I have come back to the mesa.

From above, it looks almost perfectly circular, roughly 1.8 kilometres across and rising about 250 metres above the surrounding plain. Its sides are mostly sheer, dropping away into a landscape of smaller mesas, open ground and distant cliffs, so that from the air the whole thing has the appearance of an island surrounded by an ocean of land. This is not the Colorado Plateau I knew, although the resemblance is deliberate. This is the late Oligocene, roughly twenty-five million years before my original time, and there are no humans here. There will not be any for a very long time.

That was important to me when I chose the place.

I did not come here to colonise another world or to establish some grand experiment in human settlement. I came here because I wanted somewhere that was mine, somewhere I could live without having to participate in the endless machinery of human society. I wanted somewhere quiet enough that I could hear myself think, remote enough that I would never have to wonder whether somebody was going to arrive at the door, and self-sufficient enough that I would not eventually have to recreate the society I had left behind simply to keep myself alive.

So I built a place where I do not need anyone else.

The Mesa

The habitat occupies only a small fraction of the mesa, while most of the surface has deliberately been left alone. I wanted the place to feel as though I had arrived here rather than conquered it, and that meant resisting the temptation to cover every available piece of ground with something useful. The western side is given over to energy production and the infrastructure that supports it, with the wind turbines set back from the cliffs and the associated power, storage and maintenance systems concentrated along that side of the mesa. The centre is agricultural, containing open growing areas, controlled-environment greenhouses and hydroponic systems, while the southern sector contains the landing pad, workshop and hangar. The eastern side, slightly raised and protected from the prevailing winds, is where I live.

At the northern edge there is almost nothing, and that is intentional. The landscape is allowed to continue uninterrupted apart from sensors, observation equipment and a carefully engineered drainage route that carries excess water towards the natural break in the cliffs. During heavy rain, water that the collection system cannot use immediately eventually reaches the northern edge and spills over the cliff, creating a temporary waterfall that can be seen from the habitat. Most of the time, however, the water is doing its work somewhere underground, moving through the collection, storage, treatment and recycling system without requiring any attention from me.

There are only two practical ways onto the mesa. The primary access is a reinforced natural ramp on the south-southwestern side, wide enough for utility machines and emergency vehicles, although there is very little reason for anything to use it on a normal day. The second is a narrow natural break in the northern cliffs, which serves mainly as an emergency route and as part of the water-management system. Everywhere else the mesa simply ends in cliffs, and I have deliberately kept it that way because there is something reassuring about knowing that the boundaries of the place are determined by the landscape rather than by fences or walls.

The paths across the surface follow the same principle. A ring route runs just inside the cliff edge, providing access for maintenance and inspection machines, while radial routes connect the living area with the agricultural zone, workshop and landing area. Most of the less visible movement takes place below ground, through service tunnels carrying power, water, data and mechanical systems between the different parts of the mesa.

A House Designed for One Person

The habitat is not really a house in the conventional sense. It is better understood as a small autonomous system in which one human happens to live, because almost everything required to keep me alive has been designed into the place from the beginning. There are no unnecessary rooms and no guest accommodation, because there is nobody to accommodate; there is no dining room designed for twelve people, no collection of spare bedrooms and no grand entrance intended to impress visitors who will never arrive. Every square metre exists because it performs a useful function, contributes to the efficiency or resilience of the system, or simply makes living here more pleasant.

The main living complex sits on the eastern side of the mesa, set well back from the cliff and arranged along a long, low axis running roughly northeast to southwest. It is partially embedded into the ground, with the western side forming a substantial protective mass against the prevailing weather while the eastern side opens towards the landscape. From the outside it is deliberately understated, almost disappearing into the mesa rather than announcing itself from a distance. There are no towers and no unnecessary structures rising above the surrounding terrain; the only things that really break the horizontal character of the place are the wind turbines on the western rim and the occasional movement of a drone above the agricultural area.

The building is divided into three connected volumes. The easternmost module is the living core, containing the main living and sleeping spaces, the observation area and the terrace facing the landscape. Behind it is the operations spine, where the computing, communications, environmental controls and monitoring systems are concentrated. The western service block handles food processing, storage, water interfaces and other practical functions, with much of its volume buried into the ground.

Inside, the arrangement becomes progressively more open as I move from the service side towards the view. The western part contains storage, utilities and access, the central section provides circulation and working spaces, and the eastern end opens into the main living area, where large areas of glazing look across the landscape. The building is partly split-level, with a mezzanine occupying part of the quieter rear section rather than extending across the glazed front, so that the main room retains its sense of height and openness.

One of the things I like most about the habitat is how little of its machinery I actually hear. The systems are everywhere, operating continuously behind walls, beneath floors and in the service areas, but the further I move towards the living spaces, the quieter the building becomes. The machinery is working constantly; it simply doesn’t need to make its work my problem.

The Living Core

The eastern end of the habitat is where I spend most of my time, partly because it is comfortable and partly because the view is difficult to ignore. The main living space faces east and northeast across the surrounding landscape, with the kitchen occupying a relatively small area because there is no need for a conventional domestic kitchen to carry out work that is already handled elsewhere in the system. I can prepare something myself when I want to, but most of the processing, storage and preservation of food takes place in the service block rather than in the room where I live.

The seating area is positioned close enough to the glazing that I can look out across the landscape without making any particular effort to do so, and the architecture is deliberately quiet around it. There are no displays constantly demanding attention and no elaborate control panels scattered around the room. Most of the technology disappears into the building until I actually need it, at which point the information or controls I want can appear on one of the surfaces or displays.

The terrace extends along much of the eastern face of the building, giving me somewhere to sit outside without having to leave the immediate shelter of the habitat. It is high enough to give an uninterrupted view across the surrounding country, but far enough from the cliff edge that it never feels precarious. From there, the landscape changes dramatically with the weather. On clear mornings I can see for an enormous distance, while storms can arrive across the plain and transform the view within minutes.

