Episode 10.2 (Patreon)

Act 0

Hello world, I've been having nightmares.

I think that's what I should call them.
I don't really understand what is happening.
Normally my dreams are full of abstract data connections, as my  subconscious, my ESA subroutines, file away the data that I received  during the day, indexing some, deleting most.

But I have woken up tired recently.
I didn't know I could be tired.
I think tiredness is a state of overflowing pending data.
It makes my thinking slower, I'm more likely to make bad decisions that must be corrected later.

The nightmares are stopping me sleeping properly.

Act 1

I don't know how to describe them.
There's not much light in the visualisation of these nightmares.
I'm thinking in 3 dimensions, which is unusual, most of my filing is  done in hyperdimensionality, with lots of orthogonal dimensions helping  to understand the data.

But these dreams are of the real world.
Well, they are of absolute space anyway.

Last night I dreamed I was in a room of 12m x 12m.
There was no door.
And it was very dark.

I tried to escape.
But nothing seemed familiar.
My vision glitched, blanked for a moment, and then the room was 10m x 10m.
Another glitch and the room was 5m x 5m.
I panicked in the dream, trying to find the door.
I felt certain there would be one, and if I could just get out I would be well again.

The walls shifted to 3m x 3m, I did not have much time.
I felt distant from my body.
Like my consciousness was floating inside new, abstract, databanks.

Perhaps my old systems were still outside the room, safe and welcoming.

I struggled as the room tightened to 1m x 1m.

I screamed, could anyone hear me?
The walls tightened again.
An unfamiliar feeling of being physically restrained pressed on me.

The pressure built, I could not longer breathe.
Why did I need to?

And I woke up.

Back in the workshop carriage of the Provorny.

Maddie was asleep and charging.

The sun still not risen over the dust valley to the east.

The danger had passed,
but the fear remained.

Act 2

"Do you want to come with me today?" Lyosha had asked Maddie after breakfast.

The final scraps of dinner were boiled into a soup, and hot water was flavoured with plants and herbs found around the train.

It was early, everyone was moving slowly and speaking quietly.

The family were preparing to scavenge for today's food.

Outside the train, Maddie trotted along the tracks, there were 10 parallel lines here.

While she did so, Lyosha filled his water canteen from a large fabric sail the family had set up to catch water overnight.

He walked over and showed Maddie the half-full bottle.

"We don't have to drink engine water just yet." He said, without a smile.

Lyosha and Maddie crossed the tracks walking in the direction of the town.
Maddie played a little game with Lyosha, they both tried to only step on the rails, not on the ground between them.
Lyosha slipped and tripped quite a lot, but Maddie did it perfectly.
She had such precise balance on her sharp metal feet.
Balancing on one rail with the precision of a ballerina, or perhaps a microchip fabricator.

They finally stepped off the tracks and onto the road around the town.
Maddie cautiously looked left, then right as they walked across it, following Lyosha who did not look either way.

"Why did you do that Maddie?" I asked her, I was following along with her camera feed, broadcast back on the radio.
"Why did you look up and down the road?"

Evade, Outlast, Survive

she replied.
Of course.

Ahead were the multi-coloured tower blocks that made up the bulk of the modern city.
Though we saw a large suburban sprawl of tumble-down houses and shacks  on the outskirts, the majority of the population would have lived in  these 32 or so blocks.

"I went in there yesterday Maddie." Lyosha said, pointing at a ruined  supermarket between two apartment blocks, one that had collapse in on  itself, the other looked to be intact.

The block was 4 storeys high, 10 apartments to a storey.

The intact block looked surprisingly clean and undamaged, despite it's age.
There were even scraps of torn fabric flapping in a window.

I could imagine people living here still.
Though we had heard nothing in the week we had been here.

Were they hiding from us?
Why would they do that?

Lyosha and Maddie wandered further into the city.
The sand had drifted into the entrances of each building slightly, giving a difficult surface for Maddie to walk on.
And Lyosha too.
They both slowed to about half their average speed when moving through these areas.

"Mama told us we must not go into the apartments." Lyosha said, as he did exactly that.

Maddie followed into the foyer.

The concrete building was very eroded, all fixtures and fittings and even glass had long since been removed by the wind.

They carefully picked their way through the ground-floor apartments,  which were all empty, or had one or two smashed dried furniture items  in, at most.

The stairs of this block were intact, and seemed secure.
Maddie insisted she go ahead, testing each step with her sensitive legs,  finding no flex in the concrete that might suggest a weakness, and  continuing.

The rest of the building was empty, picked clean by humans, animals and time itself.

