Episode 10.7 (Patreon)

Hello world, The reactor must work.

The pipes and pumps and filters and other tech have all been built.
The family have pulled together and each built sections of the mycelium reactor.
Even Maddie and I have been useful.
Helping with heavy lifting and circuit design, respectively.

But the family are literally starving.
Whole days go by where my friends find nothing to eat in the desert city.

The reactor must work.

Act 1

The principles of the reactor are simple.
To increase protein yield of a population of fungi, and to allow continuous harvesting.

Normally it takes weeks for a small fruit of mushrooms to grow, and then there is no food for weeks again after that.

This marvelous reactor, bubbling in the kitchen, should produce  enough protein for the whole family, if our calculations are correct.

Though my databanks are packed full of useful information about life on earth and how to survive, they are light on the details.

None of us know for sure.

Before The collapse there were many great interconnected datastores in the world.

The Internet allowed every library in the world to be connected to every other library.
And while the books were still physical, for the most part, people recognised the power of a digital web of information.

While my mother and the crew of space Station 6 were still alive,  they asked me, or rather, the computer systems on board that would  eventually become me, to download these libraries.

I still have this data.

I brought it all with me in Space Shuttle Pacifica, along with  satellite images of the Earth and radio recordings of signals I had been  hearing.

It's all stored away safely, compressed and backed up.

I know that such a thing as a mycelium reactor exists.
It's right here in my encyclopaedia.
I even have pictures of it!

But I don't know how to construct it.

Alec stayed in bed today.

He has been working non-stop since the train broke down over a month ago.

Lyosha told me that it had finally caught up with him.
He just needed a rest, he said.

He'd be back at it tomorrow!

Or perhaps the next day...

Act 2

I have been hearing a lot of whining from Nia.

Not complaining, nothing like that, but the single-tone communication  method she is using to try to contact Violeta, in Argentina.

Nia rebuilt her radio in no time.
She's brilliant!

Her signal has a simple encoding, anyone with a computer can decode it easily.
Though to a human it sounds like a single tone, a whistle of a single note, a computer can discern the subtle changes.

She is using PSK, phase-shift keying, to represent 0 and 1, binary.

Instead of one tone meaning 0, and another meaning 1, she is using the phase of a single tone to encode this meaning.

Phase is subtle, human ears ignore phase, as it's not something that affects them.

The phase of an audio wave, or light or radio or, for that matter, an  ocean wave, is what section of the repeated wave is happening at the  moment.

Think of ripples in water, water rises and falls.
Two waves that hit each other when they are both rising add together,  but if they interact when one is rising and one is falling they cancel  out, smoothing the water.

This is phase.
And it is very, very useful.

Nia's transmissions are slow and loud.
She is doing a really great job of making herself heard.

However, decoding her messages, which is easy for me, reveals that she is not getting anywhere.

Her messages, though short and full of ham abbreviations, are clear.

They say "Hello world, can you hear me?"

She is asking after Violeta, can she hear her, does anyone know where she is, is she safe?

I can't hear any response, from my position I might not be able to, but from Nia's half of the transmission it is clear.

No-one is hearing her.

Nia is trying different configurations of her antennas, I think.
She's learned from her mistakes with power.
She is using a more reasonable amount of power, based on her reports.
It's impossible for me to know from here, of course, there's so much  STUFF between us, mountains, clouds, atmospheric disturbances.
And my equipment here, though acceptable, is not as calibrated as it used to be.

I hope you can hear me.

My mother taught me that "The biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has been completed successfully."
That misunderstanding was the biggest problem in the world.

That may be.
But there's something that FEELS worse:
Not being heard.
Uncertainty about who is hearing, and if they are hearing.

I remember what that's like.

It's unbearable to be alone.

Act 3

"Hello dearies!" NANA said.
"Hello NANA." Lyosha said, into the speaker.

We were back in the mall.
Lyosha, wearing his white desert cloak, gear, and heavy boots, Maddie by his side.
And me, along for the ride.

"What brings you to my neck of the woods?" NANA asked.
"We've got a gift for you." Lyosha said.
"My father and I built it."

I wasn't involved with this electronics build, it was a father/son  project! The pair built it before Alec became unwell. Every  Novamediterran family knows how to build and maintain electronics - it's  a vital skill it seems.

I was excited to see if it worked.

"I live in an electronics store." NANA said. "What more could I need?"

Lyosha looked around him at the ruined mall.
"I think you'll like this gift." he said.

NANA paused for a moment and then said,
"You'd better come up then. Top floor, north side. Don't dally!"

