12 Miles Below

The miteseeker looked oddly complete now that it had mites running around currently in a diamond pattern deep within. Sitting on top of a flat rock surrounded by a swarm of mites all slowly terraforming the area around me felt oddly nostalgic.

“Deary, as much as brooding here with your new lantern is nice and all for you, maybe leave before the mites here start getting nippy?”

They were starting to climb over the armor, mostly just to get to the other side. But if I stayed here for long enough, they’d start to attack. So I stood up, brushed them off and got to leaving the cave. Cathida didn't quite understand all that was going on, but she had found the entire ordeal to be interesting, and it had satisfied her inner thoughts about her original mission. Journey was on the opposite side and clearly didn't care for it at all.

So long as the mite lantern wasn't a danger to the user, it was just regular equipment. That it had a sentient soul inside it was minor details to the armor.

Keith Superior kept me company through the short trip back to the surface of this strata, giving me odd trivia about the mites. Explain what he'd discovered in their domain. Along with the care and feeding of mites trapped in my lantern.

Apparently keeping them powered up was as easy as tossing in a chunk of metal inside the lantern and leaving it there. They slowly ate it, keeping themselves powered up. If I failed to feed the mites diligently, they’d start to eat each other in order to remain powered up.

Seemed oddly morbid, but as far as Keith Superior told me, the mites don’t actually exist inside those shells at all, or at least it’s complicated. Each colony was both a single unified voice, and all of them combined. A sort of swarm intelligence, within a larger swarm intelligence, within an even larger intelligence.

Imagine if all your cells were conscious and capable of free thought, but at a reduced intelligence compared to you as a whole. And all those cells had all their little micro-components equally conscious but at an even more primal intelligence. But all of it was aligned for the same goal, construction. Just at different intensity levels.

Superior had a lot of opinions, having spent a lot of time talking to the mites. Given he’d spent a month in there with nothing but the mites to talk to and learn from, he was more than happy to fill me in on the main details of who the mites actually were.

“Give it a shot? Not everyday I get to learn about mites from an actual master of mites.” I said, now making my way up into the dense bog of Bob spores. My favorite biological weapon of mass destruction happily greeted me, and I had Journey relay the message I’d completed my mission.

On Bob’s part, it had started experimenting with the idea of moving and leaving rocks in a pattern, though it still had a very hard time with that concept.

Keith Superior gave me a shrug when it came to explaining more about the mites, the kind of ‘Are you sure you know what you’re asking for?’

To which the answer was ‘not at all, but tell me anyhow.’

If we’re following the human body analogy, we’re at the brain/soul level, where all your cells makeup a new cohesive whole. At this point, mites are now building through time, seeing multiple projects in one place and the art piece itself is the entire journey through the building process across the world. From initial design, to construction, to admiration and then finally destruction. But also giving it a story of some kind? Best I can explain it as. They aren’t human so can’t put in human motivations. There’s a level of intelligence past that, but it gets really nutty.

“How nutty are we talking about?”

Going back to the body analogy, this would be multiple people now all working together to craft a project, and the intelligence that comes from that would be on a society level. Imagine clan culture itself came to life and was organizing things.

“Wait, hold the airspeeder. Wasn’t the last example all the mites on the world put together? Where would they find another entire world of mites to pu- oh I get it. The sum total of all mites from one parallel world connecting with the other parallel world mites?”

I’d seen Keith Quantum already, I’d been part of that massive collective. In a way I could see how that worked.

Yep. And that’s when things start to lose their minute touches. At that level, they’re so far removed from one singular event, it’s hard to focus on any specific world. That’s why the machines find them so notoriously difficult to communicate with. Unless you prod them yourself, they get too lost to find the exact time or location to speak back. And machines can’t move their souls around like we do, so machines can’t get their attention. Digital pings are basically radiation to the mites, tiny pinpricks that aren’t ever noticed. Wrath barely made it work, and only by exposing herself so completely she could have been crushed just by them noticing. Sending messages through the occult is a lot safer and easier, ironically enough.

It was an odd system in the end. Since Keith Superior and I could move around our souls and prod the giant collective, it was as if we became a giant red blinking dot on their map. Easy to spot and discuss with. But if we didn’t reach out to them at all, they had a real hard time reaching back due to the scale the real collective worked at. And I had a feeling there might be a scale beyond multiple worlds worth of mites all combined together would do.

They build things after all, and each level up the intelligence scale added some new dimension to what they were building. Who’s to say they weren’t constructing some kind of massive civilization, and each parallel world was a brick used for their homes? I think I understood now why Superior kept saying it was impossible to understand the sheer scale of mites. It kept going upwards beyond what humans could understand.

