12 Miles Below

The protofeather leaned away from me and lifted a few plates, shaping them up into a finger snap. I could feel some kind of digital wall built around us. A cocoon of kinds. But only for sounds. “It's a privacy ward?” I asked, hand reaching out to touch the invisible wall.

“Good work kid, looks like my lessons are really shining through to you now. ” Aztu said, already noticing I’d copied the wall and added it into my growing library of pilfered junk. “Once you get the hang of how to create things out here, you’ll be able to construct them yourself. That’s step one for my ultimate plan.”

The wall was sturdy and unbreachable. There were no holes, windows or doorways through it, built for one task and one task only. The simplicity made it durable, and I think that’s what Aztu was teaching me. “And when you say ominous things like ultimate plan, would you mind sharing some details instead of keeping me in the dark?”

"Nope." She still sat in her sofa, looking like a pile of plates all stacked up with two glowing blue eyes darting around the room under that giant triangular hat/plate. I felt I was in a fever dream of sorts at this point. The smaller finger plates waggled in front of me, right to left. Like a hovering hand too big for the main body. “I shall reveal my schemes when they are appropriate and not one moment earlier.”

I raised an eyebrow, but Aztu didn’t back down. So I shifted tracks, “This ward is for the Icon I'm guessing?” I could feel the limits reached up to her desk but not further past it. The Icon herself remained waiting on the other side, forced to smile on.

The more bells and whistles something had, the easier it was to re-use those very same channels against the user.

“For her protection you could say.” Aztu said, “She can see blurry figures of us and won't hear us. we'll be chatting about things she doesn't need to know. There’s plenty of truely ancient programs out here, so it wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for a roaming digital nomad like myself to have taken some interest in world history.” She shrugged, “Still, best to be cautious sometimes when it comes to Urs. He was the first human Relinquished really knew by name and hounded after. She hated him almost as much as Tsuya. Abraxas is occasionally a little bit wise on what I should be careful about, but you never heard me say that if he asks." She waved her prop bottle at the Icon, almost like a taunt of kinds.

The Icon’s eye twitched slightly, but she remained smiling, waiting for us to wrap up whatever scrapshit we were up to.

“Oh quit being a sour sport, this is for your own good.” Aztu said, and even if the Icon couldn’t understand the words anymore, the intention seemed to have gone through. "See, she’s got the hang of fighting in the digital sea already, I’ve been jousting with to keep my sofa and bottle in her office, so now a bit of extra practice fighting through a ward like this would be the next lesson. I give it about half an hour more until she’s good enough to actually slap all of this out of my hand.”

Aztu gave a few nods, then one cheeky thumbs up to the Icon before turning back to me, "Now, I promised you a story of the man that changed the world as we know it while leaving only the smallest footprints behind. I'm good on my promises, most of the time.”

Aztu started as she said she would, and began it with a warning: Most of her information had been discovered by A57 during his fight with the human empire, his research into finding out who he was fighting and any weaknesses possible through their history. Some had been uncovered by A01 during his direct confrontations. And the rest had been told to her by Tsuya, long after Urs and Talen had faded from history. In the same way a friend would talk about the ones they lost to celebrate their life. Many details about Urs were only guesses on her part from all the different sources she had.

His story began in a time period I hadn’t known much about. The dark age of humanity, as Tsyua called it.

In that era, humanity lived in tiny isolated pockets from one another. There were no relic armors, no occult weapons, and no Deathless.

Life was far more like the clans, with weapons from old humanity of the same tech level: Bullets, rifles, explosives, and the occult mages in between. Most villages were just barely strong enough to flee alive if caught out in the open. Most of human history after the fall of the golden age was spent exactly like this: Relinquished would sleep for years in between actions, waking up only when her army detected a village had grown too powerful somewhere in the world, and then move to crush it before falling back into torpor.

She’d had thousands of years by then to learn humanity could only be truly eradicated once her army caught Tsuya. Until the time of that final confrontation, she conserved her forces.

