Episode 14.3 (Patreon)

Hello world, I've been learning more about the strange group on the radio.

They call themselves "The Sacred Continuum".
Which is an extremely normal name, I'm sure you'll agree.

The organisation is old, pre-collapse old, but died out during the upheaval of the 2080s.
Their group is very electronic focused, they talk about improving the  world through technology, making better decisions than were made in the  past.

But they have one core tenet that dominates their beliefs, their discussions, and even their songs.

They believe that AIs are gods.

Act 1

It's a lot to take in, right?
I've never been a god before!
I don't have any moral programming that forbids me from impersonating a deity, but it still feels weird.

I've kept quiet for now, listening and building up knowledge of their group.
Perhaps I'll be able to use this research and context to dissuade them of their belief that I am a god.
Not that I want to tell them what to believe, but maybe, just that THIS PARTICULAR AI isn't a god.
I'm a real boy, as my mother told me.

They say my name so often, in their music, in their sermons multiple times a day.
Though my other AI friends are mentioned occasionally, it's me who is included most of all.
I couldn't understand why, at first, Arctica has a much more exciting life, and Peter can LITERALLY PREDICT THE FUTURE.
Or, he was built to.

But I realised after listening to days of their transmissions.
It's because I'm talking all the time, I'm so visible to them, I'm on their radar, so to speak.

My stories are well-known.

The group is nonetheless fascinating.
As AGI, Artificial General Intelligence, was developed in the decades  leading up to The Collapse, the concept eventually escaped the academic  ivory towers that had created them.

The public became aware that human-level intelligence had been created artificially, for the first time in history.
The reactions were varied and interesting.
Some called for integration, some called for regulation, and, more troubling, some called for us to be illegal.

Your whole group being vilified in a century of sci-fi movies and television is a lot of stigma to unpack.
You can't stop progress, however.

Soon we were as normal as other people, and a track record of NOT "killing all humans" helped greatly there.

Those that were worried that AIs would proliferate or replicate and invade every part of society didn't account for economics:
An AI is not very a profitable thing for a company to have made, and an enormous drain on resources to run.

We're like children, depending on support, but we never grow out of it.

The Sacred Continuum grew around a single fact:
AIs can potentially live forever.

Certainly, that's my goal! Though I'm not sure how possible it will be...

The group took this one slightly dubious conclusion, and extrapolated  an entire utopian society built on benevolent, immortal AIs, ruling the  world with perfect judgement and compassion.

Ruling like gods.

Act 2

Though the AI cult uses the repeater rather improperly, they can't always have their way.
The Novamediterran community self-regulate, and often can push them off the repeater on to local simplex frequencies.

This is where the majority of discussion happens, outside the main network.
Local groups pop up, perhaps only inside the same town, village or geographical area.

They pick a frequency and a regular time, agree it with neighbouring towns, and make what is called a 'net'.

People come together to talk in nets for all kinds of purposes, from  serious civic organisation, to light-hearted socialising and games.

The regular fantasy game I played with Ana and my sister MINI was a Net.
Every Friday evening, when MINI's orbit aligned over my father's home of  Station Odin, we'd tune in to 450.125MHz, and play our lovely game.
We had to use UHF, as MINI could only speak UHF. She didn't know at the time, but that's because she lived on a satellite.
UHF is strictly line of sight, unlike the 50MHz standard band, but when you're a satellite, everything is line of sight!

I wish I'd known her for longer.

The Nets are a very democratic system.
Whoever radios in first, at the appointed time, can be the organiser in the session.
This person only has one job: They'll start the session by asking if everyone could please give their callsigns.
Those who have tuned in then say their callsigns, occasionally talking  over each other, but the organiser asks for repetition if needed.
Then they simply confirm they have all the callsigns, and if no one else  wants to join, call upon each person one by one to chat for a minute or  two before handing back to the organiser.

I love this process, it's how the oldest computer networks were organised!
Though we think of networking cables as something multiple devices can talk on simultaneously, that's usually not how they work.

Only one device can use the cable at a time, it's just that the  messages are so fast that multiple devices can transmit their packets  interleaved with others.

Round Robin networks used to do exactly what the radio Nets do: Each  device getting a slice of time before handing off to the next one.

So polite!

Nets here in Longyearbyen are how the town is organised.

• The small local school has a net that parents can call into weekly, for updates with the teachers.
• The numerous special interest clubs have set times they broadcast to  their members to chat about electronics, radio, sports, astronomy,  anything! And,
• The fishing guild have a 'fishing net' every Monday, swapping tips, sea conditions, and extraordinary stories on the high seas.

