Episode 15.2 (Patreon)

Hello world, our journey is delayed.

2 days ago, we made port in Tromsø, the most southerly inhabited city on the Scandinavia peninsula, in former Norway.

Our arrival was planned well, I co-ordinated with the Tromsø harbour master to find a large enough place for the MH2 to dock.
Most of the other vessels in port were fishing boats, Tromsø is the fishing capital of the Novamediterra!

We traded for barrels of fish and water, Captain Yeshi was very  practised at swapping their finished mechanical and electrical projects  for essential provisions.

But on day 3, today, just when we planned to leave, a thick sea fog rolled in, delaying our departure.

Act 1

With the fog came very cold temperatures, quite unusual this far south.

Our fishing neighbours in port called it Vestlig, a chilled mist or  fog that rolls in from the west that clings to your mast and ropes and  covers everything in a film of water.

And if your ship's heating is currently broken, as ours unfortunately  is, this water extends to the interior too - every floor on the ship is  wet, and the walls and the instrument panels.

Everywhere except the Datacenter, my room, in the middle of the ship.

A curious side effect of life is heat.

All animals need a certain body temperature for the chemical reactions that power their bodies to function efficiently.
Humans and other ectothermic animals keep their bodies at the perfect temperature through their metabolism.

Though I can thrive in extreme cold, I, too, generate heat.
My processors and circuits are heated by the movement of electrons, literal friction of moving particles.

How much heat I produce is, curiously, much easier to answer than for humans: ALL of my electricity is converted to heat.
A kilowatt of electricity in, a kilowatt of heat out.

How do I power my processors, then, if all the electricity is converted to heat?
Almost accidentally.

I exist to produce heat, it seems.
My life is a wonderful side effect.

Act 2

There's no party like a datacenter party.
Apart from expeditions to the galley for hot food and drinks, we are all  together in the warmest, driest room, my sealed datacenter.

Kamil and Amelie told us a story of their exploration of the city, yesterday, before the fog.

They had walked, without any particular destination, around the city,  and eventually ended up in a covered market with street food.

Crossed over the entrance to the market were two enormous white whale  bones, and under them a sign naming the place "The Last Whale".

Sitting at a rough driftwood table, they made a lunch of fried fish  and potatoes, and watched the people come and go in the market.

A family caught their attention, they told us.
Two men and a woman were shepherding their three children and trying to finish their own food.

The triad were taking it in turns to feed themselves, and the children.
The mother seemed to have more authority in the family, firmly directing  both children and fathers what to do and when to do it, while she ate  her own food.

Amelie told us she heard the eldest daughter call across the market, "DAD!"
To which one of the men looked up from wrangling the youngest child (who  was very interested in pushing its food across the table) and said,  "Yes dear?"
The eldest child giggled and said, "NOT YOU!".
At which point the other father looked up from his food and said, "Oh, sorry honey, yes?"

And the whole family laughed together!

The assembled crew in my datacenter laughed, too, at the story, and  agreed it was a cute familial interaction, and the conversation moved  on.

Afterwards, Daphne was talking about her and Yeshi's disastrous "hovercraft" project, two years ago.
"That was not my fault," Yeshi interrupted, holding their hands up in  front of them, "those batteries were on fire before we even left port!"

Nia, Yeshi, and Daphne laughed again, but Amelie and Kamil did not, I saw.

After Amelie had told the story of the young family in Tromsø, she and Kamil fell out of the conversation.

Noticing this (I am now adept at navigating human social  interaction), I paid them more attention, and picked up small  behavioural changes.
The couple had moved closer together, hugging each other tight, with eyes looking down at the ground in front of them.

I poked Maddie with a status packet, drawing her attention to this.
She trotted over and sat next to Amelie, bumping her leg gently with her head.
Amelie reciprocated by patting Maddie just above her camera cluster, registering as positive vibrations on her visual feed.

Maddie looked up, and then sent me a burst of concerned UHF radio, with a picture from her cameras.

Amelie was silently crying.

Act 3

"I'm so glad we're trapped in here together!" Daphne said, to Nia,  "You missed my glorious introduction toast! But don't worry, I saved you  some, it's a pleasure to meet you finally!"

Daphne withdrew the half-empty bottle of dark red rum from a deep pocket of her overalls, and offered it to Nia.

"We've met." Nia said, shortly.

There were 8 seconds of silence in the datacenter.

