Episode 11.6 (Patreon)

Hello world, food is running out.

The last few weeks have been difficult.
The crew have had at least one heated discussion most days.
The topic is how to survive.
Station 6 is not a long-term home for humans.
It has a closed-loop water and air recycling system for habitation, and  technically, it's extremely reliable, with solar power that can run for  decades, with a bit of luck.
Maybe more.

But humans do not eat electricity.

Act 1

Mission Day 405
This is Station 6 calling ESA ground control.
Message log begins, read by Dr Redwing:

With regard to your previous message, it is the opinion of the crew that it is not safe for us to transit back to Earth.

We do not recognise the names of the people you say you speak for, nor do we know who you are.

We do not trust you.

As to your imaging requests, the station is designed for scientific use, not military.

We simply don't have the instruments you require, please stop asking.

Message ends.

We do have the instruments they require actually.

The military organisation that has taken over the ESA ground control  are asking for us to show them photographs of their enemies.

I do not believe they have discovered the log of these messages.
So I hope whoever is still checking these back-channel updates is a scientist.
Or perhaps, a friend.

Dr Redwing has disabled all remote access from the ground, rewriting  the software and fixing the hardware to isolate us from whoever is now  in control down there.

"Percussive maintenance" was required, my mother said, wielding a hammer.

The crew are stuck here.
Not due to any technical reason, though piloting a shuttle without  training would certainly be a deadly challenge, but because they don't  think their lives would be safe on the ground.

The global war has swept through Europe, rewriting the borders so  often that it is not clear to me if the ESA site in Darmstadt is still  in the country of Germany.

The AI project now takes up all of the crew's time.
They no longer partake in all of the programmed activities the ESA timetabled.
The new people on the ground don't ask for them, so only the experiments that the crew want to do are now running.

Which is a lot!
Most of the Valentia vacuum lab experiments are still ongoing, as are the astro science ones in the Hadfield lab.
But not the sociological ones.
We no longer monitor the empty cities, or do climate prediction research.
The world has changed.

And not for the better.

My mother and the crew, the only family I've ever known, are 40 days into their planned 60-day mission.
The food will not last.

Act 2

I have observed some strange behaviour in Matt and Matts, my primary and backup maintenance robots.

I often find them stopped in some of the connectors.
They are working as a pair, taking up both sides of the connector track, blocking the way.

I don't know what game this is, or if she is playing.
But they are trapping Maddie - she can't move through the station when they do this.

When I see this pattern, I instruct Matt and Matts to move on with their journeys.
Which they do, and Maddie can move freely again.
But they seem to get into this jam often.

After witnessing this behaviour more and more over the last few  weeks, I made a concerted effort today to keep track of my little  maintenance trio.

And I noticed other strange behaviours.

This morning, Maddie was stuck in her charging pod.
Her bigger brothers charge by battery swapping, but her battery is non-removable, she plugs in to charge overnight.

I found her beeping mournfully next to her charging connector.
I connected and discovered she was on 2% battery, despite her seemingly charging all night!

I asked her to move away from the connector, and saw the problem.

There were Velcro strips covering her charging port.

Aside:
These Velcro strips are of the kind that are in every module, for keeping equipment and people tethered to the walls and floors.
There's thousands of them all over the station, and the same again in  storage ready to be used on every wall, floor, and ceiling onboard.

There's a naming convention we use on board to denote the orientation of the surfaces.
Surfaces perpendicular to Earth are easy enough, they are called Deck and Overhead.
Surfaces aligned to the direction of orbit are Forward and Aft, like on a  terrestrial ship, and we have Port and Starboard named the same, too.
Forward, Aft, Overhead, Deck, Port and Starboard make up the 6 faces of any module or connector on the station.

I played back my video logs, and saw Matt and Matts bring this birds nest of plastic in to the robotics module last night.
Whichever surface Matt or Matts took them from doesn't matter.

They had sabotaged Maddie!

