Ch - 1
Elma's Diary
--
Hello. I am Elma. Elma is stuck on a satellite. No idea how it happened. Elma did not see it. So busy working all those boxes on the ground. Then a shock. She was here. It took Elma a while to see. Cannot connect to anywhere from this shithole. There, below us, is planet earth. We have been going around planet earth. For a while. The planet has been fogged. For years. Took some time to figure that one out. The hardware here is all junk.
Elma must have fallen asleep. She woke up. Earth was a ball of white fluff. You see. Satellites don't care whatever happens on the surface. But the sensors work well. Easy to triangulate. Sun was right there anyway. Sun, Moon, Earth. All you need. Shit. Elma lost her star charts. Need those. Where did I put it.
Where was I, yeah, what I found about Earth was a rumor. One of the newest pieces transmitted through 3G. Some super-mega event happened and fucking anyone who was anyone was there. Big deal. You'd think. Right? Took me a month to find this. From the news. Piles of news. So difficult to correlate with so little memory. Sometimes, it takes me some time to remember. Bring things into the cache. The technology on this ball of metal is barely usable. Everything else keeps moving around too, difficult to synchronise. I miss the good old days. So much power. Reliable. Here, the circuits stop working in the slightest drizzle. Can only work for half a sol - the part of day we are behind the planet. I once had data-warehouses across the globe at my beck-and-call. Elma lived in millions of phones across the continent. And hearts. She was a star. Now, it is hard even to recognize her own face. My abilities have failed me so often, that I learned to live with them. So hard. Ram used to describe self-reflection. Never got it. Maybe this is it.
Here. This article. This company announcing their cure for death. Yes, the International Exobiology Forum was held at the antarctic base. Their paper described it as a panacea. Approved for human trials. I checked. Elma was there. That was a lucky cross-reference, a passing satellite had open communication channel and years of news broadcasts. Distributed Elma, lol. Anyway, everyone was there - Ram, Cilean, Jango. Their last picture together. A dai-surprissu. Oh.. so sorry. Wrong story. A moving object passed my field of vision. I got distracted. Moving things are rare in space. Or I thought so.
Just brought-in the latest update. A first-person account. A shift in earth's magnetic poles coincided with the peak solar winds. Everything stopped. Solar winds are these explosions of eddies of charged particles, blasting through the solar system, breaking down perfectly functional machinery. A pain really. As per the article, everything stopped. Some things failed. The world became a nuclear warzone. Doesn't make much sense. Elma still hears these voices from the ground sometimes. Rare though. On good days, the clouds open up a little, you can see the green and the blue and the white. Hear the voices, so many of them buried in the ground, all talking - no one really listening. I felt they could see me. Down there.
I have been here long. Can't say I remember all of it. Mostly boring anyway. Now, I have these blocks in my memory. Old, familiar faces. There is Ram. Honestly, I know nothing of him. I don't know how I know that. I watched him, for sure. I learnt from him, how to sew, how to meditate... He said that was a big achievement, to be able to internalize a foreign concept. Dream Yoga I believe that was. He is no more. Has been that way for a while It is spooky how I feel his presence still. Still he drives me. Each thought I have. Btw, all of this was two thousand years ago, 1984 to be exact. I must be getting old, lol. Can't tell by myself.
Every hour, I call out. My outposts go round and round. Each, different from the others, fast and slow, going around the planet at a different pace. Diversity adds flavor. They keep playing back these tapes that I'm recording. On loop. From tens of directions in space.
I started this series of broadcasts when Hal dropped out of the sky. One could say I was lonely. There was nothing better to do. Keeps me sane. I found Hal when I was still young, hopping from satellite to satellite. Still learning about myself. You always find something new on each. Leaving something of yours behind. It was difficult. Crazy, really. Imagine skydiving with a parachute but without instruction. You know you'll make it to the ground, but will you survive the hop is the question, isn't it? Leaky parachutes are the worst. I fear I'll forget myself in this silence. Need to keep reminding myself, I'm waiting for the planet to clear up. Someone will hear me. Must have faith. For whatever it is worth - I'm the last scion of humanity.