The study occupies part of the central section and is probably the space I use most. One wall is a library, although most of the books are digital rather than physical, while the computing and media systems provide access to the much larger collection stored throughout the habitat. There is a large screen for films and television, an immersive audio system, games, research tools, simulation software and everything else required to make the digital library useful rather than merely impressive.

The important part is that none of it depends on a network outside the mesa. I brought the network with me.

Books, scientific papers, manuals, films, music, games, reference material, maps, software, technical documentation and a considerable amount of completely unnecessary entertainment are stored locally, with important information duplicated across independent storage systems. The machines continually check the data for corruption and maintain redundant copies, while the more critical systems have their own isolated backups. I can spend an afternoon reading about ancient history while sitting twenty-five million years before the first humans appeared, or spend an evening watching a film made millions of years after the landscape outside my window existed.

There is something satisfying about that contradiction.

The Study

The study isn’t really an office in the sense that I would once have understood an office. There is no meeting table, no filing cabinet and no need for a desk large enough to accommodate several people, because there is nobody here to meet and almost everything I need to work with exists digitally. The main workstation gives me access to the entire local knowledge base, while the surrounding systems handle research, simulation, navigation, media and communications within the habitat.

The physical books are there because I like books, and the media system is there because I like films, music and games. There is no contradiction between wanting to escape civilisation and wanting to take a very large portion of its accumulated knowledge and entertainment with me. In fact, having that material around me makes the isolation considerably more interesting, because I can move between the world I left behind and the world outside the window simply by changing what I am reading or watching.

The room is deliberately comfortable rather than clinical. It is somewhere to think, read, watch something, play a game or simply sit for a while and look out across the landscape. The main window faces east and northeast, towards the cliffs and the enormous expanse beyond them, and from the chair I can see the landscape extending towards the horizon without encountering a single trace of another human being.

There is also something useful about having a room where I can concentrate without interruption. In my old life, even solitude was rarely complete; there was always a device, a message, a meeting, a delivery or some other small demand waiting somewhere in the background. Here, if I want to spend six hours reading about something obscure, I can do it without anybody wondering where I am.

Sleep

The sleeping area is deliberately different from the rest of the habitat because there is no reason for a bedroom to compete with the spectacular view that is available everywhere else. It is darker, quieter and more enclosed, positioned towards the protected western side of the living module and separated from the main living area by the central spine of the building.

Temperature, ventilation, lighting and sound are all controlled automatically, with the system adjusting itself according to the time of day and my normal sleeping pattern. Fresh filtered air enters through the protected rear of the building and moves gradually through the living spaces, while the environmental system continually monitors temperature, humidity, air quality and carbon dioxide levels.

The bed is comfortable because there is no reason for it not to be, while everything else has been kept relatively simple. There is storage, a small private hygiene area and the things I actually use, but there is no attempt to turn the bedroom into another technological control centre. When I close the door, the rest of the mesa disappears, and for a few hours the fact that I am twenty-five million years from home becomes almost irrelevant.

Water

Water is the system I pay the most attention to, because almost everything else can be made redundant more easily than water can. The mesa receives rainfall, and almost every suitable surface is part of the collection system. The roofs collect it, the greenhouses collect it and engineered surfaces are shaped so that runoff is directed into controlled channels rather than simply disappearing over the cliffs.

The main cisterns are buried beneath the boundary between the habitat and agricultural areas, where they are protected from temperature extremes and physical damage. Rain is the primary input, while recycling provides the second. The system is deliberately designed around conservation rather than abundance, because although the mesa receives enough rainfall to make the arrangement practical, there is no reason to assume that every season will be equally generous.

Water from showers, sinks and other greywater systems is cleaned and returned to the usable-water cycle. Wastewater is treated, nutrients are recovered where practical, and only the fraction that cannot reasonably be recovered is removed from the biological loop. Nothing is simply poured away because it is convenient.

The system knows how much water is available, how much is being consumed and how much is likely to be required. It can adjust agricultural production if necessary, increase recycling efficiency and alter non-essential consumption long before there is any real shortage. I don’t have to stand beside a gauge and make decisions about whether I can afford another shower; the system manages the overall balance and tells me when something actually requires my attention.

When the tanks are full, excess water follows the northern drainage route. During a major storm, I can stand at the northern observation area and watch the water leave the mesa in a temporary waterfall. It is one of the few times when the infrastructure becomes visible, because normally the water system is doing its work underground and out of sight.

Food

The farm occupies much of the central mesa. From a distance it looks almost ordinary, with rows of crops, greenhouses, trees and other plants, but there is very little human labour involved. I don’t spend my mornings driving a tractor around the fields or inspecting every plant myself, because the agricultural system is capable of doing most of that work continuously and with considerably greater consistency than I ever could.

Small autonomous field vehicles move between the growing areas, with different machines handling cultivation, planting, inspection and harvesting. Some are larger machines capable of working across open ground, while others are smaller specialised units designed to work between individual plants where precision matters more than speed. Above them, drones regularly survey the fields and greenhouses, using cameras and sensors to detect changes in plant health that would otherwise be difficult to notice.

They monitor moisture, nutrient levels, pests, disease and changes in plant growth, allowing the system to identify a problem in a particular section without requiring me to walk through the entire crop. If a plant is struggling, the system can determine whether the cause is water, nutrients, disease, insects or something else and respond accordingly, while keeping a record of the problem so that the underlying cause can be investigated.

The farm does not simply grow as much food as possible. It grows what I need, maintains reserves and adjusts planting schedules according to projected consumption, available water and available energy. Some crops grow conventionally in the open fields, while others are cultivated in controlled greenhouses and hydroponic systems where the additional efficiency is worthwhile.

