Episode 19.5

Hello world, We are making a plan.

Stillman Fowlkes and Kimmo Shyu have been joined by Amelie Kotov in the discussion around my databanks.
Lyosha is sitting by Maddie, who is charging next to me.
It's not yet dinner time, well before Maddie needs to charge herself for the next day.
But I think I know why she wants to be close to me, after the scare of the angry group of people.
My girl is a sweetheart!

"There is something going on here." Stillman repeated, "I now agree with you, Kimmo, someone is sabotaging our power systems."
"Nice of you to finally accept the evidence," Kimmo said, "a little earlier, and we would perhaps have avoided this scare for Seth."
I noticed Kimmo did not look at Stillman when he spoke, his body was still turned towards me.
"Yes, well, better late than never, I've been busy doing my job." Stillman said.
"Does 'your job' involve no proactivity?" Kimmo said, looking at Stillman sharply.
"Friends!" Amelie interrupted, "Let's focus. You can argue when Seth's not in danger. Stillman, tell us what this new evidence is."
Stillman remained looking at Kimmo for 4s before turning to Amelie.
"I have tracked down the source of the brownouts." He said, "It is not a power supply issue, our panels, when not sabotaged, are working excellently.
It is the same with the batteries, our nighttime stores start the day with 60% or 70% of their charge remaining - 2 or 3 times the capacity we need."
"So it's a distribution problem." Amelie said.
"Yes. Yes! Exactly." Stillman said, smiling at Amelie - the first time I had seen him look happy.
"The natural resource that allows the Kuethir to be at the forefront of scientific progress is our network."
"Everyone knows that." Kimmo said.
"And while it is an asset," Stillman continued, ignoring Kimmo, "we don't understand it fully.
My team and I have been undertaking the first thorough mapping of this secret world beneath our feet.
We are doing this because someone is regularly sabotaging our power distribution network by sending seemingly random shutdown commands to the power junctions around the ship."
"Oh! This is the same problem I'm having with something disabling Seth's batteries too," Amelie said, "perhaps someone doesn't like us having power?"
"Could be, could be. We won't know for certain until we have finalised our network map and accounted for all devices on it."
"Can't this be done electronically, or programmatically, even?" Kimmo asked.
"Yes, we thought of that," Stillman said, turning to Kimmo, "but there are problems there, our systems engineer, Kaycee Stronski, tells me. She can't get the right authorisation or something.
Whoever set up the network and knew the old passwords is long dead, and we have no pre-collapse documentation to guide us."
Kimmo looked down, at this news.
"You should talk to Kaycee if you want to know more." Stillman said, facing my databanks speaker/mic cluster, "She has expressed great interest in meeting you, Seth."
"I'd be very pleased to!" I said.
"I know where she lives!" Lyosha whispered to Maddie.
"The secondary obstacle in mapping the network physically is how extensive it is, every corridor and every room are connected." Stillman continued.
"But that just takes time and people. The primary difficulty we faced in tracing the source of this problem was on Deck 9.
The network cables go below the waterline at this point, down into the flooded Deck 10."
"Surely, you can just ignore everything on the flooded deck?" Amelie said.
"We had assumed so up till this point." Stillman said, "But in our initial network overview experiments, we have discovered that is not the case.
There is something still working down there."

Act 2

"Hi Seth, is this working, can you hear me?" Amelie said over the radio.
"Yes," I replied, "3x4 there is a great deal of noise, but your signal is strong."
Amelie was using a radio built with the help of Nia Andersen, our radio operator, and Repeaterkeeper of the Longyearbyen repeater.
(The repeater is currently being operated under the supervision of Jakub Glas, keeper for the Northern Relay, high above Pyramiden on Svalbard.)
Amelie and Nia built a network radio, using the expertise of both of them to bridge voice traffic onto the Kuethir's pre-collapse packet network.
I now realise this is the same technique Maddie uses - though she seemed to do it instinctively, or something deep within her EQUUS systems did it instinctively.
As soon as we arrived, she connected, like she had pre-authorisation.
I'm not sure how I feel about that.
"Kamil and I have made it down to deck 9, but can go no further." Amelie said. "The water is already over our boots, and though the lights in the stairwell continue down to deck 10, we can not."
"Not without my underwater gear, anyway." Came Kamil's distant voice.
"The lights are all on down here." Amelie said, her voice packets stuttering and arriving out of order, requiring me to concentrate very hard on understanding her.
Back on Station 6, my mother used to joke that there are only two hard problems in distributed computing:

2. Correct ordering of messages.
1. Exact-once delivery.
2. Correct ordering of messages.
(Perhaps you had to be there...)

