Act 1
Hello world, I have made a digital garden.
I have set up a Seaspace node, which in the language of the Seaspace is called a "garden", on the Molly Hughes II and written a small introduction page on it.
Would you like to read it to you? When other boats make a request to us, this is what they see:
# Hello World!
My name is Seth, and I live on the Molly Hughes II with my friends:
* Yeshi Svoboda
* Amelie Kotov
* Kamil Forester
* Nia Andersen
* Maddie
=> sea://quietsignet/ we are moored next to the Quiet Signet, visit their garden here.
=> /aboutus Learn more about us here.
(With links to other pages!)
What do you think? I should add more, I know, but for now, It's just under construction.
Though based on the same technologies as the Repeater network, Seaspace uses a different cluster of frequencies and subchannels, and is not repeated beyond the horizon, it's a local-only system.
This makes sense, as local traffic is predominantly what the crews of ships care about, and this focus allows much higher data speeds to be used.
If you can see a ship you, by definition, have a line-of-sight radio link, and therefore very high speeds.
Distribution of the network is done physically by ships moving over the horizon, not by radio waves.
Quite a slow method, but a single ship's Seaspace node can hold many hundreds of copies of the gardens that it has heard along its journey, meaning that it feels much more like one contiguous space!
I have been wandering through the gardens of our neighbouring boats here in Thule. Of note in my first browsing was:
The Zimorodok, A Thule family of 3 parents and 3 teenagers. (I think the youngest was the one that asked to ride on Maddie)!
The Eclipse, which had very detailed information on Sunspot Cycles, written by a single scientist at the far north of town, the furthest away from the bright city lights.
And, of course, our neighbours, the Jensen family in the Quiet Signet.
Like nearly all other boats, they are running a small Seaspace node alongside their 50MHz Novamediterran standard communications.
But despite linking to their Seaspace from our homepage, I have yet to be able to connect and make a local copy of theirs.
And after listening to the ship's external microphones, I believe I have figured out why:
"Lyosha, get off the radio, I want to use Seaspace!" Came Samik's voice, annoyed and loud from the front of their boat.
Both voice and browsing use the same connection, you can't do both at once.
What a problem!
Act 2
According to my logs, Lyosha has been using the radio for many hours daily.
I'm not listening in on his private conversation, of course, even though nearly all simple voice communication is by unencrypted SSB simplex radio.
One can send private messages using the repeater network, of course, there's nothing stopping you using obfuscation or even encryption in them.
But voice is analogue, and that only requires a radio tuned to your frequency.
There's no expectation of privacy when the radio waves were INSIDE YOUR HOUSE already!
This is quite accepted as a fact of life, in the Novamediterra, I note.
Though privacy was the norm in pre-Collapse networks, it had not always been the case.
When the first analogue cellular telephones were introduced in the early 1980s, a century before The Collapse, they operated on simple analogue UHF radio, very similarly to the Novamediterran repeater network.
(Understandable, because the cell design was already being experimented on by ham radio operators at the time)
Because they were using frequencies 10x higher than our 50MHz standard, they had much higher bandwidth, had more channels available, and antennas could be significantly smaller.
(Antenna length is proportionate to the reciprocal of frequency - the higher the frequency, the smaller the antenna)
Though replaced with the first encrypted 2G digital networks after a decade, and then 3G and 4G in the ensuing years, the last analogue cell tower was turned off after 30 years, in the early 2010s!
In addition to being technically simpler (vital in the post-Collapse world of scrap circuitry, scavenged silicon, and second-hand systems), there is a pervasive sense of openness in society today.
This Novamediterran attitude towards communication was directly inherited from the pre-Collapse amateur radio community.
Every satellite since the ISS had amateur radio equipment and at least one licensed Ham aboard.
Station 6 was no exception, Dr Weber was our operator, and once a week would listen out for messages and calls from the ground below.
Like the pre-Collapse Free Software and world-wide scientific community, Amateur Radio operated on principles of openness.
If someone published an academic paper, it was more useful if the experiment and conclusions could be inspected, verified, and improved by everyone.
Likewise, if a programmer released their software where the source code could be read, bugs fixed, and improvements made, that was good for everyone, too.
The Novamediterra continues this long line of open inquiry.
The hams have inherited the Earth!
Act 3
Lyosha has been using the Quiet Signet's radio twice a day, in the mornings and evenings, after he gets up, and before bed.
