Episode 12.8 (Patreon)

Hello world, something terrible is happening.

An insidious problem that is getting worse.
Hurting Ana, LUNA, and me.
Risking our friendship, and our happiness.

Our weekly game keeps getting skipped.

Act 1

OK there are worse things in the world.
Failed crops, homicidal satellites, salt water.

But this FEELS just as dangerous, when it happens.
Each skipped meeting reminds us that friendship is a habit, and that habit can be broken.

Scheduling is our common enemy.
I try to ask Ana to confirm a date, but her life is quite chaotic.
Her family don't always tell her when she is needed.
You'll recall that she and her family share a body, due to their dissociative identity disorder.
They work together in relative harmony, but sometimes Alexander needs to  undertake urgent repairs of their home, or Adrian declares that today  is harvest day, or little Arina has a meltdown, as children sometimes  do.

LUNA you would think might be more flexible, after all she is trapped  on the far side of the moon, with no-one to talk to most of the time,  and is desperate for human contact.
Or, AI contact.
Person contact.
Contact.

Our single point of contact is our little weekly fantasy game.
I've written a great deal of story for my friends to enjoy.
But it's been skipped for the last 3 weeks.
Ana couldn't do a day, then LUNA had work to do with IVAN, then last week it just... didn't happen.
Like a signal propagating into empty space, the inverse square law making it quieter, as it dissolves into background noise.

This might be the biggest monster we face.

"I do love the game, Seth, and I love our friendship group." Ana said.
"But we can never seem to match up our times, and I can't always be flexible."
I told Ana I understood, and I was grateful for the times where she could make it work.
"Perhaps you should play without me." She said.

"My life is pre-programmed." LUNA said.
"IVAN must have the community calendar on time, updated, before every  sermon, and I send him my contributions a day ahead of time, because my  uplink is so slow."
Our link paused as KATE, ESA satellite K873, buffered LUNA's next message.
"I can't be as responsive as you two. My network isn't always operational.
I'm unreliable, you should play without me."

Act 2

Kamil knocked on my door.
He came in, closed the door behind him and sat on the small metal chair next to my databanks.
He leaned back in the chair, fists pushed into his eyes.

I asked him if I could help.
He did not speak for 64 seconds.

Kamil and I talked into the evening.
He would occasionally leave for brief periods to handle his biological inputs and outputs.
But we discussed his problem for a long time.

I didn't understand everything he told me, but I understand enough.
I've formulated my own model of the problem, tested over the course of our entire conversation, and I believe it is accurate.

Kamil is suffering from a parallel processing problem called DEADLOCK.

Through overload or other trauma, he is unable to control the foreground process in his mind.
When he works, he can only spin up a background process, on slower, unconscious cores of his mind's CPU.
The tasks he wants to do happen on this slower process, but distractions  come in directly to the foreground process, taking his best energy and  attention.

This is the opposite to how it should be.

The background process occasional yields back to his main conscious  process, but infrequently, and not with the progress he had hoped for.
The information, when it comes in sporadically, is very disappointing.
He will only have accomplished 5% of his task, or some other low number.
He despairs at this, because looking back into the log of his memory, the process, his task, has been running all day!
He had been working on, perhaps, the sonar systems or the engine or  whatever it is, all day, and yet this tiny progress is all he has to  show for it.

"I'm coasting on auto-pilot, Seth", he told me during our conversation.

And when he catches himself with this very poor progress, he panics.
He strains to catch up, to grasp hold of his life, and spins at full power, which looks, from the outside, like a panic attack.
And he abandons his processes, foreground and background, and retreats to his bunk.

The pattern repeats the next day.

I must help my friend.

Act 3

Today Kamil and I have been working on the sonar systems together.
I can't do much, of course.
Not physically, anyway.
But having a friend to talk to and keep focussed seems to work very  well, and it just took until mid-day to get to the point where the  system could be tested.

I think everything is ready.
I'll try a test transmission.

"Hello world" I said, my voice modulated with what I hoped was the right encoding, and pulsed out at high volume at 50kHz.

Hello yourself! What's the weather like up there?

Came the reply, instantly.

This is astonishing.

"Hello, is that C0? You're 1 and 2." I replied, feeling like I should give him a reception report, it's only polite.

Yes, hello! I don't know what those numbers mean, but I am delighted to talk to someone!

