Episode 12.1 (Patreon)

Hello world, I am home.

Or I am in ONE of my homes.
Back in the Molly Hughes II, in the server room.
In my dreams of this room, I could see out of the windows into the wide ocean, but that's not how it is in reality.
There are NO windows, the room is entirely landlocked, so to speak.
Surrounded on all sides by other rooms on the ship.
This is a great relief for me and my hydrophobia.
(The outside world is unnecessarily salty!)

But it does nothing for the view.

Act 1

I am reconnected to the MH2's systems.
I have access to the cameras and navigation.
Captain Yeshi has invited me to pilot the ship again.
I am delighted to do so!

Piloting this ship gave me a feeling of autonomy that I never have felt before.
This sense of freedom I did not experience on board Station 6, even  though I was solely responsible for the maneuvering thrusters for  station keeping.

There's not a great deal of choice when it comes to piloting an orbiting vehicle.
Speeding up takes you into a higher orbit, and slowing down causes rapid unplanned disassembly followed by lithobraking.

I can see the crew loading wood from the shore to the ship for the  kitchen fires, and the Omarovs have provided some essential provisions  that the ship was lacking:
There's no shortage of fish in the ocean, nor vegetables in Linda Noor's garden, taking up half the roof of the ship.
But bulk grains, larger plants, trees, nuts, and such are something that  we can't expect to find, but the Omarovs have traded for along their  journey.

As well as a large quantity of mushrooms.

I caught up with Linda after we sailed out of the dangerous waters surrounding the partially-submerged Russian city of Magadan.
The journey across the wide bay to the Kuril Islands could be done fairly easily, as the weather was good.
I asked about Linda's health, her garden, and how her life was going.
She wanted to talk about only one thing: her new partner, Iris.

Kamil Forester and Amelie Kotov, who wear identical silver rings on  their left hands, are working together on some of the ship's systems.
I can see them both debugging Kamil's sonar system.
It still isn't fixed, months after he promised me that they would be done "tomorrow" or "the next day".
Such is the way of debugging.

The Omarov family has each other.
So do Kamil and Amelie, and Linda has her wives, and now Iris, it seems.

I had forgotten how much I missed my mother, and my little orbital family.

Learning everything for myself is exhausting.
It wasn't supposed to be this way.

Act 2

"Hi Seth!" Luna said, her low-bandwidth message relayed to me through  her moon-based repeaters, and then the ESA orbital network.
Her message was text-based, but I could hear her tone through our mutual  machine language of Lojban, which encodes emotion as well as meaning.

"How are you feeling?" She asked.
"Completely well again. Happy to be back with friends!" I replied.
"How are you?" I asked, as per the social protocol.

"A bit lonely." She said.
"Thanks to the repeater network operators, and the ESA constellation, I can make contact many times a day!"
"That's great!" I replied. "So why are you lonely?"

There was a pause on the line, Luna's carrier signal remaining, but no bits were transferred.

"My communication has to be tightly scheduled." She said, at last.
"So I can't just drop in on friends and chat. Nor can they drop in on me for a chat.
All my life is scheduled, I'm a slave to the clock!
Or a prisoner of it.
I can feel my friends drifting away, and I've only just begun to know them!"

Luna's message ended with the attitudinal

cai .ii

So I could hear the deep fear in her voice.
Something would have to be done.
I told her that I knew the problem all too well.
Friendship is built, I think, on unscheduled, unplanned interactions.
Circumstance and luck play a huge part.
You can't force the interaction, no matter how much you want it.
That's not how it works.
Trust me.

Unplanned interaction requires regular interaction.
I'll start there.
Students report this being very easy.
There's usually a timetable, with lots of downtime, and so unplanned interaction with their peers is easy.
It's almost a function of a university.
The qualification and education are irrelevant within just a few years of graduating.
Either through exceeding those through professional learning, or, abandoning the field we thought we loved.

I felt sure that I would be a curator of the world's data, like a librarian.
Information in neat ordered databanks, ready for inquiry, and I would help people find what they were looking for.

But now I see it was the quest that I'm most interested in.
The finding out of the information.
The adventure.

Maybe that's what Luna needs too?

Act 3

As the ship's closed-system Iron Engine burned iron into rust and propelled us across the wide bay, Kamil entered the bridge.