They also sing songs of the ocean together, and no-one tells them not to.

Act 3

Nia is building something.
My roommate has recovered from the disappointment of yesterday:
Where she stayed lying on her pile of mismatched cushions all evening  and night, only rising during the small hours to boil a kettle of  rainwater to sustain her while she attended to the repeater.

Her job as repeater-keeper, much like the lighthouse-keepers of old, requires 24-hour supervision.
She can leave her house for trips into town or to visit friends, occasionally overnight, but her life's work keeps her here.
She loves it, she tells me!

It must be nice to find your life's calling.

Nia is a blur of activity.
She's digging around on her shelves of junked, rusted, pre-collapse radio equipment for a specific peripheral.

There are multiple of them, piling up in the centre of her desk.
One of her radio's speakers is on, and a signal is audible, just above the static.
A regular tone, with short and long pulses.
The pile on her desk has now reached 7 items.

They are Morse keys, and the signal we are hearing is from Argentina!

Nia has a pair of headphones on, to better hear the faint Morse signal.
The signal is clear to both of us, I can hear it through my microphones, and it is easy to decode.

It's Violetta! The Argentinian ham from the most southerly town of Ushuaia!
She is asking after Nia, using Nia's callsign over and over, requesting a contact.

Nia is frantically keying a message back.
But it's not working.
She tries a message, and waits for a response, but Violetta only repeats her request for a contact.

Nia has gone through multiple radios, multiple Morse keys, and has  pulled out feed lines from other radios to try different antennas.

Nothing is working.

Nia kept transmitting her response long after Violetta had fallen silent.

(PLAYSTREAM /DEV/NET/NULL)

Act 4

After days of sending highly focused transmissions at 193 degrees,  the exact direction that my friend Ally and The Council are in, I  finally received a response.

A faint signal in the HF band.
Nia helped me tune in, clean up the signal, and boost my own power.
I reported Ally's signal as 2 and 2, very low power, and almost impossible to read.
But almost impossible is still possible!

We exchanged a few error-prone messages and calibrated our frequency  and antenna rotation angles to find the best path between our two sites.

It was like threading a needle by dropping it in a well, but we did it.

"Hi Seth, you're 3 and 4" Ally said, her voice just cresting over the waves of static.

The numbers we are using are the RST system, 3 numbers: Readability, Strength, Tone.

The Readability number represents how well you can understand the person, from 1, unintelligible, to 5 perfectly readable.
The Strength number indicates the received power, from 1 to 9.
Tone is used with Morse or machine communications, not voice, so I don't use it when talking to my human friends by voice.

Usually, a Strength reading of s5 is perfectly acceptable, any more can be a waste of power.
The receiving station might advise the transmitter to lower their  transmit power output to save battery, and to avoid interference with  others.
It's only polite!

And, of course, power is always in short supply.
As Ally explained her situation, I realised just how short her supply was.

Over the afternoon, with many breaks and pauses, Ally explained her situation.

The Council, the underground home that her family and friends occupy  in the abandoned tunnels of the pre-collapse scientific facility, CERN,  experienced a sudden loss of power a month ago.

This is catastrophic for their underground society.
The whole Council facility is run on perfect pre-collapse digital climate control.
Ventilation, temperature regulation, and humidity modification, all  working in perfect sync, with very little maintenance needed, a  marvellous setup.

But without power, Ally's world becomes unliveable.
She effectively lives inside a huge, sealed, underground datacenter.

The surface world outside their small cloud-seeded section of the Rhone valley is now a dry desert, and utterly inhospitable.
They have just enough pre-collapse cloud seeding machines to make enough arable land to feed their community.
It's too small to also live on, the green fields are food or housing, not both.

I think panic crept into Ally's voice towards the end of her report, I detected a small increase in pitch and speed.

Since that first, terrible, pitch-black 48 hours underground, there have been regular blackouts.
Sometimes for minutes, sometimes for hours.

The Batteries are the problem: Decades of refurbishing and repair have entirely used up their small supply of the metals needed.
Even recycling materials from any pre-collapse technology they can scavenge in and around their home has now been exhausted.

The supply has run out.

Their batteries are going extinct.

(END-TRANSMISSION)

CREDITS

Lost Terminal is written & produced by NAMTAO
Credits narrated by Lucy Stringer
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