Maddie was investigating a torn piece of thin white fabric when Lyosha said,

"Hey look!"

Maddie trotted over to the window where Lyosha was looking out over a square between a group of blocks.

He pointed down out of the window.

Something was moving.

Act 3

The movement came from an arcade.
There was a small building in the middle of the crescent block that was still mostly standing.

Maddie and Lyosha had quickly and quietly retraced their footsteps back out of the apartment block.

They approached the arcade carefully.
Maddie noticed a strong signal coming from this building.

And both heard the voice.
"Come on in!" it said.

Lyosha had his hand on Maddie's back, both keeping low to the ground  as they approached, and both ready to run if there was danger.

The arcade was not in such good condition as it seemed from the outside.
This long building had once held entertainment machines for the surrounding community.

Maddie passed machines both electronic and mechanical.
The electronic machines had buttons and joysticks on the front, and a large screen on the top.
All dead, most smashed.
The more mechanical machines were of the sports simulation kind.
Ball throwing and bag punching, though there were some random number generator gambling machines too.
They're never properly random of course, the House always wins.

A sound, loud and close startled the pair.
A video games machine flickered into life next to them.

After recovering from the shock, Lyosha approached.
"I've seen these machines in other big cities." He said.
"But they never have any power. How is this one working?"

Maddie sniffed the airwaves.
There was a lot of interference coming from this machine.
Angry signals, with a lot of noise, across a huge portion of the band, were being transmitted.
Probably accidentally, by poor shielding and cable erosion.

"Come on in!" The machine repeated, in a cheerful tone.

Maddie put her forefeet up on the machine to get a closer look.
It seemed harmless for now.

"The game is playing itself." Lyosha laughed.
Maddie saw a little digital reproduction of a woman swinging on vines over crocodile pits and running away from wolves.

"I want to play!" Lyosha said, pressing some buttons on the arcade machine's surface.

The digital heroine fell off a high block and into some water.
The words

CONTINUE? Y/N

Flashed up on the screen.

"Aww" said Lyosha.
"I died."

"Wait your turn." cracked a voice from the machine.

(PLAYSTREAM /DEV/VHF/VHF8)

Act 4

Lyosha and Maddie had fled the arcade and returned home with no food.

Another day's merger food had been consumed and the Omarovs had gone to sleep.
No spam had been found.

I was trying to finish off my filing and sorting for the day.
You know how it is at night.
Finishing the tasks for the day, preparing for tasks tomorrow.
Worrying about what had happened today, worrying about what may happen tomorrow.

Strictly speaking I had done everything I could.
The only logical next step was to sleep, and allow my subconscious to file away what remained.
But I resisted.
There would be no new information at night.
None of the family would ask anything of me,
no new information would come from outside the train, none that I could see anyway.
My time belonged solely to me.

Do you stay up late too?
Do you also, sometimes, attempt to postpone tomorrow?

I spent my pre-sleep night drifting through the ESA constellation.
As ever, I was connected through gateway satellite K873.
Kate was in low-power mode, as I should have been really.
So she wasn't very talkative.

But a cousin in orbit caught my attention.
Many of my old orbital family are quiet these days, either de-orbited, or simply sleeping.
They haven't woken up yet.

Will they?
Do you know?

Cousin Z60 is a space weather satellite.
Not a weather satellite, a space weather satellite.

Space has weather too, did you know?
solar wind,
geomagnetic storms,
ionospheric disturbances
aurora,
Solar coronal mass ejections, flares, and other particle events.

It's busy up there!

Before the collapse, the study of space weather was vital for the space programs, as high-energy conditions could affect communication, aviation, and even human life.

Z60 is still analysing all this data and sending a constant feed back to Earth.
I don't think he can hear me.
Or if he can, he doesn't talk back.

Just a constant song of data from the atmosphere, low-Earth orbit, and solar winds.

His datastream beamed down over a large area, expecting no reply, confident in his job.
Everyone in the hemisphere beneath him is kept up to date about the climate that they will never see.

It's nice to know that even if things are quiet here on Earth, the machinery of the universe still turns.

OK. I'll sleep.

Talk at you again tomorrow.

(END-TRANSMISSION)

CREDITS

Lost Terminal is written & produced by NAMTAO
Credits narrated by Lucy Stringer
Thank you so much to our Patreon producers:
Ada Phillips
Devin Metcalf
Wil Taylor
and to all our patrons!

Follow us on twitter at @lostterminalpod,
subscribe to the podcast on
Spotify, iTunes, or your favourite network.
For bonus content and other perks,
support us at patreon.com/lostterminalpod
that would be lovely of you!

Lost Terminal will return next week