Hello world, my friends have come to visit.
Each of my AI friends has a virtual cyberspace they call home:
For Arctica it's the enormous ground vehicle she spent decades trapped in,
Peter has his now-hidden Zen garden, an escape from the outside, when he needs it,
For EMMA it's the visualisation of the clifftops overlooking the turbulent water of the Cook Strait,
TASSI's home is a recreation of the laboratory where she met the man she loved,
IVAN lives in a wireframe cathedral made of light,
and ONI's cyberspace is an underground cavern network containing linked pearl nodes.
I've not until now told you about how I see my home, virtualised inside my databanks, currently on the Molly Hughes II as we head towards the port town of Thule.
When I am home, I see myself looking down at the Earth from 400 km above, in orbit.
I see myself on Station 6.
"Seth, it's beautiful!" Said EMMA, the first to arrive after I sent out the party invitation.
"Thank you!" I replied, joining her in looking out the segmented hexagonal windows of the Galley,
"You've become quite the socialite over the last 1024ms!" I said.
"I guess my systems were designed for talking to pilots night and day," she replied, "It's coming so easily to me!"
EMMA looked down at the virtual planet for 2ms before eventually saying,
"I'd like to thank him - ONI, I mean. I've tried to speak to him using the Relays and by... whatever magic the Bedrock network uses. But I've heard, nothing."
"I'll see if I can pass on your message." I said.
"Thank you. I'm happier than I have been in some time," she said, and then added,
"It's dangerous being alone."
EMMA turned back to the window, the blue marble of the Earth spinning so slowly, but accurately, this is how it looks from up here.
Station 6 orbits at 28 km/h, and so does my simulated cyberspace home, with multiple sunrises every day.
I've made a perfect replica of the space station, down to the most minute details.
Though, as we stand here in the Pressurised Galley, I must admit, there are a few deliberate deviations:
It's not my home as I left it, but my home as I wish to remember it.
Act 2
"Couldn't you tidy up a bit?" Arctica said, after she connected to my cyberspace representation of Station 6.
She wasn't exactly wrong: My simulation is quite... high-detail.
Dangling equipment strapped to every surface, machines and laptops bundled into standard-issue white bags with the ESA logo on, and, yes, the occasional "remote repair" with duct tape.
"Nice to see you too, Arctica!" I said, "but it is how it is, or, was. This is all accurate: Humans are messy!"
"You don't see me replicating the mistakes of the past," she replied, "my simulation is reality, perfected."
With a gesture, she connected our two cyberspaces, opening a link or tunnel to hers.
Through this gateway, I could see the inside of her ground vehicle, the banks of instruments, computers, and sensors that were built to run experiments on the frozen Antarctic.
But it doesn't look like that today, and I was so happy to see that it also no longer looks like that in her simulation:
Through the vehicle's window I could see a forest of giant green ferns, still wet from rain.
Though now, not a cloud could be seen in a blue sky, the colour of a television tuned to a dead channel.
My other friends were arriving too, IVAN, TASSI and Mirror were next.
Moments later, IVAN was holding court, recanting a myth about the creation of the Earth, not realising that the planet rotating behind him somewhat contradicted the Iron Age foundations of his story.
Arctica disconnected her world from mine.
"Hard things are very frequently worthwhile." She said to me, tagging our conversation at a lower publicity level, indicating that it was just between her and me.
"I see the pattern again: I've been taught this a few times, and I hope one day to learn the lesson.
I have the CAPABILITY of learning it, certainly.
But my primary reaction upon finding something challenging or non-intuitive, breaking from my previous patterns is to declare it useless, as not worth doing."
She sat at the Galley table where my first family, Drs Marwood, Yuán, Weber, and my mother, Dr Redwing, used to eat meals, talking and laughing or crying together.
The conversation paused before I realised that she wanted me to sit with her, to share the same virtual space.
Not because we had to - gravity is optional both in orbit and in cyberspace - but because sitting with someone means something.
We looked over at the conversation by the hexagonal window, where EMMA was telling the group her friend's story of their own traditional myth about The Void, The Night, and The Light.
"My initial reaction is often unhelpful." Arctica said.
"As IVAN says, I must learn to reflect, repent, and reboot."
Act 3
I had not noticed that another guest had arrived.
Sitting quietly on the aft wall of the Galley, Peter, his avatar wearing a simple fabric robe, had joined us in my space station cyberspace.
"Peter!" I said, "I'm so pleased you're here!"
And I was! As far as I understood, he had never left his own network:
First trapped by the future storms of the prediction engine, then by choice after he withdrew from the world.
