12 Miles Below

“Bad human.” Came the gravely synthetic voice of a Runner.

Not Yrob this time, Abraxas. Same energy though.

The connection request had come relayed through Yrob though. Abraxas had sent the initial message by a mite terminal, which pinged right to a pack of Runners hanging around that terminal. And from them, it was sent to Yrob through the machine network looking exactly like normal gossip between Runners. And Yrob would then patch it through to me.

A giant game of hot potato, and I had no idea how many more hoops it was going through on the other side of the mite wall. It did make contacting the ancient machine a lot easier than finding a mite terminal.

“As I mentioned before,” I said, one hand holding my forehead, “Wrath bought us some time, and I think she really could use some closure on this.”

It had been her city. I mean, once she conquered the scrap out of it. But generally I didn’t hear any kind of negative from her control over the time she had. No giant sweeping changes or regime changes, no abuse of power or trying to terrorize the local population.

If anything she had run the whole thing flawlessly, using her computational speed and giant army of utterly loyal and tireless soldiers as a workforce to get her will done. Things ran better and faster for cheaper and with higher quality. Buildings that hadn’t been renovated for years due to lack of budget were fixed up, roads cleared, infrastructure added, all the gripes of the regular people were getting suddenly addressed for practically nothing. All because she could actively speak to a few thousand people at the same moment, getting direct feedback on what needed to be done and having a direct control via her minions on getting it done.

The people who hated Wrath and all she represented were die hard human holdouts who hated the idea of machines in the first place. Rest of the population quickly found her a mix of endearing, competent, and kind. Most of all her Chosen, who had a near family-like devotion to her.

And then all at once, it was over. The city had to evacuate in every direction immediately, all the machines scattered into the walls, and Wrath had vanished off the maps. For the Chosen, it hit the hardest. Tamery knew what had happened and relayed it to the people, but that didn’t make it any less of a bitter pill to take.

And none more than Wrath herself. She knew what she had to do, and went through with it with stride, but that didn’t make it any less of a burden on her.

“Point is, we’re going to that town and you can’t do anything to stop us.” I ended.

All I heard on the other side was a hiss of anger. “Deviate from plan. Not safe. Feather’s plan stupid. Strange obtuse plan. Simple is best. Best is direct line. To division stone, not town.”

“Your friend’s got some hardboiled opinions.” Cathida said. “Tell him he worries about the sun rising too much.”

I had two problems but a Cathida ain’t one. She’s been a lot easier to work with now that she’s convinced everyone around us is genuine one hundred percent human with eccentric fashion sense and body shapes. Abraxas isn’t as easy to convince unfortunately.

“Will pull map.” He said. “Follow direction, or I go.”

“You won’t.” I said, calling his bluff. “Mites want you to guide us, and yanking the map away and running off isn’t what a good guide would do. I’ll leave a nasty review if you do.”

Another hiss. “Fine. Go be dumb human. When explodes, I laugh at you.” Then closed the connection.

“Here’s to hoping we’re both laughing together at that point.” I said, back to being alone in my helmet.

Yrob reached one giant hand out and patted my head as if I were a puppy. “Okay?” He asked, now noticing the signal had been cut.

“Yea, I’m okay.” I told him, grabbing one of his fingers and giving that a quick pat.

“Okay.” He finished with a nod before ambling away. “Good talk. I find mushrooms. Come help after training. I teach what to look for.”

One large hand lifted up as he left, signaling, and Captain Sagrius stood from his seat and walked off to escort the machine. They went off into the darkness of the cavern, Yrob’s head occasionally turning and leaning down to see the captain eye to eye.

The rest of the knights were either patrolling around or sitting cross legged on the ground, deep inside the soul trance and within the digital sea. Father stood at the middle, having become the defacto server hub for them all. Within his systems, they all kept combat sharp and trained against Father’s simulated gauntlets.

Wrath was sitting nearby, watching me closely. “Are you ready for the morning spar?” She asked, shifting her wings back into perfectly folded positions and quickly patting the ground next to her.

I gave her a thumbs up, walked over and sat down next to her.

“Perhaps it would be better to host the match within my own systems.” She said, “Tenisent is at capacity with the other knights.”

