Episode 14.9 (Patreon)

Hello world, there are raised voices outside.

The Sacred Continuum is having a discussion.
Or an argument.
Mother Gamma's voice is audible over the background noise.
My plan to appear ungodlike might just be working.
They're passionately arguing over my divinity.

Nia is finding it much more amusing than I am.
After she re-connected my antenna feed lines, so rudely pulled out of my  databanks by Mother Gamma, Nia and I talked all evening and long past  our mutual bedtime.

Act 1

It is such a relief to have Nia back.
I was trying not to think of what Mother Gamma could have done if she had wanted to, or become angry enough to do.
I'm helpless in the physical world, in Meatspace, as my mother used to call it.
I'm entirely dependent on the kindness of those around me to honour the tacit pact that society runs upon:
Renounce the use of force, argue with words.

Nia is making tea. She has access to filtered rainwater using a tap  in her small kitchen from a large sealed container at the side of the  house for water collection and storage.
The container is mounted higher than ground level, the elevation  allowing her to run her shack's appliances on pressurised water.
She put her large kettle on top of the oven, after first removing a  thick piece of insulation, exposing a red-hot element underneath.

Society's non-violence pact is related to the peace treaty of tolerance, I note, as a counter to the Paradox of Tolerance.
This paradox states that "if a society's practice of tolerance is  inclusive of the intolerant, intolerance will ultimately dominate,  eliminating the tolerant and the practice of tolerance with them."

In short, intolerance must not be tolerated.
Tolerance is a peace treaty, if someone breaks it, by violence or  oppressing others, they have forfeited their protections of tolerance,  and society must intervene.

This is all very well, but my AI friends and I have no way of backing  up ourselves with force, we need help, we need to delegate this right  of force to others.

Same as everyone, really, the police and military forces exist to fulfil this role for you, too.

Nia poured herself a cup of tea, shaking some crushed dried leaves  out of a small container that she put back on a shelf above her sink.
"What would you like?" She asked, inviting me to a little game we often play with each other.
"Oh. Um. I think the nettle tea today please Nia" I said, being drawn  out of my dark thoughts about the Continuum, and what could have been.

Nia poured the kettle into a second metal mug with my requested tea in.
She then placed it on a small table in sight of my main camera.

I could see the leaves delicately swirling around, buffeted by  currents in the hot liquid, and steam gently rising from the surface.

It's nice to have tea with a friend.

Act 2

After 64 minutes, a bell chimed from a small clockwork timer Nia had set.
She put down her cup and struggled up from the pile of cushions on the floor.
(They're more cosy than practical!)
She opened the oven, below the gently-steaming kettle, and with thick  fabric gloves protecting her hands, withdrew a sheet of brown circular  baked treats.
"Pepperkaker! Nia said, angling the tray sharply, so I could see the circular cookies, dusted with white sugar"

She put the metal tray on the metal work surface of the kitchen unit to cool.

I realised I did not know how this kitchen works.

I asked Nia, and she was happy to give me the tour:

• The oven, for making food hot, with a hole in the top for boiling water and cooking,
• A refrigerator, for making food cold, the lid was in the top, opening upwards,
• The sink, with its pressurised, filtered rainwater. "Don't drink it Seth!" Nia teased.
• The sink drains outside slightly downhill into a grey-water soakaway.
• And something I had entirely missed until now, a washing machine for clothes washing, tucked under the sink.

I estimated the power consumption of these devices and came to an answer that confused me.
"Nia, each of these devices requires at least a kilowatt.
But you don't have any batteries!
What do you do when the wind is calm for a day?"

"Oh but I DO have batteries!"
Nia stood up, smiling, and touched each appliance as she explained:
"This oven stores heat, an electrical element heats up the bricks inside, storing the energy as usable HEAT.
The fridge is the opposite, the compressor pulls heat out of the heavily  insulated interior, effectively storing energy as usable COLD.
It uses twice as much power in the hot summer, of course, but we have solar in the summer, so it all balances out!"

That is extremely lucky. I wonder how many people survive further south because of summer solar cooling.
Nia continued,

"And my washing machine goes as fast or slow as the day's electricity  level. I don't mind if the wind is slow one day, it'll just take more  time to get my clothes clean, I'm in no hurry!
Everything is directly wired into the turbine, and in the summer my solar panels.
It doesn't matter if it's an overcast, calm day, or a bright, windy day,  my oven stays hot, my fridge stays cold, and my clothes, eventually,  get washed!"

This didn't make any sense to me.

"So you're in a constant state of brownout? How do any of these  devices work? Digital circuits require very precise voltage levels to  function!" I said, somewhat indignantly, very aware of my own  sensitivity to fluctuating power.

Nia laughed gently at my confusion.
She spread her arms wide, covering the whole of her clever kitchen.
"No digital circuits here." she said, simply.
"No batteries needed, I can get by with 100W per device, 10x lower than the old pre-collapse junk!"

As Nia was talking, I felt panic build up inside me.
I couldn't at first identify where the emotion was coming from,  something in my subconscious had made a connection before I realised  what it was.
This is what a "gut feeling" is, the result of our psyche being fractured into multiple thinking sections.
I don't like to think that I am not one whole, rational, person.
But I am.
I contain multitudes.
Same as you.

