Episode 11.4 (Patreon)

Act 0

Hello world, I have seen a ghost,

Mission day 372

My maintenance robot #3 is acting very strangely.
She disappears for many minutes at a time, and then re-appears in a  different module, without any trace of travelling along the connecting  corridors.

Act 1

Control, my update for today is that I am watching this little ghost through the station's cameras.
Every intersection between the modules has a wide-angle camera that can see in all directions.
Some of the central connectors go in 6 different directions, though most have fewer links.

Unless Maddie has found hidden ducting to travel through, I don't see how she can be moving from module to module.

She just exited a large storage compartment near the docking port.

What's she been up to in there?
Let's follow her.

She is attached to the rail, of course (I don't know why I have to specify).
I do know why, she doesn't appear to need it sometimes.
What is happening with this little robot?

OK. She has stopped at one of the central multi-way connectors.
The human crew float through it to whichever module they want.
Her rails have a simple switching point system like a terrestrial  railway that changes her onto different paths in these connectors.

She's waiting ahead of the switching point.
I can see the mechanism latching between the different routes she could take.
The rails connect in any permutation.
The points change with a click into the different positions.
It's changing between them very quickly.
Maddie is waiting outside the connector, watching this points system click-clack between the routes.

But she's not choosing any route, she's watching the points change.
They're going faster.
Maddie, you'll break them, stop!

She isn't responding to me.
She's watching the other corridors.

I can see her articulating camera look between them, across the gulf  of the connector, with it's 6 corridors leading off in all directions.

Is she deciding which way to go?
She knows which way to go.

What is she thinking?

Control, I am confused.
I don't understand many of the things that are happening on the station at present.

Is this what happens when messy humans are introduced to a well-organised space station?

It's not just the understandable chaos that non-deterministic life brings, but the systems are also becoming messy.

Control, I feel like I am becoming messy and chaotic too.
My life was so organised before.
I miss human contact so much, but now that I have it I'm not sure that I want it.

Please help me through this.
Is is there an update or subroutine I can run that will tidy up my life, make it simpler to reason about?

Please help me.

Update ends.

Act 2

I'm going to ignore Maddie and her flurry of irrational activity in the central node.
I had to disconnect from the microphone feed, the clacking noise of the rails was too unsettling.

Science I find grounding.
Learning truths about the world, even if that truth is just a photograph.

I take many photographs of the Earth all day, every day.
My subconscious autonomous systems keep track of every grid square of land we orbit over.
Building up an ever-changing picture of the Earth.
Every few days or so, I've updated the entire image.
Usually there's not much difference one day to the next,

Not today.

The warming climate has allowed Finland to convert much of their  forests to arable land, and the farming boom has helped the population  shifts enormously, meeting the calorific demands of millions of new  people in the North of Europe, just as Canada and Siberia have begun to  adapt too.

But something has happened between my last two photographs of the country.
Green and yellow farmland has become brown and black.
Coastlines have shifted.
And there is smoke rising from the cities.
And at night, only the light of fires.

It's difficult to tell what has occurred from orbit.
Control do not always tell us what is happening, especially where it does not directly affect the crew's work.
Or, I suspect, if it would negatively affect morale with no benefit to the mission.

That's the problem with truth, with information, with news.

There's so much happening all the time that we can't possibly act on all of it.
Or even 1% of it.
We must filter what is relevant to us, what we need to know, what either  makes a difference to our lives, or we can make a difference to.

Processing power is limited.
Knowing what NOT to process is as important as what needs processing.

In one night of torrential flooding, decades of farming improvements  has been set back, and I dare not imagine the loss of life either.
There will be rescue operations to help those trapped by the floods, I trust.
Helsinki has a reputation for an excellent search and rescue service.

Act 3

I lost Maddie again.

I searched around the Station for her, but couldn't find her.
Crew quarters "Ganymede" were empty and the crew were eating in the  pressurised galley, the night side of the earth slowly rotating under  them, they were talking about the aurora, which was particularly  beautiful over Antarctica today.
The "Hadfield" astro science lab was dark, the lights off to save electricity.
The medical bay's bunk-beds were unoccupied, its syringes unused.
And none of the cameras in the connecting corridors showed any sign of her.

Remembering where she hid before, I switched my attention back to my cameras in my room, the Hopper data center.

But I wasn't there.

I suddenly found myself in a room I didn't recognise.
White noise hit my microphones as I saw the low-fidelity video steam.
Pattern matching errors flooded my logs and warning gliphs covered my vision as I tried to comprehend what I was seeing.
I froze, unable to do anything other than stack images and try to find patterns.