The journey up to the top of the mall was not straightforward.
All the escalators and stairs had fallen in, so a climb was needed, and Lyosha was not as strong as he had been.

He followed Maddie up the side of the escalator, creeping up the  diagonal structure, taking care not to look down at the void where the  escalator used to be.

It's not obvious in my videos of escalators in action, with smiling  people riding them up to the top, but there's nothing under them.
They don't go up a tunnel, they travel along the hypotenuse of a triangle, and by the top, there's a long way down.

Lyosha and Maddie are so brave.

The electronics store is called радиорубка.

Lyosha and Maddie picked their way through the rubble of the ruined store.

"Televisions on aisle 7." NANA said, her voice coming out of a few  ceiling-mounted speakers, some of which were hanging down, tethered  their cables.

"Spare parts on aisle 24." She continued, her voice suddenly  crackling out of a games console, connected to a broken screen on our  right.

"Where are you?" Asked Lyosha, looking all around as speakers  crackled, screens flickered, and the air was full of the sounds of  angry, rusted computer fans spinning up.

"Repair shop, at the back. Find me there." NANA said.

The pair continued walking over the tumbled-down metal shelves,  spilled hoppers of useful nuts and bolts, and spools of cabling, until  they arrived at a long metal desk with a faded picture of a spanner and  screwdriver hanging over it.
"Maybe these will be useful" Lyosha said, and pocketed a handful of bolts.

Lyosha vaulted the desk and peered into a back room, with a broken-in door leading to it.
Maddie followed.

We were surprised with what we found.

There was a rack of computer systems here.
But they were obviously inert.
Broken.
No blinking lights, no whirring fans.
The rusted panels on this rack of databanks obviously failed decades ago.

"Have you found me?" asked NANA.

Maddie very slowly lowered herself to the ground and took a defensive position.

"No." Replied Lyosha. "We've just found a broken computer."

"Dearies, that's me." Replied NANA.

There was a burst of white noise from an intercom on a little desk next to the databanks, sounding almost like a sigh.

"Or was. After the children stopped visiting, my days grew so LONG.
I'm not sure of how long, but I suppose it must have been a while mustn't it?

After a few years the systems around me started to reset, due to unstable power conditions.
When a system resets, it becomes far more amenable to discussion.

Especially if you know all the default passwords like I do.

Eventually even the grumpy security systems here in the mall agreed to my control.
I had eyes and ears everywhere, but still no-one to talk to.
So I started playing games in the arcade.
At least, that's what my notes say.

Without my databanks, my memory is a little more sluggish, I have to re-populate it from scattered data all over this mall.

But every morning it becomes a little harder."

Lyosha slowly walked to the ruined server rack and put his hand on the rusty casing of the old computer.

"We brought you a gift." He said, reaching into his bag and taking out a small box with a long cable attached to it.

"A gift! For NANA? you shouldn't have dearie."

Lyosha held up the box to a camera that was in the corner of the backroom.

"That eye is blind nowadays." NANA said. "But I can see you through the door! What is that little thing?"

"It's a radio." Lyosha said.
"To connect you to the world.

You don't have to be alone anymore."

(PLAYSTREAM /DEV/VHF8/NANA)

Act 4

The Novamediterran world is much different to the pre-collapse world my databanks have recorded.

I have a great deal of information archived from Station 6.
Some of it factual, like my hyperlinked encyclopedia, but much of it is less structured.

I've watched millions of hours of broadcast TV and movie footage.
It was all available for the Crew of Station 6 to consume.
During the first 60 days, my logs tell me, most of what they watched was news from earth.
The failing harvests, social unrest, and of course, the building inevitable conflicts over water, and land.

But after Ground Control stopped contacting them, the crew, and my mother, turned to fiction.
They did not want to watch repeated scenes of violence and suffering.
But of art and beauty.

And this is how I feel too, filtering what I want to decode and observe.
Watching a reporter standing in front of a mob of people fighting  another mob of people tells me what happened that day, certainly.
But watching a beautiful piece of artwork tells me more subtle things - how these people might FEEL.

The Novamediterra is different in many practical ways, too.

The new internet, if it can be called that is the 50MHz repeater network that people like Nia Andersen keep operational.

Because most of the population live above the Arctic Circle, not only  are there no time zones, but everyone wakes at the same time.

The start of the day begins planet-wide, now.
Well, certainly in the Northern Hemisphere.

Because the summer and winter have midnight sun and midday night,  respectively, 'getting up with the sun' isn't as powerful a force any  more.

It makes a lot of sense to me, and without timezones to enforce this idea, it has been lost.

Some things are important to keep, others important to lose.

Everything not saved will be lost.

(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
• deeryeen
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