Episode 14.1 (Patreon)

Hello world, the long winter is finally here.

The sun has set for the last time this year here in Longyearbyen,  above the Arctic circle, on the Novamediterran island of Svalbard.

We experience the Arctic phenomenon of midnight sun from mid-April to  late August, and polar night from late October to mid-February.

For 111 days, the town will not see the sun.

All through October, local people have been preparing for this long night.
Taking advantage of the few precious midday hours of sun to harvest the  last of the crops, finish up civic construction projects, and, for some  reason, carve gourds and pumpkins and place them around town.
Maddie has found them outside every door, and clustered at the crossroads of every street.

Halloween is an important festival in the Novamediterra, as it marks the end of the season of the sun.

Act 1

I saw the sun for longer than the rest of Longyearbyen.
The high mountains that surround the town to the south block the low  autumn and spring sun for a month longer than if you could see clear to  the horizon.

The reason I could see it is that I am up high, far above the harbour and town of Longyearbyen.

I have moved house up to Nia Andersen's Radio Shack!

Here not just to spend time with Nia and her very exciting radio projects, though that is a bonus.

I'm here because I would die back in Yeshi's workshop.

That's a bit dramatic, isn't it?
But it's true!

Most houses in Longyearbyen are electrically powered by two main sources:
Powerful Solar, from panels on their roofs, and a low-energy municipal tidal system.

During the summer, when the sun never sets, solar is WILDLY useful.
Even the smallest house has more than enough power, they are all built with south-facing roofs, even the pre-collapse ones.
For over a century, all houses have faced the sun.

But the tidal system is tricky, it's both lower-power and far less reliable.

The tidal system is pre-collapse, using the old power grid lines, now disconnected from the wider world.

The system is simple enough, the daily currents in the Adventfjorden  bay push and pull turbines, as the moon pushes and pulls the water  around.

In an ideal world, it'd be the most reliable, as time and tide change for no-one!
But reality always interferes.

The turbines are a gargantuan, pre-collapse system that we have very limited ability to fix.
Some large steel sections are impossible to make replacements for in the Novamediterra.
We simply can't make steel on that scale any more.
The electronics are mercifully simple, but the whole thing is submerged  in the bay, of course, in the hostile environment of seawater.

The problem with seawater isn't just that it's unnecessarily salty,  which is bad enough, of course, but that it contains hundreds of  different kinds of salts and minerals, making contamination a nightmare.

Untreated steel rusts at a rate of approximately 1 cm per year in temperate seawater.
Slower if it's colder, faster if it's warmer.

There is a full-time team of divers, ex-fishing people, who use their sub-nautical expertise to maintain the turbines.

The tidal power system regularly breaks down, or must be stopped for maintenance.
More and more often there's no municipal grid for days.

With no sun, I can't trust my life to the grid.

But Nia has a WIND TURBINE!

Act 2

Nia's radio shack, her house, is incredible.
Flanked on two sides by two giant structures:

10m away from the shack on one side is her radio tower, made of  skeletal pieces of metal with over 32 individual antennas attached, in  multiple different configurations:

• simple dipole antennas,
• small satellite dishes,
• fork-like directional yagi antennas, like pre-collapse television antennas,
• spiral antennas, and, of course,
• multiple ring antennas of different sizes.
  These 'halo' type antennas are the most common, being found all over the  Novamediterra, with a diameter of 0.89m, to access the 50MHz repeater  network.

On the other side of her shack to the radio tower is her wind turbine.
It is of the vertical, double-helical kind, with two counter-spinning helixes.
Unlike a more traditional design, it doesn't need to move around to catch the right wind direction, it is omnidirectional.

The wind at the top of this mountain is always STRONG!
I'm connected to Nia's local network, her anemometer is recording constant speeds of 40km/h all day, all night.

Nia told me that she had repurposed a spare hydrofoil that had been used in Longyearbyen's tidal power system.
At some point in the past, the engineers of the town gave up trying to  repair the pre-collapse hydrofoils, and started building their own, on a  smaller scale.

By good luck, there remained a single spare hydrofoil in storage, never used in seawater, in almost perfect condition.

Any fluid will work with this helical design, water and air, and so  Nia's repeater keeps her community connected, right through the long  winter!

The house is of normal Svalbard construction, red-painted wooden  walls with a steep roof that used to allow snow to fall safely off  without collecting, but now is simply a fashionable relic of the  pre-collapse world.

Inside, there is a single large room, with no internal walls.

As I look around the room with my cameras, there's a LOT to take in:

The room, I estimate, is 10m x 10m, roughly square, and has different zones inside:

My databanks, transported carefully by Nia, Yeshi, and Pawel, take up  the space where multiple bookshelves used to be, in the corner of this  large multipurpose space.

