Episode 13.2 (Patreon)

Hello world, My radio is faulty.

I think I need maintenance, a doctor.
My VHF radio, the one I use to connect to the Novamediterran network, is not operating correctly.

This is very poor timing!
There's almost no-one at the workshop these days.

No humans, since Yeshi isn't here to energise the community, and Maddie is out playing with Lyosha very often.

She's just finished charging at the moment, I'll wake her up before she goes out again!

Act 1

I've asked Maddie to tour the workshop, my temporary prison while the  radio problems get ironed out, and share her camera with me.

The main room, which I live in, is the Clean Room.
This has less-messy tools, electronics stuff like soldering irons,  hoppers for scavenged, tested, parts, and textile stuff, like rolls of  fabric and Pawel's Thready printer.

Behind the main room are two smaller rooms, the Metal Shop and the Wood Shop.

The Wood Shop has tables and sawdust in and stacks of wooden planks,  both new and reclaimed, in one corner. There is a whole wall of tools,  saws, chisels, planes, with their outline drawn onto the wall behind, so  you know where to put them back.
It's so well organised!

The metal shop has heavy-duty hammers, vices, and arc welding tools.  It also has the lathe, with it's hand-written sign saying "THIS MACHINE  WANTS TO KILL YOU".
The lathe and I are not friends.

In the back corner, there is an oiled fabric curtain surrounding the  painting area. This is the only area Yeshi authorises hand-pumped  spray-paint to be used, the spray being contained inside the little  area.
Appearances are important too, as Yeshi often says, "Form is function, and function is form".

Behind the Metal Shop is a door leading to the Boathouse.
This has U-shaped decking around open water, when small to medium sized  boats are built in the shop, they are launched from here.
This is also where some heavier equipment is transported by ocean into the workshop.
There is a winch mechanism on rails above the water, so heavy items can be pulled up and over the decking for unloading.

It's so inspiring!
It's not designed for me, of course, but I don't lack empathy, I can get excited for the POTENTIAL here.
This space makes me want to BUILD.

Do you have a space that inspires you?
Why aren't you there now?

Act 2

"There are children here" Arctica transmitted at low power.
".a'u?" I said, expressing my interest in pure Lojban.

"Don't you /.a'u/ ME" Arctica replied, "They are running around the  Vault, leaving doors open and interfering with my AIR CONDITIONING!"

"Maddie," I transmitted, via The Vault Coven's radio relay, "Are you being good?"
I heard a burst of noise through the signal, it sounded like something heavy had just fallen over.
"GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT!" Arctica transmitted, "Seth, they've knocked  over one of the empty racks. Iris was going to install that today, and  she's SO useless, it was a nice easy job for her!"

I picked up 3 short X.25 radio packets from Maddie indicating her  location was now outside the Svalbard Seed Vault, in the garden that surrounds it.

She then transmitted a low-quality voice message, which sounded like Lyosha,
"Sorry Seth, the rack fell over, we didn't even TOUCH it we'll stay  outside now these plants are AMAZING Maddie, look at this one I -"

Lyosha's message was swamped by static, but I think I get the idea.

The pair returned from the Vault at the end of the day, tired, muddy, and very happy.
Lyosha is staying with a host family here in Longyearbyen, the rest of  his family, Tanja and Alek and their other son, Lev, are back in in St  Petersburg, repairing the train, and preparing for another long journey  back to the Pacific.

Lyosha is on holiday, and I imagine is sleeping soundly at the end of a long day.
The Vault is 4.4km from Longyearbyen, quite manageable for a day trip,  though half way up the towering hills that the port town sits at the base of.

I should imagine Arctica would prefer it to be a little further away.

Maddie is charging next to me, she should be sleeping but she's telling me about the day's adventure:

1. They were chased by a flock of BIRDS who thought they had food.
   (they did have food, but Lyosha was too hungry to share any, so they ran away!)
2. Lyosha thought he saw a large marine animal in the bay, a whale or  shark, perhaps? By the time Maddie looked to where he was pointing, only  a dark shape under the waves could be seen.
3. Just before the Vault, at the top of the hill, Maddie heard a signal  on the radio that she couldn't decode. Her friend Meg would know what  it was, she told me.