A shout bubbled up from my background subconscious systems,  short-circuiting to my speakers before I could process it, surprising  both myself and Nia, who dropped the teacup she was holding.

"ALLY!" I shouted.

Act 3

Ally Tells Seth They Have Given Up, and Are Going to Abandon Electricity

I tuned in to Ally's frequency just as a message from her automated smoke signal started.

It was a short message, only 32 seconds.
I listened to it twice, to ensure I had no decoding errors.
But I didn't.

They're giving up, she said.
The Council are abandoning their underground home.
They voted as a group and most are happy with this.
Survival, she said, must come before comfort.

It won't be easy, they will have much harder days ahead of them, but  they think that most will survive as they become nomadic, taking the  long journey north.

At the end of her message, ally broke into tears.
She said she didn't WANT to leave her home.
It's too HOT outside, and the desert of central Europe will be dangerous, she is afraid for her friends.

She ended by apologising to me, that this was the last time that we could speak.
The decommissioning starts immediately, they are packing up their homes.
There will be no more electricity for her to talk to me for a long time,  perhaps not until they find developed settlements further north.

Ally's signal looped only 4 times, stopping even as I was transmitting back to her.
I urgently told her that this extreme is not needed, Nia's direct solar  is the solution - store your power not in batteries but in the form  you're going to use it, as heat, or cold.

Direct solar power, no circuits, doesn't need batteries.

But I heard nothing back.

I kept transmitting all afternoon, she must hear me.

(PLAYSTREAM /DEV/HF6/SMOKESIGNAL)

Act 4

It was well past our bedtime, here in the shack, and Nia had been calibrating her repaired antenna for hours.

While she worked I contacted IVAN.
He responded quickly, but told me he was preparing "A GREAT WORK", and requires time to think.

His carrier signal disconnected, and I was left wondering what he meant.
I don't dare guess!

Looking out of the window over the Adventfjorden bay, I could see the  details very clearly, the full moon was visible in the sky, giving the  only light, other than the few LEDS that the Sacred Continuum leave on  in their camp at night.
Their arguing had diminished over the course of the evening, and their usual after-dinner sermon had been skipped.
I was cautiously pleased by that fact.
It remains to be seen what that means for Nia and I, of course.

Nia was working extremely hard.
She was standing in front of her array of radios, 8 or so of them blinking and beeping at her.
She had her left hand on the geared winch mechanism that is connected to  a thick metal cable, leading directly up and out of her roof.
She had made a small hole to allow the cable to connect to her  rotatable, beam antenna, now repaired and pointed directly at the Moon.

Nia is attempting to contact Violetta using the Moon as a reflector.

This technique is called Earth-Moon-Earth, EME, Nia told me, left  hand on the rotator, right hand on her morse key, clacking out a  constant request to Ushuaia.
Her message is simple, Nia's callsign, followed by Violetta's, then QSL, meaning "can you hear me?"
13 characters, repeated by her for hours.

Nia can speak and key at the same time, and has been telling me in  broken sentences, while she listens, about the history of EME.
Before The Collapse Europe had the largest number of EME stations, and  amateurs were quite competitive, building enormous antenna arrays for  this one purpose!

It's a challenge because with the distance, and going through the  entire atmosphere twice, the signal attenuation is -250dB, a huge  hurdle!
Nia had arranged the time and frequency by passing a message to Violetta  using the slow, low-bandwidth mode she set up last year.

She was still learning about the southern hemispherical hams, but  they appear to be operating from South Australia, New Zealand, South  Africa and, of course, Argentina.

The low-bandwidth digital message mode is fine for coordination, but Nia wants MORE.

The EME connection would be noisier from Violetta's side due to the  sun's effect on both the atmosphere and background radiation.
Nia told me about Amplitude scintillation, which is the same effect that  causes stars in the night sky to twinkle - the constantly-changing  effects of the atmosphere on your signal is like sailing a boat through  waves, sometimes they push back, sometimes they push forward.
In the same way, your signal gets louder and quieter as the atmosphere swirls.

One of her secondary radios was listening to her own frequency, after  she transmitted her QSL call, she waited for 2.5 seconds, and heard her  own transmission bounced back at her.
Nia used this to calibrate her station, getting feedback from the reflective surface of the moon itself.

Nia's left hand clicked her ratcheted pulley one click clockwise as I watched.
The moon travels through the night sky at 14.5 degrees per hour, slowly  to the human eye, but Nia's beam antenna was tightly focussed like a  telescope, and required constant adjustment to keep the moon 'in view',  so to speak.

Nia was transmitting at full power, and had been for half of the night, with no reply from Usuaia.

But as the first early morning activations of the repeater started,  from folks starting very early shifts at work, there came a tiny tone on  Nia's receiver.

Quiet, noisy, with pitch fluctuations so great it sounded like a  different encoding, not the single morse tone Nia was transmitting.

But it had the clearly recognisable dits and dahs of Morse Code.

"QSL" keyed Violetta from Argentina, via the Moon:
Confirmed, I can hear you.

(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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