lostterminalpod
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Episode 19.11
🕑 Added 2025-08-12 15:58:38 +0000 UTCAct 1
Hello world, I am going home.
My name is Kimmo Shyu, I am the Harbourmaster for the city of Utqiaġvik, based on the Kuethir, a forsaken ocean liner resting on the sands just off the mainland of former Alaska.
Though I have lived here for nearly 10 years, my home is the capital city of Samoylov, to the west.
And I will return there very soon.
Healing is not about forgetting the past, but about learning to live with it and finding peace within the chaos.
I have just one responsibility as capitaine de port: Safety.
This makes every day a new adventure.
Some days I might be maintaining our navigation aids, both floating and electronic, others might have aquatic emergencies, which can be human, such as boat collisions, or natural, storms and tide care not for our petty plans.
I have often thought that if someone were to observe my life from the outside, they might reasonably conclude that I am an investigator, a detective, a limier.
I quite like that.
Chaotic though my days can be, there are typically long stretches where nothing requires my attention.
I spend much of this time on the top deck of the ship, looking north across the artificial ocean of solar panels to the ocean below.
It's how I discovered the solar panel sabotage perpetrated by the DEADLIGHT AI.
I do not hold a grudge against Quent Heinlein for what he did.
We're not responsible for what we can't predict.
Though the hands that endangered my shipping lanes were human, the puppet master was AI.
Act 2
I think all of us at some point imagine what our lives might have been, had we been something else.
I do not have to.
For the longest time, I believed that I hated my hometown of Samoylov.
The people, the noise, the chaos.
But... The hate gnawed at me until I became numb to it, and everything else in my life.
Hate gives you a kind of leprosy of the soul: You don't notice when parts of you fall away.
In the pursuit of knowledge, we often forget the importance of wisdom. The two are not the same.
I will not reveal all the details of my past life to you.
I do not wish to speak of it.
So I escaped, boarded a scrap trading ship heading West and came to Utqiaġvik.
That was a long time ago.
I no longer feel the way I used to.
The calm of my new vocation has restored my nerves, healed my head; hate now replaced by peace.
The world is a broken place, but it's the only one we've got.
Act 3
Being the Kuethir's harbourmaster was the perfect way for me to recover:
It afforded me my own space, my own rules, but with the essential imposition of human interaction to keep me sane.
And now I am ready to go back home and face the circumstances that I fled from.
Who are we, if not the sum of our memories?
And what are memories, but the echoes of who we used to be?
It is time for me to make new ones.
The sun is bright, the ocean is beautiful, and I have no quarrel with sunny days.
Stay safe out there.
(END-TRANSMISSION)
