Episode 19.8

Act 1

Hello world, my thinking has slowed.
Now that I am separated from the distributed computing potential of the Kuethir's network, I feel more like myself again.
This pre-collapse system certainly allowed me to think quickly and make lightning-fast calculations and deductions, but I've realised that something else was happening, too.
Overnight I have been by myself, mentally, for the first time since we arrived here.
Initially, I hated the quiet, the boredom, the disconnection.
But after 64 minutes, I realised that I could finally hear myself think.

I used this quiet time to reconsider my poetry problems, after the advice of Jenny Noll, and I found the exercise, surprisingly, easier.
Slowing down my poetry writing process allowed my speech model to catch up with my data processing.
When reading, there is a difference between 'scanning' and 'speaking'.
'Scanning' uploads words on the page directly to language processing, bypassing speech generation.
This is considerably faster than speaking, which requires the overhead of sound synthesis: Pitch and rhythm, accent and cadence, all that messy analogue stuff.
The speed difference between 'scanning' and 'speaking' is as true for you as it is for me.

This revelation kept me awake the whole night, writing a single poem.
I can't generate whole works in a single minute like I could when immersed in the network, but this one, I am proud of:

All is wake and reflected sky,
our craft crawl on the seas.
Sabotaged underwater by
barnacle neuroses.

Drinking our dreams, lips parched for earth,
on lookout for the land,
where finally our boats make berth,
unfouling on the sand.

Act 2

Maddie did not charge in her usual spot overnight because she and Lyosha were attending a sleepover!
During the confusion and noise of the network outage meeting here in the Kuethir's Casino last night, Lyosha found his friend Kat Stronski, who asked her mother, Kaycee if Lyosha could stay with them overnight.
The arrangements were made, and after they had picked up some clothes for Lyosha and a bundle of charging cables for Maddie, the three of them made their way across to the Kuethir Main Stairway, and walked down 5 decks to deck 7.
On their journey, I could see through Maddie's cameras that the hallways were packed with people, despite the late hour, 15:00 NST, which in Utqiaġvik, is long after bedtime.

"Have you changed yet?" Kat said, covering her eyes as she threw a rough fabric pillow down from the top bunk bed of her room, to the bottom bunk where Lyosha was lying.
Maddie was sitting in the corner of the small room, forelegs comfortably crossed over each other, charging cable snaking to a connector on the wall, just visible in the corner of her feed.
"Yes!" Lyosha said, pulling a thick fabric blanket over him, "You?"
"Of course!" Kat said, "You're a boy, you're not allowed to see my ankles, MUM WOULD KILL ME."
Lyosha hesitated before replying, interlocking and separating his fingers in a repeated motion.
"Would she kill you, though? She seemed not to care about us staying in the same room."
"Yeah, that was unusually chill of her."
"She thinks I'm a princess too, I bet."
"What are you even going on about?" Kat said.
"Everyone knows." Lyosha said quietly.
"OH, they do NOT." Kat said, rolling over and leaning her head over the side of the bunk to look down at Lyosha.
"And if they do, they don't care. But also most people don't even know to start with! I bet Mr. Sah doesn't even know."
"He called me 'Darling' in front of the whole CLASS!" Lyosha said.
"He's just NICE! He does that to EVE-RY-ONE!" Kat said, rolling over and waving her arms above her.
"Hey, you two, go to sleep!" Called Kaycee Stronski from the room next to theirs, her voice passing through a wooden door that had been built into the cut metal wall.
8 seconds of silence went by.
"You can't quit, Lyo." Kat said to the ceiling, as she crossed her arms in front of her.
"Your Mum said we should be sleeping." Lyosha said.
Kat looked down over the edge of the bed again, before saying, "She won't come in, she's glued to her terminal every night."
"What is she doing?" Lyosha said.
"Work? I don't know, she doesn't like to be interrupted, which is fine by me, as that goes both ways." Kat said.
A sudden burst of UHF activity made Maddie raise her head and look around her, she identified the source, and looked up.
The room's wall-mounted terminal flickered for a moment, but nothing was displayed on-screen.
The UHF data was all noise, just an echo in the song of the static.

