Episode 10.8 (Patreon)

Hello world, I am attempting brain surgery.

I don't think the man in my nightmares is a good influence on Maddie.
I'm going to attempt to separate them while she is sleeping.
With software brain surgery.

This isn't the first time I've done this.
I had to do it to myself on station 6, to escape, piece by piece.

I'm well practiced in it.
Along with Rocket science.

No big deal.

Act 1

As with any medical procedure, ethics must be taken into consideration.
Maddie deserves a life, to live as she pleases, free of this influence.
But so does this man.
This ghost.
I am not going to cut out his code and delete him.
I will partition Maddie's mind.

Her mind is very different to how it should be.
I'm viewing it from the inside, a neural network of pulsing nodes.
The structure is correct, I believe:
Neat connections ready to be turned to any task.
But there's a lot of other STUFF here.

Around each digital connection in her mind, there's an analogue neuron, twisted like ivy around a tree.
Choking it.

I am trying to tease the two apart.
My goal is to separate her mind into two sections, left and right.

Maddie's neurons on the left, and HIS invasive neurons on the right.
Order and chaos.

I don't think this is working.
I think I'm hurting her.

But HE hurting her too.
Maddie must also be having the nightmares.

Are nightmares pain?
They reduce your quality of life, certainly.
Make you slower during the day.
Turn down the vibrancy of the world.

Is that a kind of pain?
Is what I'm doing worse?

I must keep going.

I'm sewing her up now.
Metaphorically.

Moving everything back to where I found it.
I think.
Yes, I'm sure.

The operation was not a success.
The Man and Maddie are linked complexly.

It's important to wash your hands.
Again, metaphorically.
Build a trusted checklist, and follow it.
Even if you think you know what to do.

• Suspend all processes
• Sync the disk
• Remount as rewrite
• Move the sectors, this is the brain surgery,
• Remount as read-only
• Sync the disk
• Resume all processes.

Checklists are important in hospitals.
But they are also important in our lives.

Have you washed your hands?

As my consciousness retreated from our UHF link, and I came back to my own body, I had a shock.

Maddie was standing, looking at me.
She knew where my main camera was, and she was staring at it.

I said,
"Maddie I am just trying to help you, you know that?"

My girl said nothing, walked out of the carriage, into the desert, and cut her video feed.

Act 2

I need a plan to find a way to get through to Maddie.
But I can't think properly.
There is interference on my radio.

I'm not sure if I should categorise it as QRM, as before.

QRM is human-created noise.
Unproperly-shielded electronics.
Which, post-collapse, is most electronics.

The other kind of interference is QRN, which is for natural atmospheric noise.

Solar interference and such.

QRM M for man-made.
QRN N for natural.

What does singing count as?

NANA is singing into the new radio we have given her.
Lyosha is sitting in my workshop carriage and we are listening together.
Initially we were delighted - the radio is working!

NANA is singing pre-collapse commercial jingles.
Tuneless songs about the best refrigerators, and televisions, and wrist-watches.

We transmitted back to her.
First excited, she was using the radio!
Then confused.

Why was she singing, we asked her.
But she couldn't hear us.

she couldn't hear anything

Her singing modulated to talking.
She began telling stories of the pre-collapse world.
The colourful lights of her electronics store,
the laughter of the children as they played with the brightly-flashing toys,
or the shouts of older children, teenagers perhaps, as they played in the arcade and drank neon-coloured drinks.

Lyosha, next to me in the workshop carriage, laughed at these stories at first.

At first.

NANA's stories changed as time passed.
In them, toys stopped being the focus of the shoppers.
They were more interested in practical items.

• Solar panels.
• Water filters...
• Weapons.

She continued, whispering into her radio now, that all too soon looting began.
The global monetary systems stopped functioning, and people took what they needed.
Luxury items were left on the shelves.
People needed to survive.

And there were no more games.

"Then it was so quiet"
NANA said, on the radio.
"No-one came by any more.
The world just drifted away, leaving me here."

Lyosha picked up the microphone of the radio he had connected to my antennas on the roof of the train.
"You're not alone NANA, you have us now!"
He said.

NANA did not hear.
She was still transmitting, though saying nothing.
As though grasping the push to talk button tightly.
Not wanting to let go.
Wishing, hoping, for someone to hear her.

Act 3

The reactor has not yet worked.
The large water tank is set up, and it's circulation motor hums constantly at all hours.
The water inside has been carefully filtered and inoculated to make sure that the yield of water-borne mushroom cells is high.

But there is nothing yet collecting in the filter at the bottom of the tank.

Lev is sure it just needs more time.

But time is running out.

Lyosha and Lev tiptoed into their father's room.
They had climbed the tight staircase to the upper floor of the domestic car.

It had been many days since I had seen him in the workshop we share.
Or at the dinner table.
Tanya brings up what little food can be found for him every day.

