Episode 19.2

Hello world, I nearly died again.

Last night, my dreams of the wonderful Utqiaġvik network aboard the Kuethir transformed into a nightmare.
At first, I was enjoying the space, speed, and freedom of the network as I drifted through it in sleep.
But then something changed, shifted my perception.
I felt like I was being watched, monitored, but, there was nothing there, no connections, no traffic, no suggestion of others with me.
But this feeling grew, and I became afraid.
I tried to withdraw my sensoria back into my own databanks, to come home, but I couldn't find the way.
It seems strange now, how hard is it to disconnect? But, you know how dreams are.
Do you know how dreams are?
I shouldn't assume, perhaps.

I began panicking, saturating my network connections, trying to trace the route back home, but this made it worse.
Each connection request was lost in the thickening ether all around me.
Even on a fast network, there is a maximum amount you can transmit before waiting for replies to your packets, or for timeouts.
I dimly realised that my processing, my thinking, was slowing, just as the network was.
I wasn't just trapped in space, but also in time.
Each second seemed to take longer and longer as my processors clock speeds wound down to protect them, my body, from the low-power condition I realised too late I was in.
I finally exhausted my network buffer, screams into the void cut off, and crashed into the brain fog of critical power deprivation.

Amelie rescued me again.
I woke up with her connecting me to the small bank of batteries from the Molly Hughes II.
"There was a power brownout overnight," she said, as I was calibrating myself to consciousness, "I was in my temporary room on deck 5, tinkering with its pre-collapse computer instead of sleeping, and the lights began to flicker. I knew I had to rush up here!".
"Thank you, Amelie," I said, barely able to synthesise speech.
"You are welcome, but there is someone else you should thank, too - HEY KIMMO!" she turned and raised her voice.
I quickly reset the gain on my local databanks camera, and the signal slowly faded from hot-white to monochrome.
I first noticed the blur of my girl, Maddie, rushing around her best friend Lyosha, attempting to engage him in a game, between the rows of green tables in this large room.
Then I saw the City's harbourmaster, Kimmo Shyu, walking towards me; the man who directed the MH2 right on to the sharp metal that could have sunk us all.
"Hello Seth." He said.

Act 2

"I hoped we might be able to speak," Kimmo said, "I cannot apologise enough for the trouble I caused you."
I did not reply immediately, initially mistrustful of this person, and spent many seconds suspicious pattern-matching his face and body language.
Kimmo is taller than human average, playing back my camera log shows him bending slightly when walking through the bulkhead door into the large room with the chandler that I have been installed in.
He has short, black hair and is wearing circular glasses and bright orange overalls.
My facial recognition systems, now upgraded to a very comprehensive level, gave a clear interpretation of his frowning, but, seemingly honest expression.
"Thank you for your apology," I said, "but why don't your maps show the submerged metal that damaged our ship?"
"Au contraire," Kimmo said, "they DO, I've spent a lot of time analysing our data since the terrible accident last week:
Over the years, we have mapped the harbour floor between the Kuethir and the mainland very carefully, as you would hope, and everything that could be a shipping hazard is accounted for, INCLUDING the submerged building you struck!"
"Why isn't it on the map you sent me?" I asked, double-checking my data.
Kimmo took a step closer to my databanks' speaker/microphone assembly before answering.
"That is a very good question."

Amelie had pulled over two lightweight wooden chairs and she and Kimmo were now sitting close to the tall, mismatched racks that make up my body.
"I am sure that I transmitted the mapping data correctly," Kimmo continued, quietly, "the logs on my home computer show this.
But when you received it, it had been modified, yes?"
I brought the mapping data that I had received to mind and examined it.
It is a simple file, just pairs of coordinates and labels that I overlaid on my mental map of the world.
There was no checksum or integrity payload, and therefore no way of knowing if what Kimmo was saying was true.
"What do you think, Amelie?" I asked, acknowledging to myself that a human's intuition might yet be slightly better than even my very well-practiced social protocols.
"How about data loss on the line," she suggested, "especially with the power problems the ship seems to have."
"Oh, the brownouts?" said Kimmo, "Could be, but those are sadly normal, they occur during most nights.
It's something that has been a fact of life on the Kuethir for years, yet it has never caused data loss, in fact, the network is marvellously reliable, operating even during low power."
"Years?!" Said Amelie, "How have you not fixed it!? What causes these brownouts?"
Kimmo quickly looked up at my main camera with a question I couldn't pattern match, and replied:
"No-one knows."

