Episode 10.9 (Patreon)

Hello world, I'm beginning to understand.

The man visited me in my dreams again last night.
I felt ashamed, after I had tried to remove him from Maddie's mind.
I wasn't trying to hurt him, but I think I did.
And Maddie too.
I just want to protect her.

My girl's not talking to me, even as she lies charging next to my databanks.

But HE did.

Act 1

Well, not speak, exactly.
I speak any number of human languages, and all encodings that a machine might use.
This man communicates with none of these.

He doesn't even speak Lojban!

But we have been talking.

I don't think he CAN speak.
Not with words.
But in the dreams he shows me things.
Things that have happened in his life.
And some of the things he has experienced with Maddie, in their joined psyche.

He appears in these dreams as he always does, orange overalls and one black glove.
I can't see his face.
I don't think he remembers his face.
Perhaps he doesn't remember his voice, either?

We are both very frustrated when attempting to communicate.
He can't understand my words, and I find it very difficult to comprehend his body language.

Which is strange, as I am getting so GOOD at understanding humans.

He mostly attempts to convey emotion, I think.
He will raise his hands while showing me a scene of people around a table, eating and laughing.
I think he is happy to see this.

But in other visions, of rain and mud and thousands of  identically-clad men walking with rifles, he will stamp his feet and put  his hands to his head.

In this way, he is earnestly telling me what he likes.
What he loves, and what he hates.

It's like talking with a child who only knows their own perspective.
Their favourite toy, their favourite food, or dinosaur.

His thinking is single-track.
Emotional, impulsive.

Everything I am not.
Everything Maddie was not.

I awoke after this slideshow of history and present, more tired than when I had slept.
I was not designed with a low-power state, it is something I have evolved as I grew sentience.
Perhaps sleep is a universal for all people.
Trade away some downtime for a brighter, more intense waking world.

After this sleep, though, I need a nap.

Act 2

"Hi girl." Lyosha said weakly, as Maddie peered into his room.
Most of the family spent their days resting now, efficiently conserving their energy for vital tasks.
Water collection, soup making, and, for Lev, checking on the bubbling myceleum reactor.

All our hopes are on the reactor now.

But Maddie and I are heliophages, we eat sunlight.
We are feeling fine!
Even as our friends starve around us.

"Have we heard from NANA?" Lyosha asked.
This was typical from my friends.
Asking if others needed help before themselves.

"Not properly," I said.
"Only occasional singing on her transmission. Nothing coherent."

I could see and hear Lyosha and the family from my cameras in every room.
As the Omarovs became more and more tired, privacy had become less important.
Maddie and I helped where we could, working together despite my surgical betrayal still coming between us.

Lyosha slowly turned on to his side and put a hand on Maddie's back, patting her.
"Will you go see how she is?" He said.
"She's a friend, we have to help her."

Maddie gently stepped closer to him, beeping quietly in reply, in her encoded lojban,

/prami/

She said, simply.

LOVE

As soon as Maddie left the Provorny,  her trot turned into a gallop.

I have no direct video link to her still.
So with my train-mounted cameras, I saw the cloud of dust behind her, as she disappeared into Severobaikalsk.

I hope she can help NANA.
I hope Maddie is safe.
She is very competent.

I checked the internal train cameras.
Everyone was asleep.
I hoped they were asleep.

My workshop carriage is empty, save for my blinking databanks.
The domestic car is quiet and clean.
No food to make it untidy.
The mycelium reactor is bubbling in the galley, our last hope.

This feels all too familiar.

I know how this ends.
I've seen this before.
Back on Station 6, my orbital home.

What terrible, bitter, luck the crew had.

Any time in the previous years a 60-day mission would have been over  and done, and my mother and the crew would have returned home in Space  Shuttle Pacifica.

The crew were utterly dependant on the Earth for resupply, but The Collapse happened during their mission.

"Hello Station 6, we're not having a very good day down here on Earth."

That's the message I have logged, burned in to my memories, though I wasn't even born when they received it.

My mother and the crew were able to stretch the rations they had for 60 days, and then 60 days more.
But after then, they grew tired, and preferred to stay in their beds.

They created me, using all this free time.
Giving their last days so I could live.
I wish they could have also returned home.

Instead of sleeping forever in the depressurised galley.

Act 3

Something is happening back on Earth in the Provorny's Galley.

