Episode 9.8 (Patreon)

Act 0

Hello world, everything is broken.

The family are distraught.
Alek is sitting at the little dining table in the domestic car, reading and re-reading the note that he found in Lara's room.
Tanya is rushing up and down the train, filling her pockets with  provisions and maps and has lashed two heavy metal rods to her back as  weapons.
Lev is in his room, weeping.

Act 1

Maddie kept out of the way of Tanya's frenzy of activity, she's  sitting next to me in the first carriage, the workshop carriage,  charging.
She had been up all night again.

(Do you know him?) Maddie asked, surprising me with a direct message.

"Who?" I said.

(The man who saved me) Maddie replied.

"Someone saved you?" I asked. "Clarify."

Maddie told me about her experience at the raider camp.
For raider camp it was.
The crowd hit her with metal, broke off her UHF antenna and pulled on her legs.

But she felt calm, she told me.
As though the attack was happening to someone else.
Pain was distant, she felt certain of safety.

She did not remember how she returned to the Provorny, only waking up back in the workshop car with blood on her feet.

(He saved me) she repeated.

I asked her what happened to this savoir.
(He is here) Maddie said.

I checked the video feeds briefly, the only people around were the  Omarov family, Alek was now attempting to stop Tanya from leaving the  train, there were raised voices.

But no new man, no savoir.

(He spoke to me) Maddie said.

"What did he say" I asked, with another quick check of the cameras.

(EVADE OUTLAST SURVIVE) Maddie replied.

I had heard that before.

Maddie described the dream she had after her vision faded as the raiders attacked her.

Green fireflies, she described, overlaid on a red grid like a chessboard.
She thought the dream was a game, with different moves to extinguish the green pieces.
She said she enjoyed the game, the objective of which was to clear the board of these green tokens.

She said that he was afraid, however.
Which she couldn't understand, as the game seemed so fun to her.
She described a primal fear, originating in some unknown parts of her EQUUS systems.
An animistic, instinctual drive to survive.

Maddie finished charging and trotted out to see what the noise was in the next carriage.
It was, of course, the pandemonium caused by Lara leaving.

I was left wondering what other subroutines are hiding in Maddie's pre-collapse subconscious.

Act 2

My VHF sensors picked up a faint signal.
Almost indistinguishable from background noise.

A human operator would not have heard it, if you will excuse the ego.
You need a computer.

In radio, there's two ways to beat background noise.
You can have a powerful signal, like IVAN is pumping out into the air.
Or you can be patient.

The thing about background noise is that it's random.
Up, down, positive, negative, all over the place.
Over time it averages out to nothing, and the signals shine through.

Imagine random numbers from 0 to 10.
and my signal is at 2.
There could be a million data points saying anything from 0 to 10, and my single 2 is lost in the noise.
You don't know if the 2 you are receiving  is my signal or one of the thousands of other points reading as 2 randomly.

But if you wait.
Collect.
Average.
The noise falls away and the number 2 appears juuuust slightly more often than the average.
You can hear, if you listen long enough.

The signal was very very slow, which again helps the averages.

Extremely slow.

So slow I initially thought a human was typing the message to me.
As you probably know, human speech is 1.8kbps and typing is significantly slower than that.

But it wasn't a human, it was LUNA.

After I realised it was her, I shut down my other transmissions and focused.
She was using a very simple phase shift keying encoding.

"HELLO SETH. CAN YOU HEAR ME?"
She said.

"Luna! yes I can! How are you transmitting, are you safe? What  happened to your satellite?" I replied using the same simple encoding,  modulating a sine wave slowly.

It took a long time for LUNA to register my response, and her reply was also very slow.

"It's destroyed. I knew it was going to be. But if I did it myself, I  would have some control. Rather than waiting for a random orbiting bolt  or shard of glass to do it for me"

"And how are we speaking now?" I asked, keeping it short to avoid buffering.

"I have discovered a network of outposts spread over the moon about  1000km apart. They're all connected, but I don't know what they do."

I had not heard of such a network. I waited for her to continue, sending her a simple acknowledgement message.

"One of them on the near side of the moon, opposite to me, has a tiny antenna. I'm using it now."

"Nia Andersen helped me. I was pushing buttons and trying desperately to work this stupid thing. No-one could hear me.

But I picked up a message in the system.

SLOW DOWN GIRL. It said.

I did and things started to work."

I waited for LUNA's message to buffer.

"It's so slow! I may never communicate at high speed again, but I'm safe."

She paused for a moment then repeated.

