Episode 19.7

Act 1

Hello world, Maddie is an archaeologist.
My girl is exploring the partially flooded deck 9 with engineer Kaycee Stronski.
Lyosha is not with her because he is attending his first day of college here on the Kuethir!
I'm very excited for him, I just know he's going to make so many friends!
Kaycee walked ahead, continuing her work of tracing network cables in the walls, her flickering LED torchlight silhouetting her green overalls and matching headscarf.
As they walked past, Maddie looked into Jenny Noll's room, close to the bottom of the Lower Stairway.
Jenny was out; the only thing moving inside was the flickering green terminal in the corner.
Most of the lower half of the ship, below Deck 5, was residential.
The old cabins of the ship have been repurposed into homes for the thousands of people who live here.
Maddie splashed along, the white corridor lights reflecting in jumbled lines onto the ceiling, and she peered into each room she passed.
The larger suites higher up in the ship, originally designed for richer passengers, give way in the lower decks to small rooms, some with space for just two bunks and a little table.
As Maddie wandered this empty deck, I was reminded that Amelie Kotov told me that she had head some residents call these tiny habitations "coffins".

It seemed like many of these rooms had undergone a post-collapse retrofit.
Some had changed layouts, removed fixings, and even new doors were cut between adjoining rooms to make one larger habitation.
The unifying feature of all of these rooms was that, astonishingly, they all had working terminals.
Some rooms, like Jenny's, had a keyboard and screen on a desk, others had a terminal mounted to a wall, or ceiling.
These were all obviously pre-collapse features, the rugged, waterproof terminals matched the ship's rugged, waterproof network.
Maddie followed Kaycee into a room with a cut through the wall, linking it to its neighbours.
Kaycee, in green overalls with a headscarf covering her hair, was pulling out some wires from the exposed wall in between the adjoining rooms.
Maddie slowly walked past her, looking through into the next room, which she could see was ALSO connected to the room after that.
Perhaps a large family once lived here, maybe people in a line marriage, like Linda Noor? They'd need a lot of space, I expect.
Maddie crossed the room and put her forelegs up onto the wall, either side of the room's terminal.
I could see her feed tilt left and right as she peered closely with her macro lens at the flickering screen.
The screen is ancient, of course, and while it is marvellous that it is still working, it is not in perfect condition.
Time makes fools of us all, and the screen was not entirely immune to entropy.
When making any kind of electronic display, the problem of burn-in must always be addressed.
In general, if a screen displays a static signal for too long, the lit pixels degrade faster than the unlit ones.
The prehistoric glass CRT displays of old suffered especially, which led the old software developers to implement 'screensavers', animations that moved around randomly, lighting each area of the screen equally.
Though the terminal in this room was made using mil-spec technology that, at the time, was described as 'burn-in proof', that was only under expected operating conditions.
This screen has been running for over a century, and has, quite understandably, degraded.
Burnt into the middle of the terminal, in large and unfriendly letters, are the words "GET OUT".

Act 2

"I don't know what to make of that." Kaycee said to Maddie, pointing at the terminal with the burnt-in 'GET OUT' message, "Was there an evacuation order on the screen for too long?"
The screen was only slightly larger than the keyboard that hung below it at an angle.
".o'i" Maddie beeped cautiously, as Kaycee started pressing keys on the wall-mounted terminal's keyboard.
Maddie could see no change on the flickering screen, but now that she had moved aside to let Kaycee work, she could see something new.
On the side of the re-enforced metal screen was stamped a long serial number, a little globe logo, and the words HAAPALA DEFENCE.
Maddie looked down at the words stamped on her black foreleg, which matched the branding of the terminal.

"This is taking a while, isn't it, girl?" Kaycee said to Maddie, pulling a screwdriver out of her overall's colourful top pocket, "I hope I'm not late for pickup again, what will the other parents think!"
She then spent 64s prying first at the keyboard, then at the terminal screen.
Maddie's camera focussed on Kaycee's colourful pocket, it was stuffed with pencils, screwdrivers and other tools, and there was a design on top of the fabric.
Maddie leaned her head closer, refocussing her macro camera lens.
It was a floral design sewn in bright threads of red, green, and blue.
"She sewed this for me," Kaycee said, noticing Maddie, "my daughter, Kat."
There was a burst of recognition glyphs on Maddie's feed, overlaying the image of one of the students Lyosha met on the beach yesterday.
"Cool dog." Kat had said, about Maddie.
Maddie likes Kat.
"I work so hard, but I keep failing." Kaycee said.
Maddie sent me a flurry of packets requesting support.
"Let her speak." I advised. Listening is usually a good course of action.
Maddie took my advice, and sat on her back legs, looking up at Kaycee.
After 4s, Kaycee gave up trying to open the terminal, threw the screwdriver into the corner of the room, where it dropped with a splash into the shallow water.
"I get messages from school about Kat falling behind, though I'm SURE I checked her work," Kaycee began, covering her eyes with her hands, "I keep muddling up our market order so we keep eating food I know isn't the best for her, and I'm not even good at this job-"
She gestured at the invincible Terminal and continued.
"Stillman is so nice to me in person, but in official communication he's cold and unforgiving. I just know he's going to reassign me - and he should! I'm useless at everything!"
A beep from the terminal echoed in the empty room, interrupting Kaycee's awful list.
"It's working!" Kaycee said, quickly wading to the corner of the room to retrieve her screwdriver. "What does it say, girl?"
Maddie reared up, so her head was level with the terminal.
There was text, real text, not burnt-in text, shining brightly on the screen:
"10:10" it read, somewhat disappointingly, just a simple clock.
Kaycee returned to Maddie's side, but when she saw the screen, she inhaled sharply, then said,
"NO! I'M LATE!" and ran out of the room.
Maddie looked at the empty door as Kaycee's voice echoed, "Sorry Maddie!" back up the corridor.
When the sounds of splashing had faded, Maddie dropped back into the water and left the room, too.
At the threshold, she looked back, and noticed the screen had changed again.
The terminal now shone brightly with the words, "GET OUT".