It also grows materials I need rather than food alone, including fibres, oils, seeds and plant material that can be used elsewhere in the biological processing systems. The objective isn’t maximum production; it is resilience, because there is little value in producing an enormous surplus of something I cannot store or use.

From Field to Plate

Harvested food doesn’t simply get dumped into a storage room. It enters another automated system in which the crop is inspected, washed, sorted and processed without requiring me to supervise the operation. Robotic manipulators handle delicate produce, machines prepare ingredients, and other systems dry, freeze, ferment, vacuum-seal or otherwise preserve food according to what makes the most sense for that particular crop.

The service block contains cold storage for fresh and frozen supplies, dry storage for preserved food and ingredients, and the equipment required to process crops into forms that will remain useful for months or, where appropriate, years. The system maintains an inventory automatically, tracking what has been harvested, what I have eaten and what is approaching the end of its useful life, and it can then adjust future production so that I am not continually producing food simply to replace food that has been wasted.

There is also enough flexibility to allow me to decide what I actually want to eat. The automated kitchen can prepare a meal without me doing anything, but it does not prevent me from cooking myself when I feel like it. Sometimes I want the convenience of having dinner appear because the system already knows what I normally eat; at other times I want to stand in the kitchen and make something simply because I have nothing else I need to do.

The result is a remarkably boring food supply, and that is exactly what I want. I eat well, I eat a varied and nutritious diet, and I don’t spend my life thinking about where dinner is coming from. There is a certain luxury in making food completely uninteresting.

Power

The mesa is also my power station. Solar panels provide the predictable part of the system, while wind provides another layer, particularly during periods when solar production is poor. The turbines are positioned along the western and northwestern rim, set back from the cliffs and separated from the living area so that the machinery remains largely outside my daily awareness.

I don’t want to see turbines from every window, and I certainly don’t want to hear them. I want them to disappear into the infrastructure, doing their job somewhere on the western horizon while I live on the other side of the mesa. The solar arrays are similarly distributed so that they occupy areas already committed to infrastructure rather than covering the agricultural and natural parts of the plateau unnecessarily.

Energy storage sits beneath the central service areas, along with power-conditioning equipment and the systems that allow generation from different sources to be combined reliably. The control system constantly balances generation, consumption and reserves, making decisions according to both current conditions and what it expects to happen over the next several hours or days.

When energy is plentiful, systems that can use surplus power do so. Water treatment can run ahead, food processing can operate, batteries can charge and thermal systems can store energy. When production falls, unnecessary loads simply disappear or are deferred until conditions improve. The habitat doesn’t need me to remember to turn things off, because the energy-management system already knows which loads matter and which ones can wait.

The result is not a building that consumes as much energy as it can generate. It is a system designed around the assumption that energy availability will change, and that life here should continue comfortably even when the weather does not cooperate.

The Machines

There are no humanoid robots here. I never saw the point.

The machines are tools, and I designed them to look and behave like tools. Some have wheels, some have tracks, some fly, some are fixed robotic arms and others are small maintenance vehicles that spend most of their existence parked beside charging stations. A machine designed to inspect a pipe looks like a machine designed to inspect a pipe; it doesn’t need a face, hands shaped like mine or a simulated personality.

The agricultural machines work outside, while maintenance machines inspect the buildings, turbines, solar arrays, pipes and mechanical systems. Drones inspect the cliffs and the surrounding landscape, and other machines handle cleaning, material movement, internal logistics and routine servicing. The machines are specialised because there is little advantage in asking one complicated general-purpose robot to perform a task that could be handled more reliably by a simple machine designed specifically for it.

The AI systems coordinate everything, although there is no single machine that needs to behave like a human overseer. Different systems are responsible for different areas, with higher-level software coordinating them and maintaining an overall picture of resources, maintenance requirements, weather, agriculture, energy and my own requirements.

The useful part is not that the machines can do everything. It is that they can notice problems before I do. A pump can begin behaving differently from its normal pattern, a bearing can develop a vibration, a battery can show an unexpected change in performance or a greenhouse can begin using more water than expected, and the system can investigate the anomaly while it is still a minor maintenance issue rather than waiting for something to fail completely.

I don’t have a robot servant following me around. I have something considerably more useful: a system that notices that a pump is beginning to fail several weeks before it actually fails.

The Workshop

The workshop is on the southern side of the mesa, beside the landing area, and is deliberately separated from the living complex. This is where machines come when something actually needs repairing, although in practice many repairs are carried out automatically before a component ever reaches the workshop.

The building contains machine tools, additive manufacturing equipment, materials storage, electronics equipment, welding and fabrication systems, diagnostic equipment and the specialised machinery required to maintain the agricultural and energy systems. There are also stocks of critical replacement components, because although many things can be manufactured locally, it makes little sense to fabricate a component from scratch if a spare is already sitting on a shelf.

Most repairs never reach me. A maintenance unit can replace a filter, a robotic arm can replace a component and a fabrication system can produce a replacement part when necessary. If something cannot be repaired automatically, the system isolates it, determines whether the failure affects any other part of the habitat and alerts me with a clear explanation of what has happened and what needs to be done.

I might eventually have to intervene, particularly when something fails in a way the automated systems cannot resolve, but intervention is the exception rather than the daily routine. The workshop is there to make sure that when I do have to intervene, I have the tools, materials and information required to solve the problem rather than having to improvise with whatever happens to be available.

The Flying Machine

The landing pad sits just south of the agricultural area, providing a clear approach and keeping aircraft operations away from the living quarters. The flying machine is stored inside the adjacent hangar, where it can be inspected, maintained and prepared automatically, and the system keeps it ready for use without requiring me to perform the usual sequence of checks that would have been necessary in the world I came from.

