Seth, it's Nia, are you there?"

I looked for a while at the ESA office building we were standing in front of.

Should I talk to Nia?

There was still a little time.
Maddie: Wait there for a moment.

"Nia, it's Seth. Your signal is good."

"It's not just MY signal that is good Seth." Nia said, excitedly, ignoring all protocol.
"I have news!"

"I have a few minutes". I said, Maddie looking up at the circular  logo on the front of the building, she recognised it from our old home,  Station 6.

"What's new?"

"I've been building bigger antennas, better antennas.
As you know, our Novamediterran network is built on the 50MHz band.
It's good for the short-range repeaters we have, and there's lots of old-world hardware to be salvaged.

But I've been experimenting with a much lower frequency, down in the 7MHz band.

Yes, you need enormous antennas, but they have the potential for  world-wide communication, like you and I have been forced to use.

I think we can do better."

#thinking

"Where did you get this idea from?" I asked.

Nia paused, connection open, but no words were coming over the line.

"Don't tease me Seth." Nia said eventually.
"But the idea came to me in a dream."

I wouldn't ever tease anyone for such a thing.
I allowed Nia to continue.

"I had been testing propagation on the 50MHz band, comparing signal  reports with the other repeater operators around the Novamediterra.

We had been getting interference from unwanted ionosphere reflections, and were re-calibrating.
These reflections are fun, sometimes, and can let you bounce your signal  many many times further than normal, but only sporadically.

In the normal operation of our network, they're actually a nuisance.

And after I'd finished testing, it was so late.

I said 73 - thank you - to the last operator, closed my eyes and drifted off to sleep, there and then, at my desk."

#thinking

"I woke up early, just before breakfast, despite my late night." Nia said.
"I thought I remembered someone whispering to me, as I came to,  something echoing in my headphones, but it was just the sound of the  open connection, the ghosts in the static.

The brain sometimes hears voices in random data.

I woke with this idea for long-distance propagation."

"So that day I built the complex antenna, and pointed it at the sky.

And I've heard PEOPLE, Seth.
Real people, not ghosts, not long-abandoned computer systems.

People, in all directions.
The SIGNALS are everywhere!"

#thinking

"That's incredible Nia!" I said.

I opened the connection again, intending to ask her more about what she had found.
I wanted to know more about the people.
I always want to know more about people

But something distracted me.

Maddie's sensors were reading extremes of movement.
She was running.
She was sprinting.
Faster than I've ever known her to.

I connected to her video feed, blurred and panicked.

Maddie, what's happening? I asked.

And then the world exploded.

Act 3

Our connection was interrupted for a moment.
My radio subsystems announced:
(CONNECTION-LOST)

And then immediately,
(CONNECTION-REESTABLISHED)

Maddie's video feed was moving around wildly, far faster than my  real-time image recognition algorithms could understand what was  happening.

She was using her highly-zoomed-in telephoto lens.
That's why it seemed to be swinging around so fast.

Maddie: Use your normal lens, I can't see what's happening here. I transmitted.

Maddie's video feed cycled through a few lenses back to the main, high-resolution camera.

And I saw why she wasn't using it.

It has cracked, a spider's-web of refraction making it impossible to see.

I could feel Maddie's fear as she transmitted an SOS packet:

{Systems: damaged, Batteries: full, Solar-panels: low-voltage, Motors: functioning, Environment: armagedden}

#thinking

Without waiting for instructions, Maddie switched to a different lens, this one infra red, and ran.

Though the feed was now devoid of colour, we could at least see objects relatively normally.

She was inside a building.
She must have bolted in while we were momentarily disconnected.

Maddie, where are we?

She didn't answer me, a terrible sound causing her to look up as the whole roof of the building began collapsing.

Run Run Run Maddie! I transmitted, desperately.

My brave girl needed no encouragement.

She galloped through the collapsing building and out the other side,  running at the EQUUS's full speed and dodging falling concrete.

She burst through the rear doors.
Perhaps they were locked, but her sharp military-grade legs tore through them like they were paper.

Maddie accelerated to her top speed, motors and actuators working in perfect synchronicity.

I watched in horror and amazement as her velocity sensors showed she was travelling at over 50km/h.

I briefly wondered if Maddie was now the fastest quadruped on earth, when another building to her right detonated.

#thinking

The concussion knocked her off her feed, throwing both Maddie and several rusted shells of cars sideways.

Unlike the cars, Maddie landed in a wide spider-like stance, stabilised and continued running.

Looking back, there was no fire, no explosion.
The building was simply no longer there.

I told her urgently that we need to find Mission control, could she slow down and find a site map or a visitor's centre?

Maddie ignored my request, and looked up.

(ENVIRONMENT: SHOOTING-STARS)

She transmitted.

She looked up at the sky, and there were white bolts of fire raining down on the city.

Maddie switched to her highly-zoomed in telephoto lens again, I  allowed myself the processing power to analyse the images faster than  real time.

And the world slowed.

These new shooting stars were long, thin rods of metal traveling, I estimated, at supersonic speeds.
Burning white-hot as they fell down to earth.

Mass Drivers, my databanks call them.

A pre-collapse weapon.
Ingenious really.

Drop a long piece of metal from orbit with precise enough accuracy, and you can hit any target on earth within minutes.
All without rocket fuel or electronics.
Both which might be unreliable, or jammed by the enemy.

I only know of one entity in orbit that could do this.
I suppose we are the FAILSAFE's enemy.

"Find shelter Maddie." I shouted.

She ran past building after building, the ESA site was very large.

None looked right.
None looked like the mission control bunker.

Many of the buildings were targeted by the FAILSAFE's mass drivers, and destroyed.

There was dust in the air, and Maddie could no longer see the horizon.

An explosion, terribly close, glitched her video feed.

The last thing I saw was some of the city's residential buildings being struck too, by these terrible orbital weapons.

A few frames of collapsing building came from Maddie, before I awoke.

Back on the Molly Hughes II.

Looking at the error message:

(CONNECTION-LOST)

(PLAYSTREAM /DEV/MIC/MIC4)

Act 4

Both Linda and Yeshi were in my room, at the heart of the ship.
Yeshi wielding heavy-duty bolt cutters, the same that they used to cut  my antenna feed lines, when the FAILSAFE attempted to burn out my radios  all that time ago.

Or perhaps...
Last week?

Linda was sitting next to our Go playing board.
Head in her hands.
Looking at my databanks.

I realised I had been screaming ineffectually at Maddie through my speakers, into this empty room.
Which had brought my friends.

"Maddie's in trouble." I said, voice glitching as I focused my power  into my radios, futilely attempting to reestablish the connection.

"What do you need?" Yeshi said, calmly and quickly, knuckles white on the bolt cutters.
"Yes, anything." Linda added.

"I don't know" I said.

"I don't know"

(END-TRANSMISSION)