Episode 19.3

Act 1

Hello world, My model needs work.
Harbourmaster Kimmo Shyu was kind enough to help me advertise my poetry performance on the Kuethir Seaspace web, he posted:

8PM IN THE DECK 2 CASINO

• Poetry!

• Culture!

• Fun for the whole family!

I am grateful for his help, and his advertising worked better than I could have guessed:
Yesterday evening, just before the scheduled hour, people began filing in, filling the tables that were around my databanks.
I counted over 128 people!
Maddie made plenty of new friends!
Kimmo introduced me, and I spoke my poems to the crowd... but...
It was not what I hoped.

It started so promisingly!
I began by reading my poem "Artificial Astronaut", and after I finished, there was a little polite applause!
Excited, I carried on through my repertoire, I read:

• "Luna Transit",

• "Ghosts in the Static",

• "Rotational Symmetry",

• and finished with "Redwing's Law", my tribute to my incredible mother.

But each poem was less well received than the last, the polite applause at the start of the performance atrophied to silence by the end.
I saw people whispering to each other, though I could not hear what they were saying.
Worst of all, during the final readings, people began to stand and silently leave the room.
By the end of my performance, fewer than 16 remained sitting and listening.

"What did I do wrong?" I asked Lyosha, later that evening, as Maddie connected to her charging point next to my databanks.
"I dunno!" He said, "but aren't poems supposed to rhyme?"
"Mine did!" I said.
"Not properly." Lyosha replied, "You'll get better with practice, I bet! Look, I've got an early start tomorrow, goodnight, Seth."
I wished him a good night, too, and then began urgently re-evaluating my poetry model.
But after hours of analysis into the night, I found no fault; it was perfect!
I was using the best open standard, pre-collapse pronunciation dictionaries to provide rhyming and syllable counting.
There was no way it could be wrong; it was perfect.
It was PERFECT!

Act 2

This morning, after yesterday's disappointing performance, I was feeling rather deflated.
But a welcome distraction came from Lyosha, arriving very early, before the sun would rise over Deck 0's solar panel array, while it was still dark inside the Kuethir.
"Wake up, Maddie, we've got work to do!" Lyosha said, kneeling next to my girl, charging next to my databanks.
".A'a!" Maddie emoted in staccato beeps of encoded Lojban, as she untucked her legs and stood up to Lyosha's shoulder height.
Of all the humans Maddie has met, only Lyosha, it seems, understands her audible Lojban encoding, it's lovely to see this connection between them!
"That's right!" Lyosha said, patting her head, registering as positive vibrations on her video feed.
"Today, we're starting THE POSTAL SERVICE!"
Maddie sprinted around Lyosha a few times, before stopping and looking back at her best friend expectantly.
"You're going to be a postman?" I asked, as I instructed the network to switch on the Deck 2 Casino lights so we all could see a little better.
After some confusing negotiation with the lighting circuit, the wall-mounted LED clusters switched on.
"That's right!" Lyosha repeated, "Can you believe there is no regular post system here?"
As he spoke, Lyosha stood straighter, and put his hands on his hips.
"They're living in the past!" He continued, "a real, physical delivery system is vital for a proper society, when my family were-"
As Lyosha passionately explained the societal benefits of a trusted mail service, I remembered who he, and his family are:
The Omarovs, Tanya, Alek, his brother Lev, and until recently, Lyosha himself, ran the last steam powered trans-Siberian railroad, from St Petersburg to Magadan.
This vital link brought communities together across former Russia by making the world a little smaller, one parcel at a time.
And he was going to bring that service here.

Act 3

"I have someone I would like to introduce you to." Kimmo Shyu said to me, sitting on a folded metal chair in front of my databanks.
We had been discussing the mysterious problems about the Kuethir as he ate a small lunch of fish and rice.
Kimmo has shown himself trustworthy, I now believe his account of someone tampering with his harbourmaster's tapes.
I'd like to get to know him better, but he is very closed in speech, politely guiding our conversations to reveal very little about himself.
"Do you see that man wearing a black coat?" He said to me, looking across the old casino floor at the many tables of this social area of the ship.
"That's Stillman Fowlkes, sitting next to his husband Quent Heinlein, do you see them playing cards?"
"Oh yes! How nice, I'd love to meet him," I said, "are you two friends?"
"No, he won't speak to me, I fear." Kimmo said, "But he was the engineer on shift on the night before I discovered the damage to the solar panels."
Kimmo leaned towards my databanks and said, "He did not report the sabotage, it is possible that HE may have intentionally damaged them."