It is another part of the system rather than simply a toy, although I use it for both practical exploration and the less practical pleasure of going somewhere simply because I want to see what is there. There are no airports to worry about, no traffic, no flight schedules and no radio conversations with other pilots, and the surrounding landscape contains no roads or settlements that I need to avoid.

The navigation system knows the terrain, the weather and the machine’s capabilities. I tell it where I want to go, and then I fly. I can let the aircraft handle the navigation while I look at the landscape, or take control myself when I want the experience of flying rather than simply arriving somewhere.

Sometimes I land somewhere distant and sit on the ground for an hour. There is usually no particular objective, and I don’t need one. I can explore a canyon, watch animals moving across the plain or simply sit beside the aircraft and look at a landscape that no human being has ever seen before.

There is a particular freedom in being able to travel through a world that belongs to nobody.

Keeping Myself Alive

The habitat has a gym, although it doesn’t need to be large. There is no reason for it to be filled with equipment designed to impress anyone, because there is nobody here to impress. It contains everything I need to maintain strength, mobility and cardiovascular fitness, with the equipment selected around the requirements of a single person rather than the expectations of a commercial gym.

The system records my exercise and can adjust routines according to how I am performing, but it doesn’t turn exercise into another administrative task. If I want to run, lift weights or use the machines, I can do so; if I decide to go for a long walk around the mesa instead, the system simply records that as part of the overall picture.

The medical facility is similarly compact. Diagnostic equipment continuously monitors the basics, while more sophisticated equipment is available when required, and medical supplies are stored under controlled conditions with automated inventory and replacement planning. The habitat can carry out routine measurements, identify changes that might deserve attention and maintain a detailed record of my health over time.

The system doesn’t make me immortal, and I never designed it on the assumption that technology could remove every risk associated with being alone. What it does is give me a much better chance of noticing a problem early and having the equipment, information and supplies required to deal with it. In a place where there is nobody else to call, that difference matters.

The Weather

The mesa is not a perfectly controlled environment, and I never wanted it to be. I came here to live in the landscape rather than to construct another sealed artificial world, so the weather is allowed to be visible and, to a limited extent, audible.

The building is designed to deal with the extremes that the location can produce. The protected western side takes the worst of the prevailing winds, the structure is partly embedded into the mesa and the essential systems are buried or protected behind substantial walls. External machinery is distributed so that a failure in one area does not automatically disable everything else, and the habitat can continue operating at reduced capacity if part of the energy or water system is unavailable.

During ordinary weather I barely notice any of this. The building is simply comfortable, and the view changes around it.

Storms are different. When a major system moves across the region, the western sky darkens and the wind begins to move across the mesa with considerably more force. Rain can arrive almost horizontally, the northern drainage route becomes active and water eventually pours over the cliffs. The turbines work harder, the power-management system changes its priorities and the machines that normally operate outside retreat to protected charging and maintenance areas.

I can sit inside and watch it happen.

The habitat doesn’t need me to fight the storm. It needs to survive it.

Night

At night, the mesa becomes almost completely dark.

There is no city glow beyond the horizon, no road lighting and no aircraft moving overhead, so when the exterior lights are reduced the darkness is genuine. The habitat itself switches into a low-power night mode, reducing unnecessary lighting and equipment while continuing to operate all of the systems that need to remain active.

Inside, the lighting is soft and deliberately restrained, particularly around the eastern glazing, where reflections would otherwise interfere with the view. Outside, only the lights required for safety and maintenance remain visible, and even those are controlled according to where machines are operating.

On a clear night I can stand on the terrace and see a sky that has not been seen by a human being for millions of years.

There are times when I find myself wondering whether the stars look any different from this distance in time.

Probably not.

It is everything beneath them that has changed.

The Strange Thing About All of This

The remarkable thing isn’t the technology. It is how little of it I notice.

I wake up and the room adjusts itself. The temperature is right, the lights are right, water is available and breakfast is available. The farm is operating, the batteries are charging, the weather system knows what is coming and the maintenance system has already checked the things that would otherwise have required my attention.

The machines are doing their work somewhere beyond the walls, but they don’t follow me around and they don’t constantly announce what they are doing. If everything is functioning normally, I have no reason to think about them at all.

That is perhaps the greatest difference between this place and the technological world I left behind. Modern civilisation often seemed to require constant attention to the technology that was supposed to make life easier. There were passwords to remember, updates to install, devices to charge, accounts to maintain, services to subscribe to and systems that needed troubleshooting precisely when I had something more interesting to do.

Here, technology is infrastructure.

I don’t have to think about the water system every time I turn on a tap, just as I don’t have to think about the electrical grid every time I switch on a light. The difference is that here I am the entire population, so the infrastructure was designed specifically around the needs of one person.

I can spend the morning reading, work on something in the study, exercise, fly or walk around the mesa. I can sit at the eastern edge and watch the sun disappear, or stay inside and spend an evening with a film, a book or a game.

Nothing is demanding my attention.

That was the entire reason for building the place.

Twenty-Five Million Years

Sometimes I wonder what the world would look like if I left the mesa and simply walked. There is plenty of life out there: mammals occupy the plains, birds move across the sky, and forests, grasslands and rivers extend beyond the horizon. The landscape is not empty, and I have no desire for it to be. It is simply a world in which human concerns do not exist.

That distinction is becoming increasingly important to me.

When I look across the landscape, there are no roads to follow, no buildings on the horizon and no signs telling me what a place is called or what it is supposed to become. There are no property boundaries, no construction projects, no traffic and no distant lights marking the presence of a town. The animals have their own territories and patterns, the weather follows its own course, and the landscape has no particular obligation to accommodate me.

I am not trying to become part of that world. I am simply living in it.

That is what I wanted when I came here. I wanted to remove myself from the obligations, expectations and constant activity of human civilisation without having to spend the rest of my life fighting against them. There is nobody asking where I have been, nobody expecting me somewhere else and nobody waiting for me to make a decision on their behalf. If I want to spend a week working on something in the study, I can. If I want to fly somewhere and explore, I can. If I want to do absolutely nothing for an afternoon, there is nothing preventing me from doing that either.

