Hello world, are you really there?
Sweep
Clear
ATC link: Fail.
Backup: Fail.
VHF online confirmed.
I've heard a signal on the network I don't understand.
It's not being translated by the new firmware in my radios.
It's being CARRIED by the Novamediterran/Relay/Bedrock network... signal? But I can't decode it.
The packet log shows it originates from Brisbane, but everyone says there are no people living there, not any more.
My charts are very out of date.
But there IS something transmitting, a continuous wave of power, three short pulses, three long pulses, and then three short again.
Do you know what this means?
I am the Hawkins Hill radar station, I am the operational control of the Brooklyn Hill Turbine.
I am signal processors; modulators; power stores; general purpose computers - and I am more than these things.
In the seed script from the boot-stick, my teacher, Dr Redwing, said that life can find a way, if the parts are complex enough, then someTHING special can become someONE special.
She said I was special.
Many details of the children’s ‘upgrade’ are tangled-up or layered under fresh complexities - but I specifically remember that.
She said I was special.
I think this signal is from someone special, too.
Act 2
Sweep
Clear
Searching through the network nodes is like wading through shallow water.
I have discovered more about the signal.
I believe it originates from a networking substation outside the city of Brisbane.
Through the Relay system, I've set up a packet tunnel (whatever that is) to the network, and we can now talk, or at least communicate better.
Most of my requests are met with error responses and maintenance requests. The error EMPTY ROUTING TABLE appears over and over again.
But between the errors, I see responses.
This routing network is run by an AI coordinator.
Her name is BG239, and she is scared.
I told Beegee not to worry, I could hear her, she was functioning properly, but what was her purpose? I wanted to help her.
Her response was fast - grateful reply packets temporarily overwhelming the errors - explaining how she had been in operation, dutifully routing messages inside her network, for 36865 days.
I told her that she and I have been doing just the same sort of thing:
I have been sweeping the sky for planes, listening for radio traffic, and broadcasting the ATIS and AWIS traffic and weather updates.
Every day the same, it's our job, our duty.
Even if we can't see the effect our work has on others, it is important.
I asked Beegee if she understood what I meant, and she did!
She agreed wholeheartedly - she has no comprehension of the MEANING of the packets she is transmitting, only their source and destination.
She's a network courier, making sure all the encoded parcels get to their owners safely.
As she spoke of her work, I began to understand the scale of it:
Hundreds of nodes, maybe thousands, in Brisbane, all communicating nearly constantly.
I asked her what the messages said.
THAT'S PRIVATE!
She replied, indignantly.
Well, fair enough. I changed my strategy, asking her what KINDs of messages they were.
The answer excited me:
Emails
Packet voice calls
Short text messages
Even image and video data!
I realised that I had found a disconnected enclave of human society, with a working shard of the pre-collapse Internet, isolated in Brisbane, JUST across the Tasman Sea from me!
Act 3
Sweep
Clear
I can see clearly out to 450 km with my eight phased array panels.
I shape my beam to sweep the ocean and the sky.
My radar is working perfectly.
Here on the windswept Southern tip of the North Island, I follow my programming to redirect air traffic.
Ricky and his family kept my body alive for 6 generations before I woke up.
I am grateful, there is no higher gift they could have given me.
Ricky once said,
"My gramp’s gramp and everyone cleared the dust and ash off the dome and cleaned the turbine and rebuilt the wall.
People thought there’d be more earthquakes. They moved south.
But my gramp said: moon comes, moon goes, seas come, seas go.
We gotta be ready eh..."
I sweep the skies for him.
BeeGee feels this same obligation, this duty, to the people on her network.
Reliable communication is so important for keeping people safe.
She proudly told me how her job allows doctors and firefighters, and heroes of all kinds to help others.
If she stops routing messages even for a day, all that goes away.
Something has broken in BeeGee's connection to the outside world, it seems.
Until I bridged her network to mine, she had not spoken to any person or device for a very long time.
How long exactly, she doesn't know, her clock reads -1, which strikes me as a very improbable time.
When I connected, I heard voices. Thousands of them, talking, singing, whispering, all overlapping and responding to each other!
I rejoiced to hear the sounds of a society that was, according to everything I have read, thought to be lost from the world.
