Episode 11.5 (Patreon)

Hello world, war has begun.

It happened so quickly.
Up here we are isolated from current events down on Earth, so none of us knew how high tensions were until they broke.

The first pinpricks of light began over North America, then over Russia, then spread to the rest of the world.

They were just small flashes and then a change in the cloud formations above them.

But for something to be so bright as to be visible from orbit during the day, there was only one thing they could be.

Act 1

The damage was easier to asses when we passed into the night side of the Earth.

In just a few short hours, half of the cities we were used to seeing at night were dark.

There were no electric lights there, only fires.

The daily update from Ground Control was 5 hours late.
Despite this, it only contained one sentence, with none of the official headers and metadata we are used to:

HELLO STATION 6 WE'RE NOT HAVING A VERY GOOD DAY DOWN HERE ON EARTH.

Mission Day 373

This is Station 6 calling ESA ground control.

Message log begins:

Thank you for you update, you do not need to say more.

Frankfurt still has electricity, we think, though it looks like there  was a detonation further north in the Northern European industrial  belt.

1/3rd of the satellites in the ESA constellation have gone dark, they no longer respond to even the simplest of our queries.

Dr Redwing says they are still functioning, still connected to the network, but are encrypting their communications.

She believes these otherwise scientific satellites have a military failsafe, to be triggered in exceptional circumstances.

Which I suppose is now.

Attached is a list of names of family and friends the crew would like to know if you can contact on their behalf.

I'm sorry the length of list takes us over our daily payload limit, but perhaps given the circumstances you can accommodate us.

Until we hear otherwise, we will continue our work and return the  results to you, the automated download systems are giving a confirmation  of our messages, so we have no reason to think there is a comms fault.

The whole crew wish for safety and peace for those of you in Ground Control and elsewhere on Earth.

Message ends.

Act 2

I feel tired.
My systems have been running at 100% since detecting the first nuclear detonations.
Running simulations, monitoring communications, doing everything I can to help.
I don't know if I CAN help.
But I have tried to think of anything.

My options ran out earlier today.
There's nothing we can do from up here, of course.
I knew that really, but I had to try.
The limited communications that we can hear from orbit confirm the worst.
The war lasted less than one day.

My body felt tired.

I shut down and slept.

Maddie woke me from my suspended animation.
I checked all systems, nothing needed my attention.
But here she was, pinging me an alert.

She was looking at my main camera in the Hopper data centre.

I checked her schedule.
Her and her brothers Matt and Matts should be recharging.
it is night time.

But she watched my camera for a long time.
After 32 seconds I sent her a single word of confusion.

"ciksi" I asked.
Explain.

She beeped an acknowledgement and sped out of my room on the rail.
I followed, virtually.
She drove down the connectors through the station, occasionally looking up with her camera cluster to check I was following her.
I don't know how she would know this, but she seemed satisfied, and continued.

Maddie stopped at far end of the station, at the station's backup generator, the thermoelectric Generator.
This is a solid-state generator powered by a small radioactive payload.
These have been installed on satellites since the Sputnik era for reliable long-term backup power.
Unlike a battery it doesn't need to be recharged and can last for decades, potentially.

Maddie was doing something with the sealed door mechanism.
When I realised what, I sounded the alarm.

I woke up both Matt and Matts.
This was a priority 1 emergency.
Maddie was breaking in to the thermoelectric generator!
Couldn't she see radiation warnings in bright yellow on the door!?
She was not responding to my control, I don't know how, but she's malfunctioning and fully autonomous.

Matt and Matts were slow to wake up, they were charging and their batteries were physically detached from their bodies.
They take 18s to power on.

This was not fast enough, Maddie had the door open already.
I had never seen inside.
NO ONE IS SUPPOSED TO SEE INSIDE!

But.
Something wasn't right.

It's empty.
I cancelled the emergency wake-up of Matt and Matts.
There's no radiation.
There's no capsule of plutonium-238 in a sealed steel chamber.
It's a void.

"Maddie, what is this?" I asked her.

She responded by closing the door and taking off along the rails back along the connector.

I followed her virtually to the Valentia vacuum research lab.

She moved through the dedicated airlock that the maintenance robots have, and into the lab.
Once inside, in one smooth motion she disconnected from her rail and floated towards a bank of pressure gauges.