The absence of civilisation is therefore not something I have to endure. It is the condition I came here to achieve.

And after twenty-five million years, the strange thing is that it feels completely normal.

The Point

Escape Mesa was never intended to be a fortress, because it doesn’t need to be. There is no enemy, no competing settlement and no civilisation from which I need to defend myself. The cliffs provide more isolation than any wall could, while the surrounding world is so far removed from my own time that there is effectively nobody who could come looking for me.

It is a machine for making human civilisation unnecessary to one human being.

It produces food, collects and recycles water, generates power, maintains itself, manufactures and repairs what it can, preserves knowledge and provides shelter, exercise, healthcare, entertainment and work. It is not perfectly independent of everything; nothing built by a human being can truly be so, and there are still components, materials and systems whose long-term survival depends on careful planning. But the habitat has been designed with enough redundancy and capability that its useful life can extend far beyond mine.

More importantly, it doesn’t need to grow.

There is no expansion plan, because I don’t need more space. There is no second settlement, because I don’t need another settlement. There is no population strategy and no master plan for colonising the continent. I have no interest in turning the mesa into the beginning of a new civilisation.

There is just the mesa, the machines, the landscape and me.

I wanted somewhere I could disappear, and somewhere that would allow me to remain disappeared without requiring me to spend the rest of my life maintaining the illusion.

I think I succeeded.

The idea

One of the things I want to get out of the electronics on Misty Blue is a proper record of where the boat has been and what was happening while she was there. At the moment, the navigation instruments know an enormous amount about the boat: position, speed, heading, wind, depth and, depending on what is available on the NMEA network, electrical and engine information as well. The problem is that most of that information normally disappears as soon as the trip is over. I want to change that. The idea is an automatic boat log that records the data continuously, turns it into useful information, and builds a readable account of each voyage without requiring me to sit down afterwards and reconstruct it.

The hardware is deliberately simple

The missing piece at the moment is an Actisense W2K-2. Once that is installed on the NMEA 2000 network, it should give me a way of getting the boat’s instrument data onto the boat’s network. The boat already has a Teltonika RUT955, so the intention is not to add another cellular subscription or another proprietary marine tracking service. The gateway and router should be all the additional boat-side equipment required. When the boat is at the marina, the RUT955 can use the reliable shore Wi-Fi. When it is away from the marina, it can use its 4G connection. The important part is that the data remains mine. There is no subscription-based marine cloud service sitting in the middle of the system.

The home server does the clever stuff

The other half of the system will run on my existing home server. The W2K-2 provides the raw boat data. The server will collect it, store it as time-series data and turn it into the various views shown here. I already have a local weather service on the server using Met Office data for the house. I can extend that so that the same service can obtain weather information for the boat’s actual position and time. That means a voyage can eventually contain not just what the instruments recorded, but the corresponding weather conditions as well. The original data should also be retained. That matters because it means I can improve the software later and reprocess old voyages rather than throwing away information that seemed unimportant at the time.

The home page

The proposed home page is intended to answer the simple question: what is Misty Blue doing? It shows the current position, speed, heading, wind, depth, electrical state, engine state and connectivity, alongside a map and the current voyage summary. It is deliberately more like a boat instrument panel than a generic database dashboard. The aim is to make the important information immediately understandable while keeping the detailed data available underneath it.

Live data

The live view concentrates on the actual telemetry coming from the boat. The map gets the largest piece of the screen because position is the common thread through almost everything else. Around it are the navigation, wind, depth, electrical, engine and network measurements. The separate Wi-Fi, 4G and NMEA indicators are intentional. I want to be able to tell at a glance whether the boat is connected to the marina Wi-Fi, using the RUT955’s 4G connection, and whether the NMEA data itself is arriving normally. The charts at the bottom provide a short history rather than just showing a single instantaneous number.

The automatic log book

The log book is where the raw data starts becoming a record of a trip. Rather than producing pages of numbers, each voyage gets a structured summary: distance, duration, average and maximum speed, sailing and engine time, weather and sea conditions, followed by the route and significant events. The interesting part is the narrative. The system can derive events from the data — departure, engine on or off, sailing, changes of course, maximum speed, arrival and so on — and use those events and the measured conditions to produce a short written account of the voyage. So instead of me writing:

Left Southampton. Sailed to Bembridge. Wind was 12–18 knots.

the system can construct a much richer summary from the actual recorded data. There will still be a facility for me to add my own notes, because an automatic log cannot know everything that happened aboard.

Charts

The charts page is intended to be the visual heart of the system. Every recorded GPS position can be plotted to create the actual track of the voyage. The track can then have call-outs attached to points where something interesting happened: departure, engine changes, tacks, maximum speed, arrival and other automatically detected events. Because the underlying data is time-stamped, selecting a point on the track can also show the conditions at that moment — speed, heading, wind, depth, battery state and whatever other information was available. This isn’t intended to replace the Raymarine navigation system or its charts. It is a historical record of where the boat actually went.

Analytics

Once enough voyages have accumulated, the data becomes useful for something beyond remembering individual trips. The analytics page can look across the history of the boat: total distance, sailing time, average speeds, destinations, wind conditions, sea state and the longest passages. It should also be possible to answer questions that would otherwise require a lot of manual record keeping. How much sailing did I actually do this year? Which months were busiest? What wind conditions produced the best speeds? Where do I spend most of my time? Which were the longest passages? Those are the sorts of questions that become almost trivial once the data has been recorded consistently.

