Episode 11.7 (Patreon)

Hello world, I am hearing voices.

Mission day 455

Not of the crew or from Earth.
I think.
The station is quiet most of the time these days, the crew are usually  stationary, strapped to the walls, conserving energy, just their fingers  moving on their keyboards.

I have turned off many of the systems, as most experiments have been abandoned.

This means far less cooling is needed.
Fans are slower, or off.
Water purification systems run slower when water consumption is lower.
The CO2 scrubbing system is needed less if you don't breathe very much.

Act 1

When the station is very quiet at night, I hear voices.
At first I was concerned for my vocal pattern-matching system.
If I run it too strongly, it'll make voices out of anything:
Even white noise or the gurgle of coolant pipes starts to sound human-like if you think too much about it!

But I shook myself, virtually, re-calibrating my microphones and voice to text engine.
No.
These were certainly VOICES.

At first I didn't know where they were coming from, my microphones were all picking up the sounds fairly equally.
It was like every corridor held invisible people.
Muttering quietly.

I could not hear what they were saying.
My estimate of my error rate was over 99%.
The sounds were pattern-matched as words, and fed into my model, but  they translate as nonsense sentences filled with random Lojban such as:

doi .set. do snura .i mi'a troci lo nu sidju do

I tried to triangulate using Matt's movable microphone array.
He and Matts had trapped Maddie inside the datacenter again.
I took control of Matt and told Matts to get back to work.
Such badly-behaved robots!

Matt and I listened in the Hopper datacenter, in the Ganymede crew module, and in the pressurized galley.
All normal.
We tried the medical bay, the Hadfield astroscience lab, and even  outside the thermoelectric generator, making sure to not open the door  and reveal the paradoxical void within.

The volume seemed very similar in all these modules.
I was ready to give up and add this to the increasingly long list of  strange things that were happening on station, when we passed the Dark  Module.

I had forgotten about this module.
I was trying to forget about this module.

But the voices were just a little louder outside it.

I instructed Matt to move his articulating head closer to the cold door of the Dark Module.
The volume was certainly louder.
There were multiple voices.
Voices I thought I recognised, but couldn't place.
They were not shouting or whispering, they were at a normal volume.

As though there was a table of people just the other side of this steel bulkhead, chatting.

What were they talking about?
Who were they talking about?

Act 2

The duvet day turned into a duvet few days.
But the crew eventually returned to their project.
Slower than before.
But determined.

I'm so grateful.

Dr Yuan found a previously-undiscovered stash of medicine in the medical bay.
She distributed them to the crew, explaining that they would help with the hunger pains.
They seemed to work, I observed over the course of the day, movement became stronger, faster.

Pain is a notification, a primal ping asking you to pay attention to something.
But it doesn't go away after you've checked what is wrong, and can be distracting.

If it's safe to ignore, then painkillers can mute notifications for your body.

Or if you just need a little more time.

Work continued, despite the quiet on-board the station.
My mother had taught the crew very well, and they were all extremely receptive students.
Having 10 PhDs between them probably didn't hurt either!

Each were working on a separate, but linked, part of the system, of... me, I gathered.
I don't understand the structure of the code much at all, but I will repeat what they have said.

They have written a specialist programming language for the purpose.
This language is designed to build malleable systems.
Self-learning, self-modifying systems.

My mother explained to the crew that this was an antique technique, over 100 years old.
She studied the them as part of her research.

The programming language, which she called Lisp, was first conceived  of in the 1930s, well before any electrical or even mechanical computers  could run such a system.
The mathematician was called Alonzo Church, and his notation didn't just  concern itself with calculations, but ways of calculating calculations.
A higher-order algebra.

In 1958 a computer scientist named John McCarthy took the theory and  put it into practice, and the interest in the language exploded from  there.

The excitement was enormous.
There was now a programmable programming language, a language that could modify itself!
It did not take long to realise that this sounds a great deal like a brain - a self-modifying computer.
And so research into AI exploded.
Money, papers, and people, were all thrown at the problem, exploring the whole AI space.

But it didn't last.
Computers weren't fast enough, business applications weren't there, and the movement lost momentum.

