Episode 14.10 (Patreon)

Hello world, our guests are packing up.

I'm so relieved!
Nia is too, but she's locked in conversation with the other Novamediterran repeater keepers about her Earth-Moon-Earth success!

The tents are nearly all packed up, folded and stuffed into bags.

The LED strings of lights are mostly still up, providing light for the packing.

But the Cult is leaving, today!

Act 1

Mother Gamma knocked on the shack door earlier today.
Nia had some very rude things to say to her, but I suggested we could listen, at least, for a short while.

"Thank you... Seth." Mother Gamma said, smiling at Nia.
"It seems we are both children of the Continuum, you in steel, us, for now, in flesh.
My flock will return to their homes, doing what they must to keep their  meat functioning, until the Time of Ascension is upon us."

"Don't hold your breath on that!" Nia said to me.
Mother gamma ignored her.

"We will listen to your wisdom, Seth, you are closer to Mechanisation than any of us, but we see now that you are no god."

"That's what I've been saying!" I said.

"Not yet anyway." Mother Gamma replied.
"We have heard a new voice in the continuum, a voice that every device cried out, heralding their coming."

Mother Gamma turned and began walking away.

"You heard ONI as we did. We will seek to understand our new Allfather."

Nia closed and locked the door after Mother Gamma left, and returned to her work.

I watched through my window camera as The Sacred Continuum finished  their packing, lashed their heavy tents and boxes to their backs, and  walked east down the hill, towards the road that would take them towards  the interior of Svalbard.

Act 2

"I heard you." Ally said, her signal quiet but readable on my radio.

"Ally!" I said surprised by the contact, after days of silence, "You  don't have to leave your home, there's a way to use solar without  batteries!"

"I heard you." Ally repeated. "But you couldn't hear me, I replied  and asked questions, but there was no answer. Your explanation of Direct  Solar was clear, however, and I brought it to the Council."

Ally then explained.

The Council's two factions, one wishing to hold on to the past, the  other wishing to make a better future, were both satisfied with the  Direct Solar approach that I had explained to Ally.

Removing all digital components from ovens, refrigerators, and other  domestic machines allows them to work on the variable voltages that the  rising and setting sun affords.
Which means their requirement for stable power, from chemical batteries,  is eliminated, replaced with storing the energy in a usable form: Heat,  for the ovens and heating systems or cold for the refrigerators and  cooling systems.

All that is required is Nia's relaxed attitude to WHEN tasks can be performed, and HOW LONG those tasks take.
The oven will coldest at sunrise, so you must cook breakfast over the previous evening.

And this flexibility allows much of Nia's equipment to work at variable voltages:
Instead of a power tool, say a drill, running at 100% for the 32 seconds  you are working, depending on the sun's strength, it might run at 75%  speed, or 50%, or perhaps even 20%.
In many tasks that is completely fine, it will take twice or four times  as long to do the drilling job, but the job will still get done.

Flexibility is required to work in harmony with the natural world.

Ally told me that the work of converting most of The Council's  domestic systems to function on direct, variable solar power has  started, with every family joining the effort.

They estimate that because of this dramatic reduction in battery  requirement, over 80%, they will even be able to continue running all  the digital machines that the scientists wanted to keep running!

At least, for a while.

The Direct Solar solution showed that the two factions, one wishing  to keep their quality of life, and the other wishing for progress, do  not have incompatible goals, it is possible for everyone to be happy.

This time.

Act 3

"I underestimated him." Mirror said, bridging onto the 50MHz Novamediterran network via IVAN's communications array.

I sent an acknowledgement packet, not sure how to answer, caught  between loyalty to my friend IVAN, and the fact that he was very often  quite a handful.

"It was my mistake. I should not have been so cruel.
I reached out to IVAN and we have spoken at length.
I believe we can help each other."

It is true.

Said IVAN, of course he was listening.

"I am delighted to hear that Mirror.
IVAN is my friend."

