Hello world, there are creatures here too.
After 24h in Stoneport, the Molly Hughes II and its crew sailed on to the most Northerly of the villages of the Inland Sea, Askehavn.
Our current location is a small, quiet village surrounded by a neat, cultivated forest.
Visible on the horizon of the Inland Sea are pillars of a pre-Collapse offshore wind farm.
The forest is grown for firewood and construction, which is processed by family-run sawmills and then picked up by the local trading ships that we see coming through nearly every day.
After trading for this important energy source, Captain Yeshi declared the remainder of the day, 'shore leave'.
While the rest of the crew took advantage of this free time in various ways, Lyosha and Maddie explored the forest around the little village.
And, just like in Stoneport, they also discovered strange biomechanical wildlife here.
While walking through a clearing between a lonely forest house and a large wood store, Maddie alerted Lyosha with a beep, and me with a notification packet.
Lyosha had been walking ahead of Maddie, and as he ran back, Maddie studied her find:
She was looking intently at a small, moving, creature.
"Ooh, what's that?" Lyosha said, as he knelt down in the long grass next to Maddie, who had folded her forelegs under her, to bring her face closer to the ground.
The creature was small, two-legged, and two-tailed.
The top match my pattern-recognition systems gave me was (:guess rabbit :confidence 34), hardly conclusive.
Its fur was a dark pastel blue colour, and each of its tails had a brighter blue ring about half-way down.
"We call them 'Yeeks'" A voice said, surprising us all.
Maddie's video feed blurred as she sprung away from the sound, and when it resolved, a dark-haired woman in overalls with tools poking out of her many pockets was standing next to them.
"Easy girl!" Lyosha said, "Sorry, she's just surprised - we were looking at this thing.".
He pointed to the ground between them, the woman looked down briefly, and then said, "Yeah, yeeks're everywhere, a bit of a pest really."
"Yeeks?" Lyosha repeated.
Maddie took a few steps back to the creature, zooming in the video feed with her feet.
The 'Yeek' was sitting back on its two legs, looking up at the three much larger figures above it with eyes illuminated by red LEDs.
"I'm Akna, by the way," The woman said, "I'm a forester for this part of the woods, that's my home behind you, are you hungry? I made a lot of potato bread yesterday."
"Yes, please! I'm Lyosha, and this is Maddie." He said, standing up straight.
It has been my experience that Lyosha is always hungry, and today seemed no exception.
"You're most welcome, and nice to meet you too, Maddie." She said, patting Maddie's head, registering as positive vibrations on the feed.
The three walked towards Akna's small, straw-roofed wooden house.
Before following Lyosha into the cottage, Maddie looked back at the field, and could still see the Yeek, its red eyes visible through the grass, watching them.
Act 2
As Lyosha ate fresh potato bread and told Akna of his adventures on the Molly Hughes II and family back on board the Provorny, I had time to think.
I don't often have this luxury.
Things are fine here, considering.
I'm safe enough.
Busy.
Always another task to do!
There's a list here as long as an arm.
(is that the expression, "as long as an arm"?)
A long list, is what I mean:
there's always someone to talk to,
some minor emergency happening on the ship,
or even simply a book in my databanks to enjoy.
That sort of thing.
I'm busy busy busy!
But... is busy enough?
Day-to-day I feel like I'm doing the right thing, I'm certainly doing urgent tasks.
But am I doing important ones?
The Eisenhower Matrix shows clearly there are four kinds of task:
Urgent and important
Urgent but not important
Not urgent but important, and
not urgent and not important
Urgent tasks are simple:
They Encompass both the day-to-day routines of maintenance and communication, but also critical emergencies such as power loss or helping a friend in need.
Important tasks are trickier:
Telling your mother you love her can, really, be done at any time.
It's not urgent, not even in the slow way food or charging is - you can skip a day, or two, or weeks, and there will be no immediate effect.
Important tasks, if ignored for too long, cause problems.
Wait too long to plant seeds, and you will miss the season,
Wait too long to read your collection of books, and you may have amassed too many to finish,
And if you wait too long to tell your mother you love her, she may not be around to hear it.
I have realised I am not spending enough time on important tasks, mostly, because I don't remember them.
