Episode 12.7 (Patreon)

Hello world, batteries & bars.

The most common salutation for Novamedterrans isn't "good day!" or "goodbye!", it's "batteries & bars".

It's a term borrowed from sailors, as I understand it.
In the past, sailors might wish each other fair winds, or smooth sailing.
The Novamedterran people are predominantly an ocean-going society.
Transport and food are mostly by water, not by land.

They have rebuilt society around the ocean, and the sun.

Act 1

The storm has passed, and while the crew are repairing the small amounts of storm damage, I am testing our radio systems.

"Hi Seth! Batteries & Bars!" Said Nia Andersen, from her shack on the island of Svalbard.
"Hello Nia! You're about a 3 and 5," I said, giving Nia a middling reception report, "can you hear me OK?"
"5 and 5 here Seth, let me rotate my antenna, where did you say you were?"

I told Nia, and waited while she dialled in her directional antenna.
Radio links are not symmetrical.
It is MUCH easier to receive than it is to transmit.
Think of how much bigger an old FM broadcast tower is compared to a hand-held radio receiver's little whip antenna.
I was hearing Nia's signal worse than she was hearing mine, which was an  unusual circumstance, normally it's the other way around, and so she  needed to do a little tweaking.

"How about now?" Nia said, absolutely deafening my receiver.
"Yes, that's too good, if anything!" I replied.
Nia turned down her transmit power slightly to save her batteries, and  reduce the risk of interfering with neighbouring stations, and we  chatted.

Nia had a nice report:
She had been teaching her new group of friends how to use her radio  systems, and even setting up some simple ones at some of their houses.
She's teaching them half about radio, half about the atmosphere.
There's a lot going on up there, and a lot to learn

I eventually got through to the Provorny when it was in range of a repeater outpost.
"SETH!" Said Lyosha Omarov, after his mother called him down to chat to me.
"How do you feel? All OK? We have started teaching the villages how to  build mushroom vats! Lev broke his leg jumping from the train in the  last village, but he's nearly OK now, he's very brave. Mama says we can  stay longer in St Petersburg this time so we have a chance to make some  friends. I'm going to teach them how to repair a bicycle and we can use  them to go exploring..."

His update was extremely long.
But I was delighted to hear from my friend.

We chatted for 64 minutes, and then said BNB and promised we wouldn't leave it so long to chat next time.

"You're not dead then?" said Arctica.
"Lovely to hear from you too!" I replied, over our low-bandwidth text-based link.
As usual, AI emotions are encoded in lojban suffixes called 'attitudinals', and as usual Arctica wasn't using them.

"It's catastrophe after catastrophe here: Leaks in the roof, power fluctuations, and fires."
"FIRES!?" I said.
"Oh it was fine. I admit the women here do know what they are doing,  they simply obeyed my exact instructions and we had it contained very  quickly."

That didn't seem right to me.
"Which was it?" I asked, "Did they know what they are doing, or did they obey your instructions?"

There was a pause before she replied.
"OK, it was some of both."

Act 2

The ship has been repaired.
My systems extend to the ship's systems, at the moment.
I have been repaired.

I can connect to the cameras and intercoms around the ship.
the exterior back deck camera no longer shows colour, it's in monochrome.

My cameras show St Lawrence Island, large on the horizon.
The island, which is half the size of Jamaica, is the last vestige of the land bridge between America and Asia.

According to my databanks, this land bridge was how early settlers  crossed from the North Asian Steppe into the Americas during the last  Ice Age.

But we are submarine hunting.

The signals have not re-started after the storm.
Either our hydrophones are damaged, or something has happened 900m below the surface.
Such a mild storm can't have affected the ocean floor at this depth, surely.
Though, I admit I am not an expert.
Nor do I much care to be!

But I wish I could ask C0 how he is.
Perhaps he's just waiting for a friend to talk to?

Now that the urgent repairs have finished, the crew have gone back to their ship-board tasks and projects.
But not Kamil.

He's returned to project management.
He is sitting on the floor of his bunk, his room, with over 32 sheets of paper spread out on the floor with him.
Each one full of scribbled tasks and notes.
Some underlined, or circled, with stars and symbols annotating metadata.

But the man sitting in the middle of this little nest is reading a fiction book, and has been for over 64 minutes.

