12 Miles Below

Book 6. Chapter 9: Journey down deeper

Took half a day to hoof it to the terminal. Quath’s psychopathically detailed map was just about as accurate as could be where his guesses were involved.

Man had clearly traveled a lot underground and had some intuitive understanding of what mites like to tinker on. Only reason he got caught in this amount of machines running around was due to Capra’Nor going belly up and he had no way to predict that. Not a usual occurrence to have an entire city get wiped off the map.

The terminal room itself was rather plain for such an important location in the city. Squat square building with empty windows, a few steps leading into it, and no door on the doorway. The rest of the buildings around it looked a lot fancier, spiral staircases, half-built statues, and lights in all the wrong places.

But Abraxas’s handwork was obvious. There was a scribbled boat like sigil, etched right into the concrete. Like he’d used his index claw to scratch it out.

Inside the mite building - very different story. Concrete turned into black metallic scales, veins of teal pale light spreading thin across the room and growing more complex the closer to the center it got.

The actual terminal had a few dozen old human era computer monitors, and some half-eaten actual computers, all sticking out of this almost liquid-looking black pillar. Monitors all had the domed screen style instead of the more modern LCD screens. Keyboards were in a few different places, but the one to use felt more obvious. It had a mechanical arm that let the keyboard be moved around without issue, and the screen closest to it was lit up, with a flashing green bar, waiting for instructions.

The Winterscar knights filtered into the room first, weapons drawn up and aimed. All purely out of reflex, the soul sight they all had let them see through walls and far beyond visual range in this concrete box, so we could all tell there wasn’t a soul or anything near us. Not even insects.

No dirt for plants to grow in, thus no food for anything else, and so no life at all to these cities.

I pulled the keyboard my way, and got to typing out commands on the prompt. To my disappointment, the mites did not include any quick shortcuts to communications, no inbox or messages I could find, just a half-working text based OS that seemed like it was running on Windows one second, then some version of linux the next second. Picking randomly between each on whatever it felt like, just to absolutely piss off whoever was unlucky enough to deal with it.

Sometimes going back up directories had the commands change on me, so things that worked a moment ago no longer worked again. And that’s just moving around using text. Every now and then the text commands just stopped working completely, and it all shifted to a GUI on screen, where I had to find a mouse somewhere to make use of it.

Somewhere out there, a mite colony was probably laughing their little robot legs off. Or maybe proud of making an OS system that pretended to be something mixed? Some kind of new age cybersecurity to make sure machines don’t touch their stuff, and make random humans decide they’d rather eat ice? I don’t know, mites are the strangest things in the world.

I had half a mind to try to dive into it using the soul fractal, search around the digital sea. That’d be my last resort if I couldn’t operate the damn thing.

We didn’t even know what we were looking for exactly. A map maybe? I did find the local area map that all terminals were supposed to have and had it downloaded into Journey’s HUD. Quath’s map was accurate to the official mite map, so that map was redundant.

Then, I found a suspicious program. Or more suspicious than the other things I found inside the terminal. Had a weird name to it, a bunch of letters and numbers strung together with an executable file signature. Since I wasn’t running this on my own hardware, I booted it up and watched what happened.

A comms program. One that actually made sense. It booted up a GUI on screen with all the expected options to connect across different channels. A bit of fiddling, and I had the audio input and output set to Journey’s broadband - and it actually worked.

Moment I had everything setup, the program booted me into some kind of chat channel and froze me out of anything else. The only other name in the chat channel other than “User number one.” was “Abraxas”

“Hello?” I asked, watching as my name lit up green. “Abraxas?”

No reply, because of course he wouldn’t. Instead, I got a download request package titled MapGuide.tar.gz.

Little on the nose there.

I had Journey open it up in a sandbox environment, only to be stuck at a password request.

“Password, my name.” The mite comms crackled before I could even ask. “Follow directions.”

That was certainly him all right, same voice and curt tone.

“All right, but before I follow any of this I got a few questions I want answered.”

“Always with the questions.” Abraxas hissed. “Fool human. Answer your own.”

“It’s about this miteseeker I got on my belt.” I said. “You wanted to bring it to me when I was underground, and then gave up and had me go get it myself. So why and what is it for?”

“Mite demand.” Abraxas said. He didn’t say anything else.

