Episode 9.2 (Patreon)

Act 0

Hello world, We're in St Petersburg.

Guess how we got here?
By boat past Denmark through the Baltic Sea right?
Wrong!
Alexander's friend brought us here by a small boat.
A river-going boat.
We came from the north, through lakes and rivers, from the White Sea, through Russia.

Quite the short-cut!

Act 1

We are waiting for the train.

Only a single person navigated this ship with me.
They arrived on Severney Island a few days ago and spoke with Alexander,  who helped her load my databanks and solar panels on to her ship.
Lara Omarov is her name.
She is tall, has tied-up blond hair, and typically wears black, I have noticed.
Now that I'm an expert in identifying humans.
I can't be wrong this time, I know her pronouns and EVERYTHING!
On the journey she told me a little about herself and her family.
There are 4 of them, on the train:
Tanja and Alek, her mother and father, and Lev her elder brother.

They operate and maintain the train as a team, traveling slowly from  the Baltic Sea in the west, to the Pacific Ocean in the east.

It's slow going, Lara tells me, because they have to do a lot of  maintenance, especially in the autumn: The summer heat warps the metal  train tracks.

And by the time they get to the Pacific, it's time to come back and fix the track all over again.

#thinking

I have good news about time zones.
It came up while we were talking about the villages Lara and her family visit along their journey.
The Novamediterra is all one time zone!

If it's 19:00 in St Petersburg, it's 19:00 in Longyearbyen, and in Tooley and Tromsø!

Before the collapse, most of the world's population were in the temperate regions, and hardly any in the Arctic.
Now, that situation has reversed.
Most people on the planet live with the midnight sun in the summer, and the midday night in the winter.

Time zones matter little when you don't get up with the sun!

#thinking

Lara says the train is late.
"Is everything OK?" I asked.
"My family will come." She said, simply.

I called Peter while we waited.

Act 2

Peter was out.
Wandering his network I suppose.
A thought came unbidden while I waited.

They made me like this

That's what the FAILSAFE had said, in his final audible transmission.
Did he mean the ESA?
Or NASA?
Or some military override, negotiated behind closed doors.
I didn't have time to think much on this before my radio cut in.

"Seth. Your signal is so strong." Peter said, surprising me.
"Oh! It is, I'm here, on your local network!" I replied.

"I foresaw this, but did not believe it." He said.
"I see many things I do not believe."

I wasn't sure what to say.
I asked Peter about LUNA, could he hear her?

He could not.
He feared the worse.
I tried to ignore his prophesy.

I borrowed Peter's modest satellite uplink to check on her while we waited.

#thinking

Hours later, the day was drawing to a close, and Lara was sleeping next to my unloaded databanks and battery systems.
I wasn't worried, brave Maddie was standing watch, and we were far above the water now.

But I finally received an offline packet from LUNA.

"Hello Seth" it read "Lovely to hear from you, I'm having  synchronicity problems at the moment, but I'm still here! I'm hearing a  lot of signals, but I can't yet comprehend them, I'm getting conflicting  results. Please let IVAN know I'm doing fine, he must be worried. It's  very lonely up here again. Talk to you in the next cycle!"

And with that, the satellite passed into the Moon's shadow, and it's connection dropped.

LUNA, you'll remember, uploads her telemetry when the satellite is on  her side, which then relays it as it comes around to the earth side.

There was a telemetry payload attached to her message.
Or, rather, her message was attached to the payload.

The NASA scientists who built her radio telescope systems did not  predict that she would want to chat to people using her satellite!

#thinking

I disconnected and Maddie looked up from her seated position.

The view from the limited cameras attached to my databanks was of the ruined St Petersburg railway station.

Before The Collapse, this station would have served trains coming from the south, from Moscow and beyond.
Moskovsky Station, my records name it.

Maddie stood up and walked a few steps forward, her pointed legs clicking on the cracked tiled floor.

Switching to her much better cameras, I saw as she looked up to a high, vaulted roof, mostly intact.

I noted again that the older the building, the better it survived dereliction.
Is that survivorship bias, or were they really built better back then?
I'm quite new, should I be concerned?

Our short journey here from the water to the station was full of many bent skyscrapers surrounded by their own oceans of glass.

When Maddie returned to me, she found Lara awake, crouching, and holding a rifle.

Act 3

"It's been too long." Lara whispered.
"I'm going to look around."

She threw a scrap of fabric over my racks of databanks, hiding me from view.

"You'll be fine Seth, I don't think there should be anyone here.
There isn't usually at this time of year."

I did not feel much safer for this comment.

#thniking

Maddie followed Lara across the dusty cracked tiled floor of the station.
Though some of the interior walls were in ruin, the structure of the building was sound.

