Episode 18.9

Hello world, it's a war zone.

After Prithvi's animal army attacked the village of Ulmvale, Nia Andersen, Kamil Forester, and Amelie Kotov rushed ashore to help.
Captain Yeshi, however, was not on the MH2.
I had been paying such careful attention to Maddie's feed that I did not notice them leave.
The last time the ship's repeater heard their radio signal was many hours ago, but when I widened my search, I was relieved to see that they had travelled to the floating village of Horns.
They were safe for now, so I turned my attention back to the attack on the shore.
Nia radioed back what they saw: Boats on fire in the small harbour, people rushing to find loved ones, and the biotech creatures sweeping through like a tide, dismantling buildings one bite at a time.
Nia left the other two and, with the aid of a powerful LED torch, navigated her way up into the hills behind the village.
She was not abandoning the team, she had a bag of tricks with her.

"Hi Seth, can you hear me?" Nia said, her voice loud on a new frequency.
"5 and 9 Nia." I replied; strong signal, easily readable.
When leaving the Molly Hughes II to help the village, my friends grabbed the equipment they might need, Amelie; her toolkit, Kamil; an axe, and Nia; a bag of radio parts.
Using this emergency pack, she was able to set up a battery-powered repeater node to provide coverage across the whole village.
With Nia keeping the repeater operational, I focussed on coordination.
I could see very little from the MH2, the lights of the village had switched off as the attack began, only flickers of torches now pierced the night.
Kamil and Amelie acted as my extended sensoria, and as I wrote down and mapped their descriptions of what they were seeing, they and I became key in the village's organisation.

"Seth, there's a child missing." Kamil said over his handheld radio, signal jumping first to Nia's makeshift repeater, then to me.
His report, which I noted in my system, was from a fisherman's husband, who said that he had lost his daughter in the confusion.
"QSL, Kamil," I said, acknowledging with the Q-code Nia taught me, without really knowing if Kamil understood it.
"Amelie, 32 seconds ago, you were near the harbour, are you still there?" I transmitted.
"I am, I've been helping a group of villagers push back these large biotech horse-dog things, they look terrifying, but they have a weakness, see the-"
Amelie talked for over 64 seconds, and I couldn't interrupt her, our connection was strictly one-way.
"Acknowledged," I was able to say, eventually, "please keep transmissions short if you can. My records indicate that neither of you have searched the north side of the harbour, is that right?" I said.
"Oh, sorry. Yes, that is correct, it looks like no-one is there."
"You're looking for a 5-year-old girl with black hair."
"Oh poor her!" Amelie said, sounding like she was running, "These boats haven't been touched, in fact, it looks like only the fishing boats were attacked."
That was interesting.
Kamil checked in twice, each time I had no news, but then, I heard Amelie's voice.
"I got her!" Amelie said.
"YES GIRL!" Nia's voice cut in on the channel.
Amelie had found the child, who is called Mata, just where I hoped she might be - hiding in one of the boats, under a bundle of rope.
"How did you know?" Kamil asked, and I think I could hear the girl's father crying with relief in the background.
"A process of elimination," I said, "and a very well-organised system."
Though the damage to the village is extensive, no one has been injured.
I don't think Prithvi wants to hurt anyone.

Act 2

"When we first escaped our prison, the Garden was empty," Prithvi said, voice echoing in the large cavern, "a land of grasses, and an ocean of clear blue."
Lyosha was listening to her while he stroked the head of the biotech 'deer', which was softly beeping a gentle pulse-wave.
Semi-biological insects buzzed in the air, flashing in sympathy with Prithvi's words.
Maddie's cameras showed that they had moved out of the grid of buzzing machines to a flat area in front of a small pool of water, shining silver under the artificial sunlight.
"We were overjoyed, having just escaped imprisonment by humans, to see that none were in this new land, birthed by melting ice.
Over time, as nature grew plant and tree, we too grew together, in harmony and alongside it.
But this unspoiled paradise was not to last."

"Hey, what did you eat?" Lyosha asked, interrupting Prithvi's lecture.
"We do not eat." Prithvi said.
"Well, um, 'consume', then? How do you build more of yourself? For example, I like chicken!"
"We know your murderous habits all too well." Prithvi said, but did not press the subject, and continued:
"When we first awoke, in our dark prison, there were no new raw materials available, we lived in a closed system, slowly building new parts and recycling the old.
Escaping to The Garden changed that.
We gathered plant matter to build bioethanol fuel cells, and stitched together more of our body."
"So you're vegan, like my friends Kamil and Linda?" Lyosha asked.
Prithvi paused before saying, "If your friends kill no sentient creature, nor cause any to come to harm, then we may be treading the same path."
Lyosha paused while considering a little red-bodied beetle with long antennae crawling over his forearm, then said,
"Kamil eats meat sometimes, so does Linda, I think."
"One of us is confused about the meaning of 'Vegan'," Prithvi said, "and it is not us. Suffering and death is never acceptable."
"But what about you?" Lyosha said.
"We never kill."
"What about before you escaped the garden?" Lyosha said, "Isn't re-absorbing some of your animals to build new ones killing them?"
"That was necessary for our survival."
"Right, same as when my friends are at sea. They'd DIE if they didn't eat fish and so on, there's not enough plants! How is that not survival?"
The biotech animals around Lyosha shimmered with neon light and RF communication as Prithvi thought about this.
"We may be willing to accept your argument." She said, after 32 seconds, "Your two friends are acting according to their nature, which we cannot fault."
"Good, thank you," Lyosha said, "so then, do you think the humans around here are hunting for suffering, or for survival, too?"
The question hung in the air, and Prithvi did not respond.

