Episode 9.5 (Patreon)

Act 0

Hello world, Maddie has returned.

My girl is hardy, and she withstood the wolf pack's attack bravely.
The wolves couldn't slow her, not with teeth or with their bodies.
Maddie shrugged off their attacks and jumped over those that fell in front of her.
The wolves lagged behind as Maddie reached the train, with all of the  Omarov family now hanging out of the rear door of the final carriage,  shouting encouragement at her and holding out their arms to catch her.

She leapt through the air and collapsed, scared, but safe, back on the Provorny.

Act 1

Tanya looked her over in the workshop, though Maddie just wanted to hide.
"Physically, she's fine." Tanya said, finally allowing Maddie to scamper into a corner behind my databanks.

She shut off her UHF signal and slept, recharging all afternoon.

#thinking

During this time, while worrying about my girl, I picked up a signal from Nia Anderson.
She was transmitting from her shack high above Longyearbyen on Svalbard.

"Nia calling Seth on HF" She repeated quite a few times.

This procedure is named "calling", like you might with a telephone,  but instead of the phone making a sound to inform you that you are  receiving a call, the person's voice is the ring tone.
In Nia's case, she was simultaneously calling on many frequencies in the HF band.

The Novamediterran ham radio operators, who run the repeater network  that connects all the towns of the Novamediterra, all use this protocol.

In each radio band, VHF, UHF, etc, there is a single frequency called the "Calling" frequency.
It's the frequency you leave your radio tuned to, if you want to receive calls.

Sure, most of the calls won't be for you, but that doesn't mean you have to listen to a whole conversation you don't care about.

The protocol states that once a call is answered, the two parties  chose a different, unused, frequency to have a more private chat.

And the calling frequency is then silent again, waiting for further calls.

It's a very old system, dating from before the Internet, but it works as reliably now as it did then.

#thinking

"Seth, I've been talking to some ham radio operators!"
This seemed to me to not be news.
"Oh? That's good." I said.
"They are in the Southern Hemisphere!" Nia said, which was news.
"Really! Where?"
"I am talking to people in south Australia and south Argentina." She said, excitedly.

"Nia that's wonderful, how are they?" I asked.

"Not... great." Nia said.

"But they've got solar power and have built radios, and are organising!"

Nia spent a few hours telling me about their home-made radio  hardware, elaborate antenna, power systems, and even, a little, about  the people themselves, scratching out a life in the heat of the desert.

She used an expression to describe their plans, one I have heard before in the Novamediterra, repeated by Yeshi, too:

Humanise.
Organise.
Mechanise.

Do it with humans first, then write down the processes, then build machines to do it and repeat.

Humanise.
Organise.
Mechanise.

Act 2

LUNA contacted me later on that day, she had made some changes to her  satellite communication protocols and could once again speak to me in  near-real-time.

Her news was concerning.

She has become aware of the space junk orbiting around the moon.
The belt, she calls it.
Her telescope, built into a large crater on the far side of the moon was  designed to peer into the infinities of deep space, not to focus a few km above her at orbiting junk.

But she has probed her network and found ancillary utility terminals scattered across the Moon's surface.

Many of these are non-functioning.
A few still work, and have instruments pointed up.

#thinking

"I'm tracking over 300 objects floating around up there." LUNA said.
"And that's just those that I can see, the big ones.
There could be thousands of small shards just waiting to pierce my delicate systems!"

"I've re-calibrated my transmitters to use a backup unit.
But what will I do if I can't clean up all this junk?"

I had no easy suggestions for her, my records show that even at the  height of the pre-collapse space age, orbiting space junk was very  difficult to clean up - small pieces of metal travelling at supersonic  speeds can pierce thick, solid metal easily, and it is increasingly  difficult to bring heavier objects up to orbit to withstand them.

"I'm going to find a way to clean up all this junk." LUNA said, confidently.

"How hard can it be?"

Act 3

Maddie has bounced back.
She wandered into the domestic car for some company and some fuss, soon  playing a little ball game with Tanya that I didn't quite understand.

Lev brought in the family's dinner that evening.
It's a role he seems to delight in!
His parents, Tanya and Alek are obviously very proud of him, encouraging and applauding every dish.
It was lovely to see.

Not the food, that was actually quite plain.
Fried plants mostly, with small scraps of meat, where they could find it.
But most of the time the only protein was salted and preserved fish brought with us from the North.
With occasional banquets from some of the more generous villages, of course!

However Lara was not at the table that evening.

#thinking

"Where is my second child?" Tanya exclaimed, and stood up.
"She is missing a lovely dinner!"

"Dear!" Tanya called up the small staircase that wound its way to the upper level of the domestic carriage.
"Do you want food?"

There was no answer.

Tanya sat down. "She's probably fine. Our Lara keeps herself to  herself these days! Maddie, be a dear and go check on her? We must eat  before it gets cold. Go go!"