"We are walking past flooded cabins." Amelie continued, "It looks like they are all empty - never used after whatever beached the ship.
They are all full of dust and grime - it's very wet down here, even the walls have a layer of slime on them after all these years of-"
"Look in here!" Kamil interrupted.
There were no packets sent from Amelie's radio for 16s, but then she said, "We've found a little glass thing, a toy, or some kind of decoration?"
"It's a tiny model of the ship!" Amelie said, "resting on the top of the room's old terminal.
Both are a lot cleaner than the rest of the room...
Kamil, is that bed dry? Someone lives here? Hey, this terminal is on!"
There was a click and a second where the only packets I could read from Amelie were blank - all zeros.
After a moment, I reconnected and heard Amelie say, "-what?"
"Sorry, some kind of glitch." I said, "I can hear you again now."
"Seth, what did you say just now?" she said.
"Nothing, the last I heard you say was the terminal is on." I said.
"You didn't tell us to leave?" Amelie said.
"No?" I said.
"We heard a voice, did you not hear it? On the radio?"
"Nothing, the line was silent on my side."
"Concerning." Amelie said, then, "This terminal we found is broken, though it's powered on, it doesn't respond to anything I type-"
"Oh, ignore him, sweetie," said a quiet voice in the background of the radio, "He's ALWAYS like that!"

Act 3

"Who is that?" I broadcast to Amelie's network radio.
Amelie's connection opened, but she did not reply directly, she was holding down the transmit key on her radio so I could hear the conversation.
"Hello, I'm Amelie, this is my husband Kamil, we're doing a network survey of the ship - I'm sorry, are we in your room?"
"You are!" Said the voice, "But don't you worry about that, make yourself at home, come, sit on the bed, I'll make a fire - you both like tea, of course?"
"Y-yes, thank you," I heard Kamil say, in the background of the radio feed, "you live here m'aam?"
"Of course, sweetie, nearly 50 years now, last of the Deck 9 gals, that's me! And please call me Jenny."
"Thank you, Jenny." Kamil said.
There was a pause in conversation, in the background I believe I was hearing metallic sounds of cooking equipment being set up, for the tea, I assumed.
"What do you think?" I heard Kamil say, very quietly.
There was no answer from Amelie that her radio's microphone could pick up.

"Thank you so much." Amelie said, after 128s, and I heard Kamil say the same.
"What, er, kind of tea is this?" she asked.
"Do you know what kelp is, sweetie?" Jenny said, much closer to Amelie's microphone than before.
"Yes, it's a sea crop, good for salads." Amelie said.
"I like it fried with mushrooms!" Kamil said, voice also louder.
"WELL! You dry it out on the deck, get it crispy, then crush it down to a powder, and it makes a gorgeous tea." Jenny said.
"Huh!" said Amelie, sipping her tea quietly, then, "I'm amazed your terminal is powered on, even if it's not working."
"Ah yes, they don't make them like they used to! Oh, but it IS working, sweetie," Jenny said, "he's just a bit shy."
"Who is?" I asked, on the line, before remembering that Amelie's radio was still transmitting, blocking me.
"It's much quieter here than it used to be, as you've seen, my neighbours all left one by one over the years, as the ship leans back and more of the deck was flooded. Soon it was just me, and him."
There were then 8 seconds of silence, punctuated by what I pattern matched as the clinking of metal mugs.
"Who is he?" Amelie asked.
"Good company," Jenny said, "a friend who listens to my stories, my worries, and never asks anything in return."
"An AI?" Amelie asked.
"Maybe, I don't judge, a friend is a friend is a friend!" Jenny said, then, "What's that box you have there?"
"Well," Amelie said, "it's a radio link to Seth, our friend who IS an AI, we all arrived last week. Say hi, Seth!"
Amelie finally released the transmit key on her radio, clearing the channel for me to reply.
"Good afternoon, Jenny, my name is Seth, it's a pleasure to meet you." I said.
Amelie began transmitting again.
"Oh, sweetie, how lovely!" Jenny said, "Very nice to meet you finally, though little birds have already told me a little about our new resident poet!"
I was not pleased to be reminded of my disastrous poetry performance of a few days ago.
However, it's important to be polite, especially when making a new friend.
"Yes," I said, when the channel was free again, "I recently discovered that I love poetry, and I'd like to learn how to write it, but it's rather... alien to me."
Amelie's radio transmitted again.
"Oh, I simply ADORE poetry!" Jenny said, "I can teach you! Seth, you and I are going to become best friends, I. Just. Know it!"

