12 Miles Below

He examined the mite creation, tapping the sides and buttons experimentally with his hand. “Activate.”

Nothing happened.

“Start. Wake up. Download.” On he went, going through a generic list of trigger words, frustration leaking out with each failed attempt. The keyboard did nothing, and the screen had no buttons to press. The terminal remained unconvinced throughout the interrogation. No signs of power.

Father didn't seem to mind as I sat down and inspected the weird object myself. Maybe it had an on-off switch somewhere on a panel? This was assuming the mites had even built one. I saw nothing that looked like switches or buttons, besides that keyboard. Instead, only wires and geometric statues that looked like decorations at the base. They led out of the terminal, moving off further into the city.

“Is this terminal junk?” I asked.

“That's uncertain. I won’t be able to tell if this is functional, or junk, until I’ve exhausted all the possible ways to turn it on.”

I saw the conundrum. It’s not always obvious when something couldn’t work. These mites, what strange little buggers they were. They seemed to build in all kinds of quality, from artistic to functional.

And… I think I’d seen this kind of behavior before. A theory bubbled up in my mind. Something that I fortunately could test. If I was right about this, it could at least let us know if this terminal was worth spending time on or not.

“Is it safe to explore around?”

Father grunted in reply. “We’re far from the last patrol path, but stay nearby. Close enough that you can get to me in a few seconds. What are you planning?”

“I’m getting myself a pet mite.”

That left him quite confused.

Once I was outside the room, I made my way across the alleyway to another building. Here, there were just concrete walls and an empty windowsill. The room was desolate except for one thing: teal lights all over the walls. Taking off my gloves for dexterity, I snatched one of those mites up. It reacted like the previous mites had - trying to walk off my hand. Each time I turned direction, the mite would also unerringly change its own, almost like a hand-held compass.

I headed back to the dead terminal with my captive in tow, watching how it reacted the whole way. My conclusion on this micro-test: The mite had a location in mind where it belonged, and it would keep trying to get there.

“What are you planning, boy?” Father didn’t seem amused by my antics as he watched me toy around with the mite in hand.

“Science! Mind if I use your knife real quick? No guarantees, but there might be a way to figure out if the terminal’s functional or not without spending too much time. I want to gather proof to confirm it for myself first.”

He stared for a moment, then kneeled down to bring out the knife with his usual flourish. He presented it hilt first to me.

“You’re oddly cooperative,” I noted.

“So long as your experiment is quick,” He replied. “On the off chance your hunch is correct, I’d be a fool to have blocked your path.” His helmet took a quick scan around the room, contemplating. “Mites often like to hide things, or play tricks of that nature. These terminals aren't easy to find, I need to be absolutely sure it's unworkable rather than a power source being hidden here. You have until I'm finished. Talen be with us, boy.”

I grabbed the knife from his extended hand. Father nodded and turned back to the terminal, searching for hidden compartments, occasionally muttering things into his helmet.

Occult weapons are oddly light, even though density-wise they really had no business being this weight. Not quite light as a feather, but light enough. A small switch at the side of the hilt let me turn the weapon on. It flared to life in hand.

Now, for my next hat trick…

I kneeled down to test my next theory, excitement burning about the possibilities. I let go of the mite in hand at the terminal’s base panel, right by what looked like an abstract statue. I savagely stabbed that decoration immediately after.

Okay, maybe not savagely-savagely. But enough that someone’s granddad would have yelled at me for it.

Mite-built metal or not, the occult weapon carved into it without issue. The damage this thing could do was several leagues above vandalism. And the mites reacted accordingly.

Instantly, every single teal light in the room marched as one to go handle the damage.

All except for a single rebel teal light: The mite I’d pilfered.

Despite the proximity, it simply ignored the problem and walked back to the empty room I’d spirited him away from.

I followed the little rebel, then stabbed the concrete ground lightly right in front of it. This time, the lazy mite went to help fix the city substructure with its fellows. Once done, it promptly continued on its single-minded war path home.

