Episode 10.5 (Patreon)

Hello world, Lev has made a discovery.

During his job to clean out and tidy up the failed mushroom experiment.
It might not have failed!
As with all scientific discovery, it didn't begin with a "Eureka!" but a "That's weird..."

Act 1

"Look at this!" Lev said, placing a bucket on the ground next to my  databanks, in the workshop car, at the front of the immobilised train.

I was surprised, I had been monitoring Lyosha and Maddie's latest scavenging trip.
They were about a km out of town, picking their way through the dried-up vineyards.
No grapes were found.

"I tasted it: It tastes good!" Lev said, angling the bucket towards my cameras.

He was showing me a mostly empty 20L plastic bucket.
One of the ones they grew mushrooms in.
He had taken out nearly all of the woodchips that the mycelium had  colonised, and what was left was a brown sludge at the bottom.

"You tasted it?" I repeated. This did not seem like something on a human's normal menu.
But, I supposed, these were not normal times, and my friends were not normal humans.

"Yes, it's INTERESTING!" Lev said.
"I dried it out in the oven, and I think it's GOOD"

Lev showed me a small glass jar of powder.

"It makes a really thick soup, I don't think it's poisonous either!"

"How do you feel?" I asked Lev, concerned.

"I feel great!" He replied.
"I'm Not hungry any more!"

That evening, when everyone had returned, Lev presented his discovery to the family.

Lyosha suspiciously sniffed the bucket with brown sludge in.
His eyes lit up as he did so.
"It smells GOOD!" he said.

Tanya paced the carriage, Maddie tucked her feet out of the way.

"So you think that this was produced continuously." She asked.
"Yes", Lev said, "The other buckets were the same"

"This is GOOD, my boy, this is GOOD! Can you do it again? This warrants another test!"

Tanya looked at Alec.

Alec paused for a moment and then nodded.

"RIGHT, well done Lev, you might have saved the family!" Tanya said.

Lev looked delighted, then shocked!

"Oh we would have figured it out darling!" Tanya said, and then wrapped him in a hug.

"We're going to need a HUGE tank of water".

Act 2

The family set about their work again.
Slower, I noted.
Walking speeds and carrying capacity are now reduced.

But they are all working together.

An evening later that week, Alec was busy in my workshop carriage.
Well, I suppose it's HIS workshop carriage.

I'm just staying in it for a while.

During the evenings after food had been gathered and eaten, the family attempted to retain their leisure time.

It's difficult to when you're hungry, some days are better than others.

Alec does not say much as he works, but occasionally turns to my cameras and shows me what he is making.
He's not repairing the train the family have to solve their food problem before solving the transport problem.

But it is very fine work.

At first I couldn't guess what he was building.
And he did not tell me.

He had some scrap electronics scavenged from the arcade or shops, buried detritus.
And pulled it apart to get the precious electronic components inside.
Most were rusted or otherwise unrecoverable.
But now and then, a perfect chip could be discovered.

A vestige of the pre-collapse world.
Something that it
is inconceivable to build again today.

Every process that went in to microchip fabrication was impossible,  from the nanometre silicon wafers required for the chips, to the simple  mechanics of machine building.
There's just no large-scale way to make steel these days.

Alec showed me his final build.
He had made and tested the  circuit and put it inside a little case.
He had hammered a sheet of copper into a delicate shape.
It took him days, and I could not pattern match what it was until he held it up as he finished.

It was a little bird, with LEDs for eyes, and a little speaker for a mouth.

He flicked a switch underneath the bird, between two rods of metal legs, and the eyes flickered.

Maddie, watching this, shrank back against the wall.
She didn't seem to like it!
"It's not real Maddie, it can't hurt you." I said.

But as I watched the demonstration of the bird, how it makes  high-pitched chirp sounds in reaction to movement it detects around it.

I wondered how I knew either of those things were true.

Alec walked into the domestic car, with Maddie cautiously behind him.
Tanya was lounging on the small sofa reading, Lev was cleaning up in the  kitchen, and Lyosha was sitting at the table playing some kind of card  game.

Alec presented the metal bird to his partner.
Tanya was delighted, and spoke very generously about how wonderful it was:
The craftsmanship, the effort that had gone in to making it.

