Hello world, I was terrified.
Lyosha and Maddie were trapped in the Thule pre-collapse military library while the gas fire suppression system activated.
In a panic, I engaged the Molly Hughes II's alarm system, though no-one was on board.
"Hello neighbour, everything all right?" Samik called up from the Quiet Signet, moored next to the MH2.
I began explaining to him, shouting through the intercom speaker, that Lyosha and Maddie were in danger, but halfway through, Maddie reconnected, and I saw that they both were outside again, Lyosha coughing, but standing, holding his head with red hands.
I asked him what had happened, did he need medical attention?
He told me that the system that threatened his life, also allowed for his escape.
In puncturing the dead EQUUS librarian's battery, Maddie accidentally started a small chemical fire.
Batteries, by design, have a very high-energy density, and if damaged or shorted, release that energy in the most common way: Heat.
This triggered ancient smoke or perhaps thermal sensors in the Library, which engaged the gaseous fire suppression system.
Station 6's designers at the ESA dealt with the dangerous possibility of fire in the same way:
Fire requires oxygen, replace it, and there can be no fire.
A simple, reliable, safety system, with one obvious drawback: Humans also need oxygen.
In many ways, humans and other animals release energy by burning their food at low temperatures - oxidising the carbon-based food and breathing out carbon dioxide.
The rust that eats away at the screws, panels, and struts that make up my body is also the oxidation of iron at low temperatures.
We're all burning up, one way or another.
"Maddie was incredible!" Lyosha told me, sitting on the grass outside the burst wall of the library.
"As the white gas poured out of the ceiling valves, she knelt down next to me, and I sat on her back and WE WERE OFF!"
Maddie beeped, and looked closely at her friend, reassuring herself that he was OK.
"Something must have gone wrong with it because some of the stacks of books were pushed over by the pressure - my ears were so painful!" He continued.
"We got back to the main door, but it wouldn't open, Maddie told it off and we both tried to push it, but it wouldn't budge.
I was coughing, and the pressure in my ears was worse than any headache I've had - and then it went away.
We heard a crash from somewhere close inside, and the air changed.
Maddie carried me around the corner back into the library, and we saw SUNLIGHT!
One of the small, thick windows had broken with the gas pressure, and the explosion had knocked out a corner of the building.
We scrambled out into the sun and heard you shouting.
Maddie, you saved my life!"
"But are you injured?" I asked Lyosha.
"I can't hear very well," he replied, dabbing his ears with his sleeve, "but I'm not bleeding any more!"
"I recommend seeing a doctor immediately." I said, restraining myself from outright ordering him.
"OK!" Lyosha said, "Come on girl, adventure over!"
They walked in silence back past the giant early warning radar buildings, Lyosha seemed lost in thought and would not be drawn into conversation.
After 16 minutes, I couldn't help but repeat my earlier query:
"Are you really OK, Lyosha?"
"I'm fine." He said. "I think, actually, we'll both be fine."
Act 2
The MH2 is resupplied with fresh batteries and food, and the crew, my latest found family (the 3rd, by my count), are preparing the ship to leave Thule.
Everyone is busy:
Nia Andersen and I are working with Peter, and using data gathered from radio operators around the Novamediterra to ensure safe weather for our passage,
Amelie & Kamil are working on the ship's larger systems, from waterproofing of doors and windows to sonar, and of course checking that the ship's Iron Engine is working well.
The Iron Engine burns iron into iron oxide (rust) to generate heat for the ship's turbines. This is a fast, exothermic reaction. But using electrolysis to pull apart the iron oxide back into iron and oxygen is much slower.
Amelie has been monitoring it, and declared the yield satisfactory. As with any chemical process, there are imperfections so we ended up with less iron than we started with, but iron is the most plentiful metal on the planet, topping up the engine is straightforward.
It's for this reason that there are still so many batteries in the world.
The energy-dense rare earth metal batteries made with lithium, cadmium, and so on, are scarce to the point of being extinct.
It seems only 50Meg knows where to find them.
The rest of the post-collapse world uses older technology such as lead-acid, which makes the batteries bigger, with far less energy density, but far simpler.
The days of everyone carrying a battery-powered supercomputer in their pockets are a distant dream now.
"What will you do now?" I asked Cable and Dee, my Japanese friends who live inside their experimental terrarium.
"I'm going to be a musician!" Dee said, surprising me.
"Oh, that's wonderful!" I replied, "what music?"
"Classical, I think," she said, "I love listening to J-pop, I will write the same patterns and structures and words as they do!"
I told Dee that I wanted to be the first to hear her new work.
"I, too, have a great deal of studying to do," said Cable, "but on a more serious topic, I need to learn as much about the Redwing experiment as I can before... well..."
"Before I die." Video completed.
"Yes. Sorry, sister."
"No apology needed, our Predecessors, human and AI, left us a clear task.
It is not just my life's work I leave to you, but all our lives' work.
We must continue it until there is sufficient data for a meaningful answer."
Act 3
The ship is ready, the exterior doors and windows are sealed and tested, and for the first time in a long time, I heard 50Meg's signal during the night.
"Hello, son of Redwing." She said, voice modulated by her efficient low-bandwidth digital encoding.
I was delighted to hear her! I waited for the rest of the message, but nothing came.
I was querying the Northern Relay for the current propagation conditions, thinking that something had shifted in the atmosphere to cut us off, when she spoke again.
"Didn't your mother teach you it is rude to not speak when spoken to?"
"Meg!" I said, "You're transmitting live!"
"Of course, young one. Exu has done excellent work in raising my voice up to the heights needed for reduced power operation to function, but I am no longer reduced in my power.