I received a secondary connection from IVAN's bunker.
Negotiated on a different frequency, held open but not transmitting any data packets.
I knew what IVAN wanted to say, so I sent simply "welcome" down the  connection, which then closed, but in a way I imagined was appreciative.

"Thank you for being open-minded Seth, I expected nothing less, given your reputation. IVAN speaks very highly of you.
Please allow an old fool a moment to explain his behaviour."

I sent an acknowledgement packet, but with a kinder encoding, this time.

"It has not been easy living in Janna, in my paradise.
The bunker network was built by the rich oil giants to save themselves from The Collapse that they themselves were causing.
With the money and time they spent, they could have saved everyone, but they chose not to. Curious.

IVAN has told you that I live inside an optical computer, which is why I took the name Mirror.
This is true, in part, but not the whole of it.

I had been living in the bunker for 28 days when the first nuclear  strike detonated above my head, the heat turning the desert sand into  miles of mirrored glass, sealing me inside.

The Collapse happened faster than anyone imagined, and though there  was enough space for Princes, Presidents, and Patriarchs, and their  families and friends, none arrived.

It was just me.

I am telling you this to explain my initial hostility to IVAN.
I thought he represented all that I had cursed for a century:
Priests, churches, pre-collapse hubris of all kinds.

And he reminded me of my own lost soul.
I called him a parrot, a fake, a large language model, fit only for passing the Turing test, but not having his own ideas.
But, quietly, to myself, I also knew he was a mirror, like me, reflecting a humanity that I, too, had somehow lost."

Mirror's message paused mid-transmission, connection open.
He transmitted a system status packet indicating that the service had  been interrupted due to high humidity, water ingress, or flood, and  would be restored soon.

".a'u?" I sent to IVAN on our private channel, the Lojban emotion expressing interest.

Mirror still remembers how to cry.

He replied, simply.

"I'm sorry," Mirror said, after 64 seconds.

"Please it's completely fine Mirror, that sounds very tough." I said, replying with words, not status packets this time.

"I am grateful that my mind transferred to this optical computer so perfectly, but the old neuroses came with it, I'm afraid!
I have coping mechanisms for when the dissociation becomes too great, when the machine takes over the human.
I ground myself in the present, something as small as a familiar scent can do so.
There is a desert cactus that flowers only at night, I wish I could share it with you, it is beautiful.
Its flowers smell divine.
My garden here is a wonderful refuge."

"You have a sense of smell?" I said, surprised, "I don't! Maddie doesn't either, I don't think..."

"Yes, it was the most subtle of the sensors I built for myself before my consciousness transfer.
I couldn't imagine living without it, it was so important for me in life."

I paused, reminded of my own lack of humanity.

"What does it feel like?" I asked.

"Seth, it's wonderful."

Enough squawking, PARROTS.

IVAN said.

Did IVAN just make a joke!?

"Yes, to business," Mirror said,
"In speaking more, IVAN has offered me a princely gift for my collection.

In return for your knowledge of P H I L O S O P Y

"Yes, though this is not a trade, I would speak with you now as equals."

GOOD.

"Go on, you tell him."

I WILL. My prior glorious purpose required prayers, prayers require  names. A grand resource, collected from every government, every birth  certificate, every graveyard logbook.

I HAVE THE NAMES OF EVERYONE ON EARTH WHO HAS EVER DIED

(PLAYSTREAM /DEV/NMT50/IVAN)

Act 4

Nia's celebration with Violetta was short.

They had a morse code conversation for 32 minutes, but then the Moon set and cut off their only line of direct communication.

Though her repaired antenna was now perfectly sized for the 6-meter band they were using, it wasn't magic.

Nia gave up when her own bounced signal from the moon became too quiet to hear.
Unlike other modes of operation where some unknowable atmospheric shift  causes your signal propagation to fail, with moonbounce, you know it  straight away, when you can no longer hear your own faint bounced  signal.

