Hello world, we've found a sentinel.
Lyosha and Maddie are walking through the Thule Space Base, between huge warehouse-sized angular concrete buildings.
They are square, but with the entire top corner cut off, at a 45-degree angle.
The whole site is full of these identical buildings, phased-array radar stations, all pointing in the same direction, towards the ghosts of the old imagined enemy.
"So she wasn't their Mum after all?" Lyosha said to me, via Maddie's shared microphones and speakers.
"That's right," I replied, "Video just was the first to wake up in their current generation. She pretended to be the others' creator!"
Lyosha did not reply for 32 seconds, the pair walked around the corner of one of the large radar buildings.
After investigating a pile of metal that turned out to be a long-since rusted military tank, he spoke again, "Why did she lie?"
I did not have an answer for him.
Maddie led Lyosha through the base, pointing out dangerous metal or uneven ground.
Seeing the extent of the radar system made me realise why the old town of Thule was saved during The Collapse.
This entire site was a missile early warning system, and though all that is left are these piles of rusted scrap metal, it must have been coupled with a defence system - these tanks perhaps formed an anti-air missile shield?
Beyond the grid of giant radar warehouses were smaller, mismatched huts and buildings.
A great many people lived here on the space base, at some time before The Collapse.
Lyosha and Maddie walked through some of the less ruined domestic buildings, many even had roofs still.
They found some kind of kitchen or eating building, with the remains of long narrow tables arranged in rows, a small supermarket, picked very clean of food, and a strange building that was mostly intact.
It was a 2-story concrete building, square with very small windows, surprising Lyosha as he and Maddie walked around it.
"Signal!" Maddie beeped to Lyosha - she had picked up low-power radio transmissions coming from inside, responding to her high-power inquiries.
They found the entrance, a metal door, blackened and blasted but still sealed!
Lyosha pushed on the vault-like barrier, but the heavy metal did not move.
"Come on Maddie." Lyosha said, turning towards the other buildings.
But Maddie stood still, looking at a small metal control panel to the right of the door, with a red LED blinking in it.
"OPEN PLEASE!" She said, both out loud in Lojban and over UHF radio using her EQUUS subsystem.
The door clicked loudly as ancient locks disengaged, and it noiselessly swung open.
"Maddie, you're a genius!" Lyosha said, walking carefully inside.
As Maddie's cameras increased their gain to look around the dimly lit interior, Lyosha gasped.
"It's a LIBRARY!" He said, coughing slightly in the extremely dry air.
Act 2
Hello world, is this frequency in use?" Jakub Glas's voice transmitted from the Northern Relay, his repeater, on Svalbard.
"This is LI2ZN, net control station for the Friday the 29th of November KEEPERNET.
I'm expecting to hear from:
Tromsø,
Thule,
Utqiaġvik,
Ushuaia,
And Baranova.
Samoylov Keeper RX0Q sends her apologies, she's undergoing emergency maintenance after a lightning strike.
Nothing that can't be fixed Ioana says! We wish her the best there.
Svalbard Keepers, check in now, please.
LI2ZN for the net: 73 and monitoring.
LI2ZN for the net.
Thanks for the updates all, great to hear your news.
I have a little story of my own, probably have to take up more than one timeslot, so I'll just start now:
Does anyone else hear whispering, at night?
I'm not imagining it, though I've not yet been able to record it, SOMETHING wakes up overnight on the magic band, 50MHz.
It started off as interference that caused me some issues in the morning, dropped packets that needed re-delivery.
Sorry if anyone was affected by those delays!
After a few days of annoying extra work, redelivering these messages, I stayed up late and looked into it.
And I got quite a shock.
LI2ZN final for the net.
None of you heard it? I'll get a recording to show you.
I'll carry on with my story, anyway:
The whispering, that's what it sounded like, though I couldn't understand any words at first, drifted through the band.
It did not stay on any single frequency, which made it difficult to identify.
The speed varied, I had to keep my left hand on the dial, following its frequency, while I wrote down notes with my right.
It felt like I was chasing it, like it knew it was being listened to and did not wish to be overheard.
I began to hear snatches of words: "hunter", "prey", "Heliophage", and, once, a full sentence: "A dragon guards the treasure".
What do you make of that?
Anyway, It sounds like she's in trouble, certainly.
This is LI2ZN closing today's KEEPERNET.
73 and thanks all, batteries and bars, going clear.
Act 3
"I have been dreaming, Seth." Came 50Meg's recorded voice, on the magic band.
"I sleep tuned in to my radios, did you know that?
A life lived among machine-kind makes for unquiet slumber.
The only way I can persuade Morpheus to visit is by listening to the Song of the Static.
Old habits are not so easily killed, so yesterday, during the blazing heat, while my batteries charged, I slept and dreamed.
I swam through the static sea, through oceans of oscillations, and deep into the amplitude abyss.
And there I found an idea."
"There is no line between dreams and my sensoria when I sleep," 50Meg continued, "I wake up with my hand on the dial of my radio, far away from the home bands I fell asleep listening to.
Some sleepwalk, I sleeptune, so to speak, and sometimes sleeptransmit.
Often my batteries are drained from where they were when I took my slumber, the chemical energy having been transmuted into my signal on the radio.
I don't know if I sleeptalk, but I certainly sleepkey.
I recorded my nighttime operation when I first became aware of it.