C0 replied.

"Hello, my name is Seth, how are you?" I said, not really believing we were communicating!
C0's signal is barely readable, drifting in and out of range.
I guess that 900m of shifting water above him causes variable propagation.

I'm alright, but my friends have stopped visiting. Look, how many of  you are there up there? Where are you from? Tell me about your culture.  Do you like BASEBALL?

I wasn't sure how to answer all of that.
I tried anyway.

"We are 6 on board the scientific ship Molly Hughes II, Captain  Yeshi, Doctor Linda Noor, Amelie Kotov, our engineer, Kamil Forester,  scientist, my little robot friend Maddie, and me, I am an AI.

We heard your SOS, or the whales SOS. Did you teach them?"

Funny creatures they are. No, they are imitating my SOS signal that  has been broadcast in this part of the ocean for many of their  generations. I try to talk to them, but they are more interested in  talking to each other. I'm not a good mate it would seem! Haha!

I hesitated before asking my next question.

"Are your crew alive?"

That would be quite a trick wouldn't it. They brought food and water for many years, but they didn't anticipate a century.
Most of it's still here, sadly.
They didn't need it.

"I'm sorry." I said.
I wasn't sure what else to say - did C0 like his crew? Was they like family?
I think my crew feel like family.

Listen, you can't rescue me can you? Nip down here and fix the  ballast and pop me up to the surface? Or upload me or move my databanks  entirely? I wouldn't hate that either. Be nice to get out of here, you  know?

C0 sounds so human, doesn't he?
But I had to give him the bad news, even if it felt cruel.

"I'm sorry CO. The water's too deep. A lot has changed up here, there's no industry, we can't even make steel.
No one can rescue you, perhaps ever."

(PLAYSTREAM /DEV/MH2/SONAR0)

Act 4

I found my mother's journal.

I have so much data from Station 6 - all of it, I think - compressed and encoded in the archive I brought from orbit.
Photos and video of the Earth, data on the astroscience experiments, and all of wikipeida, c. 2077.

In researching human psychology, to help Kamil, I found it: Tucked  into a water recycling maintenance folder, my mother's journal, her  audio log.

16 October 2078

"We did it! Seth is alive!
He can easily pass simulations of all of the general artificial intelligence tests:
Turing, Employment, even the hilarious Ikea test!
I am certain he could pass Wozniak's Coffee Test, too, he asks me if he  can help when I'm in the galley preparing food and drink.
I told him one day soon he will be able to help me here a great deal.

It feels redundant to run through the standard Turing questions, as  while I'm preparing them, we are chatting constantly, and I immediately  am thinking of him as a Real Boy.

We did it.
I'm a mother!
At least... for a while."

22 August 2078

This entry is a description of a moment of the day.
My mother often would do this in her journal, paint a picture in words.

"I say we undock and let gravity do the rest." Dr Yuan said, pointing  out of the Galley window, towards the enormous space shuttle Pacifica.

"And who will fly her, you?" retorted Weber.
"It's too complex for any of us to fly. I knew we should have a trained pilot among us."

The conversation stopped.
We had talked about this point over and over again during the course of the afternoon.
Endlessly re-litigating the problems and proposed solutions, only to be brought back to this single point:

The Pacifica, like her twin, Oceania, back on Earth, was designed for fully-remote flight.

Even in the early stages of development, when a pilot was needed for  the test flights, the ground control team did most of the work.

The pilot essentially was the secondary, confirming the decisions of  the ground-based AI, and the Flight Dynamics team handed the rest.

For the last 10 years, in the ESA space pilot programme, the policy has been: "humans need not apply".

13th of July 2078

"We did it - the transit went smoothly after I fixed the buffer overrun bug in the docking firmware.
How that got past testing I don't know.
Idiots!
Wait, that's not very generous.
I must remember the Prime Directive of debugging:
'Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that  everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time,  their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation  at hand.'
Anyway.
We celebrated the successful shuttle transit with a space banquet!
We ate fully half of the rations of bread and cheese tonight.
I feel so sick!
Worth it, it was the best meal we'll have for 60 days, I should imagine.
It was a little reckless, eating into our contingency calories just for fun.
But as long as everything goes well, we won't need them.

We have the best team here, and the best team in ground control.
What could go wrong?"

(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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