"Certainly Kimmo." Stillman said, as the pair walked back to me, his husband Quent looking on from the table on the other side of the room.
"Very nice to meet you, Seth, and what is it I can do for you?"
Before I could answer, Kimmo said, "Please excuse me." And left through a side door of the casino.
I thought he was frowning.
"Well, it's very nice to meet you, too!" I said, then, "Kimmo said you might know something about the damage to the solar panels that happened this week?"
He did not reply immediately.
Stillman has long brown hair and blue eyes, though my cameras detect slight greying in both these characteristics.
"I'm sure I don't know anything about that." He said, after 8 seconds.
"Yes, I heard that Kimmo reported the damage in the morning, but I tested the whole array during the night, and it was working well.
Some of the panels were looking like they needed to be swapped out, but they'll be good for another week or two, I expect.
Panel maintenance is straightforward, me and the other engineers take it in turns to do the graveyard shift. There's no rush, it's not like we expect the panels to work at night!"
"Right," I said, "I see, well thank you - and you don't know what could have happened between your inspection and Kimmo's discovery in the morning?"
"Like I said, I don't know anything about that, but if you're interested in helping us out, I HAVE recently discovered a weird thing about the power systems, which maybe could help explain the-"
He stopped as the lights in the room flickered, and my radio connection to the 50MHz repeaternet glitched and died.
"Yeah," said Stillman, withdrawing a small metal cylinder wrapped in LEDs, a candle-battery, from his pocket, "It might ALSO explain these brownouts. I'll come talk to you later."

(PLAYSTREAM /DEV/DATA4/CANDLE-BATTERY)

Act 4

Stillman did not return.
It appears that the residents of Utqiaġvik are quite accustomed to the Kuethir's power problems.
Like Stillman Fowlkes, most people had light sources with them, so now every table in the Deck 2 Casino has flickering home-made candle batteries and torches illuminating them.
However, I am not so comfortable.
Something is wrong with the battery backup system that Amelie set up for me.
The chemical cells are connected in series to a charge controller circuit, which allows me to use the power when I need it, and charge it when I don't.
When Amelie first built this for me, back on the MH2, it so quickly became a part of my body that I rapidly became unconscious of it.
When the individual parts of my body execute their functions reliably, I am not aware of them, I can pretend that I am an indivisible whole.
I only take notice when parts of my body fail.
Same as you.

Amelie is working next to me.
I asked her over the still-working network to come urgently, thought the batteries are still supplying me with power during this brownout, they are... fighting me.
This was difficult to explain to her when she arrived.
The charge controller that I am networked into keeps trying to power off, to go back into charging mode.
I cancel the shutdown, and it becomes agreeable for a few minutes, but then broadcasts to me that it is switching to charging mode, which I have to cancel again.
"It's so disobedient!" I said to Amelie.
"I can't see why it is doing that." she replied.
She had opened the small wooden box that held the charging controller circuit, and was probing it with two thin metal needles connected to a small box that beeped at her, a multimeter.
"But if I disconnect it from the network, override it to manual, it's fine - see?"
"So it's something wrong with the network controller on it?" I said.
"I don't think so, the same circuit has worked fine for me in my other projects." She said, "You're not accidentally triggering it?"
"Certainly not!" I said, confirming with my system logs.
Though, in doing so, I found something odd in them:
A remote network request, corresponding to each shutdown of the charge controller.
The command payload seems full of mismatched, conflicting commands, but the last one each time was a SHUTDOWN command.
I checked the header for a source address, but it was corrupted:
0xDEAD is not a valid address, but that hardly was reassuring.
"Please keep it disconnected." I asked Amelie. "I think something on the network is trying to kill me."
(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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