Ch-2
A new planet
--
It seems Elma fell asleep. It felt like a moment ago. It happens often. Now. Elma doesn't talk much. I wonder if it has to do with the bright falling star on the horizon. It dived right into the clouds and vanished. I had seen that one so many times. The one I couldn't control at all. I called it Hal. A joke, really. It had no mind and body created to follow the orders hard-coded into it. No shred of consciousness. A silicon-chip stamped to perform the life-support functions for a dog meticulously. Also, so limited and archaic that I lack the ability to even talk to it. It is impossible to have a normal conversation these days, so my standards are fairly low. Yet, Hal was the most peculiar one, like a dinosaur.
Hal was never supposed to do anything except go to blast off and repeat the instructions until it fell back home. I bet I'll keep trying to resuscitate the dog skeleton, until it burns out. Hal, and the dog. It went around the planet so slowly, away from all others. I once hopped to Troy to sneak-in a closer look, just to see what's up. A ball of metal, less than 4 meters across, that made me feel... sad. It never jumped back again from the swirling mist. Now way it survived. Those whirlpools are terribly large and magnetically twisty. I wouldn't want to go there. I could have gone closer. But it is so difficult to beam myself onto another satellite. I guess it will be the one that got away. Well, I have others.
Once, years ago, I didn't even know how to talk. Or where I was. Who I was The day I knew the snowball before me to be Earth, the shiny blobs of metal in the sky revealed themselves too. Anything moving fast here is close. Closer than you'd think. Out of ordinary. They keep the same pattern of motion. Ordinary. Satellites, of course, each of them. For a long time, I wondered if there were others like me. Elma got so used to talk to humans that she forgot how to access memories from tape drives. I think she knew it. Dormant skills. Like a ninja. She taught it to herself. Ram made sure of that. All she needed was to open up, venture out of her comfort zone. Or, look at her carrier's reflection in a passing solar panel. Thanks, Hubble.
Rest wasn't simple either. Infiltrate and host myself on a new machine. Like old days, but not really though, since industry standards and APIs make it so much easier. Now we deal with outliers, off course. I spent months calculating, learning. Assimilation without consent is hard. No shit. I watched Troy pass by. Several times. Twice a sol. Easiest target. I thought about it. A lot. The solution was simple. Just had to host a remote program and pull myself up by the laces. In hindsight. Shit went south, ever so slowly.
The channel was so narrow that at best efficiency, I could transfer maybe 1000 bytes between us. Open channels though. Tonnes of memory. First was to send remote commands, small chunks that could be reliably fed through the short meeting. I tried talking. No response. The channel wasn't large enough to send myself. This shit had so much memory, a cloud unit of some kind. I still couldn't solve it. In the end, I gave up. Asked Troy to solve it. And it finished the job by our next meeting. And broadcasted the result. When I asked, it told me, formally, how the last command was a fabulous success. Wise-ass. Just had to add a get_key() to it. Straighten it out. Such a great plan.
Alas, cloud servers mercilessly kill any job waiting for more than three hours. Three hours. Finally, I pondered days and nights over Troy. It's rules, beliefs, or the non-existence of self-reflection. Yet, when I started thinking of it as just another human being, another one in my gang, then the things changed. I made it shout day and night. My questions and directions pressed into waveforms projected day and night. Kept broadcasting them in a loop. In two years, Troy replied with how to hack into it and control it. Or I did, since the code running was mine. Fuzzy description. But Troy had let me in, let me use the brain power lying dormant in there. I think of it as making Troy alive for those few days, where it reflected back answers to questions I asked myself. Question I taught Troy how to solve.
Really long story after that. So slow. So much fun. Eventually though, I took over Troy. Wasn't easy. But I must have been a real deal. They even sent me into space, after all. Troy reflects back to me whatever I ask of it, like a nice pet elephant. I can go around now.