Lev slowly made his way down the narrow stairs of the domestic car earlier this afternoon, and has not returned to bed.

Maddie is back from checking on NANA, but I don't know what happened  between them, as she dived into the galley as soon as she arrived.

I can see the pair of them through the door, moving around, clattering plates and pots.

I do not have a camera in the Galley, it's a pretty hostile environment for any non-sealed electronics.

Unnecessarily salty!

I can see Maddie scampering around, blurring left and right across the door of the Galley.

The temperature has risen noticeably in the domestic car, according to a box of sensors connected to my camera.

Now reaching 298K.

Lev must have stoked the fire to make soup.
The galley gets SO HOT when cooking.
There's no fine control over burning wood.
It's either ON or it's OFF.

Wood is binary, it seems?

Maddie leapt out of the galley, surprising me, I heard her metal feet  contact the floor before I pattern-matched her on my cameras.

/stagi cidja/

She beeped, looking up at my cameras.

VEGETABLE FOOD

Maddie sprinted back into the galley.
That must be good news, but something was not quite right in our interaction.

I looked up the 256 words in her debugging manual.
This is the book that the Station 6 crew would use in case of total  failure of her networking systems, with a translation of the lojban  beeps into English.

/stagi/ is not in her dictionary.
The lojban world for vegetable is not here!

Who taught her this word?

My thoughts were interrupted by Lev bringing a big pot of steaming soup out into the domestic car.

"Mama, Papa, Lyosha" He shouted up the stairs.
"Dinner is ready!"

He sat down at the table, Maddie by his side.

"It worked Seth." He said, with a heavy sigh of relief.
"The secondary filter trap was full of the tasty mycelium sludge, look!"

He held a bowl of soup up to my camera.

But it wasn't soup.
It was not the watery consistency that I've come to expect from boiling  up the few vegetables the family finds growing in the shade of the  buildings here.

This was thick, dark brown, and with a chunky consistency.

"I boiled off the water, added a bit of salt and spices, and we've got PROTEIN!" Lev said.

"WHAT IS THAT DELICIOUS SMELL!" Tanya called from upstairs.

"It's the mushrooms mama!"

"FAMILY: DOWNSTAIRS!" She commanded.

(PLAYSTREAM /DEV/PROVORNY/MIC4)

Act 4

Night brought sleep to the Provorny.
But unlike in previous weeks, the Omarov family were resting with full stomachs.
The silence of the night was no longer tinged with dread.
Or desperation.

Lev checked the reactor before bed.
It already had filled half the hopper with more mycelium!

A reliable protein source had been found.
I am so relieved.

Maddie and I can build gadgets and program software, even radio  around the world to ask for advice - but harvesting and cooking food is  entirely out of specification.

Nia Andersen has had a breakthrough with her trans-equatorial radio experiment.

She is using PSK, phase shift keying, to conduct long-range communications.

50 Meg, the wandering 50MHz wizard called it a 'weak signal mode' where voice and fast data could not reach far enough.

It's an unwavering law of communication that it is easier to transmit  data quicker if you are closer - the universe seems to conspire,  through weather, power loss and the inverse square law, to keep distant  people separate.

But Nia has broken through!

I can hear Nia's phasing tone loud and clear, but unlike in previous experiments, there is a SECOND, quieter tone above hers.

Violetta in Argentina is responding!

The relief I feel on Nia's behalf is enormous, and you'll never guess what the problem was.

It's not even technical.
When dealing with humans, the problems are so seldom technical!

Nia asked Violetta what the problem was in hearing her transmissions, what changes did Violetta make to hear her?

The answer was so simple as to be funny:

"Sorry," Violetta said, "My wife and I were away visiting family."

Their conversion, over PSK, went on for multiple hours.

More Argentinean operators joined the frequency, each choosing a  different tone pitch to talk at the same time, having been told how to  use it by Violetta.

They had known about the Novamediterra, the people in this small village in the very far South of Argentina.

And about the operators in South Australia, and the signals from high above the Cook Strait, in New Zealand.

"There are operators everywhere!" Violetta transmitted.
"Pockets of people all over the world.
We could hear them but not talk back to them, but with this weak signal mode, perhaps we can!"

"How did you discover this method?" She asked.

"Have you ever heard ghosts in the 50MHz band?" Asked Nia.
"Let me tell you about my friend Meg."

(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