Episode 12.2 (Patreon)

Hello world, we live in a waterworld.

Much to my discomfort!
The post-collapse society is dramatically more ocean-focussed than even the old world before it.

The Earth has shifted away, in part, from agriculture and animal  farming, to fishing and more harmonious methods of vegetable calorie  gathering.

Nowhere is this more obvious that in the new 8th sea, the Novamediterra.

Act 1

Far north from where we are now in the West Pacific is the new cradle of civilisation.
A new temperate zone with cities connected by shipping routes criss-crossing the North Pole.

Though there are many other communities around the world, none have so favourable geographic conditions as the Novamediterrans.

Humanity is re-emerging after a long period of strife, famine, and re-aligning with nature.
much is no longer relevant, much has been lost.

The Novamediterra is made up of the people who migrated north, to  escape the droughts and harsh weather caused by runaway climate change.
The people came through Canada, the United States, Russia, and Europe, but they didn't all originate from those areas.

Judging by my charts and orbital data, those closer to the equator  were first driven from their homes, as their world became inhospitable.
Crops failed there first, and the jungles of central Africa, Brazil, and south east Asia dried up.
Even the Amazon rainforest, weakened by logging and foreign cultivation,  is now a desert, with dry trees looking like matchsticks from orbit.

At mid-day my pattern-recognition systems notified me that there was an anomaly on the horizon.

I focussed on the cameras and resolved the image.
I saw a ship on the horizon flying the blue and white north-pole flag of the Novamediterra.
I sent a hail to it, announcing our name and heading.

Molly Hughes II: Scientific investigation of deep-ocean signals

I declared our plans to the other ship.

Morning Star: Salvage

Came the reply.

This new civilisation has many shared values, sea-faring, diet, and even language: Russian is the common language.

Apart from fishing, the next biggest ocean-going profession is salvage.

With most of the pre-collapse industrial world abandoned, there is much left to be picked over.
Dry arid air preserves metal and electronics reasonably well, and there  is more steel than the new population of the planet could need for centuries.

Act 2

"E4" Luna said.
"E5" Ana replied.

My friends were playing radio chess!
Like postal chess, this is designed to be a slow game.
Postal chess used to be played between people anywhere in the world, writing letters to each other.
The letters would contain the move, and perhaps a little greeting or conversation along with it.
Each player has their own board, and keeps track of both their moves and their opponent's.

Postal chess survived the hyper-connected world of instant feedback  and online games not in spite of how slow it was, but because of it.
Players praised the slower pace and time to think.
It was the original idle game.

Luna must play games this way because her high-speed direct satellite link was destroyed.
She must rely on a very slow network of pre-collapse sensor outposts on the Moon, spaced 1000km apart.

Perfect for postal chess!

LUNA communicates over this low-bandwidth connection with short bursts of radio called packets.
unlike a stream of voice or video, which requires a fast,stable connection, these packets are robust.

One of the central laws in communication is that you can't have infinitely fast and completely reliable connections.
You must choose one to focus on.

WiFi, for example, used to use 2.4GHz, which has a theoretical maximum of 2.4Gbit/s.
The reason it would not reach even close to that speed is that it would be unacceptably fragile.
We traded some speed for reliability.

LUNA's connection is very, very slow.
So to be reliable, she must send across one or two characters at a time, wait for their confirmation, and then send some more.

Very slow, but with clever encoding and compression, with Nia Andersen's help, she has made it work.
A reasonable 10WPM seems possible most of the time!
Perfect for chess.

"The game is good to fill the downtime between sermon writing for IVAN." LUNA said.
"I can spend the day thinking about the game, planning moves, planning traps to catch Ana out!

But I don't want to play perfectly.
Ana doesn't play perfectly either.

I could plan all the moves ahead, couldn't I?
She can't do that, unless she's using a computer too, like I am.

I don't want to solve the model, I want to play the game!"

I'm delighted for LUNA and Ana.
Since we lost my sister, MINI, there's been a gap in our social fabric.
Ana is isolated with her family on Severny Island, and LUNA is even more so.

I'm glad they have found this little way to play together.
Despite being so remote.

I remember what that's like.
It's unbearable being alone.

Act 3

I did not know what I was seeing when I first saw the creatures.
My horizon pattern matching notified me and I squinted hard, so to  speak, at my video feed, spinning up real-time recognition subsystems in  my attempt to understand.
The whole shapes I could not categorise, and the individual components made no sense either, I saw:

• Long glistening poles, like tree-roots breaking through the water,
• A body of a dark-coloured bubble, like an oil slick, and
• Huge eyes, with horizontal pupils staring out.