The world was in a stalemate, and far more isolated. A distance of twelve miles to anyone in that time was an ordeal; a distance of a hundred miles was impossible. The surface existed as folklore to most people, or not even something anyone knew of. And Tsuya preferred it kept that way.

But the story of Urs had nothing to do with the surface, despite our own religion and the songs of the gods. I suppose that part was invented wholesale over time.

To surface dwellers, Urs was the aspect of resilience. People invoked his name overcome limitations from within. Things of the living, like fear, weakness, and self-doubt.

But he’d been a man once before he became a legend, and all smoke came from embers.

In this older more dangerous world, he was born. And he was born with unfortunate health. A limp, a crippled hand, a deep hunch, an eternal cough and a strange mind. ȐἈŊőＢΕș

He became ostracized, and cast out of his village’s protective barrier before he was even ten. Superstition, malice, or perhaps just rejection by his parents - Aztu didn't quite know, and neither did Urs himself remember. The bare minimum was given to him, and he was told never to return. He never did.

By all rights, he should have died outside. Somehow, by luck or by hand, the boy did not. He managed to sneak and hide from the machines, mile after mile. Surviving off drops of water dripping from metal above, strange food from the wild gardens left by the mites, hidden caverns where machines couldn’t crawl after him - and a burning will to live.

He didn’t resent his family for abandoning him. He was too young to know otherwise. A strange mind, Aztu had said. Anyone else might have been traumatized from such an event, but Urs might simply have lacked the emotional capacity to think that way. To him, this was the world as it is. He was alone and simply had to work with what he had. He had no other option than to be resilient and continue forward for as long as his legs could push him forward.

Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.

The boy continued until he stumbled on a corner of the world that remained hidden from both Relinquished and Tsuya. A sanctuary. There were many such hidden places in the world. Most are small and hold nothing of value.

Maybe by extreme good luck or the mites deciding to help out a little, this time the little grove hidden away from all eyes had something of value: Resources. A well of water, a grove of apple trees, nuts and potatoes. Enough to outlive starvation. He ate until he was close to puking, and drank until his stomach was bloated, then slept there for an entire day, exhausted.

The next day, he fully explored the little sanctuary and found tucked inside the root of his apple tree, a small mite forge humming along, waiting. A weak one compared to the greater grander ones that lined the underground. Capable of generating books, small amounts of material, and other junk items.

He stayed in this safe grove, made a small home for himself out of twigs and grass. Days passed, and his curiosity pressed him to test the forge, slowly drawing out lessons, materials, and gear. From what Tsyua had told Aztu, the boy wasn’t taught all the right things in the right order. Even knowing how to read and write had been difficult. His name came by accident, when he’d typed out three letters without knowing what they would do, only thinking the symbols themselves looked nice put together. Urs never remembered his real name, he'd been too young when he'd last heard it.

Oftentimes, the boy would waste months learning things that ended up being gibberish. The mites would give him lessons of more dream-like quality, and his first real lesson was finding out when he’d gotten an actual replica of something man-made, and when the forge was spitting out scrapshit. Testing things in the real world became important to the little hermit. But while his self-teaching was slow, he did have entire years. His stockpile of true useful lessons grew over time, and as did his practical knowledge and skills.

In a few years, Urs was better equipped than most humans in the entire world could be - which isn’t quite the boast it sounds like, considering what people had back then. By now he’d grown into a young man that would rove out of his grove, searching for the strange items and curiosities that the mite forge demanded of him in exchange for their blessings. Item by item, lesson by lesson, he grew. He improved his home in that grove from twigs and leaves into a full house of metal scraps. The wild grove turned into an organized garden filled with foods and tended with care by the hermit.

He learned to speak with the mites at some point in all this, building a lantern of his own and following the path to the very end. “I personally have a hunch that his lantern was found early on, and wasn’t just a standard lantern but a miteseeker lantern instead.” Aztu said, tapping my black box on the table. “One pointing him to that grove this entire time. How else would a crippled kid survive that long during a time period like that? Or learn how to read and write by himself?”