“What is a mite lantern? Tsuya called this a seeker, you’re calling it a lantern. What does it do?”

“Holds mite shells. Create mini-colony. Way to speak to mites.” Abraxas said. “Find mite. Get mite inside. Done. Mite speakers use lanterns.”

The soul sight showed me it was a containment of some kind and would intercept data being sent out from whatever was in the center. That was all I could figure out about the thing when I had time to look through it. Abraxas confirmed it then. I needed to find a mite colony to test my theories out now.

If it were a good idea to even do that. I turned to Wrath, “Do you have any records of mite speakers in the database by chance? When I met you, you were on the search for one so that you could decode Tsuya’s message.”

She shook her head. “Machines do not seem to care about current human religions or culture. Only what was left from the older eras are preserved, and there are no mentions of mite speakers. Tamery explained to me that they are not taken seriously. I sought them out of desperation.”

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I turned to Father, who just stared back at me with a blank look. Then grunted. “They are known as madmen to the Undersiders. I have never met one yet.”

The mite seeker was still neatly put on my belt, all innocent. “Am I going to go insane if I get this lantern working? That’s what I’m a little worried about.”

“Not know.” Abraxas said. “I have lantern. I not insane. But I machine, not squishy human.”

“Filling me with great confidence here.” I muttered. “Why did the mites want me to have it? And not someone else, or you even?”

“Not know. Not care.” Abraxas said. “Mite say take lantern from surface. Bring lantern to human named Keith. Got you to lantern. Did work. You follow map guide down. Get other work done.”

“They know my name?” I mean, I’m flattered a giant colony of half-insane-but-maybe-not-insane-machines all knew me by name, but it’s also a little odd. “When?” I asked.

“When? When what?”

“When exactly did the mites decide I should have the lantern?” Maybe I could pinpoint exactly what I’d done differently that got me on the mite’s target list with my own name.

He hissed back, then gave me a date and timestamp over the text channel. Which was oddly cooperative of him, finally.

“Journey, do you know what I was doing at the time of this?” Armor has recordings of everything, and those would include timestamps down to the second.

Cathida gave an answer. “Right during a timeblock journey doesn’t have records for. Hold on now before you get snippy with me, I know why we don’t have records for this. You were stuck in the portals that scrapheap Feather threw you in while he was dealing with your other favorite toaster.”

Oh. First time I connected to the infinity of other Keiths. Made sense the mites knew about that, they gave me that quantum cube the next time I showed up asking for help.

“All Journey saw was a jump from one location to sailing through somewhere completely different, right at the toaster’s neck. And also had a large time gap between.”

Now they wanted me to have this lantern that worked like a comms channel to them?

Abraxas seemed to take this as the end of the convo. “Follow map.” He said. “If questions, find terminals. I watch. Don’t die.”

And then logged off the channel, his job done.

“Starting to wonder if the mites themselves would be easier to talk to than him.” I grumbled.

Wrath patted my shoulders. “They are not.” She said. “It was a frustrating experience. I was left with additional questions and no source of answers. I would not have been seeking a mitespeaker otherwise.”

Wait a second.

I slapped my helmet, now figuring out what the mites were really up to.

I was going to be Wrath’s personal mitespeaker.

Abraxas’s map covered a lot more ground than Quath’s map. But it also had a lot less detail. It felt more like reading the ramblings of an insane man. At least there was one large green line leading from the terminal room we were in, and going all across the map, down levels, turns and other shenanigans.

Some parts had scribbles on it, the kind that had the accuracy and grace of a Logi using some basic paint program and a mouse to draw with. For example, one scribble just read “No.” and was superimposed on a large section of the map’s sides.

Another said, “Not here.” and a third marked near the entrance to the underpassage. There were two openings in that section. One had the guiding navigation line, and the other had “Dumb.” written above.

Some more cryptic parts of it had wording like “Solve puzzle.” or “No touch box.” or “Tap right side wall.” One even said “Jump.” and that’s it. Worse - it would be one of the first weird passes we’d encounter, likely in a few hours from now.

“Well, it’s got a path to follow.” One of the knights inside Sagrius’s armor said. “It could be worse.”