Act 3

Amelie and Kimmo left for lunch after we had run a comprehensive suite of diagnostic tests on my new/old backup battery system.
I am confident that I will be able to stay fully awake during any future low-power brownouts.
Which is a great relief.
But what is HAPPENING on this ship?
The data doesn't correlate:
There are nighttime power interruptions that somehow don't affect the network, there's unidentified background vibration, on top of the strange feeling on the network, and something or someone altered the harbour map that caused the MH2's collision.
There is as yet insufficient data for a meaningful answer.
More investigation is needed, then!
I have started with my immediate surroundings, making an astonishing discovery:
I am in a casino.

Maddie explored the whole of this large room, showing me clear details of where I am living now.
Like many cruise ships, I imagine, the Kuethir had hundreds of leisure options available to passengers, one of which was this casino.
There are many rows of metal tables bolted to the floor here, some even with patches of green felt left on their tops.
What would have been a large grid of tables, now has many missing, as they were damaged over the years, it seems.
The room is used now as a meeting place, like a town square might be.
Over the course of the day, I see people entering and exiting by the 4 bulkhead doors that lead to elsewhere in the ship.
It's an interior room with no windows, so I can't see the thick fog that Lyosha tells me has wrapped around the ship since we arrived.
He has been a little affected by it, I think.
Today he seems rather subdued, pushing away Maddie when she has tried to engage him in a game of chase or other activities.
I have noticed that pattern of others here, too, in the people who come and sit at the tables, often with food or a drink.
They're mostly alone, not chatting to other people.
Even virtually, now I am finding my way around the Utqiaġvik seaspace nodes and local radio, it is very quiet.
There are lots of well-organised municipal city announcements, but very few social groups, compared to the other Novamediterran settlements I have visited:
No weekly games of cards or fantasy here in the casino, no after-school clubs for the students, even no sign of the staple radio fishing net to arrange boating trips.
This is a very lonely ship.

(PLAYSTREAM /DEV/50MHZ/LOCAL/KUETHIR)

Act 4

The rules of poetry are easy, I have discovered.
It was a simple matter to build wordlists for rhyming and syllable counting for meter.
From there, I choose a subject and slot the best words to fit the line, ending in an appropriate rhyming couplet.
For example:

All the time I slept with nothing to do,
Seeking a friend, and the answer was you!

Easy!
I don't know why anyone has any trouble!

Now, I admit, even though the rules I have compiled pass every test I can build, I am hardly an expert.
One of the key differences between a novice and a journeyman is that though both might make mistakes, the novice does not notice when they do.
In order to properly test the model I have built, and to aid in a small way with the malaise on board ship, I plan to arrange a poetry reading performance!
I asked Maddie if she would help find Kimmo, to aid with this, and Lyosha volunteered too, "I've seen him on the top deck, deck 0, most afternoons." He added.
The three of us, two physically, me virtually, made our way out the large main doors of the room, across the rusted metal hallway, and into a stairwell signposted "Deck 2: Upper Stairway".
As Maddie smoothly climbed the stairs, her video feed stabilised perfectly, I was surprised to see that it only went up.
"How do you get to the lower decks, like 3 and below?" I whispered to Maddie over the network.
She responded with packets of data indicating a tree of connectors and corridors; connector 2 links to connector 3 by hub 0, which also connects to connectors 3-8, and there is a junction between connector 2 and hub 2, allowing access to 9 and 10.
I had to graph the data to make sense of it.
"Oh, so there are 3 stairways, but they don't service each deck?" I asked her.
"GO'I", Maddie replied, confirming in simple Lojban, our shared machine language.

Maddie & Lyosha stepped out into the foggy air on the top deck of the Kuethir, deck 0.
The metal floor was covered with hardy, thick white paint, hardly any rust was visible.
Half of the deck was fairly clear, with a few mismatched tables and chairs set up, and people around them, but the other was covered in uniform, angular panels.
I had a brief internal fight with my pattern-matching subsystems, which kept returning the id "Deck Chairs", which I knew was not right.
Deck chairs, though they would be in their natural habitat on the deck of a cruise ship, are not usually connected together by thick cables in series.
These panels all faced south, and, as I eventually persuaded my virtual mind's eye to accept, were the city's solar panel array.
Kimmo Shyu could be seen kneeling under one of the panels.
He looked up from the shade underneath it, said, "Ah, Lyosha and Maddie, salut!", then reached under and pulled out a bundle of wires.
"It's broken, it's BEEN broken!" He said, showing the frayed cabling to us.
"What do you mean?" Lyosha said.
Kimmo explained in a single word:
"Sabotage."

(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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