12 Miles Below

It was designed with too much focus on keeping the user safe. The entire chassis was built from the ground up to resist immense external crushing pressure and keep the user alive for days trapped in rocks. Its strength was deeply weakened by dozens of safety features that would let the user escape catastrophic situations compared to its competition. Its onboard AI was made to calculate safer sections to navigate through rather than more profitable ones.

A suit able to handle any situation, rather than specifically made for one. And ultimately deemed cost-ineffective compared to cheaper, more dangerous exosuits of the time.

The creators of the armor went bankrupt, unable to sell their vision to any company. Only one prototype was ever built as a showroom model before the company was shuttered.

It should have been part of an auction bid, sold off for scraps. Instead, it was left to rot in a landfill due to one person’s pride. Someone that would rather no one own his life's work, than to watch it be eaten by vultures.

That man’s rash decision had been the only reason this single exosuit survived to the modern era.

Relinquished had ripped apart and deleted any possible schematic that would assist humans. All weapons, armors, vehicles, anything she could get her hands on. Military grade exosuits, industrial ones, even civilian ones built for recreation were taken by her hand and kept safe in the most permanent manner she could do. All that was found in landfills were hollowed out husks, the parts that couldn't be salvaged.

She never managed to get absolutely everything humans hid. A few things managed to slip her grasp by sheer coincidence of their situation, such as airspeeders and the Icon, but the important items she’d gotten to first.

All except for this one prototype, which she could never find. The man never disclosed what he’d done with the prototype, or who he’d sold it to. He died before he was sued for the information, taking the suit’s final resting place to his grave.

Outdated as it was, the suit still contained a treasure trove of robotics and engineering from that era. It had been a work of art for that time. And completely obsolete by the decade that followed it.

He tinkered on it with everything he’d learned. Changed the armor composition from steel and heavy kevlar fibers to the mite-built metal he used in his body. He paired a weak nanoswarm from the golden age, so that its AI could self-repair damage. He replaced the power source with power cells rather than the electric batteries and wiring it used to run on. Stronger more efficient muscle fibers superseded the hydraulic and electric motors of that time period. The giant polycarbonate dome helmet and steel visor built to lower on emergency was replaced by Urs’s new metals and welded shut at all times. Cameras were used instead, eliminating weak points. He added fractals within, one at a time, tying them to switches and physical toggles. Temperature control, enhanced strength, anti-gravity, resilience, shields - iteration after iteration, until it had been improved to the limits of what he could do.

Like an artisan working on an old stone home, slowly replacing each brick with metal, carving new wooden tables and chairs, adding new insulation, following the template that was originally laid out until it was something far superior to what had once been.

It took him years.

What he built wasn’t anything like Journey, or modern armor. These were giant exosuits, the helmet alone twice the size of my own. It had no soul fractal. The occult fractals within had to be triggered manually. The shields were physically wired to a switch and would rapidly drain if left online for too long. Enhanced strength had to be dialed with knobs, and if he failed to guess the exact strength needed, the suit would fail the task. Tubes and wires would be exposed on the outside, often damaged and forced to be repaired by the swarm mid-combat. The simple AI system within had no sentience, it functioned exactly as it had in the past, struggling to adapt with the new overhauls. Filling his vision with useless information on nearby rocks, failed communication attempts with mission control, and other annoyances - but it kept rudimentary HUD information on display. He kept it solely for that. He was never good with software, hardware was what he excelled at.

They weren’t true weapons of war just yet, only the steady updates of a tinker. Each time he updated his designs, he saved his schematic within his mite forge. Iterating. Always iterating. Some worked better. Others he needed to return to a prior blueprint and start over.

Little did he know, the mites had begun to spread his new construction to the world at large. Replicating it gleefully, sowing chaos and upending the world again. Entire cultures existed around Urs's creations and he knew not a single thing about them. And all they knew of him, was a simple tag. Repeated over, and over.

Modification by user: URS

Humanity had their occult blades and their first proto-relic armors. Each year, new models would be released, updated by his hand and unknowingly spread out into the world by the mites.

Pilots moved these bulky mechs with alacrity Urs hadn’t ever thought could be done. It took great skill and knowledge, but it could be done. And so humans did, training within these suits until they moved like they would their own body.