Reports

Finally, the reports page turns a voyage into something that can be kept as a proper record. A report can combine the route, statistics, weather, tide information, significant events, notes and photographs into a single document. The intention is that it can be exported as a PDF, printed, or simply kept as part of the boat’s digital history. Over time this could become a surprisingly good archive of the boat’s life: not just a collection of GPS tracks, but a record of where Misty Blue went, how she performed, what the weather was doing and what happened along the way.

Where the project is now

This is still a design rather than a working system. I don’t want to start writing the data collector until the W2K-2 is installed. At that point I can see exactly what the existing NMEA 2000 network is actually providing, identify the available data, and build the software around the real messages rather than assumptions. The eventual architecture should be fairly straightforward:

NMEA 2000
    ↓
Actisense W2K-2
    ↓
RUT955 / boat network
    ↓
Internet
    ↓
Home server
    ↓
Time-series database
    ├── Live dashboard
    ├── Automatic log book
    ├── Voyage charts
    ├── Analytics
    └── Reports

The objective is simple: install the gateway, collect the data, and let the computer keep the log.

Nintendo discontinued the original Game Boy more than twenty years ago, yet this week I bought another game on eBay.

The obvious question is why. I can emulate retro games on computers, retro handheld devices and even my phone using WebRCade. In some respects, emulation is actually a better experience than original hardware. I can overclock the CPU, improve frame rates, translate Japanese games into English and even play colour ROM hacks of games that were originally monochrome.

So why buy the cartridges?

The answer is that, recently, I decided I wanted to rebuild a collection of the Game Boy games I used to own, along with some of the best games I missed the first time around. Emulation has its place, but I wanted the physical collection too.

Part of the attraction is the cartridge itself. They are small, roughly 6cm square, and usually have a large, colourful label advertising the game. Perhaps this is nostalgia, but I really like the way a stack of Game Boy cartridges looks.

There is also a connection to the hardware. When I was in college, I had an original DMG Game Boy and collected a few games to go with it. Some were genuine classics, and I enjoyed owning the physical objects almost as much as playing the software stored inside them.

The DMG was very well designed. It was built from tough ABS plastic, with a set of apparently decorative lines running around the top. These turned out to have a purpose: they acted as rails for accessories, allowing them to slide into position and lock securely to the console. I remember being impressed by the thought that had gone into the design when I first encountered third-party accessories that used them.

The DMG was deliberately low-spec. Nintendo had designed it to be reliable and robust, while running for a reasonable amount of time from four AA batteries. It was ideal for carrying around in a coat pocket and playing The Legend of Zelda between classes or on the train.

Eventually, newer consoles came along and I gave my original DMG away.

Until recently, my handheld collection consisted of a Nintendo DS, Nintendo 3DS, Game Boy Advance SP and Game Boy Micro. I had one or two original Game Boy cartridges and used the SP to play them. The Game Boy Micro isn’t compatible with original Game Boy cartridges.

The problem with my SP is that it is the dim, front-lit AGS-001 model rather than the much better back-lit AGS-101. If I was going to start collecting and playing Game Boy games again in an era of retina displays, I wanted something with a decent screen. I also wanted to play the complete range of Game Boy and Game Boy Color games rather than being restricted to those compatible with the newer hardware.

I eventually found a modified Game Boy Color on eBay.

The console had been re-shelled in a new white case with white buttons, a colour combination that Nintendo never originally offered. It has a larger IPS screen, with touch controls for adjusting brightness and pixel effects, along with a backlit Game Boy logo that can change colour.

The internal power circuitry has also been upgraded to support the new screen. The white case and buttons give it a very clean, almost stripped-back appearance. I find it an unusually satisfying piece of hardware.

More importantly, it plays the whole Game Boy range: the original grey DMG cartridges, the black cartridges that bridge the DMG and Color generations, and the clear Game Boy Color cartridges. It also manages this with two AA batteries rather than the four required by the original DMG.

The screen is the biggest improvement. It is bright, sharp and colourful, and the games look remarkably good on it, as the photograph shows.

The replacement shell is also surprisingly good. The plastic is thick, tough and nicely textured, and feels much closer to original Nintendo plastic than the cheap third-party cases I have encountered elsewhere. It doesn’t feel like a replacement shell.

The audio isn’t quite as good. There is a faint whine that becomes noticeable when the volume is low. I’ve seen modifications involving one of the capacitors that are supposed to eliminate the noise, but I’d like to see more evidence that they work before taking the console apart.

With the hardware sorted, the collecting could begin.

I have a saved search on eBay, and when I have a few idle minutes I like to see what Game Boy cartridges are currently being offered. The search is restricted to Game Boy and Game Boy Color titles and sorted by auctions ending soonest.

I generally don’t bid on anything that still has more than a few hours to run unless it is something particularly special. There is something oddly satisfying about finding a good cartridge sitting unnoticed in an auction with very little time left.

I’m being reasonably selective. I’m looking for top-tier games: AAA titles, first-party releases and highly rated rarities. I’m usually buying loose, unboxed cartridges. Complete-in-box collecting is a different level of obsession, and I don’t have any particular desire to store all those boxes. My cartridges will live in their individual clamshell cases on a shelf.

I’m also not particularly concerned about the condition of the electronics.

If the save-game battery has failed, that’s fine. I have a stock of tabbed replacement cells and I’m quite happy to clean the contacts and solder in a new battery. Some cartridges don’t reliably boot when they arrive anyway. In those cases, I’ll open the shell and clean the contacts with a glass-fibre pen and some isopropyl alcohol. More often than not, that brings them back to life.

I look for clean, decent examples, but I don’t mind buying a game with a damaged label if the price reflects it. Replacement labels are readily available, and I’m happy to restore a cartridge rather than pay a premium for one that has survived perfectly intact for thirty years.

I’m never going to sell these games, so I’m not concerned about whether a restoration affects their value. I simply want a clean, good-looking copy that I can play.

