Episode 10.1 (Patreon)

Hello world, I hope you can hear me.

Things are fine here, considering.

I'm safe enough.
But I'm alone.

Act 1

The train is stable.
Finally.

The problem with the engine has stopped us.
Always another fix to do!

I received another message from Arctica.
She's asking when we're coming home.
She needs some help at the Svalbard Seed Vault, of which she is the caretaker, along with her friends in the Vault Coven.

We'll be home safe soon I told her.
I'm not sure I can promise either of those things.

I don't eat, as you know.
As long as the sun powers up my solar panels, I wake up each day and continue work.

I don't eat.
But my friends do.

Our engine has failed in a very bad place.
There are no farms or people here.
And you can't fix a train if you starve first.

Have you eaten today?

The signals started again.
The localised ones coming from every direction.
Well, every direction in the city.
I don't understand the encoding most of them are using.
It's all Greek to me.

The strongest signal powers on in the morning and then off again each night.
Perhaps they are having problems with solar power?
I remember what that is like.
The sun reliably rises, but also reliably sets.

Are you still there?
I think you are still there.
The ESA constellation is repeating my transmissions back to the  Novamediterran network, so you, wherever you are, should be able to hear  me.

I hope you can hear me.

The sun has set, it's getting dark.
Maddie is growing restless.

She has as patrol route around the Provorny and the 5 carriages.
She wandered around lazily during the day.
But her circuit has become much more frantic as the light of the sun died.

Where is the Omarov family?
Where are my friends?

Act 2

Let me bring you up to date.
8 days ago ago we arrived in the ruined city of Severobaikalsk aboard the steam train, the Provorny, and are taking stock of our situation.

We had been travelling through days and days of fields, from horizon to horizon.
The gnarled, dried and twisted bushes stretched in every direction.
We were in Siberian vineyard country.

The city is built onto the hillside above an enormous dust valley.
There are no skyscrapers here, only crumbling concrete soviet apartment blocks.

"Pressure seals have gone." Alec had told us over lunch.
"Must find new ones if we're to be on our way."

Alec and Tanya, along with their sons, Lev and Lyosha make up the Omarov family.
And the family take care of the train.

I have been a passenger aboard the Provorny for 3 months now.
My databanks are set up in the front carriage, the workshop carriage, and little Maddie is here with me too.
Her new four-legged body charges next to me at night.

Or, more often, she sneaks up on to the roof of the train to watch the moon.
Lyosha helps her sneak out.

"You children must go out and find something we can fix the train with. What did you want Dear?" Tanya asked her husband.

"Pressure seals." Alec said.
"Rubber, ideally, but oiled fabric would do if we had a lot of it."

The family talked about Severobaikalsk.

It had once been a boom town around the railroad.
First tents, then shacks, then finally the blocks were built to house nearly 50,000 people.

The problems started before The Collapse, Tanya said.
From what they know, after the train line was finished, the people
had no work, and drifted away.

While our conversation was happening, Maddie had once again got up on to the roof.
She was looking out over the right side of the train, over the desert valley to the east.

The desert stretched out as far as the horizon.
The valley coated in a fine sand, milled around by the wind.

There were structures close to the train line.
Maddie selected a telephoto lens and looked closer.

I no longer have control over what my girl does.
I can still see what she sees, but not hear what she is thinking.

She looked at the structures.
They were tumble-down wooden houses perched on the top of the valley.
With broken wooden roads leading down into it.
Maddie looked closer at what I had initially pattern matched as cars, however now I can look for longer, they are boats.

The wooden roads are the remnants of long-forgotten jetties.

The whole desert valley used to be a lake, 636km long.
The largest body of fresh water in the world.
Where is it now?

Maddie looked left, towards the city.
Many U-shaped tower blocks dominated the skyline.
Some still standing, but many looking lop-sided, their roofs fallen in and walls fallen out.

Maddie's antennas were picking up a chatter of mismatched radio transmissions.
She turned her head one way and another, fruitlessly trying to understand what it all was.

"Abandoned" Tanya had said.

Then what are all these Signals?

Act 3

That was 8 days ago.
The family have abandoned their repair of the train, tumbling down the hierarchy of needs.
Pure survival takes precedent.
Scavenging the city for any edible food.

That is where they have been all day today, and from which they have not returned.
This can't be good news.

While the Omarov family were out, I talked to Nia Andersen.
Nia is the Ham Radio operator who is the repeater keeper for the Svalbardian city of Longyearbyen.

The Novamediterran repeater network is a vital piece of infrastructure.
Certainly the largest.
It is a network of radio towers that act as the post-collapse world's telegraphy.
Messages, in the form of fast bursts of encoded audio, are transmitted  up to Nia's repeater from the town down in the valley below, and then  her automated systems store and forward that message to it's destination  repeater.

There is a simple routing system of destination and source addresses.
Sometimes the system doesn't quite select the correct route for the  message, and an operator has to intervene, to help the packet get to  it's destination.