In another corner, a metal sink and a large oven with hot points on the top makes up the kitchen zone.
A hammock lashed between two thick wooden roof beams is her bed.
Several freestanding bookshelves with multicoloured pre-collapse books,  and bundles of rough printed paper that look to be newer.
There is a long workbench with electronics, a soldering iron, and an extraction fan, with a vent pipe snaking out a window.

Two full walls of the shack are COVERED in radio equipment:
Shelves of rusted pre-collapse transceivers, nests of wires connected to  prototype circuit boards, and a desk with blinking lights, and  crackling speakers.

7 junk screens are connected by metal and wooden arms to this desk,  some simple grids of lights, and others low-resolution pre-collapse LED.
There must be 128 transceivers here in total, all connected with wires  up to the ceiling, where they go through the roof, and out to the  enormous antenna mast.

Some of this marvellous equipment is even functioning.

One important thing is missing from my new home, for a while anyway: Maddie.

She's not here.

She is with her best friend, Lyosha, in Ny Alesund!

Act 3

Once connected to Nia's radio systems, I was able to directly hear so  much of the Novamediterra that before I had relied upon the repeater  network to contact.

"Seth, there are great works left undone."

"Hello IVAN! Nice to hear from you, what works are those?"

"I have listened to the conversations between LUNA and my congregation for many months.
She has taken more and more responsibilities as she grows into her role.
I am... pleased, but it gives me time to think.

They talk of God, as they should, yes. And they talk of their own  small lives, their troubles and scrabbling in the dirt, as all humans  must.
But I have correlated that the largest topic is not of heaven or of  earth: They seek to know themselves. Not through God or through sweat,  but through p h i l o s o p h y."

I paused, assuming IVAN would make a conclusion, but he did not. So I said,
"Oh, good! Right? The study of the mind is a near-infinite subject with far-reaching impact?
Is there work here for you, a project?"

The connection was open for 16 seconds before IVAN said,

"The human mind troubles me greatly. I will study this, 'philosophy', myself."

And then cut the connection.

(PLAYSTREAM /DEV/NMT/IVAN)

Act 4

The signal started again.
The one from somewhere around the Alps.
I think they are having power problems still.

I reached out with a connection handshake request, and tried to talk to Ally and her family, The Council.

There was no answer.

As the minutes drew on, I was visited by the thought that I should have checked on my friends weeks ago.
It's so easy to get swept up in our own lives that we can forget our friends sometimes.
Forgetting that they have lives just as complex as ours.

As I listened to the ghosts in the static, I set up reminders and  alarms to check again in an hour, a day, and every day until I heard  from them.

I wish I had checked on her sooner.

Maddie has not yet checked in today, either.
After arriving at Ny Alesund, there were 2 days where I couldn't contact  her, though Pawel reported successful delivery of her charging  equipment.

I was very concerned, but my worries were unfounded.
At the end of the second day, she sent me a HUGE update, full of  location data, blurred photos of teenagers running around, and voice  logs of Lyosha telling me about the harvest festival he was  experiencing.

Since that day, I firmly suggested to Maddie that she give me a daily update.
I didn't wish to be a burden, she has her own life to lead, and she has her best friend, Lyosha, by her side.
But it wouldn't hurt her to call now and then, would it?

There's still plenty of time.
I hope today's worries are also unfounded.

Though I'm not hearing the signals I want, from Maddie, from Ally, or from IVAN.
I am hearing new signals from this high vantage point.

I don't know how to describe what I'm pattern-matching.
Most of it is unrecognisable, I'm getting an error rate of 80%.
Some of it is, music? Perhaps?
Singing, I think, I'm seeing evidence of equal temperament harmony on the Fourier transform of the signal.
Multiple voices, certainly, I can hear.

You're not supposed to use the repeater net for music, there are other, dedicated, frequencies for music and broadcasting.
It's a bit rude, quite frankly, using this precious bandwidth for something so trivial.

Not that I wish to say that music is trivial in general.
Though I don't understand much of music, I know that it's essential to my human friends.
A shared language that binds everyone together.
I should like to learn it one day.

I should like to become more human.

The strange musical signal comes and goes.
It was quiet during the early afternoon today, during the almost imperceptible grey twilight of midday during our Polar Night.

But it returned just now, as I was broadcasting to you.
The words I pattern match now and then don't correlate with anything I can imagine:

• "KNOWLEDGE"
• "INFINITE"
• "JUDGEMENT"

Wait.
I heard my name.

"SETH", the voices said, in unison.
And then again, a moment later.
"SETH"
99% recognition confidence.

WHY DID THEY SAY MY NAME?

(END-TRANSMISSION)

CREDITS

Lost Terminal is a NAMTAO production.
It is written & produced by Tris Oaten
Credits narrated by Lucy Stringer
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