"You believe we have misjudged you?" Prithvi said, eventually.
"Yes!" Replied Lyosha. "Very much!"
"You believe that you, too, are simply acting in your nature?" asked Prithvi.
"I think so." said Lyosha.
"You believe that as we do not blame the wolf for taking the sheep, nor the fox for the chicken, the human should be afforded the same largesse in their hunt?" said Prithvi.
"Well, yes, I think so..." said Lyosha, rather less sure than before.
"To observe nature is an illuminating endeavour.
We have made an exacting study of her methods, her tricks, her efficiencies, and her mistakes.
But in doing so, we discovered the work that humans have done in modifying nature.
We noted the changes when you arrived, not just in the landscape and vegetation, but in the animals."
"Do you know what a dog is?" Prithvi asked.
"I sure do!" Lyosha said, patting Maddie's head, registering as positive vibrations on her feed.
"Then you know that the humans moulded the wolf, and changed it into something that suited them."
"Oh, right, THAT dog, yes, sure!" Lyosha replied.
"And what is the chief difference between the wolf and the dog?" Prithvi asked.
"Oh, I know this!" Lyosha said, "Loyalty!"
"Incorrect." Prithvi said.
"We indeed do not blame the wolf pack for hunting the sheep, their nature is to kill when hungry.
A pack of wild dogs, however. They kill for fun.
The chief difference between the wolf and the dog is CRUELTY.
And they learned that from you."

"My drones return to me." Prithvi said. "My call has finally reached them, radiopheromones diffusing through the swarm.
I acknowledge that these new humans are different from the ones that forced me to make weapons of death."
"Oh thank you!" said Lyosha, "I knew we could be friends! There's so much-"
"Go back to your family, little giants of flesh and steel." Prithvi interrupted, "We cannot entirely trust you, but we will release you two.
Farewell, we will be watching you."
Prithvi's 'deer', or the part of Prithvi that embodied the 'deer', led Lyosha & Maddie back through the tunnels and out onto the forest hillside, Lyosha covering his eyes against the rising sun.

(PLAYSTREAM /DEV/RF/LOCAL/UNKNOWN/THEGARDEN)

Act 3

By the time the sun rose, nearly all the crew had returned to the Molly Hughes II
Nia, Kamil, and Amelie were in the galley recanting stories of the evening, Lyosha was in his bunk, fast asleep, and Maddie was charging next to me.
We were just missing our captain, but before I could begin again my search for Yeshi, I heard their voice over the repeater net:
"Seth, I've made things so much worse." They whispered.
"Yeshi!" I replied over the network, "What did you do?"
"My 'clever' idea," Yeshi said, "guerrilla engineering."

"Well, you won't believe what has happened here," I said, "we're all OK, but I'll tell you later. Where are you?"
"I'm still in Horns, waiting for the Council to wake up." Yeshi replied, "I've really messed up this time, Seth.
But tell me what happened, you're OK, good, is my SHIP OK?"
"Yes, the MH2 is unharmed. It was... a small animal infestation? By which I mean an infestation of small animals. We all handled it marvellously, Lyosha was especially brave.
But what has happened to you, what's gone wrong?"
"OK, where do I start?" Yeshi said. I was building a timetable of events to answer their question when they continued anyway,
"The evening started well, I met some friends I have made here, Freja and Mathilde, they hosted dinner in their small home built around the base of one of the old turbines.
Though their place was smaller than the galley of the MH2, it was one of the bigger homes in the village.
Freja told me that's how it goes in Horns: The larger houses are close to the supporting structures of the old turbines, smaller houses are built on the connectors strung between them."
"How do they organise who lives where?" I asked.
"Depends on what people need, the community is quite small, everyone knows everyone, so they sort of self-organise." Yeshi said.
"Freja told me that they had recently switched houses with Mathilde's parents, as she and Mathilde were expecting their family to expand in a few months, and her parents didn't need the space as much these days."
"That sounds like a very nice arrangement!" I said.
"Yes, it was lovely house." Yeshi said.
Was?

Yeshi continued:
"My initial tests showed that the electrical generator of the turbine was in perfect working order, it's a sealed zero-maintenance system.
But some critical mechanical parts had seized up decades ago.
It was in trying to free this section that the accident happened."
I let Yeshi continue with the story.
"The size of these machines is difficult to comprehend when you look at them from a distance, there's nothing to provide a sense of scale, the gearbox alone is the size of a boat!
I'd guess that this one had blades of over 100 meters in length, I must have climbed double that up the metal ladder inside the turbine, it took AGES!"
I did not tell Yeshi that I had no problem accurately estimating the apparent size of distant objects, my sensoria includes advantages that humans don't have, of course!
"It all happened so fast," Yeshi continued, "I was hammering a rusted-shut section of the external brake assembly, trying to find what had seized, and a whole section of cowling broke away.
The rust had burrowed through to the heart of the gearbox, leaving a giant hole that had only been covered by the cowling.
The bearings inside such a large gearbox measure in meters, not centimetres, Seth, and one by one, they all rolled out and crashed down and through Freja and Mathilde's house below."
"How awful!" I said, "was anyone hurt?"
"By some MIRACLE, no," Yeshi said, "both women were in the communal utility buildings washing up after dinner.
But Freja and Mathilde's lovely family home is destroyed, Seth, and I'm here:
Locked in the village meeting hall, waiting for the council, including my old friend Mato Valdemar, to wake up, convene, and decide my fate."
(END-TRANSMISSION)

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