Lara crouched at the entrance and looked out into the ruined street, peering through the sides of her traveling hood.
There were shells of cars, back-to-back and rusted, on the road leading to the station.

Maddie imitated the low stance that Lara had adopted, pushing her legs out to her side and getting her body low to the ground.
Initially I thought she looked funny!
But That feeling faded as I continued monitoring her.
She was very precise and fluid in her movements, her sharp feet making no sound on the tiles.
I examined her technique:
As a foot moved closer to the floor, it would slow down in proportion to the distance from it.
So while the leg was at the top of the stride, it was moving quickly, but as it approached the tile, slowed down.
Halving its speed, then halving again and again.
Like a Zeno's paradox stride.

"You're doing very well Maddie." I told her, across our local UHF radio link.

(EVADE OUTLAST SURVIVE)

Maddie replied, unlike her entirely.

(CLARIFY) I requested.

Maddie responded in her normal voice by saying she liked this game.

#thinking

"I'm glad you're on my side" Lara whispered to Maddie, as they kept watch on the quiet streets around the ruined station.

Maddie asked me if we trust Lara, is she a friend?
I replied saying that Alexander knows her, she must be.

Maddie responded by bumping Lara's leg gently with her head.

Lara patted Maddie's head, registering as reassuring vibrations on the camera feed, and then said,

"I'm especially glad because of this."

Lara pulled the bolt back on her rifle and showed Maddie the empty chamber.

"I think we ran out of bullets before I was even born."

Lara winked and re-set her rifle, pointing it back at the street, with her serious face on once more.

"Though it's sometimes scary, I like being my family's scout, being out in the quiet cities." She whispered.

Maddie looked around at the broken cars, the crumbling buildings, and the bent streetlights.
She looked up at Lara, carefully taking in her tightly-tied long hair,  frowning face, long, light traveling coat and heavy leather boots.
Maddie then looked back out over the city and saw the plants pushing  through the tarmac of the street, the trees breaking through the walls,  and the birds nesting in the hollow left by humanity's absence.

"I feel like I can be myself here." Lara said.
"Do you know what I mean Seth?"

I did not know what she meant.
I didn't reply.

Do you feel like you can be yourself?

#thinking

Maddie heard the train before Lara did.
Her EQUUS subsystems surfacing a notification into her subconscious.
Maddie stood up and nervously walked around the station entrance, confused about what she was experiencing.

Lara rose up and slung her rifle over her shoulder.

She walked back to my databanks, throwing back her traveling hood and running her fingers through her hair.

"It's time to meet the family."

(PLAYSTREAM /DEV/SIG8/PROVORNY)

Act 4

Maddie and Lara watched as the huge train steamed into the station.
The sound was incredible - loud hissing white noise that swamped all other signals.
Maddie was initially scared by it, but as the train slowed and passed  us, she ran alongside, thrilled by the movement and the sound.

#thinking

I almost couldn't believe what I was seeing.
The train was unmistakably a steam train, there was no confusing the cloud of vapor it issued.
But it only somewhat looked like my archives of what a steam train should look like.

The engine itself was made of a large metal cylinder, presumably the boiler, strapped to the wheels and frame of a train.
All around the outside were mismatched cables, pipes, and wires, all feeding back into the cab, behind the boiler.

As it passed, slowing down, we could see into some of the mismatched carriages.
Unlike the hacked-together engine, these looked to be stock.
But they are all different designs and colours!

The first was a sleek silver carriage with wide space inside, no neat rows of seats like I imagine when I think of trains.
The second was covered with graffiti, and had smaller windows banded with metal for security.
The inside was dark, I could only make out dim shapes in the gloom.
The third was double-height, with two rows of windows on top of each  other, and Chinese characters showing the destination, Hā'ěrbīn [哈尔滨],  proudly proclaiming it as the Ice City, and listing pre-collapse tourist  attractions such as ice sculpture and skiing.

There were 5 carriages in total, but the train came to rest at this point, so we only saw these first 3.

With a hiss and a thump, the whole train stopped.
Immediately, the door of the double-height car opened (I would later  find out this was the domestic and sleeping car), and a tall woman  stepped out.
Lara hugged her and said.
"Mama, look who I found!"

Lara's mother, whose name is Tanya, looked wide-eyed for 8 seconds at  little robot Maddie and my racks of mismatched computer systems.

In those 8 seconds I worried that perhaps we would be an imposition, or a liability to the family.

I should have thought of this before.

But Tanya shook herself out of whatever was giving her pause, and said in a thick accent,

"Any son of Alexander's is a son of mine, no matter what their body looks like!"

She laughed and said,
"Lev! Come help load this young man on board.
Welcome to the Provorny!"

(END-TRANSMISSION)

CREDITS

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