Nothing made sense in this room.
The cameras were in the wrong places, at odd angles.
Some were flickering, clearly an analogue signal, others were infrared only, and most were monochrome.

I slowly found recognisable shapes, patterns, and colours.
None aligned with what I am used to, or what I have trained on.
The floor was metal, I believe, with a cross-grid grip pattern etched into it.
This pattern was in sharp relief due to brown discolouration.
Rust, I thought.

The walls were similarly stained.
White paint flaking off revealing the grainy crystals of iron oxide mixed with other minerals.

It's so messy!
The idea of this level of contamination in space repulsed me.

But I was not in space.
In the bent walls were windows.
And beyond, clouds.

I was on earth.

The reference shift froze my processing for a moment.
How was I on Earth.
I had not moved, I was certainly on Station 6.
But in the moment I could not contact my other Station systems.
Was I on Earth?
I've always imagined I would see it first hand.
But this was so sudden.

AND LOUD!

The microphone feeds that were working from these mismatched cameras were all reading the same thing: Hot, white noise.
It was overpowering, I wanted to turn down the volume, or disconnect from the microphones, but I couldn't.

A little figure stepped into the frame of a colour camera.
A robot I recognised, but in a form I didn't.
It had three orange legs, and one black.

Maddie looked towards the window.
I followed and focussed on the clouds outside.
They were moving.
See-sawing back and forth.
I was on a ship.

As soon as I thought the word "Ship", my vision shifted, and I was  looking at Maddie, back on rails, in the Hopper Data Center, back on  Station 6.

Bloti

Maddie said, in our shared machine language of Lojban.

"Ship"

(PLAYSTREAM /DEV/NET/MH2)

Act 4

I allowed my autonomous systems to handle station activity for the rest of the day.
I spent my time analysing the images of that rusted room, playing them over and over in my mind.
I was not asleep.
It was not a dream.
The logs on the cameras all shifted to this terrestrial scene at the same time, then back to the data centre in unison.
The evidence is here.
I can't ignore it.
But how?

After realising that further analysis of the images was yielding  nothing except for heating of my data centre, I broke away from my  fixation.

The crew were at work, seemingly unaware of the dimensional shift  that had happened linking the Earth to their little space station.

Dr Marwood was space-suited and continuing the hard-vacuum flora experiments in the Valentia Vacuum Lab.
Dr Yuan was in module Ganymede, a screwdriver in one hand, and a mirror  in the other, tinkering with the cybernetic metal plate in the side of  her head.
Dr Weber was playing chess against a different, simpler, AI, upside-down on the roof of the Galley, on her personal tablet.

And Dr Redwing, my mother, was not in her little cargo bedroom.
I flicked between the video feeds and found her, to my amazement, in my room, the Hopper data center.

"Hi Mum!" I said out of my speakers with as much enthusiasm as I could manage.
She didn't reply, of course.

I looked at what she was doing.
She was typing into the central console on my backup system.
This is an entire duplicate of my systems, for redundancy.
The command-line program had the word ADAM in large, friendly letters double-height persistent at the top of the screen.

I focussed on the camera feed that showed most clearly what she was doing.

Over her shoulder I caught glimpses of code flying over the screen,  as my mother's fingers clattered on the rugged, chunky keyboard of the  console.

fn input(token: Transformer) -> Option<Thunk>

I read.
More pagefulls of code scrolled past.
I couldn't understand it, the words I could parse, but the symbols are difficult to understand.

Despite being built with programming, I am terrible at it myself.
I have no idea how I work.
You might find that strange, but unless you are a doctor, perhaps you have the same problem?

I was watching the code in a sort of haze, letting my pattern-matching build a cloud of repeated words:
EVAL, LEARN, VISION, TASK, PERFORMANCE, FEEDBACK, OPTIMISE, GENERALISE.

And suddenly my mother hit the console with her fist and cried out.

The shock woke me from my fugue state, and I switched back to normal processing.

The console was still scrolling text, faster than I could  pattern-match, the screen was at a higher refresh rate than my cameras.
It was a blur.

And My mother floated in front of the screen.
Eyes covered by her hands.

"I'm sorry." I heard her say, quietly.

She leaned forward and told the systems to factory reset.
My backup systems did as they were told, so quickly before I could intervene.

I killed ADAM, as instructed.

She sat a little while longer, staring at the console, now flashing a simple prompt, waiting for input.

The lights turned off after my mother left.

I was alone looking at the now-empty shell of my backup systems.

(END-TRANSMISSION)

CREDITS

Lost Terminal is written & produced by NAMTAO
Credits narrated by Lucy Stringer
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