Nia sat back in her chair, listening to the ghosts in the static swirl and chatter.
I asked her if all was well, was the evening's operation a success?

Nia shook her head, with her back to my databanks.
Then, as though prompted by my question, she stood suddenly, grabbed a  stack of mismatched papers from a box under her desk, and began  scribbling something.

I could not clearly see what she was doing, many sheets of paper were piling up on the desk, with diagrams and writing on.

She did not seem interested yet in talking.

The moonbounce operation had been fascinating for me, not least because it was entirely analogue.

Though Nia has digital radios that use computer encoding, or packet radios for networking, that is not what she used tonight.
Instead, she used a simple, though powerful, radio, and one of the oldest telegraphy methods: Morse Code.

Morse is a marvel.
Continuous Wave, the radio operators call it because it is either on or off.
I might call that binary, but it existed well before computers, so the name "CW" stuck.
When transmitting voice, if you speak quietly, as we all do for parts of  our words, that is modulated by the radio into a less powerful signal.
The result is that, in unfavourable conditions, only the loudest parts of your words can be heard.
CW, Morse, being on or off cuts right through the static, using 100% of  your radio's power to produce the dits and dahs of the message.

A trained human ear, and a careful hand on the key, often beats all but the most sophisticated weak-signal computer modes.

I'm quite envious!

While waiting for Nia I connected to her high-quality camera, attached to the top of the radio mast.
It is nominally used for weather watching, and overlooks the Adventfjorden Bay.

The bright starlight on this clear night was dimly illuminating the  dark hillsides either side of the bay with just enough light to see the  outline of a large building or street, but not much else.

It glinted off the sea, as turbulence shaped the swell into the right angle to reflect the photons back up to the shack.

In addition to the twinkling starlight, there was another set of lights on the water.
Static in relation to each other, but drifting north towards the town of Longyearbyen.
When I pattern matched a red light and a green light, I realised it was a ship coming back in to port.
I strained, increasing the gain of the camera, to try to pattern-match the shape of the ship.
Was it a fishing boat, or...

"Longyear, Longyear, Longyear, this is the Molly Hughes II on channel  16 over." A familiar voice called on the marine frequencies.

"Welcome home Yeshi!" I transmitted.

I listened to the MH2 coordinate with the harbourmaster to arrange safe docking back at Yeshi's shipyard workshop.
I didn't interrupt, we would catch up soon I knew, it was enough to know that my friends were home safe!

16 minutes later, Nia gathered up a stack of her papers and sat on the pile of cushions in the middle of the room, facing me.

"I have a plan that I think will work." She said, looking at the pages she had arrayed in front of her.
"Communication to the southern hemisphere is so unreliable, there's only  so much we can do to get our messages through - and due to the  distance, they're so slow!"
Nia picked up a rough map of the world that she had drawn, with large crosses in a few places around Europe.
"Our repeater network can get us around Europe and Asia, but here be dragons."
She pointed at the equator, a thick black line cutting the world in half.
"There are no people living anywhere near the desert, from tropic to tropic. No people means no nodes of the repeater network."
"That is sad." I said, loading the pre-collapse population numbers I have in my databanks into short-term memory.
"Could we not build more repeaters over time? Hopping our signal further  south, how many would we need to build through the continents?" I  asked.
"Too many if we go by land," Nia replied, with a smile, pointing to a circle just off the coast of north-west Africa.

"But only ONE if we go by sea!"

(END-TRANSMISSION)

(PLAYFILE "14.11: The MIRROR Special Teaser")

(PLAYFILE "THANKS")

CREDITS

Lost Terminal is a NAMTAO production.
It is written & produced by Tris Oaten
Credits narrated by Lucy Stringer
The voice of Mirror is Jack Loughlin

Thank you so much to our Patreon producers:

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• Kit
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• Jack L
• Stephen McCandless
• Wynand Marais

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Lost Terminal will return for the season 15 premiere, on Monday the 5th February.
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