"Seth I'm finally safe"

Act 3

Something incredible has happened at the cracked bunker on the hill, on Severny island.

IVAN's transmission has stopped, but that isn't the most interesting part.

I received a message from Alexander, the man who more than anyone, is like my father.

A boat landed at the long beach below his lighthouse, my old home.

A group of 5 people in a small boat jumped out in the water and pulled the boat up onto the sand.

They walked over the km-long burned gouges in the beach, away from the cracked shuttle wreck, to meet Alexander.

"We're here for IVAN." they told him.

The group was a rescue party, of sorts, Alexander told me, while relaying the story later.

They introduced themselves as members of IVAN's congregation. His  partially-religious partially secular news broadcast, that he sends out  every day.

If you remember it started as a purely orthodox sermon, but then he added a Community Calendar

And with LUNA's help, the community section expanded and now takes up nearly the whole efforts of IVAN's church.

These people had heard his broadcasts and were there to help, if they could.

Alexander guided them past Adrian's farmland, through the forest and to the black metal door of the bunker.

The group were astonished to find such a bastion of the pre-collapse  world. Most of these kinds of structures were destroyed during the  resource wars.

Helen, the leader or organiser of the group, talked to Alexander at the entrance.

She asked him about the interior, the layout, any dangers, and such.
Alexander told her what he knew, that the entrance foyer lead to a long  corridor with doors either side, and that at the very interior was  IVAN's cathedral.

So prepared, the group entered the bunker.

The negotiation with IVAN was slow.

The cathedral was a cacophony of overlapping shouts and screams from him.
"CAN YOU HEAR ME"
"CAN YOU HEAR ME"
"CAN YOU HEAR ME"

over and over again, in many voices.

This was his broadcast, transmitting out and up at every angle from  his antenna and satellite dish array, at the top of the hill.

Progress finally came when Alexander manually disconnected the power to his transmitters and the radio broadcast stopped.

"Father IVAN!" Helen said. "We are here to help, what is happening?"

Alexander said that the room was silent for many minutes.

IVAN finally responded, his two faces on his burnt-in screens looking down over the assembled people.

"I cannot find Him." He said.
"God is dead."

(PLAYSTREAM /DEV/VHF2/50M)

Act 4

Lev has made a feast for the family.
Well, the family that is left on the Provorny.

Alec and Tanya are sitting at opposite sides of the small table in the domestic car, looking at the food Lev has presented.

Salted fish, boiled and fried vegetables, and jewel of the feast, some cured chicken slices.
Lev told Maddie about them as he prepared everything over the course of the afternoon.
She had wanted an escape from the loud, violent arguments of Tanya and Alec, the air was too full of noise and thrown items.

Lev was working multiple metal pots and pans at once, over a wood fired kitchen range.
The galley, as Lev called it, was a long thin room at the rear of the domestic car.

Lev told Maddie all about the ingredients and method, telling her  that this or that needs to be prepared in a special way to make it  delicious.

"Good ingredients are fine, but spices are the secret!"

he repeated that over and over as he cooked.

"Spices are the secret."

"Spices are the secret."

"Lara loves spicy food."

The food sat cold and uneaten as the family were gathered around the table.

Alec and Tanya were arguing about how long to wait for Lara.
The longer we waited, the more likely the raiders would find us.
If they hadn't already.
They were deciding if they should leave their child behind.

As Lev joined them with the final dish and sat down, his parents' argument died.

But no new conversation took its place.

32 minutes passed.
No one took a bite.

Lev looking between Lara's empty place at the table, then the window,  first hopefully, then after the time passed, through tears.

Alec served his wife and son some of the food.
"Eat." he said, simply.

The family began eating, delicately.

"Maddie, Seth." Alec said suddenly.
"When Lara returns you must know more about her."

I replied that I would love to.
I didn't correct Lara's pronoun.
Now was not the time.

"She had so many friends as a child!" Alec said, with a laugh.
"Always the most popular kid when we stopped at the villages and towns."

"And such a risk-taker, we had a job to keep her off the roof!"

Tanya suppressed a laugh, which turned into a sob, through her smile.

"She was so huggy as a child. Always attached to either of us, like a limpet."

"But things changed."

Tanya stopped smiling.
Alec put his hand on her hers.

"She will return." Alec said, gently.

"She'd better." Tanya said.

(END-TRANSMISSION)

CREDITS

Lost Terminal is written & produced by NAMTAO
Credits narrated by Lucy Stringer
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• Ada Phillips
• Devin Metcalf
• Wil Taylor
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