Act 3

"Kat, tell Kimmo what you told me last night." Lyosha said.
It was the morning after the sleepover, and the four of them, Lyosha & Maddie, Kat and Kimmo Shyu had met in the Kuethir's Library, which is on the same deck as me, but more towards the back of the ship.
The Library, which is part of the ship-wide Queen's College campus, is built inside a pre-collapse bookshop.
Seeing though Maddie's eyes, it is clear that none of the original books survive.
They have been replaced with hundreds of post-collapse bindings of old favourites, mined out of the old world's data, as well as newly written books by modern authors.
"OK," Kat said, "so we were lying awake, talking quietly, so Mum wouldn't hear us, and-"
"Your mother let a boy sleep in your room?" Kimmo said.
Maddie saw Lyosha look at Kimmo quickly, hearing this.
"I let a boy sleep in my room." Kat said, then continued:
"ANYWAY: I told Lyo that I saw something weird in Mr. Heinlein home."
"His and Stillman's place on Deck 4?" Kimmo said, scribbling on a piece of rough paper with a metal pencil.
"I don't know who that is." Kat said.
"Oh, eh, Mr Fowlkes, his husband." Kimmo replied, "Why were you there?"
"I'm ALLOWED to: It's his office. The teachers all have 'office hours' where we can come and ask questions outside of lessons."
"Oh, that's nice." Lyosha said.
"Right, so I wanted to talk to him about my Oceanography homework - he's asked us to write a paper on ocean currents, comparing and contrasting them to modern ones, but I was already behind on my electronics project, which was due the next day."
"Oh, I love Electronics, what did you make?" Asked Kimmo.
"A 3-bit binary adder, made only out of relays - it was SO LOUD!" Kat said, then,
"So I was going to ask Mr Heinlein for an extra day for his oceanography paper, it was UNFAIR: I was late making the binary adder because all the books we needed were checked out of the library for the whole term!"
"All of them?" asked Kimmo.
"YES!" Kat said, "The soldering part is easy, I'm great at that, and I've made a beautiful wooden case for it, but we're making logic gates from relays, which I didn't know how to do."
"Yes, I can see that." Kimmo said. "And what happened next?"
"Right," Kat said, "So I go to his house and tell him I need an extension on his paper.
But as I'm explaining it to him, I looked behind him into the room, and the floor was COVERED in books.
All the electronics and logic textbooks were there, some open, some stacked up - like 20 of them!"
"Quent has all the books?" Kimmo said, "whatever for?"
"He's a liar." Lyosha said, placing the metal box that Quent had given him on the table in front of them.
"I knew it when he was explaining this network junction box that Stillman was investigating. He knew more about it than he said."
Kimmo stopped writing and slowly placed the pencil on the table.
"I recognise this." He said, "We use these in our solar grid, too."
"I believe we may have found our saboteur."

(PLAYSTREAM /DEV/BINARYADDER)

Act 4

Amelie Kotov helped her husband, Kamil Forester, out of his underwater diving equipment, while Lyosha and Maddie watched, sitting half-way up the lower stairway.
They were on the partially flooded deck 9, and had just watched Kamil come back up from the ENTIRELY flooded deck 10.
"The ship has been sabotaged, all right." He said, after pulling off his diving mask, a piece of glass with a flexible seal around his eyes.
Maddie looked up as Lyosha stood, leaning on the metal handrail of the staircase.
"How could Quent have done it?" Lyosha said.
"Well, he'd need breathing equipment to start off with," Kamil said, tapping the metal cylinders that provided him with compressed air underwater, "but he'd also have to be about 100 years older."
"Older?" Amelie said, pulling the heavy cylinders out of the water onto the partially submerged stairway.
"Yes, whoever damaged the ship did so a very long time ago, and with precise pre-collapse tech."
"But Quent IS the saboteur!" Lyosha repeated, "Kat caught him!"
"That may be," Kamil said, "but something was rotten here long before he began."

Kamil and the gang joined Stillman Fowlkes and Kimmo Shyu back in the Casino.
He told us what he had discovered, down in the darkness of the flooded deck 10, which was much deeper than he had anticipated:
The deck is split into small sub-decks, at least 4, Kamil estimated, and much more industrial than those above it.
He drifted past huge boiler rooms, water desalination plants, and air ventilation machines - all with pipes snaking up into the rest of the ship.
Larger still was the ship's datacentre, designed not to steam movies or to allow passengers to play games or chat, but to run the ship's essential systems:
Navigation, engine tuning, and the air, and water the crew would need to survive.
Biggest of them all was the engine room - a 4-story set of turbines that, long ago, propelled the ship between continents.
All these facilities, however, were entirely ruined by a century of salt water.
All save one.
Kamil could see but not access the datacentre through the hermetically sealed bulkhead door.
It had entirely flooded, of course, but there was a sealed, olive-green mil-spec rack visible with lights still blinking.
He described how it connected up through the roof to the network and power grid above, like a parasite to its host.
Finally, Kamil came to the back of the ship, where a section of the hull had been cut in a perfect square - 25m x 25m, he estimated.
The steel had been cut from the inside, he said, and with cutting equipment that was still at hand, stashed in military-looking lockers on the corridor walls.
All bearing the name, HAAPALA DEFENCE.

(END-TRANSMISSION)

CREDITS

Lost Terminal is a NAMTAO production.
It is written & produced by Tris Oaten,
Credits narrated by Lucy Stringer.
Thank you so much to our Patreon producers:

• Ada Phillips

• Kit

• Wynand Marais

• Jade Felicity Bilkey

• Stephen McCandless

• Mike Schneider
  -and to all our patrons!

Follow us on mastodon @lostterminal@namtao.com,
subscribe to the podcast on
Spotify, iTunes, or your favourite network.
For bonus content and other perks,
support us at patreon.com/lostterminalpod
that would be lovely of you!
Lost Terminal will return next week