But, Superior wasn’t human anymore, that’s how he could speak to them. And I think he knew it too deep down inside. We both just knew from the moment we grabbed hands with each other, just how far he’d changed over the month in isolation.

I did feel a little bad about my hand in all this, since I co-signed him into that hell inadvertently. The only thing that let my guilt cool off somewhat, is that if I could go back in time and knowingly take that gamble on who’s the clone and who stays in the body, I’d still have done it.

It would have been my own choice that time around rather than it coming as a surprise.

And that was it. I was officially a mitespeaker.

We stayed in a bit of quiet silence watching as the mites all moved around inside the lantern. “So, Keith Superior, isn’t this supposed to be a miteseeker? Is it pointing you to somewhere?”

It is. But they won’t tell me where it is, only that the time isn’t right yet. Some events have to happen first, but they’re not telling me what events. Only that I’ll know when I know. I can feel there’s something more built within the lantern, but it needs both me and the mites inside to be working together. And they’re not yet willing.

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“Of course they’d be cryptic. Even with a direct one to one line with them.” Actually, come to think of it… “Can you ask them why they’re being so cryptic about things?”

Good question, give me a sec…. Okay, so if I knew, I’d cause events to no longer line up correctly. They see me as building material, something to be placed in a specific location of what they’re constructing. If they give me the wrong words, they’re basically putting me somewhere else and the building won’t be built.

“Not ominous at all, nope.”

Oh of course not, just part of the package Prime. You’re a mitespeaker now right? Gotta give you some good doomsday prophesies and make sure the Undersiders politely ask you to leave their kitchen.

“Don’t worry, after they see what Wrath does to their kitchen they tend to already ask me that. Talking about her, do you know what I’m here for specifically? Besides the company.”

Already ahead of you. Mites messages to her aren’t going through because she’s not connected to their network, but they are telling you to go to specific coordinates. They aren’t telling me why exactly, only that that’s where you should be heading to right now. Coordinates are being updated every few seconds, mostly by minor amounts. Longer you spend here, the more the final coordinates change up. They’re adjusting for time.

Keith Superior wasn’t able to send them to me directly, and a giant set of numbers wouldn’t really help me out without a reference to how to read them anyhow. So instead, what Superior suggested was just following his advice on where to go, translating mite gibberish into actual useful directions.

So that ended up being my first rambling shamble following the advice of mites on where to go, and it certainly felt like we were some old wizard constantly forgetting where we were supposed to go or be. If I didn’t have Journey, I think I’d have been exhausted multiple times over given the constant meandering happening.

Keith Superior and I often had to stop and consider what kind of directions we were being given. Sometimes, mites got the time period wrong, thinking certain projects that had used to exist were still there. Other times it was the opposite, and their planned projected builds delayed the work. Though it all, I got to help Keith Superior retake some humanity back, speaking with anyone besides mites seemed to help him stabilize.

And we also talked shop about how to cheat and weedle the most we could out of this advantage. In fact, I'd say the majority of our conversation were all about how to cheat. Including in card games and possible other important tasks. There were two Keiths in one world now, and I intended to use two Keiths to the best possible amount I could get away with.

A few things we discovered - if Superior ever left his soul fractal in the mite space, he was worried it would shrivel up and die, leaving him stranded out in the world with no more connection to the mites. There was something unique about the soul fractal he inhabited, it was a drop of my blood somehow kept alive in stasis and shaped into a different variation of the soul fractal. His soul somehow sustained the blood, and the blood sustained him, in a sort of evergreen feedback loop. He could move around in the lantern and stretch soul tendrils out, but actually moving himself out of there came with risks of forever severing his attunement to the mites. Not great.

“What if I made a few mirror fractals and hung them over the lantern?” I muttered, contemplating as we passed by the foot of a mountain. “Could you then tap it and duplicate yourself out into the world?”

I’d be duplicating the miteseeker itself. I think even if you duct taped an occult blade to the side and drew some angry eyes, I still wouldn’t be able to make the box move because it doesn’t in the first place.

“All right, what if I kept your box closer to me? Say right by my belt or back? And then you accessed the mirror fractals I already use on my armor?”

That could work. Only one way to test it out.

I brought the lantern to my lower back, where one of the mirror fractals was located on the inside of the armor’s inner spine. They didn’t take up much space, but it worked. This would be the first time trying to use a fractal to animate something from the ‘outside’

Occult pulsed around me, and a disembodied ghost of myself walked out, armor, weapons and all.