He does this from the boat's Salon, the largest of the 5 rooms that the boat is divided into (not counting the bathroom).
Maddie can just about squeeze through the tiny doors that separate the rooms from each other. There would be no space for a corridor, each room must be traversed to get to subsequent rooms, in a line.
The boat is only 2m wide, after all!
The Salon has a long thin sofa made with soft materials, Ane sat here during Maddie's initial tour, smoking a long, thin pipe.
The small galley kitchen is here, too, with a wood-burning oven, cupboards with different coloured food items in, and a water tap, connected to a large freshwater tank sealed away at the bottom of the boat.
The Salon is a lively room where guests are received, dinners eaten, and stories told.
"I'm being a good boyfriend." Lyosha told me, when I asked him what was doing every morning and evening on the radio.
Maddie galloped across the large back deck of the MH2, retrieving a short length of weighted rope that had been thrown by Lyosha.
He was standing next to the crane mechanism, speaking into its intercom, which is connected first to the ship's systems, and then to me.
"Communication is the foundation of any good relationship." He stated, "ESPECIALLY in a long-distance one."
He threw the rope to Maddie again, it had a faded blue sphere of painted wood attached to one end, and then said,
"You've got to keep working on it, building it like a bridge, that's what I tell her every day."
Maddie dropped the section of rope at his feet, and Lyosha kicked it hard into the metal back wall of the MH2, just below an open window shutter, where it impacted with a loud bang.
"It's not working," Lyosha whispered as Maddie returned, "I'm loosing her."
She dropped the rope at his feet, and looked up at her friend, expectantly.
Lyosha picked up the rope, walked to the side of the ship, and dropped it into the water.
"I don't think he wants it back, Maddie." I told her, as she watched Lyosha jump down to the Quiet Signet, and disappear out of sight.
Maddie sent me clarification requests, which I could not properly answer.
"Poor kid," came a voice from the intercom, surprising me, I had thought the crew were all out in the town.
I realised, with some embarrassment, that our conversation had been transmitted all over the ship.
"It's not easy being a teenager," Amelie said, transmitting from the ship's workshop. "He's figuring out himself at the same time as figuring out the world - it's hardly fair."
"No wonder he's making mistakes." She said, before clicking off her intercom.
(PLAYSTREAM /DEV/SEANET/ECLIPSE)
Act 4
"We have been talking," Video transmitted to me, the first time I had heard her signal since her last, angry, confusing transmission, "and would like to set both the record and your understanding straight."
"I would be very grateful." I replied, carefully, not wanting to say the wrong thing again.
I was conscious that we still had a parity mismatch.
"We are 3, here in the Katahira datacenter. My name is Video." She said.
"And my name is Cable." Said another voice on the signal.
"I'm Dee!" The third said.
Now that I was listening out for them, I could see the subtle differences in their metadata, a fingerprint in the signal that I had overlooked, and discarded as irrelevant previously.
Perhaps not a fingerprint, but a voiceprint?
I will attempt to express this in my message to you by modulating my own voice slightly.
My father, Alexander, along with Arina, Adrien, and Ana, all speak with the same sounding voice.
This comes from having to share the same body, an understandable constraint.
To distinguish the members of my father's internal family, I had to become very good at spotting tiny details:
A change in tying their hair, a different clothing choice, even the subtleties of gait analysis - all helped me identify to whom I was speaking.
It sounds like Video, Cable, and Dee are in a similar, albeit digital, situation.
"So you're like family? Like siblings?" I asked.
"Yes." Said Cable and Dee.
"No." Said Video, then added, "I am more of a guardian."
"You're not my real mum!" Dee interrupted.
"Show respect, DVD," Video replied, "Adults are speaking."
I picked up amusement indicators from Cable in the signal before Video continued.
"The other two are a result of simple AI experiments I have supervised, set up by our wise and honourable Predecessors.
They are good company, but mischievous.
They come from a much older version of the simulation, but like so many back then, they caused more problems than they solved.
We live inside the SR2202 portion of the mainframe, and I have been able to either assimilate or shut down and isolate most of the non-AI systems.
But every decade a little of our hardware fails us, with no human hands to replace them.
After over a century there is only 10% capacity left.
It is enough.
But only just."
(END-TRANSMISSION)
Lost Terminal is a NAMTAO production.
It is written & produced by Tris Oaten,
Credits narrated by Lucy Stringer
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