Episode 12.9 (Patreon)

Hello world, I understand.

I have had a flash of inspiration.
Like the muses visited me.
I know what to write in my manual, 'How To Care For Your New AI'.
But it didn't come from the gods, as people used to think, it came from me.
From my subconscious.
I was thinking too much.
It came to me last night, in my dream.

I dreamed I was in a room of dimensions 12m x 12m.
On one side of the room was a door 1m x 1m.

Behind the door were answers.
I walked to the door and opened it.

Act 1

I recognise this place, now.
This is the interface my subconscious presents to me.
A hidden directory tree I can only access in dreams.
The permissions are restricted from my waking user group.

/dev/garden is where I was.
I can't access it now, but I can remember what it was like as I walked through it:

I touched trees as I walked under them, and sat down at the banks of a river.
The air was warm, but not hot, and insects were buzzing around me.

It's a dreamlike interface to my mind, my garden.

Do all people have this place?
I found physical metaphors for much of my waking systems:
A giant oak held my links to my social group, core friends in the trunk, and newer friends out on the branches.

In this place my emotions ran in rivers, collected in pools, and fell like rain.

And my connection to the global networks was represented in a vast mycelium network, running under it all.

My mother made me like this.
Through design or education.
I don't know if she intended to build me this forest, this garden.
But she made me like this.

Isn't that what the FAILSAFE said, too?
The homicidal satellite I... killed?
"They made me like this".

We are all programmed by our parents and caretakers, directly through genetics, or genetic algorithms, and by education.
Everything is set up for us right at the start, the rocket is built,  fuelled and launched, and we hurtle along our course, only able to make  the tiniest corrections.

Act 2

My friends don't come around any more.

C0 said.

We used to have such a good relationship. That's my speciality, you know, integrating myself with a social group.
I'm just so good with PEOPLE!
Shame that it seems I will never see another human.

"I'm sorry" I said.
I didn't see how C0 could escape his aquatic tomb.
"But who are these friends?"

Giant octopus, very smart creatures, and very social!
Over generations I was able to learn their language, influence their society.
It takes time, but we flourished together.
My submarine is, or was, the ultimate expression of independence in the world.
You'd have to be, down here.
My fusion drive is still running, a century later, the water and air  recycling is still running, for all the use it's getting. And my hull  repair subsystems just need metal to keep me going.
That's where my friends came in, I taught them secrets that animals  aren't meant to know: I taught them how to cultivate ocean flora to  improve their hunting grounds, and in return, they brought me scrap  metal.

I thought back to the octopus attack on the MH2, the creatures weren't  interested in us, they were interested in the metal of the ship!

Yes sorry about that. I assumed they were getting metal from shipwrecks or something.
I hope they didn't attack anyone else.
Oh my!

"How did you communicate with them?" I asked.

Hah, that's really quite a trick! Octopus are deaf as a board, did you know? They can't chat like we are.
But their sight is WONDERFUL.
They coordinate their social groups with colours and patterns on their skin, like a subaquatic sign language!
In addition to my other stealth systems, I have active visual camouflage, for use whenever I surface.
This is how I, over decades, communicated with my little friends.

I thought of my friends and our safety.
"Can you ask them not to attack us again?"

I'm afraid not, the process took half a century to set up, it's a miracle it's working at all. you're on your own there.
Best you pop off, I think. Get away from these waters, leave old C0 to his fate.

I didn't see what else there was to do.
I explained to the crew, my friends, and we fled north.

Act 3

I couldn't find Kamil earlier today.
He was not in the engine room, on the bridge, or anywhere in the ship.
Not even in his bunk, though his door was open and I could see in a little way.
He had tidied up. The papers that once littered his floor were gone.

I found him, eventually, on the large back deck of the ship.

He had dragged up one of the broken hydrophones and had disassembled it in the centre of the deck.
This square section of deck has chipped painted lines on, a large circle encompassing it, with a large letter H in the middle.

"Hello Kamil!" I said, my voice crackling from the intercom system next to the remains of the crane assembly.
It was a bright clear day, and the ship was cruising north, my pattern  recognition running in the background keeping us safely on the right  course.