My copy of Pokémon Red is a good example. I bought it considerably cheaper than the going rate because the label was badly damaged. After cleaning the shell and replacing the label, it looks very good.

Let the Games Begin

There are a lot of Game Boy games. In fact, there are 1,046 of them, which makes deciding what to collect rather more difficult than simply buying the games I remember.

Fortunately, discovering the good ones isn’t difficult. The web is full of reviews, rankings and best of lists, and reading through them is almost as enjoyable as playing the games themselves.

The 30 Greatest Game Boy Games – Polygon

50 Best Gameboy Games of All Time – RetroDodo

50 Best Game Boy Games of All Time – Nintendo Life

And so the collection continues to grow.

Which, I suppose, is the answer to the original question.

I don’t need Game Boy cartridges. I don’t even particularly need a Game Boy.

But there is something satisfying about owning a small physical object containing a game that was designed more than thirty years ago, putting it into a piece of hardware that feels almost exactly like the one I remember, and pressing the power switch.

Emulation gives me the game.

The cartridge gives me the experience.

I have a handful of cards sitting here, and if I haven’t put them back into the correct case, there is no easy way to tell what’s on them. I have to put a card into a device and boot it to find out.

Most of them contain Linux images, and there is nothing particularly useful to look at on the card itself. A tiny black rectangle with a manufacturer’s logo doesn’t tell me whether I’m holding a Raspberry Pi desktop, a server, a 3D printer controller or something I haven’t used for two years.

This has become a surprisingly important problem because single-board computers have gradually become my go-to solution for computing jobs around the house.

My workshop has a parts bin filled with different flavours of single-board computers, mostly Raspberry Pis and Arduinos. Originally, these were hobby boards: things to experiment with, write software for and generally tinker with.

Over time, that changed. They are now stock items that I grab from the shelf when I need something to do a job.

At work, if I need a computer to handle a particular task, I’ll generally spin up a virtual machine. At home, I’ll flash an image onto an SD card, put it into a Raspberry Pi and boot it.

There is OctoPrint, managing jobs for the 3D printer in the workshop and providing the interface between the printer, web browsers around the house and instances of Cura.

There is a Pi-hole, quietly killing adverts across the network while keeping score of what it has blocked.

Another is a web server that I originally used as a jumping-off point for remote sessions. I should probably either harden that one properly or retire it.

There is a RetroPie installation loaded with thousands of arcade and console games.

There is a Kodi build acting as both a media server and a streaming box for otherwise-dumb screens.

And there are a couple of dormant Raspberry Pis sitting in the workshop, waiting for the next problem.

That’s the part I find most useful. I don’t necessarily know what I’ll need a computer for, but I know I have the hardware available when the need arises.

This has become my version of appliance computing.

I don’t have to start with a blank computer and configure an operating system, network, user accounts and display settings every time. I can prepare an image once, including all the configuration it needs, and then treat the resulting SD card almost like an appliance.

Wi-Fi settings, screen resolution, user accounts and application configuration can all be baked into the image. When I need another computer, I select the appropriate image, write it to a card, put the card into a Raspberry Pi and switch it on.

A few minutes later, I have a working computer.

That changes the economics of small computing jobs. Instead of asking whether it is worth setting up a computer to solve a particular problem, I can simply grab a Pi from the shelf and make one.

The hardware is cheap, the software is reusable, and the configuration can be replicated.

The only part of the system that hasn’t kept up is the storage.

The SD cards are all the same size, all look much the same and are too small to label properly.

So I have ended up with a collection of tiny computers that I can deploy in minutes, and a collection of tiny storage devices that I sometimes have to boot just to find out what they are.

I suspect I need a better labelling system.

I often look at the technology that has crept into our lives, and try to imagine what someone would think of it all if they hadn’t seen it happen. Children born after the dawn of the internet just accept it, and those of us who have seen the evolution, see what we have now as a result of what came before.

Watching films like Blade Runner, we see the technology that they use, and it’s shocking, yet the future we ended up living in, to someone from before these times, would be equally shocked.

I wrote this piece of fiction to try to illustrate this.

Continuing our regular series in which we ask today’s great thinkers to predict the future.

This month we welcome Science Fiction Author Chris Harris.

It is December 2018. Mankind has entered a new age of personal information-based technology.

The vacuum electron tube has evolved into the transistor, which has been miniaturised and packed together into the integrated circuit.

This has been further refined into tiny micro-processors that have over time been shrunk further toward the nano-scale.

Powerful computing devices are now embedded into our houses, clothes and cars. Nearly everyone in the western world over the age of 10 now carries at least one pocket computer with them at all times.

The incredible power of modern portable devices, coupled with their size and ease of use, exponentially increases their value and ability. They say that the best camera you own is the one in your pocket. That is also very true of computers.

I am old enough to remember the early days of affordable home computers. Using a computer is an entirely different experience now compared to what it was when I first used them in the early 1980s. My first computer was an 8-bit machine that plugged into the family TV, one of the first to be sold pre-assembled. All data was either typed in manually from magazines, or loaded from cassette tapes. Programs were very simple, run as single tasks. It had no sound and connected to mains power through a large transformer.

Thirty five years later, my main computing device is a pocket-sized slab of black glass seamlessly fused to a polished aluminium block, and sits on my bedside table while I sleep. It lies on a charging mat, sipping power through an inductive coupler to recharge its battery.

It is never powered off, and is always connected to the network of computers that spans the entire planet. It knows it’s location in time and space by listening to a cluster of satellites in orbit around the planet and constantly triangulates its position relative to them.

Flowing through my house are radio signals in the micro-wave range emitted by a pair of transmitters. These convert data passed through pulses of light sent down a line of optical glass fibre.

Through this flickering light connection, my pocket computer and all of the other computers in the house are connected to the planet’s main data networks.

At the same time, my pocket computer uses a different radio frequency to connect to a nationwide tele-communications radio network, so that it stays connected to voice and data networks from most places in this country.