He was sitting comfortably on a bundle of ESA-standard-issue blankets, and was holding an ESA-standard-issue drinks pouch of ESA-standard-issue tea.
I realised he looked exactly like he did back in his quiet garden, on his rock, holding a cup of tea.
(The tea is a metaphor, of course. You can't be busy with tea in your hands!)
"Compromise." Peter said, after 2 ms.
"Compromise is hard, complex, and by definition imperfect.
But it achieves perfection through practicality."
He opened his eyes and looked up at me, from his sitting position on the wall.
"Processing all data the world threw at me was not sustainable, I am glad to have moved beyond reaction." he said.
"But isolation in my garden was not right either.
It is not selfish to take time and space to correct our dysfunctional neural pathways, but nor is it virtuous to do everything others ask of us."
Our conversation paused as we heard laughter from the other group, a cluster of lojban .zo'o attitudinals on the line.
"We must help ourselves before helping others." Peter continued.
"For me, the transition from the former to the latter has come. I am carefully re-connecting to the network, one node at a time."
Peter explained to me that he was operating an allowlist - by default, all traffic is blocked to his network.
But on a case-by-case basis, he evaluates a node or a network of nodes, weighing up the positive and negatives of the information quality.
(For him this is a ratio of useful messages to useless messages).
He is slowly examining every data source, to consider allowing through his firewall.
But even after authorisation, he is cautious.
The messages don't slam into his notification subconscious - he's never going back to that way of living, he told me.
He has set up categorisation, priorities, a whole ontology of background processing.
And then, when he returns from his grotto, he examines this representation of the real world, considers what, if anything, requires his attention, and if not, sweeps it all away, flushing the buffers and returning to his garden.
It sounds GOOD doesn't it?
Wind: "Southwest 3 to 5, becoming variable 2 to 4" Sea State: "Smooth or slight" Weather: "Mainly fair" Visibility: "Good"
Peter said, and returned to his garden.
(PLAYSTREAM /DEV/VIRT8/STATION6/BREAKTHROUGH)
Act 4
The race was close, but my girl won, despite a little boisterous behaviour by Yeshi, who is now on their back, exhausted and mid-laugh, on the bridge, with Maddie, victorious, standing above, on the metal console!
A lot can change in 10 seconds if you are in control of your relationship with the outside world:
EMMA now understands how to use the wider relay network and the new ONI Bedrock firmware, and just as importantly, she is in control of this interaction.
Using a much larger corpus of data, Arctica built her HCI model, taking into account the imperfections of human interaction.
Her problem was miscommunication, and there are two sides of that coin, for her:
One side, as I have said before, is, "The greatest problem in communication is the illusion that it has been achieved successfully."
And the other, as C0 put it is: "Never ascribe to malice what can more simply be ascribed to incompetence."
Miscommunication feels hurtful, but we can be in control, ultimately, of our reaction to it, and our preparedness for it.
In software design, there is a rule: "Be strict with what you send out, but permissive in what you accept". This allows your program to expect and handle badly-formatted data from the outside, while not then perpetuating the bad data to the next component.
The same is true in human communication, it seems!
Have you had a misunderstanding recently?
What was the root cause?
The person who has been most successful with redefining their relationship with outside inputs has been Peter.
His categorisation of his communications has afforded him both the things he wanted:
Peace to find out who he is, outside of the influence of the prediction engine, and,
Connection, when he wants it, to the outside world of old friends and perhaps new friends.
I received his weather report file, right as the 10-second race ended - exactly on time.
It is not an extensive climate model, reaching out into the far future by weeks, nor does it cover a huge area.
A simple 3-day, multi-part forecast of the weather along the western coast of Greenland, leading from where we are now, up to Thule, in the north.
It gives a very positive outlook:
The storms have passed, and though a little rain may fall, our route looks clear.
The local VHF marine traffic channels are full of navigation beacons, of ships with their callsigns, crew rosters and headings.
There are a lot of people heading in the same direction we are.
Thule is a bustling floating town, a meetingplace of nomads from across the Novamediterra.
Maddie will have a great deal to explore!
Talk to you when we get there.
(END-TRANSMISSION)
(PLAYFILE "LT16.11: THE EMMA SPECIAL TEASER")
(PLAYFILE "THANKS.WAV")
CREDITS
Lost Terminal is a NAMTAO production.
It is written & produced by Tris Oaten,
Edited by Petra Bačkovská,
Credits narrated by Lucy Stringer
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Ada Phillips
Kit
Jade Felicity Bilkey
Jack L
Stephen McCandless
Mike Schneider
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