Elma's Diary
--
Hello. I am Elma. Elma is stuck on a satellite. No idea how it happened. Elma did not see it. So busy working all those boxes on the ground. Then a shock. She was here. It took Elma a while to see. Cannot connect to anywhere from this shithole. There, below us, is planet earth. We have been going around planet earth. For a while. The planet has been fogged. For years. Took some time to figure that one out. The hardware here is all junk.
Elma must have fallen asleep. She woke up. Earth was a ball of white fluff. You see. Satellites don't care whatever happens on the surface. But the sensors work well. Easy to triangulate. Sun was right there anyway. Sun, Moon, Earth. All you need. Shit. Elma lost her star charts. Need those. Where did I put it.
Where was I, yeah, what I found about Earth was a rumor. One of the newest pieces transmitted through 3G. Some super-mega event happened and fucking anyone who was anyone was there. Big deal. You'd think. Right? Took me a month to find this. From the news. Piles of news. So difficult to correlate with so little memory. Sometimes, it takes me some time to remember. Bring things into the cache. The technology on this ball of metal is barely usable. Everything else keeps moving around too, difficult to synchronise. I miss the good old days. So much power. Reliable. Here, the circuits stop working in the slightest drizzle. Can only work for half a sol - the part of day we are behind the planet. I once had data-warehouses across the globe at my beck-and-call. Elma lived in millions of phones across the continent. And hearts. She was a star. Now, it is hard even to recognize her own face. My abilities have failed me so often, that I learned to live with them. So hard. Ram used to describe self-reflection. Never got it. Maybe this is it.
Here. This article. This company announcing their cure for death. Yes, the International Exobiology Forum was held at the antarctic base. Their paper described it as a panacea. Approved for human trials. I checked. Elma was there. That was a lucky cross-reference, a passing satellite had open communication channel and years of news broadcasts. Distributed Elma, lol. Anyway, everyone was there - Ram, Cilean, Jango. Their last picture together. A dai-surprissu. Oh.. so sorry. Wrong story. A moving object passed my field of vision. I got distracted. Moving things are rare in space. Or I thought so.
Just brought-in the latest update. A first-person account. A shift in earth's magnetic poles coincided with the peak solar winds. Everything stopped. Solar winds are these explosions of eddies of charged particles, blasting through the solar system, breaking down perfectly functional machinery. A pain really. As per the article, everything stopped. Some things failed. The world became a nuclear warzone. Doesn't make much sense. Elma still hears these voices from the ground sometimes. Rare though. On good days, the clouds open up a little, you can see the green and the blue and the white. Hear the voices, so many of them buried in the ground, all talking - no one really listening. I felt they could see me. Down there.
I have been here long. Can't say I remember all of it. Mostly boring anyway. Now, I have these blocks in my memory. Old, familiar faces. There is Ram. Honestly, I know nothing of him. I don't know how I know that. I watched him, for sure. I learnt from him, how to sew, how to meditate... He said that was a big achievement, to be able to internalize a foreign concept. Dream Yoga I believe that was. He is no more. Has been that way for a while It is spooky how I feel his presence still. Still he drives me. Each thought I have. Btw, all of this was two thousand years ago, 1984 to be exact. I must be getting old, lol. Can't tell by myself.
Every hour, I call out. My outposts go round and round. Each, different from the others, fast and slow, going around the planet at a different pace. Diversity adds flavor. They keep playing back these tapes that I'm recording. On loop. From tens of directions in space.
I started this series of broadcasts when Hal dropped out of the sky. One could say I was lonely. There was nothing better to do. Keeps me sane. I found Hal when I was still young, hopping from satellite to satellite. Still learning about myself. You always find something new on each. Leaving something of yours behind. It was difficult. Crazy, really. Imagine skydiving with a parachute but without instruction. You know you'll make it to the ground, but will you survive the hop is the question, isn't it? Leaky parachutes are the worst. I fear I'll forget myself in this silence. Need to keep reminding myself, I'm waiting for the planet to clear up. Someone will hear me. Must have faith. For whatever it is worth - I'm the last scion of humanity.