“That’s both familiar and profoundly strange.” I said, watching as the ghost followed it’s pre-imagined path. I’d been so long at it, that I’m used to every ghost popping out of my armor being completely under my control. The only time that had been different was during the bridge fight, when multiple Keiths from other timelines all focused on one.

I now had something like that right here. Not as many, but still a good start to my new dreams of having an army of Keiths all working together.

I’ll need some good practice with that. Didn’t know you could get rusty at imagining movement.

The mirror image Keith Superior had summoned moved with stilted actions, not quite as fast or as smooth as my own images were, despite both of us having roughly the same amount of practice. Though I did go on to fight To'Avalis, To'Orda, Murdershrimp, and general training while walking around so I had more real world experience to draw from.

“I think not having a body to move around as daily reference might take a toll on anyone. Don’t beat yourself up too much, you'll pick it back up in no time.”

Got nothing else to do all day, might as well do some practice. Father would be proud and call me his new favorite son. Sorry Prime.

“Ultimate goal here would be for you to pull Father's own trick and take a Feather.” I said, thinking. “I think a Winterscar tradition about messing with Feathers would be pretty fun addition, you know?”

As if the Feathers don’t already hate your guts. Might need to start smaller, get a relic armor body first like Arcbound. It’s not too bad, just gotta keep me fed with power cells every eight hours, or more if I end up in a fight.

“Can you ask the mites for the nearest mite forge that could build one of those?”

It’s far. And if we tried going there, we wouldn’t be where we need to be right now. Mites are not telling me anything else on that front.

So no body from a relic armor. “What if you took over a machine body? If we fought murder shrimp, broke it’s soul fractal and then slipped you inside the chassis, could you control murdershrimp?”

Maybe? We’d need to try it out. But then you’d have a bit of a hard time talking to me about what you need.

“If you had control over a machine shell, can’t you use the speakers? The real mitespeaker here isn’t me, it’s you. And other mitespeakers out there probably didn’t get into a situation like this, where they knew it was possible, and had made peace with the other them.”

Father did do it for a Feather’s shell, so I think in theory that could work? Up this hill here, the coordinates changed again.

I did as instructed, marching up a valley of blue grass and trickling streams of water weaving through. Bob remained behind, his spores too dense to float that far up without some deliberate attempt, of which he was happy to ignore. Walking out of the miasma, Journey got a quick occult firebath to purge any spores and then ate the rest itself with a flash of the nanoswarms.

“We’ll have to test it out once we run into a machine.” I said, feeling the muddy ground under each bootstrap. “They haven’t been down here for a while now. Actually, can mites warn you when machines are nearby or give us any kind of clues? I’d be nice to know if the machine army is on the way here or still off doing something else.”

They’re saying no. It’s the whole destined fate thing, where if they did give us warnings, we’d probably pick to be somewhere else. Ah, we’re here. Stand a few feet further off to the side… right about here.

It had good view around the strata. Further off I could even see the giant tree with the portal cut into the center. And behind was the mountain range leading into the next biome, some kind of frozen over landscape given the white I could see.

“Anything I should look around for?” I asked.

No, they say you need to wait here for about four hours. We got here early since we caught on with that tower not existing yet and could pass by. They really rerouted just about everything the moment we were walking through that.

“For all powerful beings, they’re rather bad at directions and planning.” I said, sitting down on a large flat rock in the middle of this clearing. I unhooked my helmet after Journey gave me an all clear signal and took a deep breath of the nippy air down here. “Know what we’re waiting for in specific? Some kind of terminal that’ll let us talk to Wrath?”

They won’t say anything more other than gathering the four together. In very ominous and religious fervor I should add.

I watched the breeze flatten the blue grass slightly down, and the sound of insects chirping around me. Bob’s existence here had wiped out basically all sounds of life, so this felt calming. Relaxing all in all, even though I knew there were multiple plates spinning around out there. When I left the Icon, she'd told me a new CEO had appeared from the main servers. The Odin were also out there, probably finally making first contact with Bob, now that the sentient bioweapon was starting to wrap it's head around using written language. Relinquished was probably plotting something, and I knew I was stuck in the middle of it. Probably even more events were happening I couldn't be aware of.

And of everything, the mites had told me I had to sit here and wait for four hours for something to happen.

“Well, if we’re stuck here waiting, what other things could we do now that there’s two of us here to pick fights with?”

I have a few suggestions, but I think we should go down one route we haven't yet tried anything on. Two souls connected, working together isn’t something that happened a lot in the past history, right Prime? I know you got a bunch of info from Aztu about that, and I’ve got all my experiences with the mites along with an entire realm here to toy with. I think we might figure out some combinations nobody else besides the human emperors got to tryout.

How much do you think we could do in four hours?