(PLAYSTREAM /DEV/NET/KUETHIR/DECK9GALS)

Act 4

"Hello? Can you hear me?" Jenny transmitted over the network radio.
"Yes, I can, loud and clear." I replied.
I refrained from giving a signal report, I guessed that it wouldn't mean very much to Jenny, and besides, the network radio was working well again.
"Wonderful! I've got my cup of tea, and I'm all ears!" Jenny said, "Did you want to talk about your poetry performance, sweetie?"
Not really, I thought.
"Yes, I think I should." I said. "I don't understand what went wrong, I spent so long making sure the poems were well-paced, rhymed accurately, and with the correct meter."
"I believe I know where to start, if I may give you some feedback?" she said.
"Yes, please! I'll listen to anything, and thank you so much." I said.
"Well, young man, I can help you not just because I know a thing or two about poetry, but also because I was in the audience that night."
After Jenny said this, I felt... something. Embarrassed? Vulnerable?
I realised that I had been planning to present to her a modified recollection of my awful performance, I was already filtering the data to present the most positive view of events.
This feeling was that imagined future disappearing, I could not abstract or hide my mistakes from her through our conversation, she had heard them directly.
"Well, sweetie, I was impressed at your bravery - to perform to so many people is something I never got the hang of!" Jenny said.
"But bravery only goes so far: Read me your first piece - the one with the astronaut?"
"Artificial Astronaut?" I said, "I'm really proud of this one, that's why it's first! It's important, it's about where I came from."
"Lovely! Go on, then." She said.
I tried to filter out the associations with my bad memories of my performance, and said:

4 orbital voyagers seeking progress
In this world I can't paint a portrait
I'm a digital boy trapped in analog mess
so I dedicate to them this modest sonnet

"Young man, your poem doesn't rhyme." She said after a pause.
"What!" I said, "But line 2 and 4 end with 'portrait' and 'sonnet', see?" I said, "They rhyme!"
Jenny hesitated again before replying.
"I'm sorry, not in your voice they don't, and, more important, what of the meter, the rhythm?"
"Well, I think it is simple," I said, beginning to doubt myself, "it's all in pentameter - 10 syllables per line, following iambic rules."
"Sweetie, neither of those two lines are 10 syllables, can't you hear that?"
Now it was me who left the conversation hanging, my thoughts spinning in livelock.
I spiralled, imagining other unknown flaws in my language model causing unnoticed confusion and embarrassment with every interaction with a human for, perhaps, my entire life.
Was I making mistakes without realising it?
How many people have I upset?
My CPUs ran hot, pattern-matching my entire memory, re-examining every log.
My thinking began to slow as I risked overheating - but then:
"I know how to fix it." Jenny said, collapsing the waveform of my desperate thoughts.
"How?" I managed to say.
"Your voice is your own," She said, "and you're trying to sound like someone else."
"SOME of your lines might rhyme if someone else said it, 'PROgress' sometimes sounds like 'pROGress', sometimes sounds like 'proGRESS', it just depends on who is speaking!"

I thanked Jenny, eventually, replying very slowly, background thoughts attempting to gauge the scale of the work ahead of me.
After our conversation, I see now that if there are 10 people in a room, there are 10 unique accents and patterns of speech, of course.
I realised there was no existing model I could base mine on, no giants on whose shoulders I could stand on, no shortcuts in this endeavour.
If I were to master performance, I would have to generate my speech model from scratch.
Same as you.

(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