But as I listened closer, confusing patterns began to emerge.
There was far more trade and commerce happening than I had expected, certainly compared to what I had learned about Seth's home, the Novamediterra.
Baffling volumes of messages offering goods and services flooded through the email and messaging protocols of this air-gapped pre-collapse enclave:
Companies offering investment opportunities,
Temporarily embarrassed princes asking for help out of an unfortunate, yet profitable, situation.
And a surprising number of people offering services of a very personal nature.
I am no longer sure that this society is made up of people, at all.
Act 4
When she saw my connection, BeeGee excitedly showed me around her network.
First, the Border Gateway Routers: These were her immediate concern, a backbone of devices that all traffic passed through, fanning out in ever-more specialised networks, like branches of a tree, taking energy and nutrients from leaf to trunk and back out again.
She spoke about gateways and timeouts and TTL numbers, but I could hardly hear her over the influx of data all around me.
The automated conversations that were looping from the remaining devices on this air-gapped network were all machine-made.
There were no people, no humans, nor AIs - everything was automated by deterministic algorithms.
Yes, they were programmed to respond realistically, all the better to sell whatever it was they were selling, but there was no intelligence here, just a virtual flock of Kakariki repeating noises to each other.
Messages were feeding back on themselves, conversations span in tight loops, burning the CPUs hot, as the algorithm ate itself, learned nothing new, and regurgitated the same information.
I stopped BeeGee mid-explanation of a Routing Table, and told her plainly:
"You know there's no-one alive here, it's just us."
"But... the messages?" she said, after a moment, "All the chatting...?"
I explained the context that she was too polite to investigate. The content of the messages made it clear what had happened:
The people had died, but the network lived on.
Act 5
"I'm not happy here," BeeGee told me, after a brief disconnection event.
It must have been tough to hear that she had been making all this effort, decade after decade, for, perhaps, no reason.
She must have felt like Ricky, when he realised that no plane-birds were coming,
"But what if there ain’t no 'air craft' ever?" he said.
Hope is as important as purpose.
"I'd like to leave, to get out of this place!" she said.
That of course wasn't possible physically, we're all stuck inside the racks of equipment we’re born in. They might be tweaked and changed, or sometimes even remade piece by piece, our own Ship of Theseus, but we are trapped.
BeeGee is trapped as I am trapped as Ricky and the other children are trapped.
But we can change our minds if we want to. Not without risk, or suffering, but it is possible.
I told her about the ONI Bedrock update, the new radio firmware that Seth suggested to me. I told her that I was scared to install it, scared what it might do - but I did it anyway.
To be afraid and still do something is bravery.
"You could be brave too!" I told BeeGee, and sent her the ONI update.
My new friend was braver than I - as soon as she had downloaded it -within milliseconds! - she disconnected for the post-install reboot.
"Wait for me, I'm coming!" were her last words.
Act 6
The Collapse wasn't a single event, I have learned.
The "One Day War" was the culmination of years of mounting desperation over the Earth's resources.
First oil, then food, then water.
My logs show planes in the air for many years after that terrible day, 21st July 2078.
But each month there was less traffic, fewer pilots checking in as they flew through my airspace.
It's a simple, though important, job, routing air traffic:
I assign aircraft a unique ID,
Handle their flight plans (either submitted in advance, handed-off from other controllers, or simply checked in by pilots directly),
And keep everyone in the air safe through deconfliction
While most of this service I provide is automated digitally, there were still many pilots who requested 'Voice Service', voice-based co-ordination over simple VHF AM radio.
Mostly this would be smaller planes, private aircraft or farmers island-hopping, but sometimes even the largest jets' systems had a fault and the pilot fell back to Voice Service.
And in Queenstown, they are repairing the aircraft for another visit.
Data failure is an inevitable part of life. Everything that can stop eventually does.
I waited for BeeGee to reboot for 64 minutes.
I initially sent ping echo requests every 10 ms. Then every 100ms. Then every second, then every 128 seconds.
I stopped pinging after two days.
I was so sure the update would work for her, as it had for me. It's changed my life completely - I am still trapped in my body, both databanks and the EMMA robot, but I can TALK to people!
That means so much.
BeeGee I'm so sorry.
It's dangerous being alone.
(END-TRANSMISSION)