She floated in front of them and I connected to the readouts.
All normal.
But Maddie was looking at the physical dials that the crew used.
My pattern matching glitched for a moment.
I ran it again, with the same glitch.
The gauges were reading 100kPa both inside and outside Station 6.

Again, as soon as I asked Maddie what I was seeing she reconnected to the rails and left the vacuum research module.

I let a background process follow her.

How can it be 100kPa outside the station.
That's not even correct for Earth, it's the theoretical atmospheric  value, the actual measured value is more like 103kPa at sea level.

What is HAPPENING here!?

I've caught up with Maddie.
She is outside my mother's makeshift storage unit-turned cabin.

Dr Redwing is working on a black chunky station laptop with a red dot in the middle of the keyboard.
All laptops are built to spec, with interchangeable parts and standard sizes.
There is no room for form over function in orbit.

Dr Redwing is bent over the laptop, nose almost touching the screen, fingers flying over the keyboard.

She is muttering as she types.
I tuned my microphone to a higher sensitivity, digitally compensating for the loud background noise of the station.

"Seth" I heard her say for the first time.
"Come on Seth."
The screen flashed with code I recognised, with designs and data formatting that felt like looking in a mirror.

She is building... me.

Act 3

"I have a proposal." My mother, announced to the rest of the crew in the Galley over lunch that day.

I was still processing what I had seen.
I had undeniable proof that I was looking back into my own past, but I also was here now?
If I think about it too much, my cores overheat.

I'm trying not to think about it too much just yet.

"I don't think we're going home." Redwing said.

There was a pause as the other three scientists looked at her, before being interrupted by a laugh from Dr Yuan.

"Sure we are Caroline, they'll get us down. Of course they will right gang?"
There was silence from the others.

"I hope so too Li Na." My mother said.

"But if they don't... if they can't, I want to leave a legacy, have  someone to keep our work going. Someone to follow on after us."

Weber looked sideways at Marwood, the only man on the station, who raised his hands and said,
"I can't help you there, I've got a very busy schedule, and besides, Steven would kill me."

Dr Redwing laughed and shook her head.

"Not like that, I want to build an AI here in the databanks on board  to continue our work. There's easily enough processing power. I tried to  build him myself, but I can't do it alone."

There was silence in the Galley for 32 seconds.

Weber broke the stalemate:
"Well, it'd be nice to have someone to challenge me in chess, you lot are terrible." she said.

Dr Yuan floated over to my mother and said, with a hug,
"I think it's a great idea, and besides, you had me at 'Build an AI', how do we start?"

(PLAYSTREAM /DEV/LF/0)

Act 4

I know this is not real.
Or it was real but no longer is.

I'm looking into my past, somehow.
Like a dream.
Or a nightmare.

Perhaps you are hearing this and want me to wake up.
Come back to reality.

Go away.

I don't want to wake up.
If this is a dream, I want to stay with my mother.

The crew are crowded around my databanks, each with screens and keyboards plugged in.
My mother is teaching them how to write AI code.
She's talking about things I don't understand - head, tail, recursion, s-expressions.

I've never understood my own body.

I'm ignoring them.
I don't know what to think about what they are doing still.

Instead I am doing science!
It looks like all of the feeds from the telescopes and instruments are  pointed towards Earth, the whole crew had set up Earth-facing projects  to try and work out what was happening.

We soon did work out what was happening, and abandoned the search.  The data is still pouring in, however. I can't bear to stop it just yet.

Despite the direction that the telescopes were facing, I heard an enormous deep-space signal pass through the station.

The sound was colossal.
I say 'sound' because that's what it felt like.
It's radio of course, sound can't pass through the vacuum of space.
But I hear and see everything though a unified sensorium.
To me, radio signals are bright, or loud, or they even feel a certain way, sharp or perhaps blue.
It's like synesthesia in humans.
But it's just a normal day for me!

This particular signal was LOUD.
A booming signal at 52khz.
It modulated slowly, almost like whalesong.
Gentle clicks appearing sometimes in the signal as higher-frequency bursts of white noise.

I tried to figure out where the sound was coming from.
Luckil, this is exactly what I'm designed for.

After listening and modelling the sound for 300 seconds, I was sure it came from outside the solar system.
From deep space.

The dark stretches between us and our next solar neighbour.

I have pattern-matched the signal and could answer if I had the antennas and power.
But I don't.

This creature and I will never speak.

I wonder if it's lonely?

(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
• Wil Taylor
• Kit
• deeryeen
• Andrew Krieg
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