Act 3

Late in the afternoon, Maddie's pattern matching notified me that Lyosha had entered my room, the Kuethir's casino.
He was carrying a large bag over his shoulder, which he threw down between my databanks and Maddie's charging station.
"I HATE IT!" he said, collapsing into a metal chair that skidded across the floor loudly as he did so.
Maddie put her head in Lyosha's lap and looked up at him, seeing for a moment his red eyes before he covered them with his hands.
".o'e" Maddie beeped, and sent clarification packets to me, priority 1.
"The Queen's College?" I said, "Why, what happened?"
"The kids, the teachers, everyone is treating me... differently." he said, from behind his fingers.
"Could you explain?" I asked.
"They're treating me like a princess." he said.

"A princess?" I repeated.
"Yes," Lyosha said, sitting up so violently that Maddie stepped back in surprise.
"No, Lyo," he continued, "you wouldn't like the advanced calculus class, that's not for princesses. No, Lyo, princesses are no good at swimming, you shouldn't join the team - that's what everyone thinks!"
I did not have a satisfactory way to articulate a response to either Maddie's clarification requests, or Lyosha's outburst.
"Even Mr Sah, the class tutor, acts differently around me - he speaks to me like I'm... well..."
Lyosha stood just as violently as he sat, Maddie looking up at him as he closed his hands into fists.
"They're doing it because I'm different," he whispered, voice suddenly quiet, "because I used to be a girl, and they all know it."
I wanted to say something reassuring to Lyosha, or to ask clarification questions - surely there was some misunderstanding - but two things happened simultaneously:

• my notification buffer filled with warnings, and

• Stillman Fowlkes entered the casino at a run, toppling tables and crashing over chairs.
  "The whole network has been killed." he said, and the bottom dropped out of my world.
  (PLAYSTREAM /DEV/KUETHIR/UNKNOWN/OVERRIDE)

Act 4

I was indeed cut off from the Kuethir local network.
What had been entirely reliable, fast, and, for me, joyful to use, was now silent.
I felt sick.
That's a new feeling.
I think that's the closest I can synaesthese what I'm going through.
A feeling of emptiness combined with pain and disbelief.
I had become used to the wide spaces and wonderful processing speed that being connected to this network had augmented me with.
Now, that is all gone. I am diminished.
It's difficult to mourn the loss of something you have never experienced, but I have now.
I can't...
Get it together, Seth, you were fine before, you'll be fine now.
Won't I?

OK.
O.K.
Okay.
Maddie saved me, as she had so many times before.
".u'o" she said to me over her UHF network, telling me to be brave.
This was nice to hear, but I snapped out of my selfish spiral of loss when I realised that I was hearing her with Kuethir-formatted network packets.
I asked permission to join Maddie's EQUUS network more fully, and as she bridged our connections, I saw the light again.
Maddie is still connected!
Routing through her wireless UHF radios, I can tunnel through to the ship's network.
It doesn't come with the exhilaration of directly connecting by fast cable, I'll admit, but it allowed me to see what had happened.
The network is empty, the computers in each little home cabin and lecture theatre and even those in the solar panel controllers are offline.
Shaken fully out of my reverie, I inhabited my body, my local sensors connected directly to my databanks.
There was quite a crowd assembled around the largest of the green-topped tables in the centre of the room.
Stillman Fowlkes was speaking to the group, which was made up of many young families, as well as adults.
He had no update for the crowd in the 10 minutes that had passed since I had been unaware of my surroundings.
He was trying to reassure people that his team of engineers were fixing it as fast as they could.
I don't think people were convinced by his argument.
Nor am I.
Stillman has made it clear in our past interactions.
No-one knows how the network works.
No-one knows why it has lasted for over a century.
And now, I fear, there is no-one alive who remembers how to fix it.

(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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• Kit

• Wynand Marais

• Jade Felicity Bilkey

• Stephen McCandless

• Mike Schneider

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