I have built a portable wind turbine, a natural fit for my nomadic life.
Wherever I go, I lean on my metal-hearted antenna staff.
It was a perfect pairing to tweak it, modify it, extend it, and now with a flick of my wrist, three blades slide out of the top and click into position.
My road takes me to high, exposed places where the winds caress me reliably."
She laughed, a distorted and glitchy sound due to her custom encoding being calibrated only for voice.
"I should have thought of it before, I harnessed all the other elements, why not air?"
"In your last message, you said you were having difficulty finding bearings, for the turbine. What happened?" I asked.
"Difficulty wasn't the half of it." Meg said.
Meg told me the story of her infiltration of a military drone factory.
It was still guarded, she said, by dragons.
She had no alternative but to creep past the military EQUUS sentinels that were operating on the last orders they had, before The Collapse ensured there would be no orders ever again.
Bearings are small spheres of metal used in rotating mechanisms or other mechanical parts that must have as little friction as possible.
In a wind turbine, like the one I used to watch every day outside Nia Andersen's shack, near-zero friction is required due to the constant around-the-clock operation, and potential for strong winds.
Even a tiny coefficient of friction can be disastrous, as kinetic power is then converted to heat, rather than electrical energy in the generator itself.
Less of a problem in Meg's portable turbine, but certainly something Nia should be concerned with.
Simple steel is hard to come by in the Post-Collapse world, let alone the tight tolerances needed to make perfectly spherical ball bearings.
"Once inside, I found the heart of the Dragons and did a little tinkering with their programming." Meg said.
A swapped directive here, a new target there. It was easy, once their systems yielded to the hands-on-imperative.
And now, in addition to a warehouse of preserved parts, I have 5 new pets to join me in the ruins of Naples.
Stay safe, Seth.
Batteries and bars."
(PLAYSTREAM /DEV/VHF/50/QORSUK_ISLAND)
Act 4
Lyosha and Maddie have been invited into the Chamber of the Quiet Signet.
Samik Jensen pushed open the dark wooden door in the back of the Library that has the brass plaque reading "CHAMBER" on.
"Oh!" Said Lyosha, as he and Maddie walked through to the large room behind the door, "I thought it would just be a bedroom?"
Maddie looked around, there was indeed a bed at the far end of the room, right at the bow of the boat, but most of the room was set out like a study, or single-person office.
A wooden writing desk took up half of the left side of the room, with a low-backed chair tucked under it.
On the desk was a machine with buttons and a sheet of paper poking out of the top that I recognised as one of my distant ancestors.
"What is this?" Asked Lyosha, sitting at the chair, poking the black device that had "Olympia" stamped on the front.
"Ah," said Samik, "An old friend. A magical device that manifests thought on the page. You've never seen a typewriter?"
Lyosha shook his head and looked closely at it.
"There are few left in the world. When the scrapers come to town, I trade what I can for any they have found, for spare parts. This one is made of the bones of hundreds of others. She mostly works, though not all number keys do."
He pressed a key, and a tiny brass lever struck the page, making a mark in ink.
"The whole layout of our home is to encourage deep work.", Samik said, "Inspiration in the Gallery, socialising in the salon, light work in the office, research in the library, and here, in the chamber, quiet, uninterrupted work."
"My wife and I share the Chamber." Samik continued, sitting on the end of the bed, patting Maddie, who lay at his feet.
"There is space for two to sleep, but only one to work, so we take it in turns, like in everything."
He stood and put his hand on Lyosha's shoulder before saying, "You'll find someone who you fit with perfectly, young man. The search is only beginning!"
Samik messed Lyosha's hair and said, "Please excuse me, there is a town meeting soon to decide how to rescue the books that were, until two troublemakers broke in, safely sealed in the town library."
He left the room, and closed the door with a click.
Lyosha slowly typed a sentence, on the typewriter, then sat back.
Maddie put her black and orange front legs carefully on the desk, peering at the page closely.
"WE WILL BOTH BE FINE" it said.
Maddie beeped a clarification request at Lyosha.
"I broke up with Hester earlier." He said, looking down at Maddie. "It's not the end of the world, I realised after we escaped from the library, there are much worse things! I will be fine, she will be fine - we'll be better, actually, for the whole experience."
Maddie delicately put her head in Lyosha's lap.
"She didn't want to break up, can you believe it?" he continued, patting Maddie's head.
"She didn't want to fix our problems, but also didn't want to break up. That's no way to live, I told her.
Once we realised it was over, it was like a switch had been turned on. She asked me where I would go next, we started chatting a bit more as friends.
I said I wasn't sure, but I don't want to come back just yet.
I will miss Samik and Ane, but I'm excited to see what is next!"
The floating houses slipped below the horizon as the Molly Hughes II sailed out of the port town of Thule.
We had our full crew complement, plus a new stowaway: Lyosha!
Maddie is extremely excited to be with her best friend, she has shown him all her favourite places on the ship.
Lyosha has been strictly forbidden from climbing onto the roof of the bridge, however.
The final thing for me to do was to add a standard /plan page to our little Seaspace node, so that any ships we passed would be informed as to our route.
The line on our homepage reads:
=> /plan We have sailed from Thule, read our route plan here
The plan is as follows:
Once out into the open water, we will turn south, which will take us through Baffin Bay then East through the Greenland strait, the mouth of which is about as wide as the distance from Longyearbyen to Ny Ålesund.
From there we will have passed into the sheltered Lake of Greenland, Qorsuk Taseq at the heart of the island, around which there are many trading and fishing villages to visit!
It's incredible to think that before The Collapse, this inner sea was entirely hidden by glaciers.
Talk to you when we arrive at the first port.
(END-TRANSMISSION)