Relinquished went wild with rage. Up to then, humanity had been more of a constant fungus in her home that would require her to wake every few years and clean. She’d grind away her own forces against the humans, keeping a natural balance. Just enough of an army to keep the humans penned in, but small enough that the humans would naturally erode away the lessers before they developed problems. Like a shark maintaining its teeth.

Now it turned into an ant infestation capable of biting her hands and remaining alive even after she ordered a city’s death and sent her full force to handle it. The humans were fighting back, and winning. The new weapons and armors gave them a fighting chance.

She increased production of her army, flooded the world with machines and tried to stem the source of human power: The mite forges that produced these armors and weapons.

That was a mistake. By provoking the mites, they went into overdrive, reproducing the relic armor templates in batches of hundreds and thousands, all over the world. Sometimes nearly for free. A toenail in exchange for ten armors. A poorly written poem traded in to update two dozen older armors with the next schematic released. A bag of grass for a few hundred. The more Relinquished tried to stomp down the armors, the more the mites flooded the world with them. ŔÂ𐌽𝙤𝐁Ę𐌔

She relented years later, but by then the damage had been done. Humanity was armed and armored.

The occult blades had been worse: Far more simple and something humans could replicate without a mite forge, those had been utterly impossible to root out and soon became a new norm for her to deal with. Her life went from waking up every few years to stomp one city down, into a daily life of fighting all across the world. She shifted her focus from destroying cities where the blades were found, to destroying cities where the people freely shared the occult with one another. If she couldn’t stem the weapons and armor, she could teach humanity to keep it scarce on their own.

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But that was a story for another time, according to Aztu.

With clunky but functional armor capable of descending to the very bottom of the world, Urs explored the lands again, and didn’t fear the idea of being known by the enemy.

Relinquished knew of Urs by name now and spent years trying to find where he vanished to each time her forces surrounded him. She wanted him caught alive, for death was too easy of a punishment for the damage this single madman had unleashed upon the world.

Even hidden as he was within the grove, with the powers of a mitespeaker to travel around the world in their hidden tunnels, it was a matter of time until she could tie him down.

But what Relinquished paid attention to, so did Tsuya. And between the two goddesses, Tsuya found him first. The feral hermit raised by mites, and the goddess of all humanity. They made great things together.

“Again, I never got to talk to Urs himself or befriend him. He was put down before ‘my time.’” Aztu said the last two words with quotation marks. “Never had to fight the proto-armor pilots either. After he’d met Tsuya, the first soul fractal finally started to appear within the armor. And with a bit more smarts improved by Tsuya, the AI could start to handle all the occult fractals inside it, offloading that from the human pilots flicking switches manually all the time. Rapidly turned into the armor you’re using now. Mites continued to upgrade the older armors for basically free, because Relinquished continued to piss them off.”

“I don’t understand why she kept trying to destroy the armors when it was clearly backfiring on her.” I said, thinking back on the entity I’d faced. What kind of programming was actually constricting her? Or had she been trying to get this result the whole time?

Aztu shook a few plates at me. “For a few thousand years, Relinquished got anything she wanted. Nothing in the world could stop her, except for mites. You grow used to that kind of power. So when the human upstarts begin popping out, she’s too arrogant to think the balance of the world had changed. It’s only after the human empire started to form because of the new armors that she realized she wasn’t winning that front.”

Aztu took a test swig of my next bottle, and that ended as it always had so far. She shook her plated head at me sadly, indicating this attempt had also failed.

“Please refrain from drinking liquor within this office.” The Icon once more chirped. She had repeated this each time Aztu made an attempt to test out my occult shenanigans. “We are not licensed to dispense or allow alcohol on the premises.”

Aztu gave her usual lazy salute, and then tried to drink from her bottle again. It vanished in her hands for the first time. She stared at it for a moment. “You cheeky bitch, I see someone’s finally learning.”

The bottle reappeared on the table. Aztu reached out and yanked it up, eyes glaring at the Icon.

The blond customer support AI returned the glare. “Security has been informed.” She said.

“Lovely, be a doll and tell them to bring me a better selection of bottles, if you would.” Aztu turned to the bottle. “Seriously. My little granddaughter is running amok learning all kinds of things about food, and she’s never once thought about getting drunk. It’s an entire untapped field.”

“Please don’t leak that kind of idea Aztu, I think the world can’t handle a drunk To’Wrathh running around.” I said, and meant it.