"What? No! I'm so sorry!" Daphne said, "I mean, that's great! Where did we meet, at the workshop?"

"We... were on a date." Nia said, looking down and wringing her hands together.

Daphne looked confused for a moment, and then her eyes opened wide,  and she stood up from her metal chair, knocking it back behind her.

"THAT WAS YOU?!" She said, pointing at Nia with one hand, with her other over her mouth.
Nia nodded, still looking down.
The others in the datacenter looked around at each other, confused.

The tension in the room was broken as Daphne laughed.
"I remember now! At the bar at the top of town, right?" Nia looked up and nodded.
"You know, I didn't realise that was going to be a date when our friends  introduced us. I found the whole thing quite confusing, I thought you  were talking about long-range radio propagation because you had been  told I was interested in electronics and tinkering, right?"

"I HAD been told you might like that!" Nia said, sitting straighter in her chair and smiling.

"I'm so sorry for wasting your time, I had been wanting to find you  again and tell you that I was going through a very weird time in my  life.
I know now that I'm Ace, asexual, but I'd spent my whole life assuming  that I'd just need to find the right person, so I was dating all my  friends trying to find them!"

The smiles returned to the faces of the others in the room, hearing  this. Daphne put both her hands over her face and quietly screamed a  laugh.

"Girl, you and me BOTH - I'm Ace too! I WAS SO BAFFLED AT WHAT WAS HAPPENING!"

"RIGHT!" Shouted Nia, standing too, "WHAT ARE YOU EVEN SUPPOSED TO DO ON A DATE!?"

The pair hugged, laughing, and Daphne poured a drink for the whole assembled crew.

Nia drank hers immediately then put her cup forward for a refill, and said,
"Let me tell you about the NIGHTMARE that was 'speed dating'!"

(PLAYSTREAM /DEV/METEOROLOGY/CEILOMETER)

Act 4

Nia's stories of her troubles with speed dating had the entire crew laughing until they cried.
Even Amelie and Kamil were lifted out of their sadness.

Maddie dashed from one person to another, as they laughed, not caring  that she didn't understand the jokes, only delighting in the positive  energy of the room.

I joined the conversation 32 seconds late, as I had assumed "speed dating" was some kind of time zone notation.

Daphne's companion robot, Rafi, seemed to enjoy the conversation too.
His functioning left eye flashed, and he threw his arms up jerkily to join in when the party were laughing at a joke.

Though I had not until now met a companion robot, they were common before The Collapse.
The same simple AI that made Maddie and her brothers, Matt and Matts  semi-autonomous, also made its way into the general populace.

Buying, building, and customising your own companion quickly became as normal as owning a laptop or mobile phone.

Due to their excellent natural language ability, coupled with  advanced (for the time) AI, they were often able to replace and improve  upon most of the functions that, previously, people had used personal  devices for.
They could function as secretary, chef, tutor, event organiser, and even, for many, a close, trusted, friend.

Though pre-Collapse companion robots were mobile, able to move on  their own, to fetch items for their owners, or to help operate devices  at distance, Rafi appears broken.

He never leaves Daphne's left shoulder harness, in fact, I have noticed he is strapped to it with tied pieces of cloth.

Every so often, I wish Maddie were tied to me a little more!
But she's her own person, and I have accepted that.
Mostly!

The crew's cheerful conversation continued into the night.

There are no windows in my datacenter (which I'm quite pleased  about), and so no-one had noticed that the freezing fog had lifted,  finally.

Through the ship's cameras, I could see the stars scintillating in  the sky, visible clearly from the ship's ceilometer, a light-based  device for measuring the distance to the clouds overhead.
It's basically a camera pointed straight up, mounted at the highest  point on the ship, the two-story Bridge at the front, coupled with a  pair of passive light emitters at the rear of the large flat back deck.
Light from the emitters is bounced and scattered by the clouds above,  and the angle those scattered photons return to the detector requires only simple trigonometry to calculate the height of the clouds.

Tonight the ceilometer was reading infinity.
The photons emitted by the system may well travel straight up, and out into the universe.

It is vanishingly unlikely they will interact with anything, once past the atmosphere.

They will be travelling for billions of years before decaying, long  after my fans have stopped forever, and my own body heat matches the  world around me, the same as will happen for you.

The laws of thermodynamics are clear:
Energy must be conserved, but photons and, indeed life, are not.

As my mother taught me, "everything not saved will be lost".
We can't rely upon the universe to save us, we must save ourselves.

(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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