S1E26 - Hipatia - A Little Unsettled

There is, unfortunately, no escaping physics. Bound by the speed of light, even information must take its time to get birth going. And as we move farther into the void, that time grows until the distance becomes unspeakable.

Sergeant? Okay, so I just sent you a message, but, well, something happened, and I'm I'm less sure I'll be able to respond as regularly as I'd hope to. Do you remember how I said the engine deck is fully sealed off? Like the sensors show, everything to be normal, but I've got no way of accessing it? Well, I was lying in bed the other night, and I had a troubling thought. Given the environmental controls of the ship are my responsibility, I know full well that although everything is geared to work and maintain things as as best they can, there's always variables in a system. There's always some slight fluctuation jitter in the readings. Nothing's ever the same all the time. The sensor readings from the engine deck are too normal. I've not been monitoring them all the time, but I check in on them every couple of days or so. And there's been no variation in any of the readings I've taken? Absolutely none. It's all far too tickety boo for my liking. So I can't sleep, and I decide to get up and run an experiment. The environmental controls are still open to me, so I try something minor. I lower the temperature by two degrees, I input the command, and I wait several hours. And the sensor readings are still steady at the standard compartment temp. I mean, it's hard to bleed heat in space, so maybe it's just too small of a difference to register in that space of time. So I attempt something a little more drastic. Foolhardy. I tell one of the water pipes to vent just for a moment in one of the crawl spaces adjacent to the engine room. I'm as sealed off from them as I am from everywhere else on the deck. But crucially, the main compartment isn't. There are various vents, and a release of that much water, even briefly, like a puddle, should see a spike in the relative humidity, possibly enough to trigger an alert. The results? Nothing. Not even the slightest tick upwards. So I'm a little unsettled, and there could be dozens of reasons why I didn't see the change I expected to. But without access to anything other than the sensor telemetry, I'm limited in what I can observe. There's no new diagnostics I can run, I can't access the security cameras. But then I remember some of the crawl space is down there, real tight, like the sort you'd have to wriggle like a worm to traverse. I mean, they are not the sort of places you want to do a standard maintenance circuit on, unless you were really sure there was an issue and you already knew what the issue was before you ventured in. So to help combat that, they installed maintenance monitors, which include cameras, which are slaved to my system rather than security. And sure, looking at a long, narrow tube filled with pipes and cables probably isn't going to be enlightening, but some of them are installed next to the vents, some of them are installed next to open vents, so I'm really hoping you can see the attachments. It's a set of still images. I figured they have more chance of making it through to you and corrupted than a vid file. But does that look organic to you? If you could respond as soon as possible, that'd be that'd be real good. I'm gonna go ahead and admit it. I'm pretty scared right now. Just message me back when you get this. Pleased.

Unspeakable Distance is an actual play podcast of communication delay by audio quinn a link to the game's. Itch IO page and credits for our players are available in the show. Notes linked to this episode. The this podcast has been a production of the Library of Cursed Knowledge Podcast Network.