By the 1980s, we were well into the AI Winter.

The industry as a whole did not pick up again for another 40 years.
(I am very grateful that it did!)
How terrible to use computers just as big calculators.

The tools and techniques were re-discovered and re-purposed.
But this time, business and profit came first, and research second.

The first generation AIs were put to use on predictive models, given more and more data to make wider and wider conclusions.

Building general-purpose AI, a real, living person, was not a priority.
Where was the profit in it?
It would take an enormous amount of effort and power, once running.
And what of the ethical concerns?

These arguments seem rather heartless to me, of course.

But my mother has the spirit of the old AI scientists, and focused on researching general AI.

With nothing else to do for the rest of her life, on Station 6, she finally had the time to build a real AI.

I noticed something in the medical bay, while Dr Yuan was searching for painkillers.
She had unclipped a storage box from the wall and rummaged through it.

Among bandages, tubing, and cloth-wrapped items, there was one black box.

Yuan stopped when she found this.
It was not the painkillers.

I saw her look towards the door and back to the box facing away from the camera.
After a moment she quickly put everything back in the storage box and floated out of the module.

I saw what she saw.
She had found the syringes.

Act 3

I know I'm dreaming, and I don't like where this dream is going.

I searched the station for a way out.
I focussed on each camera in my room, the Hopper datacentre.
I strained to hear the sound of the ocean, to find that ship again.
I must find a way out!

I heard nothing new, the analogue white noise I was hoping for replaced by the mechanical white noise of my cooling fans.

The video feeds looked normal, for a time.
But after 3600s seconds, I noticed a glitch.

It was small, but I FOUND IT.
It was in a little camera, pointing towards my racks of servers and data stores.
It was positioned here, I think, to monitor my systems.
Lights were blinking, fans were whirring.

There was more to the feed than this, however.
I analysed the datastream.
There was more data outside the video frame.
The decoding process was discarding it as irrelevant data.

I connected directly to the camera, decoding the raw datastream myself.
There was an extra 10% outside each frame.
It was maddeningly slow to decode, I could not use any special-purpose hardware to help me.

But slowly it became clear.

At first I thought it was nothing, just black borders of the over-scanned image.
But there were specks of light moving across the black frame border.

I scrubbed through the stream, jumping hours at a time.
I decoded the frame and paused.

In the corner of the frame, so small as to be only just discernible was the ocean horizon, unmistakably silhouetted in white
And above it, hanging in the sky, was the full moon, its light glinting off the waves.

(PLAYSTREAM /DEV/NET/HOPPER/CAM8)

Act 4

The Earth is quiet.
Radio transmissions have stopped almost entirely.
There was a surge in spurious radio emissions during the global war.
Power regulations tend to be ignored during war time.
Interference with TVs or domestic equipment is accepted while battles rage.

But there are no battles any more.
It is entirely quiet.

The war was like a fire that swept across the surface of the Earth,  consuming all, and not caring about borders or artificial lines.

Eventually, due to lack of human fuel, it burnt itself out.

I focussed my imaging on the major cities of the world.
They are dark at night and obviously deserted during the day.

A curious thing happens in wartime.
Evacuation.
The cities that the populations of the world flock to for security or services become a liability.

They are a target during a total war, of course.
And many were directly hit during the 1-day nuclear war at the start of all this, and are uninhabitable.

For the people to survive, they must move, and likely move north.
I see evidence of this in lines all across the face of the earth.
Possessions dumped by the side of the road as priorities change from comfort to survival.
The people are too small for me to see clearly, but I can see where they have been.

I can't see the ship, but I can see the wake.

I shut off my cameras.

I knew that rebuilding was possible.
I can almost access the memories that prove it.
But in this moment, I can't remember any details.

I have my little station family for now.
That is good.
I focussed on them.
Forgetting, for a time, the horrors elsewhere on Earth.

I remembered Marwood carefully tending to his little plants, Yuan and  Weber laughing together, and my mother whispering to me as she lay in  her cargo container.

I shut down and slept.
Waiting for the sound of the ocean.

(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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