“Couldn’t even figure out how to use a basic line tool, just the pen tool to scribble everything with.” I said, huffing. “He’s supposed to be a walking calculator. This is ridiculous.”

The rest of the winterscar knights shrugged when they saw the map. Sagrius nodded, saying it was understandable and that’s all that mattered. The knights inside his armor argued we should be happy to even have a map. Their expeditions down here usually ended up being about making that map.

Wrath, gods bless her heart, decided to make the map look a bit better. She copied the whole thing, then re-drew the lines in neat direct patterns that looked far more professional. It took her all of two seconds to regenerate. I was very happy after that.

From there, we sallied forward, only having to stop to camp out one more time in the dead city before finally crossing into the underpassage, leading through the mountains.

This was where we’d started the real descent to the second layer.

Plants, blessed in every color, soon showed up. And some of them were even edible, according to Journey. There were insects all over the place, but unlike the clan colony, these insects were far smaller and wild instead of domesticated. Not to mention they weren’t the best source of food down here. Why eat insects when there was game like wild rabbits, deer, goats and other animals who’d made a life down here?

We traversed the underground like seasoned veterans, repelling down canyon cliffs, following through directions, up until we reached a giant door and a dead end. The first real obstacle. The door itself looked like an airlock blastway, built out of gold and circuits. One giant circle with a hexagonal patterned line going from one end of the circle, down through the center, all the way to the other side. Making the door look like two different sections of a hemisphere that were shut together.

This was the part of the map that had one of those cryptic messages written on it. “Jump.” It had said.

We were in a deep cave, where the ceiling was about half a Keith standing on my shoulders tall. Not a lot of room to jump in. And nowhere to jump to. Unless we backtracked and went back to the river we’d passed on the way down.

“Anyone have ideas?” I asked, turning my headlights to the other knights. All of them shrugged. Winterscars were new to the underground.

Sagrius also shrugged. “The knights within say mites create challenges to pass. Roadblocks of some kind.”

“Wrath?”

She equally shook her head. “When Feathers travel long distances, we use paths other machines have already solved. They do not generate paths through obstacles like these. It is registered the same as an impassable wall.”

“Maybe Abraxas is using some kind of metaphor?” I thought, looking at the wall. “Figure of speech? Like a leap of faith maybe?”

Sagrius walked right up to the doorway. Then he jumped in place. Not high, only a simple up and down a few inches. He took Abraxas’s message to the literal definition.

And he was right.

The doorway responded, lights flashing green once, then red a bunch of times. And it didn’t open.

We got the puzzle real quick. Number of flashes in total was exactly the number of us that were standing before the door. So we all jumped in place as our next attempt, and the door flashed a bunch of green with no red. Once it flashed the last green, it cracked open on the dividing central line, and opened up the pathway.

Ridiculously simple. And also near impossible to just outright guess. Who in their right mind would walk up to a door, and decide to jump in place?

That’s probably why Abraxas had us go down these specific paths in hindsight. Machines wouldn’t have guessed that, and so this pathway was effectively a deadzone to them.

Past the door, it went to a small dead drop straight into a secret lake below us. Wrath threw out a few sensor pings down there just to make sure there wasn’t anything nasty under the water. Found only rocks and organic material as a return, sitting in a moderately large cavern with only one exit out.

With everyone in armor, we took a step off and dove right into the lake. Relic armor sank like a rock given the weight. Fish, plants and what looked like a colorful set of weird mineral rocks at the bottom greeted our boots. Our little group marched out of the depths and up to the shoreline, with exception to Wrath who zipped through the air directly to shoreline, taking the opportunity to stretch her wings while in safety.

It was a rather cozy spot, filled with sphere-like metallic houses with welded together grating acting as small pathways in between each home.

We had fish out in the lake, a closed shelter that had no blindspots, the area was too small for drakes to squeeze through to get here - and there were plenty of plants and food growing all around the side of the lake. Plus that giant doorway puzzle that acted like our personal bouncer.

This was going to be our camping spot for a night.

Armors polarized the view of the lake, letting us see through the water and spot where the targets were. Swimming around, and soon to be cooked over our campfire. The rest of us brought back plants, mushrooms and other herbs surrounding our side of the lake with glee.

Around that cooking campfire, we had the first good meal of the expedition.

That’s when Relinquished decided to pay a visit.

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