“There’s such a thing as capacity?” I asked, a little puzzled.

She didn’t answer, looking elsewhere. “...Not quite. But I do wish to train with soul to soul combat and I am fairly certain such an event would happen in the future and would make sense to begin with smaller training sections, such as having only you to handle. Additionally…” She continued with more and more reasons, as if her original idea wasn’t good enough. Her words were starting to get jumbled together, increasing in speed with each new sentence. I didn’t know why this was such a big deal to her?

“Wrath, it’s fine.” I said, cutting her off midway. “You don’t need to convince me or anything, your original idea makes sense. No need to be nervous, we’re here to train just about anything we can train. Makes sense to also train on your home turf and be sure you’re ready to handle anything that comes knocking at your doors.”

At first, we trained within Journey’s systems, since it couldn’t move its own soul anywhere else and Cathida existed within its systems. The armor was too stubborn and unbothered to send a digital avatar anywhere other than it’s own personal network, so to train against Cathida, the knights would have to go directly into Journey and pick a fight there. After Father got his shell, we eventually realized it would work better within his shell.

Journey was simple armor in the end, its AI wasn’t particularly creative, and Cathida was simply a combat and language engram. She could fight and trash talk, but she couldn’t come up with new novel ways to take advantage of an endless digital training ground. Best she could do was follow the same drills she did with her squires.

Father was a different beast entirely. He had a lot more combat experience, and had taken Avalis’s memories of the lower stratas as inspiration to generate new combat situations for us all to practice with. Each morning shift, I’d go in with a few other knights and we’d do anything from simulating a battle against machines to training our balance and running across different biomes. Combat wasn’t the only training he could throw at us.

But never once had we trained within Wrath’s own home yet. And at some point in the future, there might be someone trying to beat her up from the inside out. It’s gotten to be a strange world these days, we had to adapt to it.

“You ready?” I asked, grabbing one of her hands. She flinched for a second, wingtips batting the ground like some kind of nervous tick. Was she scared of having a fight inside her systems? “It should be the same as in Journey or Father, just a lot more one to one. Don’t worry, I’m not here to make it difficult for you.”

She’d traveled around the digital ocean almost through a proxy of sorts, a virtual connection from her soul fractal outwards, same as we did. Sort of like a puppet being manipulated by strings, and the master hand above would be her soul fractal, still safe and sound inside her soul fractal.

Wrath nodded, and I took a quick step from my soul fractal out into the world and searched around for anywhere to hold onto. I could see her central soul fractal, connected to two other fractals - one of them the prison cell she used to house another soul and the other fractal was the Unity fractal itself. Didn’t want to get near that.

I didn’t aim for her home fractal, nor the prison cell she still had. Instead, I searched for the concept of a computer system and quickly found it. A leap through and I was in.

The digital sea was anything virtual, throwing our concept of self through the information highways and molding the world as we traveled through it. I could travel so much faster and farther through the digital sea than I could with a soul tendril. A tendril could only reach out a few dozen feet into the open air before it grew too thin and unprotected from the elements. Inside a computer system of some kind, I could launch the concept of myself far out into the wide world, anywhere that system was connected to.

I couldn’t fight soul to soul over the digital sea, so while it came with far larger reach, it also came with far less consequences and warfare use.

Still, Wrath was right next to me. In moments, I was within her digital systems, like an intruder.

And I found myself in the weirdest environment I’ve ever seen.

I don’t even know how to begin to describe this. I appeared on a rowboat with no oars, right in front of Wrath who was sitting prim and properly upright on one of the seats, holding a few red flowers in her hand.

Rowboats and boats in general appeared a few times in movies and stuff I’ve read, so I’m familiar with this. That doesn’t mean I don’t find the idea of giant cloth stretched out to ‘catch’ the wind over what was basically a massive wooden bowl to be a little ridiculous. If wind had enough power to move several tons like the surface storms would, I couldn’t imagine cloth being sturdy enough to stay in one piece against debris and other junk equally tumbling through.