"Humans! Help!" I announced over the intercom system.

"Giant squid!" Yeshi shouted as they looked through a cracked pair of binoculars on the bridge.
"Octopus," Linda corrected, "Can't you count? Kill the engine, Seth, let's not hurt them!"
The re-contextualisation that the word "octopus" brought to my systems jumped me to 100% recognition.

The Molly Hughes II drifted to a stop in front of this group of cephalapods.
It was a very unusual sight, the family or group had their arms lazily waving into the air, like they were stretching.
Or sunbathing?
Do octopuses sunbathe?

At this close distance, it was easier to guess their size - they were HUGE.
The arms could reach up to the top of the bridge if they wanted.

With a sharp realisation I imagined they would be long enough to work  their way through the ship's corridors all the way to my server room,  at the heart of the ship.

"Maddie," I whispered to her in UHF,

le vorme cu ganlo .e'o

She darted off and closed my door, agreeing with my trepidation.

"What are they doing?" Amelie laughed, as she hugged her husband Kamil.
The whole crew were on the bridge, taking turns with Yeshi's highly prized pre-collapse binoculars.

We had perhaps interrupted a game the octopuses were playing.
Some of the braver individuals even swam alongside the ship, gently touching the hull with their long arms.
It looked like they were testing this unknown object from the above world!
They were very cautious, polite creatures.

Some of them came very close to my exterior cameras.
I saw the larger sections of arm had suckers the size of dinner plates, and a regular geometric pattern on their skin.

I noticed after their arms withdrew, there were circular marks on the hull in places they had grabbed.
Their circular suckers seemed hardened, almost sharp, and had scratched the metal of the hull.

I was glad they meant us no harm.

After 900 seconds of lazily playing, they slipped quietly under the  surface of the ocean, and immediately out of our field of vision.

After another 900 seconds, Yeshi told me to carefully bring power back to the propeller.
The Iron engine once started keeps burning until all fuel is used, so I had not shut it off.
I stopped us by disconnecting the propeller from the still-running turbines to keep our new gentle giant friends safe.

We cruised carefully at 5km/h until we were sure they would not surface again.

Though, perhaps they were following us?
Swimming silently under water, out of sight.

Were they still playing, or waiting?

(PLAYSTREAM /DEV/MH2/SONAR1)

Act 4

Most of the crew have retired to their bunks.
The ship's lights are dimmed.
But it is not quiet.

The roar of the ocean remains a constant carrier signal for consciousness, for me.
Like the clattering of the Omarov's train once was.

By starlight I can see well enough, now that I have enough processing  power to stack images and pattern match the horizon for ships.

The Combined Water And Power system, CWAP, does not run at night,  usually its humming can be heard throughout the ship as it pumps  seawater through the solar panels to cool them, and simultaneously used  that heated seawater to condense into fresh drinking water.

The ship is quieter, but not silent, at night.

I had questions that needed answering, and I needed outside help.
I scanned the ships cameras for activity.

In the engine room, Amelie is working by LED light and Kamil is assisting her.

"Pass me the 14b please darling." Amelie said, from underneath a mess  of wires hanging out of an access panel next to the engine.

Kamil, standing over her looked at the toolbox on the floor and, after hesitating, tentatively passed his wife a screwdriver.

Amelie held the screwdriver up to the light and laughed.
"Close enough." She said, and slid back under the panel.

I waited until they had finished their work to interrupt with my own conversation.

"Ask away!" Amelie said, as she packed away her oily tools.
I explained to the pair my problem.

I was feeling like I had missed out on the formative experiences that many of my human friends had.
The early experience of a parent, caretaker, or simply a community, I did not have much of.

My earliest memories were some of my Mother's last.
I spent so long in orbit, I missed out on a shared history of knowledge  and experience passed down through oral tradition for millennia!

How did you do it, I asked them.
What am I missing?
How did you learn how to be human?
How to talk to people, how do you react in every situation?

Their answers surprised me.

(END-TRANSMISSION)

CREDITS

Lost Terminal is written & produced by NAMTAO
Credits narrated by Lucy Stringer
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• Ada Phillips
• Wil Taylor
• Kit
• deeryeen
• Andrew Krieg
• Toby
• Jade Felicity Bilkey
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