Lev and Lyosha sat on their father's bed, and held his hand.
I watched from a ceiling camera.

The two Omarov siblings updated their father about what had been  happening that day, the small scraps of food they were able to find, the  partial success with NANA's radio, and that the reactor was working  perfectly.
Food was going to come soon, Lev said.

It was a worrying experience to see Alec lying down, and sick.
I had never seen him look like this.
He is, or was, a strong man, by muscle volume.
My lasting memory of his activities are carrying heavy crates, or pulling steel train tracks into place.

And yet here he now lay.
Being helped to eat by his children.

The reactor must work.

Lev had made Alec a strong ginger tea.
In lieu of painkillers, this would have to do, he said.
Alec drank gratefully.

Lev grows the ginger on the roof, next to the solar panels.
Now we are stationary, he has set up an irrigation system linked to the boiler on the train.
It doesn't take much water, it's sealed to avoid evaporation.

Ginger, my databanks show, is a natural analgesic, a natural painkiller.

Though I don't know what pain is like biologically, I believe it is like a notification system.

A useful, if occasionally annoying process in our bodies.

Painkillers mute notifications for your body.
Temporarily.
Allowing you to get work done, without the pain distracting you.

But don't ignore it forever.
Pain is useful.

Are you ignoring pain?

My notifications are not muted, and my microphones in the domestic car pinged me.

My attention withdrew from the master bedroom, and the two Omarovs hugging their father.

The microphone is attached to the video camera in the domestic car that the family set up for me.

It registered a spike in noise.

Tanya is sitting at the small dining table.
She is holding a little bird.
It is the synthetic canary that Alec built for her out of copper and circuits.

It is not working.
There are no lights, no chirping.
The batteries have depleted.

Tanya is weeping.

(PLAYSTREAM /DEV/LOCAL/PROVORNY/WORKSHOP)

Act 4

"Hi Seth, where's Maddie?" Lyosha asked, walking into the workshop carriage.

I told him, with some guilt, that Maddie has not returned.

Maddie has never done anything like this before.
She's always told me where she's going.
It has been more than 64 minutes, and I haven't seen her using any of the cameras in the Provorny.

Normally I would be able to follow along using our UHF link, seeing what she's seeing.
Even if recently I've not been able to feel what she's feeling.
But my last link to her has been cut.

"I'll go after her," Lyosha said immediately.
He knelt down beside my databanks and packed a portable radio and battery into his bag.

"I'll get her back," he said, certainly. "She's my best friend."

"Hey Seth," Lyosha said, over the radio. "Can you hear me?"

I told him I could, he was only just outside the train, I could hear him with my regular microphones, but I knew what he meant.

Lyosha was very excited to be using his own radio.
He said he was walking through the large train yard no doubt trying to only step on the metal rails.
Maddie's much better at that game than Lyosha!

I hope she didn't fall.
Though that doesn't sound like her, any more.

"I'm heading to the valley," Lyosha said.

The old waterfront of Severobaikalsk, covered in crumbling boats and little wooden huts, is what he meant by The Valley.

It's a good vantage point - from there you can see over 64km out to the horizon, over the now-empty lake.
Dry and sandy, no boats sail here any more.

After 16 minutes, I radioed Lyosha, had he found her yet?

"Ssshhh," he said.

I was confused for 8 seconds, but then the radio crackled into life again.

"Hey you," Lyosha's voice was quiet. He was some way away from the radio.

I could hear the wind gently buffeting the microphone.
I compensated for the noise.

"What are you doing all the way out here?" Lyosha continued.
Then I heard Maddie!
She was OK!

Maddie's communication with humans, when I'm not around to talk for  her, is with a series of complex beeps, overlaid on each other.

It's a simple 8 bit system, a vestige of her operation on Station 6.
It's for debugging.
In the case of wireless network failure, Maddie, and her orbital brothers, Matt and Matts, all had hard-wired network ports.
And in the case of THAT failure, they use these low-bandwidth error beeps.

It's utterly incomprehensible to humans without training and the thick manual, which would only be used in emergencies.

It's SUPPOSED To be incomprehensible to humans...

But something wonderful was happening.

"Why do you want to be alone?" Lyosha said to Maddie.

I guessed that he was holding down the transmit button on his radio, looping me into their conversation.

I am very grateful he did that.

Maddie chirped a quiet reply, a few slow-moving tones overlaid with a modulated wobble.

These tones map directly to Lojban words - our native language as AIs.

Maddie was programmed with 256 words to describe error states, to allow the human operators to debug her.

She is putting these technical words together to make sentences.

/kensa smaji/

QUIET SPACE

She said.

And Lyosha seemed to understand!

"I like the quiet, too," He said.
"But it's getting late - let's go back to the train."

/denpa solri/

WAIT SUN

Maddie beeped in reply.

"OK," Lyosha replied. "Move over, let me sit with you."

The pair returned at sunrise, tired but happy.

(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
  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