There had indeed been something I'd recognized in the mites, more of a behavior really. If I considered the mites more like human tinkerers... I could map a sort of culture in my mind.

“The mites are craftsmen,” I said.

“They’re what?” Father asked, not quite understanding what I meant.

“The mites might not be one super hive mind. They look more divided into sub-groups, and each of those groups has land staked out to do what they want in it.”

Some mites might have been more motivated to create, and others might just be doing the bare minimum to get by. And some others, like the mite I’d pilfered from the empty room, hadn’t worked on anything at all.

They all pitched in to fix the superstructure - the city itself - but individual creations were up to the sub-groups that squatted in those parts.

“Bizarre theory. And you learned that from playing around with a mite? What’s your proof?”

I pointed at the renegade, who’d been happily walking against the flow of traffic. “That one. I swiped it from another room. A room where nothing was built inside besides the city superstructure. See how it’s not helping? This isn’t the room it’s assigned to.”

Father nodded, shrugged, then turned his attention back to the terminal. “The mites are not human. Don’t forget to factor that in as well.”

Was I personifying these machines too much? They might think and feel in ways humans absolutely couldn’t and I was only seeing the surface of it all.

There were bigger things to care about down here. The mites might have ranked too low for the relic knights traversing down here. Those mite-speakers might have already discovered all this, but Father clearly hadn’t talked to one, since this was all news to him.

“There’s one more test I need to do. How much time do we have?”

"Half an hour, not a moment more."

"That's all the time we can spare?”

“That’s all the time I gave myself to find the power source. Each hour increases the chance machines find us. Their patrols can change, or I could miss the signs. It’s only a matter of time until that happens.”

“Can you carry me to speed me up then?”

Environmental suits were absolutely not designed for running around or sprinting in mind. It’ll be a bit hard to work around his arm problem, but the family armor should be able to carry me easily with one hand.

He’d done it before - and he’d caught up to a moving airspeeder while ferrying both me and my sister. I was smaller back then, but my sister hadn’t grown that much taller since.

“No,” He said flatly. “If the armor runs out of energy, we’re dead. We need to ration what we have. Martial your strength. Half an hour, then we continue forward and you won’t slow us down for experiments next time. Do we have a deal, boy?”

“Fine. And if it does work, you’ll trust me for that next time then. Fair?”

“Don’t make terms with me. I’m already giving you the benefit of the doubt.”

But he didn’t make a move to stop me; instead he turned back to the terminal to continue messing with the controls.

It was going to be a struggle to run, but I had food and drink to recoup that energy. Power cells were the bottleneck resources right now. Couldn’t be helped.

I grit my teeth and bolted out into the alleyway now that I was on the clock, looking for rooms with structures inside them. It didn’t take long to find what I’d been looking for, thankfully: the last piece of the puzzle for my tests.

Its screen was halfway completed. Metal plating was missing, or forgotten about. Its circuit boards didn’t have correct endings, nor were they even connected to the whole. I had no idea what this structure was supposed to mimic, but it was clearly defective. Into the room I went.

Father’s knife hummed again in my hands as I sliced off a piece of the mite tech, specifically a circuit board from the wall. And then I watched as this room’s mites went to fix the board.

It took them three minutes. During that time, the resulting board looked similar to the one I had cut.

Similar, but not exact. There were additions in odd places and outright missing parts.

There were far fewer ways to create something that works compared to a near infinite amount of ways to make something that doesn’t. No need to guess this wasn’t a working piece.

I raced back to the terminal. The mites were already finishing up their touches to the sliced statue.

Hilt first, I returned Father’s knife to his hand. “Look at how the sliced off piece is an exact replica of the piece they’re re-building.” I picked up the sliced off identical decoration, but quickly dropped it right back. Metal is cold. I got busy putting my gloves back on. “I’m almost positive it’ll work - it’s simply not powered on. What are the chances that the power source is inside the room?”

“Moderate." He said. "But I suspect the wires are where the power would come from. It’s only unknown how far away the source is. We could travel a half an hour or more before reaching it.” Father stared at the terminal with contemplation. “They could also simply end nowhere at any time.”