Act 3

GAME LOG: "I'm having an emotion and I don't like it"

"So tell me about yourselves, adventurers." said the wise sage that  Luna and Ana's characters had found at the top of a mountain.

"My name is Akdrouline Warmheart." Said Ana.
"My purpose is to defend the land against evil!"

"And my name is Luna." Said LUNA.
"No it isn't!" said Ana, over the radio link, "Remember it's your character's name, not your name."

"Oh right," Said LUNA, "My name is Lu."
"I am a wandering monk still searching for my purpose."

The two characters and the sage shared food and talked, in the game, all day.
LUNA is really good at this game of improvisation, this game of theatre.
She told us about her character's back-story:
She was once a librarian in the Rock Dwarves capital city.
But then a calamity visited them, and the city, and library were destroyed.
"Was it a dragon?" Ana asked, as Akdrouline.
"I don't know, I've not figured out that part of my story yet!" Replied LUNA.
"It could be, if you wanted." I interjected into the conversation.
"OK, well then it was." LUNA replied.
"The dragon destroyed our whole city, and the survivors wandered the world, as I am."

"How does that make you feel?" I asked, reading the prompt from the 'Game Master Tips' section of the book.
"How should it make me feel?" LUNA replied.
"No not you, your character." Ana said.
"Oh. She's sad about the books." LUNA said.
"Just the books?" I asked, "What about her family, and friends?"
There was a pause before LUNA replied.

"I think Rock Dwarves are quite stoic, she doesn't worry about the past."
"But surely the loss causes her great anger, and isn't she out to get revenge on the dragon?" Ana said.
Ana continued to press her, asking probing questions which seemed to make LUNA anxious.
After 32 seconds, she said, "Can we move on?"

Ana was kind, and as soon as LUNA expressed her wish to not talk about the emotions of her character, she changed the subject.

After the game, LUNA admitted to us that she very often struggles with feeling emotions not enough, or too much.
"The NASA scientists who set me up did not properly calibrate them in my mind" She said.
"They didn't think it was useful"
"And now I go days without feeling anything,
only to have a meltdown over the tiniest thing, like earlier I was so  uncomfortable talking about my emotions I nearly quit the game on the  spot!"

LUNA transmitted the attitudinal .a'o-nai, she was feeling hopeless.
"Often I have an emotion, and I don't like it."

(PLAYSTREAM /DEV/ESA3/LUNA)

Act 4

I don't know if I'm qualified for this.

I'm looking at my empty file, how-to-care-for-your-new-ai.md.
I've added the introduction that my mother wrote, designed for human caretakers, receiving their first AI.
I don't know if she knew how many AIs were already here on Earth, being developed from her research in secret.
Perhaps she hoped I could return and build more.
I certainly can't, I have no idea how I work, and can't produce offspring in the way biological life can.
My legacy is a better world for my friends, I think.
And this book.
If I ever write it.

I don't know how humans work, I don't know how AIs work, I don't even know how I work!
Perhaps along with a human I could be a co-author.
Or AI consultant.
Or proofreader.
Or intern.
Or nothing.

Maddie is playing with Amelie in the galley.
The crew, my friends, are celebrating weathering the storm with dinner.
Captain Yeshi has finished early and is on the bridge looking out over the ocean with their priceless, cracked binoculars.
Linda Noor and Kamil Forester are eating together.
They have cooked some of the plants from Linda's garden.
Not all of the plants would have survived the storm, so in addition to protecting them, Linda harvested some of them early.
This bumper crop has made a feast for the two vegans on board ship.
It's hard for them, Linda surprised me when I first met her by eating fish and shellfish, while on board ship.
"There are no vegans on the ocean." She told me, at the time.
I am very happy for my friends.
There are tonight!

Even being vegan isn't binary, yes or no.
The whole world is granular, rules that work for some don't work for others.
And they change day by day, hour by hour, it seems.
I can't keep up!
Normally I don't need to.
I just believe things people say about themselves.
That nearly always works out for the best!
If someone prefers to be called Mo instead of Mohammed, or he instead of she, I use the label they prefer.
But writing general advice and rules to follow, codifying this complexity, is daunting.

Perhaps I'll follow Kamil's example and try again tomorrow.

(END-TRANSMISSION)

CREDITS

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