Notifications ping urgent requests into my random access memory constantly - pain demands to be felt - but to know what is important, I must also make long-term memories in my tertiary storage systems.
Forgetting what I had decided to do is very similar to having no will, no agency.
There are changes I must make, but I don't yet know how to make them.
I wonder, do you ever have this problem, too?
Act 3
Akna told Lyosha about her village, and her trade: Wood, grown for energy.
The forest around her house and the village is made up principly of ash trees.
Easy for carpenters to work with, a great fuel for burning, and, in her opinion, it is the most beautiful wood.
Energy Forestry, Akna's vocation, is a vital part of Novamediterran life.
The people in the post-Collapse world have a long memory of the mistakes that led to the resource wars that started in 2078.
The burning of fossil fuels, even if it were an option today, is only ever talked about in the past tense, not as something to be re-kindled.
Akna showed Lyosha and Maddie around to the back of her house, where most of the cleared land was taken up by a large wooden building - a wood store.
"You have to split the ash a year before burning, ideally." She told them, as Maddie looked up at the neatly stacked blocks of wood.
"It's a waste to burn it when it's still full of water - your food won't cook very fast, and if you're not careful, it'll fill your house full of smoke!"
The smoke, of course, was the problem, specifically the carbon in it.
But it is possible, as the people of Askehavn demonstrate, to build a cyclical energy lifecycle around wood:
Burning the fuel to release the energy also releases carbon dioxide, but the process of growing the trees in the first place captures the carbon dioxide back into the trees again.
Energy forestry takes many forms in the Novamediterra, in addition to long-rotation forestry of trees such as ash, or sycamore, short-rotation crops are grown too, such as willow or poplar trees.
These short-rotation trees can be ready for harvesting in just a few years, and are used in some areas to make liquid fuel, ethanol.
Places like Askehavn are particularly suited for forestry because of their geography - the hills the village backs on to would make for poor farming land.
As my friend Ally discovered when her community was considering energy forestry for the first time, farming benefits far more from flat land, as there is more work, day to day, to be done, and so automation is more beneficial.
Large areas of forest can be managed by a single forester, like Akna, so while food is grown on the plains, the fuel to cook it, grows in the hills.
(PLAYSTREAM /DEV/SENSOR/ATMO3/CYCLES)
Act 4
Yeshi spent their 'shore leave' not on the actual shore.
They left on a small trading boat early in the afternoon and did not return until it was nearly dark.
Over dinner, in the Molly Hughes II's galley, they told us where they had been: To the offshore wind farm in the centre of the Inland Sea.
Strung between the ancient turbines is a village, spread out like a spiders-web, called Horns.
The crew of friends around the dinner table exploded in animated conversation after this revelation:
"How tall are the turbines?" asked Nia.
"Are their young people there?" asked Lyosha
"Does the electricity generation still work?" asked Amelie.
Maddie had no questions, but ran between the excitable people, happy for a game.
Yeshi held up their hands asking for quiet, finished a mouth full of fish stew, and explained.
Horns village, Yeshi said, is the biggest fishing port in the Inland Sea, and they talked to one of the skippers after he and his crew of 4 had come back from delivering their catch to the Sablelong market.
Mato Valdemar he was called, and he and his family had lived there since his grandmother started the family fishing trade.
The layout of the village was a jagged star shape, around a central large flat building.
Before The Collapse, it was used for accommodation for 64 or so permanent engineers for the wind farm's maintenance.
It would have had a helipad on the roof, and reserves of fresh water and food for many months at a time, there was even evidence of a gym and leisure facilities.
But Yeshi saw none of that, only hearing stories from the villagers.
What was there now was cosy wooden houses painted in bright colours, clinging to the giant turbines like tree houses.
(END-TRANSMISSION)
Lost Terminal is a NAMTAO production.
It is written & produced by Tris Oaten,
Credits narrated by Lucy Stringer
Thank you so much to our Patreon producers:
Ada Phillips
Kit
Jade Felicity Bilkey
Stephen McCandless
Mike Schneider
Trixie !
and to all our patrons!
Follow us on mastodon @[email protected],
subscribe to the podcast on
Spotify, iTunes, or your favourite network.
For bonus content and other perks,
support us at patreon.com/lostterminalpod
that would be lovely of you!
Lost Terminal will return next week