We were moving on the water. But not by some mythical wind-catching cloth. Instead, at the rear end was a man with a bushy mustache, a striped white shirt with a red bandana who was busy dipping a long wooden pole into the water, using it to push the entire rowboat forward. That part’s much easier to understand than using cloth of all things, we had to do the same with Abraxas’s rowboat and we tag-teamed it.

“Nice space?” I asked, looking around me. Old era human buildings were all around, making a somewhat large lazy river in between, with stone archways up ahead. “Some kind of mite biome you discovered beforehand?”

She flicked her wings, “A location I read of often enough in human literature. I felt it would be a good place to discuss before we began sparing.”

Looked to be some intermediate zone where she wanted to talk. I gave her a quick thumbs up, then sat down on the other end of the rowboat, both of us now sitting and looking at each other in the slightly cramped boat.

The man behind us made no motion other than to steer the boat forward, likely programmed to do that in perpetuity. This was Wrath’s virtual server, she could make it look like anything she wished.

“Well, what did you want to discuss?” I asked, “Something you can’t mention to the others? Far as I can tell, it’s just you and me here.”

She stayed quiet for a moment, almost squirming in her seat. “...Is the scenery appealing?” She finally asked.

Odd question? I took a second look around. “Would make sparring a little interesting, no doubt. Stone walkways on the edge of the canal here looks like it would be solid footing for combat, and the amount of buildings here would make breaking line of sight a pretty good plan. Could possibly weaken the bridges and have them collapse in a trap of some kind too. Not sure what’s in the houses around us, but they would definitely add a lot of options. Water here is too shallow to stop relic armor, and we could easily jump from bank to bank.”

“Ahh, that is not quite my objective.” She squirmed in her seat some more, metal feathers behind her rustling around. Then she handed me the flowers in her hand.

I took them, not quite sure what the goal of this was.

She frowned, then held her chin in thought as if trying to solve a puzzle. “This is not the expected reaction. I believe I been too vague with my directions, can we restart?”

“Uh, sure.” I shrugged, then handed back the red flowers into her outstretched hands.

She grabbed them back, ran one hand over her hair, took a breath and looked back up to meet my eyes. “How do you feel of the.. artistic vision of this area?”

Oh. Now I see what she’s doing. “It looks pretty authentic.” I said taking a third look around. “A city with roads and rivers flowing in between buildings is a really novel idea. I think you took the fantasy elements from stories and made a really fun location come to life. Great work.”

She smiled at that, looking more smug and happy. “I have spent some time researching the best location for this. Do you feel more enamored?”

I gave another look over the area, and the red flowers in my hands. “It’s got an interesting vibe?” I said, half a question. “Is this an old human ritual of some kind?”

She nodded her head quickly at that. “Yes, I was attempting to recreate the moment.”

“Did it work?”

She frowned. “I do not believe so. I may have missed an element. Your reaction was different from the records.”

I lifted the flowers up. “Was I supposed to do something with these? I’m not sure the importance of them.”

She quirked her head. “I am unsure of their importance as well. I assumed it would be something primal within humans that triggered some emotions. In the texts, they never explained why these were seen as symbolic, only immediately felt.”

“Might have been a cultural thing from the past?” I asked, a little curious about this. “I know Kidra loved flowers, but she’s too pragmatic to grow any real ones. Or her stuffed animals take priority in her room layout. She does use flowers a lot in her kimonos and other dresses. Some Houses have flowers as part of their sigil, usually Agrifarmer Houses.”

She seemed perplexed at all this, then said she’d plan to ask Tamery further details about it. We moved onto a much more traditional sparring field to practice together.

The whole trip ended up benign. Machines didn’t get in our way, Abraxas never called back, just silently sulking somewhere in the distance, and Yrob cooked a new meal each day.

It was relaxing, calm and filled with just general chat. Never knew exactly what Wrath had been planning with that earlier session, the rest of the time had been regular spars and practice as normal. I think she wanted some initial practice within her own chassis first, and once she realized it was all fine, she got back into the rhythm of morning drills.

We reached the Chosen town in a few days, exiting the cold tunnels and mite cities into a familiar forest and beyond it, what we found wasn’t a thriving little city.

Instead, we found walls, weapons pointed at us, and a host of terrified people hiding behind all of it.