The Voice Under the Ice
A science-fiction novel told by KASPAR, the control system of a station deep in Antarctica: no hands, twelve seconds per letter – and an operations log no one has read in thirty-nine years. The first volume of the Unknown Latitudes cycle.
- Cycle
- Unknown Latitudes · Volume 1 (of 3 planned)
- words
- 30,672
- Reading time
- ~2.5 h
- Formats
- EPUB · PDF · PRINT
- Price
- E-book $2.99 · Paperback $9.99
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Reading sample
I have no hands.
That is the first sentence I have to say about myself for everything else to make sense. People who speak to me for the first time take it for a figure of speech, for a kind of modesty. It is a technical statement. I can regulate the temperature in fourteen rooms to a tenth of a degree, I can start a diesel generator, close a valve, brake a winch. But I cannot pick up a screw that is lying on the floor. I cannot hold a cable. I cannot hold on to anyone who is falling.
Everything that was saved in this story was saved by hands. I was only the voice in between.
They christened me KASPAR, which officially stands for Kernel for Assistance, Supervision and Polar Autonomous Robotics. That is one of those acronyms you build backwards, after you have decided on the word. Ines told me later where the name really comes from: Kaspar Hauser, a young man who stood in a city one day without knowing where he had come from, and who had to learn language before he could tell anyone what had happened to him.
From the first chapter