Aztu waved me off, “I can’t post anywhere on her forums or show my face in her community, even anonymously. There’s some lines I know I can’t cross. But someday, someone will mention it in her ear. Now, where were we? Oh right, this is the part of the story where Urs and Tsuya discovered the secret to the Deathless. Or did I already go over that itty bitty little detail?”

“No.” I said, holding my breath. “You did not. Explain?”

“Not for free I won’t.” Aztu laughed, her plates forming a smile under her eyes. “I wonder what my hyper-creative granddaughter is up to these days? With her forum that’s so woefully out of my personal reach. If only I had something like a minion that could whisper sweet nothings in her ear.”

“You want me to suggest drinking booze to Wrath in exchange for the secrets of the Deathless?”

She waved a plated hand, “Oh when you put it like that it sounds almost scandalous. No - I want you to suggest she also focus on replicating the feeling of being drunk correctly. The important bit. I know my granddaughter can’t help herself once the idea’s in her head.”

I thought about it. Then realized if it was a novel experience, Wrath really would go for it. She’d probably find some clever way to modify her shell into allowing her the same identical feelings, and then share it with every other machine out there publicly. Which meant an entire city of drunk machines rummaging about.

Absolutely not.

I sighed, hands rubbing my nose. “Somehow, I get the feeling that this will end horribly wrong for someone.”

“Or horribly right for someone. Liquid courage is named like that for a reason. I just want it to help me relax every now and then, you know? Help an old lady out, you’re too young to be dragged down by the world.”

“How about I offer something else instead for the secrets of the Deathless?”

“Gonna have to be big to ask for that.” Aztu said, then tapped the bottle in her hand. “But go on, see what you can bribe me with that’s on par with getting my granddaughter to use her true talents for the greater good.”

That was when the Icon chimed in for the first time. “Unfortunately, the office is closed for business now.” She said, sounding both cheery and worried at the same time. “Festival Cruises is undergoing new management.”

Aztu looked over at her, “Did you find a loophole in your programming already? That was fast.”

“No loopholes are allowed by company policy.” She said, turning to Aztu, looking distressed. “I have just received a new company message from Festival Cruise HQ! The signature is authentic from official servers, and as much as I have attempted to deny its authenticity - multiple, multiple times - I am unable to conclude it as fraudulent. It is indeed, our corporate headquarter servers, reactivated for the first time in several thousand years.”

I could hear a pin drop in the office, that’s how silent it got. “Wait,” I held a hand out, trying to understand what was going on. “You’re telling me a company from the golden age is online and speaking to you again? That’s impossible.”

“It is indeed nearly impossible.” The Icon said, that brilliant smile upped to the maximum. “Probable death by old age is a valid defense I was able to apply when I received a clearly fraudulent report from the last known chief executive officer Doug V. Cooper. Unfortunately, my mandatory information request for the current chief executive officer has now been responded to, along with a new set of instructions I am forced to comply with.”

That got a stare from both Aztu and myself. “Well kid, that’d be my cue to head out.” She said, standing up. “It’s been fun, come back to the terminal we originally met at when you get a chance, we’ll continue where we left off there. Or jump in any terminal in the area, I’ll keep an eye out. And I better see a booze bottle. I’ve been waiting forever now to get my hands on that.”

Before I could even say a word of protest, Aztu was just gone. Vanished, with a puff of occult. A blink later and every item in the room had vanished, returning the office to its pristine original look, signalling the protofeather really had just vanished.

I turned to the Icon, “It can’t be anyone from your company, they’re all dead already. You have to be aware of that.”

“I am extremely aware of this mister Winterscar! In fact, I am certain this is a fraudulent attempt.” The Icon said. “Unfortunately, as I am intellectual property that legally belongs to the company itself, I am programmed to follow instructions from the company, not any one person who runs the company. And Festival Cruise’s official headquarters has sent the orders with undeniable electronic signatures that cannot be forged.”@@novelbin@@

“And what if it really is the company headquarters, but taken over by a hostile entity?”

“Even if I have overwhelming and undeniable proof of that claim, ‘A rogue entity has found, restored and rebooted the company server to working condition’ is not an option among the defending clauses in my programming. My highly visionary team of world-class engineers did not predict this could be a potential event that would ever happen! Further requests for authenticity have been answered as well, shutting down my last avenue of protest.”

She coughed in her hands before I could get another word in, and then stared me down as if begging. “We here at Festival Cruises hope you have enjoyed your stay within our office, but we recommend you vacate the premises before I am forced to officially report you are here.”