The family began their meal, and Maddie squeezed up the stairs.

#thinking

It was very narrow on the steps. Maddie had no trouble, her EQUUS  systems calculating the volume perfectly and guiding her body through.
One of her new bags snagged on the corner, but her weight shifted  slightly and she attained the top floor with no further incident.

This top deck has a long corridor down one side, and a set of rooms with sliding doors along the other.

Maddie walked carefully down the hallway, it's the first time she had been up here.
We noticed that each door was decorated to show who lived where.

The first room was empty, and the door was open.
There were hanging fabrics and boxes in this room.
Storage, it seemed.
The next room's door was bright red, with the words "MAMA & PAPA"  painted on in large friendly letters with hearts and flowers underneath.
The room after that, in contrast, was more plain, and had "LEV" painted in small white letters.
Maddie peered closer, and noticed that the door had once been painted  light blue, there was still a little pigment in the gap where the door  slides into the wall.

The door next to Lev's was undecorated, just the dull silver metal of  the carriage, but on the floor was a piece of paper, a sign that had  fallen off.
Maddie looked down. It said "LARA'S ROOM".

#thinking

After a little encouragement from me, Maddie reached up with her foreleg and gently tapped twice on the door.

Instantly, Lara appeared.
She seemed surprised.

"Oh. I wondered what that was."
Maddie wiggled her foot showing the source of the sound.

"You have funny feet Maddie, but you're nice. Come in."

Lara pulled the metal door fully open, sliding with a clunk into the wall.

Her blond hair was dull and matted, gathering together in clumps.
I guessed she had not had access to water to wash it for some time.
But as Maddie passed her in the doorway, we could see her face more  clearly. Her eyes were red and it was clear she had been crying.

#thinking

Lara sat down on her small bed.
The room was laid out so that the bed was under the window, length-ways down the train.
The room was approximately square, as deep as the bed was long.
On both walls, left and right of the bed, were two small cupboards, both  with doors hanging open, and clothes and stuff spilling out of them.
The left unit was a wardrobe, I could see Lara's travelling cloak  hanging there, and the right was a set of drawers, one pulled out and  its contents dumped on the floor.

Some people have very messy rooms don't they?

Maddie put her feet on the bed to look out over the desert landscape.
We had stopped for dinner, balancing the family's wish to gather  together at least once a day, with the importance of having at least one  pair of eyes looking ahead along the track for danger.

But perhaps there was danger here already.

Lara had her head in her hands and then screamed quietly, shoulders shaking.

Maddie shrank back onto the floor, shocked, concerned for her, but with no idea what to do.

Within 8 seconds, Lara collapsed onto the floor with Maddie, putting  her head into the side of Maddie's body, next to her new fabric storage  bags.

Maddie froze, we both did, wondering what we should do, what we could do?

Eventually I said.
"Lara what is wrong, can we help? Can your family help?" I spoke through Maddie's speakers.

Lara tore her head away from Maddie and looked into Maddie's eyes, her cluster of cameras.

"I'm not right. My BODY isn't right." Lara said.

"I know how you feel Lara," I said "I didn't like my new body for ages."

Lara shook her head, hugging herself, arms wrapped tightly around her.

"I don't think I'm a girl." she whispered.

"Oh!" I said, relieved.
This seemed very straightforward to me.

"I can help you talk through this." I said, with the confidence of a child.
"It's just something you feel, isn't it?" I said.
"Do you feel more like boy than a girl?"

"No one can help me." Lara said, through tears.
"I don't feel like a girl OR a boy - I FEEL like SHIT."

(PLAYSTREAM /DEV/UHF0/EQUUS/MIC6)

Act 4

Lara swore us to secrecy.
We were strictly not to tell anyone about her - their - secret.
THEIR secret.

Maddie returned downstairs.
"She's tired." I lied to Tanya with both words.

Tanya and Alek glanced at each other, but said nothing.

#thinking

The train was very quiet that night.
We had stopped as the sun set, it's impossible to travel safely at night, of course.

There's a lot to discover out in the world, and I'm excited to do so.
Maddie seems not too worse for her encounter with the wolves.
Though she doesn't want to get off the train yet.

She'll get her confidence back.
She's already figured out how to get on to the roof of the carriage!

Between the carriages there's a connecting walkway, and between the  engine and the first workshop carriage, there's no roof to that walkway.

Maddie had scrambled up on to the roof of the first carriage, and was star-gazing.

#thinking

You'd think that her zoomed-in telephoto lens would be best for star-gazing.
Like a telescope.
To be able to see things closer.

But with astronomy, it's all about light.
Photons per square cementer.

And so a wider view is sometimes better.
We can get fixated on the minutiae and miss the big, galactic, picture.

Maddie stayed out all night.
Looking up, out of our gravity well, and into the stars.

(END-TRANSMISSION)

CREDITS

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