“In my mind,” I said, “Any engineer proud of his work wouldn’t leave it with no way to turn on. I don’t know if the mites would think like that, but my hunch says they wouldn’t have made something like this in a spot of land where power wasn’t accessible. The wires are for something. We should track them.”

Father nodded at that, and shrugged. “That seems in character with the city’s possible rules. You're on a time limit, are you sure you want to follow these wires?”

I thought for a moment, then nodded. I was sure. Father stood without another word, and began a quick march outside. I trailed behind, both nervous and hopeful.

We passed by plenty of mite structures along the path. Some of it was just blocks with flashing lights. Others were multiple screens, all rotated at different angles and all of them black and unpowered. But the wires were all there, they just weren’t always connected - except for ours, which was systematically unbroken. Each minute, my confidence grew. It had to lead somewhere.

We left the building entirely, following the wires across the alleyway in a quick jog. They looped and traveled wildly around the path, grouping together and splitting apart at different times.

Eventually, over the course of ten minutes, it led us to a massive building. This had been filled with hundreds of wires, entering the site from all directions. All of it converged indoors on a massive switchboard filled with lights. A podium near the center had all sorts of buttons, levers and valves that surrounded the small space. It was quite obvious that the switchboard was connected in some way to all those controls.

“Have you seen this before?” I asked Father, hesitantly.

He nodded. “Mites leave puzzles like this occasionally. A team I was on a few years ago ran into a building like this one. Those switches control the lights.” He pointed, then casually flipped a switch by the podium controls. A few lights blinked on while others turned off. “Our theory was that this controlled power in a block of the city, but the mites had built it in such a way to be difficult - if not impossible - to turn something on intentionally. It ended up being a waste of time, unfortunately.”

I quickly saw what he meant. Each press of a button and pull of a lever showed predictable pattern changes in lights, just like a puzzle. Some switches would only change a few lights, and other switches would change dozens at the same time. That’s all well and good, but this had at least thirty possible controls.

“Do you know what I’m supposed to do with all this?” I waved at the switchboard.

Father shook his head. “We spent only a few minutes before deciding it wasn’t worth investigating further.”

“How much time do I have?”

“Twelve minutes remaining.”

No surprise, the relic armor probably had a timer counting down on the heads up display inside his helmet. I decided I was going to make all the lights turn on to start with.

The patterns melded into my thoughts, and with each button press I could see how the whole would work. It took a few minutes to categorize all the commands possible, but there was a pattern to this as well. And a few tricks. A good number of these controls had duplicate effects once you lined it up in your head, even if the controls looked physically different.

I felt at home with this little brain teaser; I’d always been good with numbers. My mind flicked through the permutations until I’d found a path to light them all up.

After a minute of rapid switch turning, a wrench in the works hit. Turning on too many lights would cause the entire board to switch off. That lasted a few seconds before the switchboard would turn on again, and reset back to its original configuration.

The mites showed no change in their behavior - they really didn’t care about anything besides fixing what was broken.

Father, on the other hand, looked almost nervous, as if he’d seen something he hadn’t expected. “Were you clicking things at random?”

“No, there's a pattern to it, like you said. I can see how I can get the results I want.”

“There’s no way you could have learned how to do that this fast.” He shot back. But there was uncertainty in his voice.

“Fine then, pause the timer and pick out any light. I’ll have it turned on in thirty seconds.”

“Thirty seconds only, and this one.” He rose to my challenge, pointing out a small light in a line near the end of the switchboard. I calculated in my head, saw the path forward and pressed five switches rapidly one after the other. On the final switch flick, the light he’d pointed at lit up brightly. I felt a surge of pride at that.

“That had to be luck.”

“Want to try another? I could do this all day.”

The helmet obviously obscured any expression from him, but his silence told me everything. “No, I stand by my word. Continue.”

I played with the puzzle again, this time looking beyond the switchboard to see the actions each flip and twist would cause. It was all well and good to turn on lights, but I had to know what those lights meant.

