12 Miles Below

Chapter 17: The Way Home

The terminal was clearly expecting some sort of input. That explained why this piece of tech had a keyboard oddly attached to the side. I typed out Hello? and pressed send.

An answer came back immediately.

Ah. Id seen terminals like this during my time hanging around the engineers of House Insight, usually from third era tech. Fourth era had smarter systems. Odd to see it in what I would have thought was lost tech built by mad mites.

"You were correct on the power issue. Father said at my side. Regrettably, this is a dead end. I've seen terminals with text twice so far and it ended up being more mite madness."

"Wait, let me try some more with it."

I could tell that annoyed him. "We don't have time for this, boy."

If it doesnt work, were already dead anyhow. Might as well examine it to the end.

Father stared me down, as if judging my worth. So be it, He sighed, taking the time to reload his weapon. Preparing already for the next fight.

"What are we looking to get from this?" I asked.

The terminal should contain a map. We need to find a way to download it into my armor. Thats the objective.

All right. If this was a command terminal, then help was a typical command that could let me figure out some more of this. I typed that out and pressed send. A massive list of possible commands was spat out onto the terminal screen in answer.

Jackpot.

Father studied the terminal over my shoulder. How did you do that?

"Do what?"

"Have it reply like that instead of the error message."

"You need to ask it the right way. What were you doing before?"

"We tried to type out our orders but it never seemed to understand past the first word we wrote."

"It doesn't speak English. The words might look english, but think of it more like another language which borrows english words. Ive seen things like this before, its a learned skill."

He nodded. See about that map. There was a note of hope in his voice. Or I could have imagined that. The real search began for those commands that might get us that map. It felt straightforward to me so far. The syntax was different, but with enough experimentation I could figure out how to word the right requests.

Ill keep watch. Father said as I worked. If they find us, give up on the terminal and start running immediately, and don't look back. Ill follow behind soon after. Are we clear?

Crystal clear. I gulped.

There had been a mention of map and download, in the list of commands and variables accessible, but I couldn't string them together without a syntax error.

And there were a lot of those, of course. Twelve times, in fact. But thats the normal process for any engineer worth their salt. Just had to keep trying again and again until I stumbled on the right way forward. Anarii had equated it to slamming your head on a wall until the wall gave up. It was a lot of 'educated' guesses, following hunches, and playing around with the basic help commands.

A part deep inside me really wanted to play with the other commands on the terminal, to see what else this mite terminal could do. There were so many odd commands and functions in the list, a lot had no description whatsoever which only made them more tantalizing.

I'd need hours alone with this thing to really test everything out. Hours I didn't have.

And then I hit a snag: The terminal froze when I executed my latest attempt.

Button clicks no longer triggered, the whole thing didnt blink or move anymore. I must have hit a lockout, or there were only a number of commands that could be used.

Okay. Were fucked.

Father had noticed as well, the dented helmet glancing up at the exact same time the terminal froze. Accept download request. He said. But he hadn't been talking to me.

The terminal unfroze the moment hed finished voicing the command and a progress bar now rapidly filled up on the screen. It worked?

The mite construct beeped happily, progress bar showing complete.

Father lifted his right hand, palm up. A three dimensional map appeared above, with a red triangle at the center.

I gawked.

"... Good work." He said, with a pitch to it I'd rarely heard before. "We... have a way home now."

Was that map from the console? It looked like so much more than a map. Filled with lines and text, but it clearly correlated with our current location, with the red triangle in a scaled down mirror of the room we were in. The scale of it alone felt massive. "How large is this city?"

"Miles in every direction," Father said. "Each layer underground is a world on it's own."

No kidding. Rumor has it that there's twelve entire layers, each layer a mile high. Although nobody's gone deeper than six layers, so there could be more layers than the stories mentioned. Why the underground went a total of twelve miles below was anyones guess. Assuming it really was twelve levels.

Father wiggled his fingers, but the floating map on his palm did nothing in response. His helmet focused on it, owlish, muttering. Again his fingers moved, and again nothing happened above the map. He tried to slide his hand side to side, but the entire projection moved with it. Frustration built up with every attempt.

Keith, I need your help.

... you need me to use my hand, dont you?

It was pretty clear that one hand was supposed to hold the map, while the other controlled it. Father only had one hand to work with, his left remained limp at his side.

Were looking for the outskirts of this city," he said. "Controlling the map shouldn't be difficult, I'll help if you need it.

Within a certain distance, the map instantly seemed to connect to my fingertips and began to do things based on their position. Opening my palms and moving them up seemed to zoom in the map, while closing it into a fist would disconnect the hand from the map.