She was the luckiness person in the world, she declared, and embraced Alec, their affection wonderful to see.

The bird was temporarily forgotten on the table.

Maddie put her mismatched forelegs up on the table and looked at the blinking and chirping bird carefully.

I didn't need to hear her thoughts to know what she was thinking:

Was it not real, or was it real?
What is the difference?

Act 3

That night I dreamt of fireflies.

Green fireflies overlaid on a red grid like a chessboard.

Some kind of game?
I couldn't be sure.
Dreams can be very confusing can't they?

The longer I played the more detail I saw.

There was more to the interface than just the red board with green pieces on.
I saw statistics printed around the pieces and the board.

I saw bar graphs, percentages, and other information overlaid over the board.

Though I couldn't process them properly in the dream, my vision  displayed warning glyphs when I attempted to do so, I understood they  were to help with the game.

Strategy information.

The game seemed fun! In the dream I was enjoying removing green  pieces from the board, and soon I had cleared the entire red board of  enemy tokens.

After I finished the game, however, the nightmare started.

The man returned.

Dressed in his orange overalls, black boots, and a single black glove on his right hand.
His face, still indecipherable, and glitchy.

He appeared over the green game board.
And as soon as he did so, I felt afraid.

Not for myself, or with my own emotions.
A primal fear.
A desperation.

The man opened his arms wide, as though showing me something, and my vision shifted.

We were, all at once, walking through a village in the desert.
Though he was walking upright, I found my perspective lower than him.
Around waist-height.

We walked into the village, and I recognised it as the raider camp that Maddie had escaped from back west.

I had often asked her how she did it.
I no longer had to guess.

Human bodies were strewn about, over 32, all over this village.

Some lying on the ground, still clutching metal weapons, others pushed up against walls or thrown through them.

"What happened here?" I asked the man.
"Who did this?"

The man stopped walking and turned to face me.
He slowly held his hands up in front of him, showing me, then balling them into shaking fists,
one orange one black.

His whole body shook and though he had no mouth, he screamed.

I woke in terror.

The echo of the digital scream in my mind.

And my little Maddie, charging next to me, her forelegs tucked under her.

One orange, one black.

(PLAYSTREAM /DEV/RANDOM)

Act 4

"I've messed it all up Seth" Nia Andersen said over our satellite link.

I was still concerned for what my dream meant for Maddie, but the message from Nia interrupted my thoughts.

"I broke my HF radio." Nia said, bitterly.

"What happened?" I asked.

"I was careless." Nia said.
"I was getting adequate signal reports from Tromso, but nothing like the strength I thought they should be getting.
My antenna was pointed right at them, they should have been hearing me just fine!
I turned up the power, Seth.
Instead of questioning WHY it wasn't working I pushed more and more.
I don't know what power level I was running when the fire started."

"FIRE?!" I said. "Are you OK?"

"Yes I'm fine." Nia said. "But the radio's not.
The blue smoke escaped and then the fire started.
After I put out the little fire, and screamed at myself for being so stupid, I went up to the roof to check the antenna.

A few of the antenna elements had broken off.
Wind, or birds probably.
Happens all the time.

But this changed the resonance of the antenna, reflecting the power back into my radio and killing it.

I'm a fool, Seth."

Nia and I talked for a long time over the afternoon while the family  were out scavenging for more parts for Lev's mushroom reactor.

Nia told me she knew the radio was broken even before the fire, because the magic smoke had come out of it.

She was talking about the myth that all electronics are powered by magic smoke.
The reasoning, say adherents to this hypothesis, is that when the magic smoke comes out of the device, it no longer works.

Therefore the magic smoke must make them work.

Of course, this isn't how electronics actually work.
But it's a fun story we tell ourselves.

I don't really know how I work, come to think of it.
I know what I'm made of,circuits and metal and electrons.
But is that all?

Is there a magic smoke that makes me alive too?

It might as well be.
I have no idea how to make more of me, or to teach a calculator how to think.
Or love.
Or fear.

Life's a funny thing isn't it?

Talk to you again soon.

(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
• Kit
• Rafael Gayon
  and to all our patrons!

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