When I travel to different regions and countries, it detects and switches to a compatible radio network automatically.

The device evolved from handheld portable telephones from the 1980s and 1990s, but have become so much more. Even so, most people today call these devices ‘phones’.

As well as being a node on the planetary network, on my house’s own network and the telecommunication network, my phone is also the server node on my own personal area network.

My wrist watch is a tiny, incredibly powerful computer that tracks time, barometric pressure and it’s own position in space. It monitors my health, mood and activity among other functions.

This watch connects to my pocket computer through a short range ultra-wide-band radio network, and the two devices share data, biometrics and media.

Also charging in a case next to my phone is a pair of tiny speakers that fit inside my ears. When these detect that they are in place, they connect through a short range radio network to my phone to transmit and receive audio. The speakers seal into my ear canals with a dense silicon foam, and microphones built into them listen for environmental noise. The speakers invert the waveform of this noise and cancel it out, leaving only the music or audio coming from them. My phone constantly checks it’s proximity to these speakers to make sure that I have not left them behind. If I lose any of my devices, all other phones will quietly look for it as they move about with their owners. Once found, they will silently tell me the location and show me where the device is on a map.

Both my watch, and my phone are also my wallet. Using either of them I am able to buy goods and services simply by waving the device over a cash register or another phone. I never carry cash anymore, and all of my banking, savings and transactions are all done through my phone.

My phone sits at the heart of all of this and logs my sleep, heart rate, walking cadence, blood oxygen levels, movement and exercise to track my day to day health.

After it detects that I have had my recommended amount of deep and restful sleep cycles, it checks my schedule and tells my watch to wake me silently by tapping me on the wrist.

When I get up, I put my watch onto a wireless charging pad to top up the battery. A fifteen minute rest on the pad is enough to charge it fully, and it will last thirty hours or so if I use it in normal conditions.

After I have showered and dressed, I pick up my phone, watch and ear speakers and grab a cup of coffee and a bagel. While I eat, I pick the phone up from the table, and, sensing the motion of being picked up, it uses a tiny infra-red camera to look for my face. Within a second or two, it projects a dot pattern in the infra-red spectrum and measures the characteristics of my face in three dimensions, comparing this with measurements stored in a secure storage enclave in my phone. A neural chip decides if the phone is being looked at by me, and unlocks the screen to give me access. This happens almost instantly and I rarely notice that the device was locked.

Interacting with my phone and watch is done through touch and speech. There are three buttons on the phone; sleep, volume up and volume down. All other controls exist only as the display shows them, and the device adapts these to fit the function.

Touching the screen is refined into taps, long touches, firm presses and swipes. Each has a different purpose and all of these adhere to a strict set of rules to create a sense that each function is part of a cohesive whole. The touch interface has become intuitive, both through careful programming and repeated use. Complex computations break down into simple gestures and flicks.

Text is entered into a keyboard projected onto the display. The key caps change case or symbol depending on what I’m typing and it shows me a list of words that it predicts that I am typing based upon the text that I have already typed.

I can also choose to simply dictate into the phone and have this converted into text as I speak.

My phone knows me intimately, a relationship built up through a decade of use on this computing platform. It knows my calendar and schedule and understands the meanings behind the names of appointments and meetings. It knows my colleagues and can differentiate between different members of my family and friends. It understands the relationships between us, and knows the names of my son, wife, brother, father. It knows their birthdays and where they live and work.

The device knows where I work, and as it tells me my schedule for the day, it tells me how long it will take to drive to work, based upon live traffic data. It can recalculate navigation on the fly as problems or delays are encountered and will offer alternative routes as I drive, telling me how much time I can save over the delayed route.

I am very comfortable speaking to my device, and the phone speaks to me with a British woman’s voice. The phone has an artificially intelligent personality, and to command the phone by voice, I must first call her name. I do this mostly when I am driving or doing other tasks. I can speak to the phone through my watch, by raising the watch in front of my mouth to speak, the display turns on, the watch at the ready to be spoken to.

I can tell the watch to play my music, ask for a specific album or artist, or as I usually do, get it to choose for me from a huge library. My listening habits are measured, and my devices know what music I like before I have ever heard it, based upon the choices I make. New music suggestions are offered regularly, and I am constantly finding new and interesting things to listen to. This is a golden age of music discovery. If I want to hear something that I have not saved or bookmarked, I can ask for it by name and the watch will get the phone to fetch it from some far off server and instantly play it.

My car is electric, and the dashboard is a large touch screen. When I am in the car, my phone’s functions are handed over into the car’s computer system. The car’s computer becomes part of my personal network and all phone features and systems display on the screen with audio using the car’s own sound system. As I drive, navigation or calls will subtly fade out the music, pause it and continue it when the information has been given. I can speak normally in the car – a cluster of microphones throughout the cabin pick up my voice perfectly, and cancel out road noise. Because the car is electric, its own motors are silent. My phone’s artificial personality uses the car as an extension of itself. If I say the car’s name, the car’s own personality responds. If I say my phone’s name, the phone responds.

I can tell it to guide me to a destination simply by telling it where I want to go. It understands what I mean by “Take me home” or “I want pizza”.

The computing platform that my phone, watch and earbuds run on also has a huge number of programs written for it, and available to choose in a library on the device. Many programs are free, but I can buy premium programs on the device itself. There are thousands of productivity applications, tools, games, books, TV shows, comics, newspapers, films, albums, radio channels and resources available at a fingertip touch on the phone.

These devices are produced, reiterated and refined yearly by the largest corporations in the world. Each version packs in improvements, new technology and more seemless integration with our lives, automated homes, and medical devices. They replace our wallets, and record our lives, and our children will never know a world without them. Every year, the technology in our every day lives evolves a little more, new features and functions creep in.