The obvious conclusion made me almost groan at the wasted time. Wires leading off also had lights built in. When the switches were pulled, some of these wires would have their lights also turned on. And one of these wires would lead back to the terminal, which I was willing to bet, had no light switched on. The problem with all this: there were hundreds of wires. I’d forgotten which one was my terminal wire.

“Ratshit. We’re going to need to go back to the terminal.” I sighed, pointing out what I'd found out about the wires to him. It had taken us ten minutes to get here in the first place. By the time we arrived back at the terminal, that half hour of experimentation time would be gone.

Father reached out and grabbed my shoulder. I thought I’d done something off, until he patted my shoulder, awkwardly. “I’ll end the timer.”

I nodded back, unsure how to answer. Was he saying... that he believed I had a working solution?

Father turned and continued to walk, and I followed behind. We didn’t say anything to each other, but a warm feeling was left in my stomach.

Halfway through our return, he came to an abrupt stop. Danger was signaled out, along with a stop all motion order. His helmet scanned around, looking in different directions, as if trying to hear or spot something through the alleyways.

There was only silence as far as I could tell.

He burst into action a second later, picking me straight up without a word of warning and bolting away.

A wailing scream sounded in the city, shrill and chilling. It was joined by others, almost like wolves who’d found prey. Feelings of panic deep inside started stirring. “Wait - what’s that? Slavers?” I half-whispered, trying to keep as quiet as I could over the comms.

“Does that sound anything like a human to you?” Father hissed back.

Machines.

I’d always thought they would be silent killers, mechanical and precise. Without emotion. In my imagination, they’d swarm without a sound, only grim intent following a program of some sort.

Reality was clearly different. The machines sounded outright primal, more feral than even animals could be. They howled and screamed, the voices coming closer despite Father’s speed. We couldn’t see them yet, but it was clear they were closing in.

In minutes, we had made our way through the alleyways. He let go of me, shouting to keep running on my own into the clearing up ahead. Father reached into his belt with his free hand and dropped one of his two grenades on the floor mid-run. He didn’t bother to align it more in the center of the pathway. It bounced after him, rolling to a stop as we sprinted far past it.

It hadn’t been primed, instead left alone and inert in the hallway.

Father spoke out over the screeches, easily catching up behind me. “They’re called screamers. Close range rank and file that bank on shock and awe. They’ll cut you to pieces if they get in range.”

“Can we outrun them?” My short breath was already an answer to that. Even sprinting for a few moments had already winded me. The environmental suit and gear I carried was too heavy for this kind of effort.

“They’ve already pinged us. Running was never an option. We’ll need to fight, win quickly, and run before more come.”

We stopped at the center of the clearing. This was where Father decided we’d make our stand. The corridor we’d just come from would funnel the enemy, and the plaza would give him room to fight. As good as it gets to tilt the odds.

“Make sure your gun is loaded," He said, speaking fast. "Find a building to hide in and let me handle this. My armor can take hits, your environmental suit can’t.”

He turned to stare at me and grasped my shoulder with his hand again. “Keith, listen to me closely. They will kill you if they get the chance. Don’t expose yourself. Don’t be stupid. And don’t try any heroics. Are we clear?”

I nodded, and that was all the confirmation he needed. He made his way to the best position he could find in the clearing. The wall sides of the alleyway. There, he drew out his rifle, and held it as steady as he could with a single working arm, using the edge of the wall as a makeshift grip. If there was any time to use his other hand, even if he aggravated the wound, it would be now.

Still, that arm remained limp at his side.

I could hear more screeching down the alley as I made my own way to cover. They overlapped one another, bloodthirst filled each terrifying howl.

Fear gnawed at my stomach. I tried to stamp it out with logic. Father had his relic armor; machines were no match for him from what I’d heard. It took many working together to take down a relic wearer.

That sounded too good to be true all of a sudden. The clan gossip could have easily embellished the truth to make us all feel better.

No. We’ll be fine. Everything will work out. I desperately wanted to believe that.

The mass of screams closing in promised a different faith.

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