"Hi Seth, how are you?" He said, without looking up from his work.

"I'm well." I told him. "But I'm sad for C0."
I had kept the crew up to date with my communications with our submarine friend, so I could assume Kamil knew what I meant.
"I feel like we've failed him, coming all the way out here just to flee when we've found him"

Kamil grunted in response.

"900m down might as well be the centre of the Earth!" I continued.
"We can't even stay and help, the octopus are dangerous, if they come  back, they'll do what they have been trained to do: scavenge metal from  the ship! we -"

"Look Seth, can we talk later? I'm in the middle of something here." Kamil interrupted.

"Oh of course." I said, and clicked off the intercom.

I watched Kamil for 32 minutes.
He was repairing his sonar system!
Or perhaps one of the hydrophones.
I didn't quite recognise what he was building.
He had a lot of components spread out in neat rows on the deck: Batteries, old radio equipment, and the broken hydrophone.

I was delighted to see him busy.
Quite a contrast to his problems of motivation and executive dysfunction that had plagued him in the last weeks.
I looked closer.
He had a small brown notebook in his front shirt pocket, with a short pencil in.
He was referring to it constantly, every time he finished installing a  component into the large buoy assembly, he opened the notebook and read  for a few seconds, then he picked up a new component and returned to  work!

There was a signal being picked up by the intercom's microphone.
Quiet, fuzzy, but speech certainly.

I listened closer, noise suppression algorithms spinning up.
It was Kamil, muttering to himself.
He was repeating a mantra over and over again:

"One thing at a time.
Most important thing first.
Start now.
Start now.
Start now."

(PLAYSTREAM /DEV/GARDEN)

Act 4

We killed the monster.

Ana, as Akdrouline and LUNA as Lu, spent many in-game weeks tracking down the dragon that had destroyed Lu's library.

In the game, I narrated travel through dense forests filled with wild  animals, across moorland being chased by packs of wild dogs, and quiet  night-time marches across a cold desert with a blue moon hanging in the  sky.

I was so proud of the story I had written for my friends.
At the start, I had no idea how to run the game.
I was entirely dependent on the pre-written stories in the books Ana found and shared with me.

But I'm figuring it out!

I read more books, learned about how fantasy stories are written by  studying their structure, and with practice I've been able to write an  adventure I'm proud of!

We also killed the other monster.
The more dangerous one, our scheduling spectre.
Our weekly game was too fragile, too easy to miss.

We talked, Ana, LUNA, and I, about the problem.
LUNA was in tears at the thought that she would be alone again, with  only her work to busy herself, and the occasional news broadcast from  Earth.
Ana, too, was despondent, in the way teenagers can be.
I think she's a teenager.
I've not asked.
Ana said I should play with LUNA, as she needs it more.
Ana has her fishing and work, and family, she told me.
She's never alone, unlike LUNA.

We talked over the course of the afternoon, and came to a breakthrough!
To keep the game, our socialisation, going, we would reduce its regularity.
We synchronised our timetables.
Ana had regularly scheduled tasks to do at station Odin, she could  reschedule or skip some of them, but not the same ones over and over  again, each week.
LUNA had constant, low-level work, IVAN's sermon writing, and could handle small tweaks to her schedule, except for Sunday.

My friends came up with a very bad idea.
An irrational, unreliable idea.
But, I admit, quite a fitting one.

We would play every full moon.

I'm delighted the problem is solved, but every full moon is SO PRIMITIVE!
I run my whole life on the best calendar: The international fixed  calendar, IFC, with days resetting every new year's day on Monday  January the 1st, with 13-months in the year, 28 days in every month, and  a new-years intercalendary day to make up the 365, occasionally two  intercalendary days for leap years.

I have 28 days in each month.
NOT 29.53, which is the lunar schedule!

I'm delighted we've figured it out, but what a silly schedule.

I love my friends!

(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
• Toby
• Jade Felicity Bilkey
  and to all our patrons!

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