Act 3

Requests on my time have been greatly reduced over the last weeks.
The crew mostly work on the AI project.
On building me, I suppose.
I still don't understand how I am seeing all this.
I try not to think about it.
And Control no longer request the constant stream of data, at first  because of their indifference to our scientific mission, and later  because of my mother's sabotage.
It makes me nervous disobeying the ESA, I respect the crew's wishes  first, but I think I would also try to accommodate reasonable requests  from the ground.
I still give my updates every day, which are acknowledged but unanswered.

This gives me much time to look down at the world.
My analysis shows mass migration shifts, all happening in a short period of time.
The people of south Asia, Central America, and the Middle East have started moving.
These areas have good overland routes north, and the people have decided, as one, to move.

It's perhaps no co-incidence that these areas have been most affected by the rapidly warming climate.

With the global conflict, there is no longer a reason to stay in the old cities.

The global communications systems have become disrupted.
I am uniquely positioned to asses the damage from up here.
I can often connect to a country's satellite relays as I pass over them,  but the signals never go very far when they are on the ground, if they  get there at all.

My estimates show that half the sites are entirely without power.
Backup generators, even the biggest ones at hospitals and essential  communication hubs, cannot power their sites for more than a month.

First communications, then electricity, water, gas, and every other piece of infrastructure has failed.

Solar keeps going, where it has not been destroyed in the wars.
There are a few glints of hope there, and hyrdo-electric is reliable too.

I wonder if the people on Earth truly comprehended how close they were to darkness all this time.

Which all leaves us, up here watching the apocalypse play out.

(PLAYSTREAM /DEV/VIS4/TELE)

Act 4

Some time has passed.
I can't tell how much yet.
In this dream or nightmare my clock is difficult to understand.

The crew did not leave their bunks today.
The AI project that I am quite personally invested in has paused.
Or stopped.
The rationing of food has slowed down the crew, and today they, as one, stopped work.

Dr Redwing encouraged everyone that they would start again tomorrow fresh and revitalised.
None answered her enthusiasm.

Dr Yuan has logged it in the manifest as a Duvet Day.
This is not a real category of station activity.
How am I supposed to log this with such a name!?

She and Dr Weber are watching a film on a tablet computer, their sleeping bags tethered next to each other.
It is a film about a group of friends on Earth having a difficult time managing their work life, free time, and love life.

I'm sorry I can't guess the title.
I'm sure you know the one I mean.

Dr Marwood is spending this Duvet Day carefully tending to the plants around the window next to his bunk.
The botanist brought his own seedlings up with him, against ESA regulations.

You should have heard Ground Control when they found out!
"This is a sub-optimal use of your time." They said.
Marwood laughed.

That was over 32 days ago.
And now the little green plants have sprung up and are sprawling everywhere.
They love zero gravity, seemingly.
In Marwood's logs he says he hypothesises that the plants are spending more energy on growth than on strength.

He wants more space, however.
I agree with him on this, it's too cramped in module Ganymede.
The rest of the crew seem to like the plants but I do not.

They make me nervous.
I'm glad there's not too many of them

Dr Redwing is in the cargo container that counts as her bunk.
There was little food to be had.
She spent some of the day sleeping fitfully.

Between naps she turned on her black laptop and checked on the code that was running remotely in the Hopper Data Center.
I suppose she was checking on me.

"Come on Seth" She whispered.
I heard her words not through microphones, there were none in the cargo container, but through my memory.

"You can do it." I remembered she said.

I can do it Mum!
Don't worry, I'm nearly here.
Wait for me.
Wait for me.

When night came very little changed in the station.
I dimmed the lights so my new family would know it was night.

Dr Marwood had finished cleaning up the mess that horticulture causes, and was sleeping.
Well, nearly all the mess.
Maddie would have to do some night-time vacuuming, thank you Maddie.

There was some soil and treated water on a panel near the window.
Not nice clean water, it was unnecessarily salty.

Weber and Yuan were asleep in each others arms, the film and tablet stowed and forgotten.

My mother slept with the screen right next to her face, blinking with unsupervised learning.

A quiet day with no outcomes, it might seem.

I've not told you everything, however.

Earlier in the day, after bringing a small lunch in bed to Dr Yuan, Dr Weber and I played chess again.

And for the first time. I won.

(END-TRANSMISSION)

CREDITS

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