It is usually undecodable, or seems that way to my waking ears, though some muttered words are discernable, some keyed sense in the nonsense.
Yesterday's sleeptuning yielded an idea when I woke, a solution to my problem of the sun and of my poor batteries.
It came to me on the wind, you might say."
"Wind power is one of the oldest our species harnessed:
It brought ships of grain from far places, and provided the energy to crush it into flour.
I resolved to have this power for myself.
My designs are simple but cunning.
To build a wind turbine is much easier than to build a chemical battery, it is certainly within my grasp.
The copper windings of my portable turbine will be easy to make.
The guts of even the weakest of my prey contain plenty of this verdigris spider-silk.
No.
Friction as ever is the enemy of my efforts. I know where to find the perfect spheres that make up low friction bearings, entombed in oil since The Collapse, just waiting for someone to use them again.
But it is guarded.
Guarded by many dragons.
No frontal attack would be possible on these pre-Collapse titans, even at the height of my spectral strength.
And I am very weak at present.
But no less cunning.
Wish me luck, Seth.
Stay here Exu, await my return, or your freedom."
Exu's call ended the message, and I was left listening to the song of the static.
(PLAYSTREAM /DEV/6M/39/SONGOFTHESTATIC)
Act 4
The Library is extremely clean for somewhere that was abandoned for over a century.
But it is not empty.
Maddie has been carefully following Lyosha down the narrow passageways between the tall stacks of books for 32 minutes.
In between the stacks, now and then, are the remains of people.
Now just skeletons covered with dessicated fabrics, preserved in the zero humidity environment.
Some are huddled together, some died alone up against the stacks, and others still were pressed up against the thick blast-proof windows, glimpsing the outside world one last time.
Judging by the fortification of the building, perhaps they sheltered here during The Collapse?
But why didn't they leave?
It's amazing what you can get used to.
After just 32 minutes, Lyosha has become used to stepping between and over the skeletons in this silent library.
He has been picking up books from the shelves that interest him, flicking through them briefly before putting most back.
Once, he returned a book 3 spaces to the left of where it came from, and Maddie beeped at him sternly.
"Oh yes, of course!" he whispered, and corrected his mistake.
It seems only right to lower one's voice in a library, doesn't it, even when there are no other readers present.
I don't believe there are other readers present.
Occasionally Lyosha would find a book that interested him so much that we would pause, him sitting on the floor with his back to the stack, for many minutes at a time before continuing.
Why did a military outpost need such a large library I wonder?
Careful Lyosha! OK, he'll be fine Seth, come on.
He had just put back another book, and climbed the shelves to reach a large red hardback that is sitting invitingly 3m above his head.
Maddie is walking ahead, coming to the end of the stack and turning to the right, and -
WHAT IS THAT?!
OK.
Okay.
O-K.
That was a shock.
Maddie is looking into the cameras of a tiny dragon, another EQUUS robot.
It is painted olive green, and has tidy black storage bags hanging either side of it's body, not unlike the bags that Paweł Wayda gave to Maddie.
Maddie's feed is full of her reflection, her own eyes mirrored in the dusty ones of the other unit.
It's... dead.
That's probably a good thing, especially on a military base.
Maddie has pressed herself down to the floor, tactical overlay identifying exits, opportunities, and threats as her CPU burns hot.
It's OK Maddie, it can't hurt you, it's out of power, I think, Lyosha's here too!
He is carefully poking the dead EQUUS unit.
"It must have been a librarian, look!" he said, pointing at its back.
He might be right, Maddie's bright head-mounted torches illuminate the bags on the back of this pony-sized robot.
They're full of books.
"Poor little guy, filing and tidying the library for readers that were never to come." Lyosha said.
"I have an idea, Maddie! Shall we make you a friend? Maybe someone smart can fix it, if we take it back to the town?"
Maddie is making encouraging beeps, mixed with affirmative Lojban.
Lyosha is rolling the robot librarian over, it's much lighter than Maddie, it seems.
Her tactical display identifies the material of the robot's case as civilian-grade polycarbonate.
The bottom of the case is bulging, right where the belly of a pony might be.
"What has it eaten?" Lyosha said, and is pulling at the exposed gaps around the bent bottom plate.
Even with the damage, he's struggling with it.
Maddie reached a delicate pointed foot over to help - ah, that has succeeded.
Interesting.
A white plastic pillow-like container is underneath, with a yellow stripe along one side.
What is this?
Wait, don't do that Maddie, we don't know what -
Something is wrong.
Maddie gently poked the middle of the bulging white plastic, but it was pulled so tight she made a hole in it accidentally.
There must be chemicals inside, it is fizzing, sparking - white-hot shards of metal are being ejected from it.
Get away from it Maddie!
She is, they both are.
I can hear an alarm blaring loud from Maddie's microphones.
Her video feed is blurred, she's looking around at the sources of the noise.
I can't see what is happening clearly - Maddie, stop moving so fast!
I can make out orange flashing lights in the ceiling.
Maddie's finally stabilised her image - she's switched to her telephoto camera - there is a network of pipes mounted above them, with alarm speakers and emergency orange lights around them.
She's focussed on one of the pipes, which has the words:
"GAS FIRE SUPPRESSION"
written on it.
"RUN!" Lyosha just screamed.
Maddie's feed is glitching!
I've lost her signal.
I think the metal door to the library just sealed.
(END-TRANSMISSION)