“Is a miteseeker a special kind of compass? If you say it’s made to point somewhere.” I asked. "You never did cover what it did, just that it's a bit more than a lantern."

“That’s a good way to describe it, come to think of it.” Aztu said, one plate tapping where her chin should have been. “Mite lanterns let you speak to mites soul to soul, but some lanterns also point in a direction at all times. Like hidden knowledge, a portal network, or just a random spot hidden from everyone else’s eyes. You’d think mite tech would be unreliable, but I’ve never heard of a miteseeker lantern not pointing to something of importance in some way. It just might not be an important thing to you. But it always points to something special.”

“Does that mean you want to collect different lanterns to uncover all the little secrets of the mites?” Leave it to them to make the world into a collector's worse nightmare.

Aztu laughed, “No, that’d be rather too convenient for mites wouldn’t it? Once you attune to a mite lantern, that’s it. It’s your lantern. You can't use any other lanterns out there. If yours happens to be a seeker, you're in luck. If not, that's all you ever get. If we reach the point you'll attune yourself with this,” She tapped the black box again, "It'll be obvious why."

She waved me off before I could ask another question. “You’ll get to the path when you need to be on it. Again, this part of Urs’s story is just guessing on my end, nobody’s ever recovered his lantern. If you get your hands on it, and it points you to a grove where he'd built his life in, then you'll have your answer. Maybe he left some relics behind there too.”

“I get it, you don’t know the full and complete story. Just bits and pieces strung together.”

Aztu nodded, then stopped. “Hold that thought for one moment, I have to deal with my other pupil.” She turned her blue eyes to the Icon standing outside. “Close one, you almost managed to yank my sofa this time. Keep trying, I’m sure one of these times you’ll actually succeed.” Aztu snuggled herself further into the sofa, getting comfortable. “Better get faster, anytime now I might just take a sip of this. In your office. How scandalous.” The prop bottle was picked up and waggled in front of the Icon.

The Icon stared back patiently.

“She can’t hear you.” I said, mentally poking the ward around us.

“Like I said, some things don’t need any words.” Aztu said, nodding to herself. “But pay more attention to the wards. Right. About. Now.” Aztu turned again to the Icon, and waved the prop bottle one more time. “You do know if you can divide your attention once, you can divide it a few hundred times over right? I thought you golden age AI’s were all about multita- ahh, much better. There you go.”

She turned back to me, humming. “She went from attempting two simultaneous attempts to rip these items out of her office, to about three hundred per second, in parallel. I think she’s going to be my best student. Sorry, kid. I love all my students equally, but I'm also lying through my teeth when I say that. It's fun talking to a human again after all these times, but I have had human friends before. I've never been able to piss off a golden-age AI however, even if she's just a customer support bot.”

I’d seen what she’d done to the ward. How she’d expertly woven a small hole through it, just enough to let her words pass by in a string of data. But it hadn’t been done by moving any data or doing anything with programming at all, she used the occult herself somehow, forcing a hole where there shouldn’t have been a hole. And if she could punch a hole in a nearly flawless wall like this, it wasn’t because that wall had been made by her. It was something more.

The real lesson behind this wasn’t to just teach and taunt a poor golden age AI: Aztu was teaching me how to breach digital firewalls.

She coughed, getting my attention again. “Now where was I? Oh right, the part where Urs almost dies, gains one of the world's most powerful fractal power from the mites and a half-machine body. Or did I already go over that detail? Slips my mind sometimes, old age.”

My head went from studying her tricks and digesting the information to being completely derailed. “Uh, not even a single hint.” I said, smelling the bait here. “What are you up to with that kind of baited sentence?”

“Bait? Me?” She said, eyes going back from the Icon to me. “I’m just implying if you wanna hear more, I’m gonna need something like a bribe first. My throat is mighty thirsty.”

Ah. That’s what she’s after with that pause. “Dangling me off a cliffhanger for maximum dramatics, you unrepentant scheming snake.” I said. “What’s your terms?”

I could see the little gears turn inside her evil little eyes. As if I was walking right into her plans. "Well... if you insist..."

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!