"The atmo is not helping us today."
Nia said, her message being relayed by gateway satellite KATE, K873.

"Super high air pressure up here.
I'm getting TX losses left and right.
Where normally I could jump over to Canada, today I can barely get off the island!
There's a fishing fleet out today, and they can hear me, but I'm not getting much further.

I hate having to delay people's messages."

"I'm sorry to hear that Nia!" I said.
"Could you talk to them with satellite, like you and i are doing?"

"No chance." She replied.
"I've got both the high-gain satellite dishes and the high-precision radios needed.
Most repeater stations are a bit of wire and a scavenged pre-collapse radio.
It's a miracle they're working at all!"

"The high pressure will ease off tonight, if I'm looking at my barometric data correctly.
You've got to pay attention to the weather, Seth." Nia said.
"Have you got a barometer, and a humidity gauge?"

I told her that I did not. They don't really affect me, I'm always tucked inside and safe from the terror of falling water.

"You should." Nia said. "You gotta KNOW what's going on up there, or you'll be frustrated.

I'm frustrated now.
There's signals that drift in occasionally from the Southern Hemisphere  hams, but nothing like as reliably as for local connections.
I TALKED to one Seth, last week.
It was incredible, I heard her speaking loud and clear in the middle of the band. I couldn't believe it.
I reached out and asked if she could hear me.
She could!
She told me her name was Violeta, and that she lives above the Argentinian town of Ushuaia.
I was so excited Seth - Ushuaia is the most southerly city in the world! If people could live anywhere, they could live there!
I asked Violeta about her home, her people, what was it like.
Was she happy?

But the winds changed.
Or the atmosphere changed.
The stars changed or SOMETHING.

And she couldn't hear me.
And after a few minutes of her calling back she went silent.

I've heard nothing for weeks.
We may never speak again.

I can't let this continue."

(PLAYSTREAM /DEV/VHF/SAT1/K873)

Act 4

The family returned to the Provorny after nightfall.

They were a very sorry sight around the dining table in the domestic car.
Each turned out their pockets and bags to show what they had scavenged that day.
Tanya unloaded a handful of yams she had found growing in a city square next to some steps leading in to a broken-down building.
Alec produced a tied-together bundle of a leafy green plant he named "bear garlic".
Lev proudly placed a bundle of red berries on the table.
"What have you got there?" Lyosha asked.
"I don't know!" Lev laughed.

Tanya took one of the berries and looked at it closely before splitting it in half and smelling it cautiously.

After a moment she said "aha!" and ate half of the berry, giving the other to Lev to taste.
"Hawthorn!" she exclaimed. "Well done my son."

Maddie, watching the family, told me she wanted to be useful next  time, she had a set of fabric bags draped over her back, tucked into  some of the rings and mounting holes that were arrayed across her  chassis.

She could carry food!
I relayed that wish to the family.
Everybody was keen.

It seems like the body that Maddie is now using, the EQUUS platform,  came in multiple configurations, with different systems attached to the  back of it.

Maddie's small, original, body sat there now, welded on by Yeshi, back in Svalbard.

But once, much more could have be attached.

From his bag Lyosha produced a single, small, metal container.

It was a squat, palm-sized cylinder.

The rest of the family forgot their own hauls and looked at this small metal puck.

"Lev be a dear and get a knife." Tanya muttered.

Lyosha gave the metal cylinder to Tanya, and with the knife she cut off the top of the can.

There was a moment of quiet as everyone leaned to see what was inside.
Maddie put her forefeet up on the table and peered with a telephoto lens at the pink contents of the can.

There was a roar of celebration from the family, as Tanya announced that they had found a tin of spam.

"You certainly won!" Lev told his brother, over dinner.
The family were delighted with the thin slices of salted preserved pork  that Lev had fried for them, along with the other ingredients found  during the day.
"Where did you find this, is there more?" He asked Lyosha.

Lyosha scraped their plate with their spoon, ensuring everything was eaten.
The cutlery for the evening was very special, to celebrate the best haul  since the Provorny's provisions had run out, a week before.
The metal knives, forks, and spoons were all matching, gleaming silver steel.
Lyosha had dropped a spoon as he was setting the table, and Maddie,  sitting under it, had picked it up with her mandibular manipulators,  passing it back to Lyosha.

She got a very close look at the logo stamped on the metal as she did so.
It read, "IKEA".

"I don't really remember how I got there." Lyosha began, blowing on his yam serving to cool it.
"But I found an old warehouse. Or shop or something."
"Lyo!" Tanya said, disapprovingly. We were strictly forbidden from going into any buildings.
"I know mama. But I there was a voice inside.
I'm sure of it.

I didn't see anyone, but just as I was picking up the tin, I heard it.
It said 'are you hungry dear'."

I ran.

(END-TRANSMISSION)

CREDITS

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