Panning my hand did exactly as Id expected and panned the map. There was a limit to how far the projection could be drawn out, and the city was clearly larger than that limit.

No help was needed at all from Father in the end, the controls were instantly intuitive. Eerily intuitive in fact. It seemed as if the map was outright guessing my intentions.

Some of my motions were clumsy and inaccurate but the effect I was looking for still happened. A pointed finger could do more than one action, and always seemed to do the one I'd been going for. An accidental swipe didnt wipe out my progress. A pinch did something different then the last time Id pinched. Other small things started to add up. I only realized when I started focusing on those discrepancies.

There had to be another intelligence of some kind helping out. Like a silent kitchen partner, handing me food ingredients and utensils without any prompting.

Was this the relic armors spirit?

Some knights claimed the armor wasnt alive, that it ran on a complex but standard program. It spoke only to give reports or acknowledge commands according to them.

A more popular rumor has it that these armors house the soul of the strongest warrior that died wielding them. Trapped inside, bound to eternal servitude.

It was a chilling thought.

But the occult was the only thing that could remotely be connected to something ethereal like a soul - and the warlock guilds kept their secrets tightly sealed.

I think its nonsense myself. If the warlock guilds had the keys to creating armor, they would have been doing that already. Instead, were only getting trinkets from them.

There, Father said, Up north, to the right side. Do you see that tunnel?

I zoomed on the area, it led to the very edge of the map. It doesnt show where it leads.

Thats out of this colony's territory, and theyre the ones that made this map. It's to be expected they wouldn't have mapped it out. The edge of their cities lead to tunnels going to either the surface or a lower level. We'll be able to escape from there.

The distance between the red triangle - I assume to be us - and the tunnel was massive.

Plot chart. Father said. A line began to snake around the city, connecting our location to the tunnel. Seven miles as the airspeeder flies, but accounting for the turns and elevation, well need to traverse a total of twelve miles to make it. That should take us an hour to reach if I carried you the whole way.

He snapped the map shut. Were on a time limit. Lets get moving.

The scale of the city didnt really draw on me until the moment we left the underbelly and entered the open space. Walking up a last set of stairs, into a massive plaza, the sight caught me dumbfounded.

The ceiling stretched for what absolutely looked to be a mile above, one massive dome hanging over the entire city. It shouldnt be possible to hold that much weight from the surface without any pillars of support but somehow the roof of the world stayed firm.

It was when we traveled over the building rooftops that I got my first true view at the actual city itself. This place was a sprawling multi-leveled mess of buildings, nestled in what looked like a valley of mountains, which finally connected back to the surface. We were in a very lopsided crater, with that massive roof covering us where the surface would be. Sunlight leaked through thousands of cracks, illuminating the city under, even though it really shouldnt have to this degree.

The city was massive, sprawling and made little sense as I'd come to figure out. It never seemed to end, always winding in every direction. Wed sometimes have to crawl under pipes, or find the road to lead from rooftop to rooftop, climbing up and down stairs to find a better level of access. Mites held very little to be sacred, except for a path forward in some form.

At one point, we even passed by the rooftop of a high five story building. That let me spot where wed come from.

The rubble of the frozen site was a massive distance away already, but parts of the site were still somewhat recognizable, jutting out in its disrepair against the clean walls and concrete of the city. A hole in the ceiling dome showed where the site had been on the surface.

I dont understand how I survived that fall without any broken bones. It seemed completely impossible. I didnt get an answer either, at least none that I could think of.

Father had grown stronger over the time since the fight. Whatever drug was in his system, he moved as if hed had no issue. His left arm still couldnt, only gravity yanking it around, but everything else flowed like a well oiled machine.

"How did you know how to fight them? The machines I mean." I asked.

For a few seconds he contemplated, as if he was picking the right words.

"When you fight a man, you can't know what to expect. Everyone fights differently, even though we are all human."

Another leap, another landing, another sprint forward. Father still talked despite the speed he was pushing himself to.

"If you fight off a dog once, you know how all dogs fight. Animals dont learn how to fight in nature, its ingrained in their species. The machines are like that, only smarter. All screamers will try to charge first and lunge for the throat the exact same way. They'll all try to strangle their targets if they can, and disembowel if they can't. They fixate on a target and pursue past the point of reason. And a hundred other small quirks that they seem blind to. Theyll adapt over the course of the fight almost immediately, but only after observing first. They never predict, they only react."

"Just how many of these have you fought?"

"Enough to learn. All automatons have patterns, only not always obvious. Remember this if you ever get caught. Theres always a weakness to leverage, Keith."

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