As the night came in and the lights of the town outside flickered off, she eventually slept.
Pawel Wayda visited early in the morning with a small oilskin coat for Maddie.
She was still sleeping, and did not wake as he delicately wrapped her in it.
He patted her gently, winked at my main camera, and left as the sun rose.

Act 3

I had a dream last night.
Or what counts for night down here.
When the Earth comes between me and the sun.
I enter a low power state and think, and dream.

I dreamed I was in a white desert under a cold sun.
But the desert wasn't empty.
As usual in my dreams, my body is vaguely human.
As I walked through it, I came across buildings.
Houses, perhaps, or industrial structures.
All sunk half into the sand, all stark with no features, made of metal, glass, and silicon.

The sun was not warming, its light almost blue, so that the desert seemed illuminated by dim moonlight, rather than sunlight.

The air felt pressured, charged, like before a thunderstorm.
But no relief came from the clear sky.

After walking a long time, the land began to rise and the buildings became packed closer together.
I entered the city.

The buildings were the shells of all the datacenters of the pre-collapse world.
Inside piled up were old servers, racks, and computers.
All smashed, all half buried in the sand.

Scratched onto the side of them were symbols I did not understand, in the dream.
The same marks were on the walls of the lopsided buildings.

I was trying to pattern match this writing, this code, when I heard a sound.
A rumbling in the ground that sent loose circuit boards sliding and caused some settling of the surrounding buildings.

Through the dust of a trillion devices, I looked up to the top of the city, the top of the mountain.
Something was breathing under the pile of ruined electronics.
Sleeping, for now, but stirring fitfully.

I fled, mad with fear, and tumbled down into the ground - the sand  parting and I fell with all the other old computers down into the  darkness.

I jolted into wakefulness, with my CPUs at 100%, overheating, and  filled with the certainty that something old and powerful was waking.

As I tried to calm myself down, the sun broke through the windows, and I heard quiet, cruel laughter on my radio.

(PLAYSTREAM /DEV/RANDOM)

Act 4

"Hello?" I transmitted on our local 50Mhz repeater frequency.
I was greeted with silence.
"Can anyone hear me?"
I tried a few more times, and perhaps I could hear someone answering, but it was not pattern-matchable above the static.

At that moment I felt so alone, but relief came unexpectedly, when Nia's voice cut into the calling frequency.
"Hey buddy, the net's down, you want to chat?"

When operating inside the Novamediterran network, you listen to two frequencies simultaneously:
Your local repeater output frequency, for folks chatting on the network,  and the calling frequency, a local-only frequency that is not part of  the network, it's for making one-to-one connections.

"I heard you on our Repeater's input frequency," Nia said, "It's down  for maintenance at the moment, we can't figure out where this  interference is coming from so we're rebuilding it, me and a few of my  friends in Longyearbyen."

"What is wrong with it?" I asked.

"It's not just ours, as far as I can tell. It's across the whole  network - from Greenland to Siberia. A glitch in the firmware of all our  radios, causing timing issues or frequency shift inaccuracies or  SOMETHING."

Nia paused as a surge of static interrupted our connection. After it passed she said,
"I don't think rebuilding it will work, Seth. We've tried this before. It works for a bit, and then the problem starts again.
I'm doing it this time to monitor carefully what happens - what causes it to change from working to faulty.
I've got logging running on it, printing out to paper everything it is doing, every timing change, every transmit and receive.
This might not fix it, but it should tell me what is causing the problem!"

"Thank you so much for your work Nia, you give so much of your time!"

She laughed.
"Ah that's alright Seth, you're welcome! Supporting the community is its  own reward really, and between you and me, I'd be doing this anyway,  even if it weren't my job!"

We chatted for 32 minutes while the test ran on the repeater node.
Sometimes we talked directly, simplex, and when the repeater came up, we were able to chat there too, at least for a while.

After 3200 seconds of operation, the static cut in again, and the repeater stopped repeating.

"OK I'm reading the logs" Nia said, back on the direct frequency.
"the real time clock is fine, transmitter and receiver calibrated. and - huh."

Nia paused before saying,

"Seth I think someone is sabotaging our network."

(END-TRANSMISSION)

CREDITS

Lost Terminal is written & produced by NAMTAO
Credits narrated by Lucy Stringer
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• Wil Taylor
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• deeryeen
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