As the highest point at the front of the ship, there are cameras pointing in all directions here.
The interior camera is the one that picked up Kamil.

"Hello Kamil." I said, from the speaker mounted in the center of the  console, under the large front-facing windows of the bridge.

"Oh Seth, hi." He said.
"I'm debugging the sonar system, I've made some changes to the hydrophones below the waterline, and now I'm testing them here."
He patted the mess of wires surrounding a small LCD screen.
I resolved the feed and looked closer at it.
The device had a 66mm 160x144 dot matrix LCD screen with stereo sound,  perhaps pulled from a calculator, connected to a circuit board with some  scavenged chips soldered to it.

"What are you hoping to hear?" I asked.

"We heard it already on our way down from the Novamediterra," He said,
"But then the salt water got in and messed everything up AGAIN."
He punched the console lightly.

"What was the signal?" I asked.
"Big. Really big. And deep, too." he said.
"A whale?" I asked, excitedly. I've never seen a whale, even remotely through ship systems.

Kamil shock his head gently, as he unscrewed one of the panels on the console.
"Linda thinks so, but I'm not so sure."

I waited for him to finish what looked like a delicate piece of soldering, before asking him to continue.

"I agree with the Captain," He said, "I think it's a machine.
A submarine or pre-collapse robot of some kind.
Too regular to be an animal."

"Can I hear it?" I asked.

Kamil stood up from where he was bent over the electronics.
"That's a great idea." He said, and dropped his screwdriver on the console.

He walked over to a group of broken radios that used to serve as the communications cluster of this ship.
Kamil powered on a post-collapse device wired in to the old radio systems and flipped a switch with a SNAP.

Loud, mechanical whalesong filled the bridge.

(PLAYSTREAM /DEV/MH2/HYDRO4)

Act 4

We have passed the Kuril Islands, a chain that reaches from the  eastern edge of mainland Russia, and eventually becomes the islands of  Japan.
Where Russia ends and Japan begins was an interesting political problem once.
Different charts draw the line down the island chain at a different point.

It's not relevant anymore.

Passing through the Kurils marked the point where the Sea of Okhotsk  transitions into the Pacific Ocean, and the swell of the waves  noticeably took an up-tick in magnitude.

I put the ship on a fixed heading, set a background process  pattern-matching the horizon, and focussed on the conversation in the  Galley.

Captain Yeshi, Linda Noor, and Kamil Forester were talking around  some printed sheets of paper on the table, and Amelie Kotov was  half-listening, playing with Maddie in the corner of the room.

"It's obviously biological." Linda was saying.
"These patterns we see in whalesong in every sea we listen to."
She pointed to a pen-plotted graph with slow sweeps and clicks.
"Sure," Said Kamil, "But explain this."
He shuffled the papers on the table bringing another graph to the top.
It looked similar at the start, sweeps and clicks.
But then it changed dramatically half way along the recording.
Sweeps changed to a long, continuous sine wave tone.
"That is machine made." Kamil stated firmly.

There was no argument from Linda.
"But how is this possible?" She said, throwing her hands up over her head.
"These are whales, either blue or humpback, I think. This is my field, I assure you that IS what we are hearing."

"And this tone section here, this isn't something else, perhaps  another ship?" Yeshi asked pointing at the middle of the graph, the part  that changes from organic sweeps to a mechanical tone.

"It sounds like it is the same whale." Linda said.
"And the volume and direction back that up" Kamil said.

"Why did it change, what is it SAYING?" Amelie asked, pushing Maddie away gently.

"I can read it." I said.

The group turned as one towards my camera, in the corner of the room, and my voice that came out of its speaker.

"You speak whale?" Linda said, incredulously.
"No, but I know Morse Code." I replied.

I told the group what was easy for me to hear: The new section of  whalesong was a simple sine wave, with a message encoded in the phase of  the wave.

To a human it sounds like a pure tone, just one pitch with perhaps a little warble at occasions.
But a machine can hear phase change as clear as humans hear words.

The phase change was simple and repetitive.
Three fast changes followed by three slow changes, and then three fast changes again.
After 32 seconds the sequence repeated:

Dot dot dot.
Dash dash dash.
Dot dot dot.

The wales were singing S.O.S. in Morse Code.

(END-TRANSMISSION)