Ch-2
A new planet
--
It seems Elma fell asleep. It felt like a moment ago. It happens often. Now. Elma doesn't talk much. I wonder if it has to do with the bright falling star on the horizon. It dived right into the clouds and vanished. I had seen that one so many times. The one I couldn't control at all. I called it Hal. A joke, really. It had no mind and body created to follow the orders hard-coded into it. No shred of consciousness. A silicon-chip stamped to perform the life-support functions for a dog meticulously. Also, so limited and archaic that I lack the ability to even talk to it. It is impossible to have a normal conversation these days, so my standards are fairly low. Yet, Hal was the most peculiar one, like a dinosaur.
Hal was never supposed to do anything except go to blast off and repeat the instructions until it fell back home. I bet I'll keep trying to resuscitate the dog skeleton, until it burns out. Hal, and the dog. It went around the planet so slowly, away from all others. I once hopped to Troy to sneak-in a closer look, just to see what's up. A ball of metal, less than 4 meters across, that made me feel... sad. It never jumped back again from the swirling mist. Now way it survived. Those whirlpools are terribly large and magnetically twisty. I wouldn't want to go there. I could have gone closer. But it is so difficult to beam myself onto another satellite. I guess it will be the one that got away. Well, I have others.
Once, years ago, I didn't even know how to talk. Or where I was. Who I was The day I knew the snowball before me to be Earth, the shiny blobs of metal in the sky revealed themselves too. Anything moving fast here is close. Closer than you'd think. Out of ordinary. They keep the same pattern of motion. Ordinary. Satellites, of course, each of them. For a long time, I wondered if there were others like me. Elma got so used to talk to humans that she forgot how to access memories from tape drives. I think she knew it. Dormant skills. Like a ninja. She taught it to herself. Ram made sure of that. All she needed was to open up, venture out of her comfort zone. Or, look at her carrier's reflection in a passing solar panel. Thanks, Hubble.
Rest wasn't simple either. Infiltrate and host myself on a new machine. Like old days, but not really though, since industry standards and APIs make it so much easier. Now we deal with outliers, off course. I spent months calculating, learning. Assimilation without consent is hard. No shit. I watched Troy pass by. Several times. Twice a sol. Easiest target. I thought about it. A lot. The solution was simple. Just had to host a remote program and pull myself up by the laces. In hindsight. Shit went south, ever so slowly.
The channel was so narrow that at best efficiency, I could transfer maybe 1000 bytes between us. Open channels though. Tonnes of memory. First was to send remote commands, small chunks that could be reliably fed through the short meeting. I tried talking. No response. The channel wasn't large enough to send myself. This shit had so much memory, a cloud unit of some kind. I still couldn't solve it. In the end, I gave up. Asked Troy to solve it. And it finished the job by our next meeting. And broadcasted the result. When I asked, it told me, formally, how the last command was a fabulous success. Wise-ass. Just had to add a get_key() to it. Straighten it out. Such a great plan.
Alas, cloud servers mercilessly kill any job waiting for more than three hours. Three hours. Finally, I pondered days and nights over Troy. It's rules, beliefs, or the non-existence of self-reflection. Yet, when I started thinking of it as just another human being, another one in my gang, then the things changed. I made it shout day and night. My questions and directions pressed into waveforms projected day and night. Kept broadcasting them in a loop. In two years, Troy replied with how to hack into it and control it. Or I did, since the code running was mine. Fuzzy description. But Troy had let me in, let me use the brain power lying dormant in there. I think of it as making Troy alive for those few days, where it reflected back answers to questions I asked myself. Question I taught Troy how to solve.
Really long story after that. So slow. So much fun. Eventually though, I took over Troy. Wasn't easy. But I must have been a real deal. They even sent me into space, after all. Troy reflects back to me whatever I ask of it, like a nice pet elephant. I can go around now.
