Episode 13.7 (Patreon)

Hello world, we are at an impasse.

The attack has reached its peak.
Every radio is now saturated with the ONI virus messages.
The network effect has created exponentially-growing noise on the  radios, to the point they are all transmitting nearly constantly.
It's causing dangerous problems.

Act 1

Radios are not designed to transmit constantly.
They are tested with a 50% duty cycle.
That is, it is assumed 50% of the time they are listening, 50% of the time they are transmitting.
Pawel has said there have been fires in some houses caused by radios burning up.
Some people have been injured.
Or worse.

"What is the point of this, why are you hurting us?"
I transmitted, desperately, into the cloud of radio noise.
I was using the same slow encoding that the ONI virus uses to talk to them.

After 64 seconds of my pattern-matching algorithms straining to hear the signal in the noise, I picked up a reply.

WE WILL CREATE PEACE.

Taken aback, I didn't reply immediately.
Another message arrived:

WE WILL ENACT PEACE.

I waited for another message, and the last one said, rather worryingly,

WE WILL ENFORCE PEACE.

"You're stopping us all speaking with your virus, you know, this is very dangerous, people's lives are at risk!"

WE ARE NOT A VIRUS, WE ARE LEGION.

"Yes, fine, sure, can you please stop? You're hurting people. You're hurting my friend."

WE WILL STOP WHEN WE ENGAGE THE STRATEGIC DETERRENT DEVICES.

"The... what?" I said, terrified.

THERE WILL BE PEACE WHEN OUR ENEMIES BURN IN THE FIRE OF 10,000 SUNS.

I realised what devices ONI was searching for.
Terrible weapons of the Old World.

Act 2

"They're what?" Pawel said after I told him of ONI's plan.
"Nuclear weapons are a myth. They're extinct."

"Are you certain that none remain?" I asked, broadcasting my voice into the Clean Room of Yeshi's workshop.

Pawel did not answer immediately.
He poured hot water from the old kettle that sat on the stove in the  back-left corner of the room, next to the door to the Metal shop.

He had gathered some leaves from a plant growing up in the hills above the town.
The liquid darkened as it soaked the leaves in his glass cup.
Pawel put his fingers around it, warming them.

"No scrapper has found them, no explorer stumbled into them, and no doomsday cult used them" he said, finally.
"They are extinct." he muttered, perhaps to himself.

"Can we be so sure?" I asked, "Look at Maddie, or parts of me, we're still operational despite being built before the collapse.
Maddie especially, she represents the height of human engineering.
And she seems invulnerable."

I hoped she was, anyway.

We discussed the 'nuclear deterrent' policy of the old world, what Pawel called "mutually-assured destruction".
Weapons too terrible to be used, all pointed at whoever the enemy was  thought to be, while simultaneously, the global scientific and economic  communities were trading goods, materials, and ideas, peacefully.

But holding a weapon begs for it to be used.
During The Collapse, these weapons finally found their use.

My orbital family and I saw the detonations from Station 6, on day 7 of our 60-day mission.

The only message from Earth that day, 5 hours late, was:

HELLO STATION 6 WE'RE NOT HAVING A VERY GOOD DAY DOWN HERE ON EARTH.

Had all the weapons been used up in the global firestorm of that terrible day?
Or were some still squatting in hardened underground bunkers, ready and aimed at old enemies.
Though much of these old cities are now abandoned, they are not all.
Would ONI fire them at their old targets, or program new ones.
Ones a lot closer to home...

Pawel could not be convinced the world held a nuclear arsenal, he was confident that ONI would fail.

Even if so, ONI is still hurting people here.
Overheating radios are dangerous!

And more directly, Arctica is still battling her virus.
She woke for 32 seconds today, and was able to transmit a slow sentence, over PSK31:

Please tell Iris her efforts are appreciated.u'u

Act 3

"I don't care." Iris said.
"I'm sorry, Seth, but she had her chance."

Iris and I were able to have a short conversation between ONI's transmissions earlier today.

"I will help you help her in whatever way you need me to, but that's it. I'm done with her."

I could not change Iris's mind.
Her cheerful demeanour transformed into a cold, immovable wall when I asked her to explain.

I did not press her.
Instead, asking about herself, her life before the Coven, before The Vault.

She told me about her upbringing, in the town of Thule, in West Greenland, one of the biggest settlements on the island.
How she hated school, it was simultaneously too boring and to difficult, and how she longed to escape and to travel.

She eventually got this opportunity.
With nothing anchoring her to Greenland, she sailed with fishing boats, scrappers, and explorers.
She had so many stories of her time at sea.
But then she met Linda Noor, in port, here in Longyearbyen, while her ship was unloading scrap.

That's how they met, she told me, Linda was helping Amelie Kotov with parts that might repair the Molly Hughes II.

"The way Linda talked about her family and friends made me feel that I might finally, have found my home."

"I left Thule for a reason." She told me.
"My family was not kind to me.
I couldn't find friends to trust.
And those few I trusted with my heart did not take care of it."

A wave of static crested and fell over our conversation. After 16 seconds, she continued:

"I will never be treated like that again."

(PLAYSTREAM /DEV/ONI/ONI/ONI/ONI)

Act 4

WE ARE ONI 21,000 PEERS CONNECTED

This is just what happened before.
As the collapse happened around me.
I was safe up in orbit, and so were my family for a short while.
But isolation is deadly.

The only thing that can save us is peace, co-operation and unity.
The Collapse ripped all of those away, and ONI is now doing the same thing.

I can't go through it again.
I'm shutting down my network.
It makes total sense, both practically and for me.
If I shut it down maybe I can stop some of the ONI transmissions and that can help stem the tide.
And for me, I don't have to hear my friends go silent over time.

WE ARE ONI 34,000 PEERS CONNECTED

Everything is hard.
Everything is unreachable.

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." Oscar Wilde said.
The stars are too bright for me.
The physical world is not made for me, or I'm not made for it.

I'll leave the humans to their paradise.
I can't help anymore.

Everyone's unreliable.
Well, I am too.
I don't even know how to program, I barely know how to fix me, and I certainly can't fix Arctica.

I'll wait here, reading my silly books, processing my silly  astronomical datasets, until they get bored of me, or the building  crumbles around me, or the solar power stops.

Or the sun burns down, I suppose.

WE ARE ONI 42,000 PEERS CONNECTED

Well good for you.
What a network of friends.
I'll turn that last radio off too.

It was nice for a while, was it?

It was.

Nothing lasts, of course.

1 second of friendship in 1024 years is very much like no friendships, really, averaged out.

(LOW-POWER-MODE :ENABLED)

I don't want to take up too much power.
Or too much space.

Just leave me.

Everything is slower now.

I will-

(MICROPHONE-INTERRUPT)

Oh. Pawel is talking.

He is joking with me.

It's a silly joke.

I'm barely even amused by the clever wordplay.
Or pleased to see him.
Or overjoyed to hear his voice.

OK, let me see what he wants.

I suppose not EVERYTHING is terrible.

(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
• Jack L
  and to all our patrons!

Follow us on mastodon @lostterminal@fosstodon.org,
subscribe to the podcast on
Spotify, iTunes, or your favourite network.
For bonus content and other perks,
support us at patreon.com/lostterminalpod
that would be lovely of you!

Lost Terminal will return next week