12 Miles Below

I did it? Wait - How did I do it? I ran out of password attempts.

“I’m an administrator now?”

“Affirmative.” Journey answered, voice still monotone.

Father spoke up, “What are you talking about?”

“I'm getting more control over journey, funny enough it worked completely out of my control. I’ve unlocked something, though I’m not quite sure how.”

That seemed to make him worried, for good reason. He stood and walked over. “Unlocked what?”

“Administrator rights.”

“... and what does that mean?”

“It means a lot. But most importantly, there might be a way to fix your arm.”

This all raised some serious questions I had to solve, and I didn't mean getting an arm to move. Except, right now, we had to get to the surface. And the best way to do that was to get Father's left arm back into working condition. Here goes nothing: “Journey, ask Winterscar to move Father's left hand for him.”

No idea if that was the right way to request things from relic armor. My guess was that the suit would know what I’m after, they seemed more like butlers and servants.

“Current administrator for combat suit callsign: Winterscar; cannot be reached.”

“Can’t be reached because there isn’t one yet by any chance?”

“Unknown.”

Okay. The question is if my luck would hold twice, because guessing random passwords clearly hadn’t been what did the trick. But it might have put me on the map to something or someone else. Would it work for him? Or was the root administrator that helped me out just now only able to do that for Journey? “Father, repeat this word for word to your suit. ‘Winterscar, upgrade my account to administrator.’ And when it asks for a username and password, say user - password.”

For a moment I thought he was about to rebuke me for wasting time again. Instead he nodded and followed directions without complaint. Once done, he turned back to me curiously. “It told me my account was upgraded to an administrator?”

Ho ho ho, we are cooking with fire now.

The override for Journey came from a root administrator, and was considered remote - that means the real administrator was at a distance. It's possible it was notified of my attempts to brute force the armor on failure, and when it looked into my situation, decided to throw me a bone. Given that Winterscar requested the same, and likely failed to unlock administrator the exact same way as well, my theory is that Winterscar also sent out a ping just like Journey had. To the same root administrator. Who already had decided to help out.

Ergo, that would explain why Father only tried to unlock it once while I had to go through all failures.

More troubling - this root administrator had the permissions to two different relic armors, one of which had been sitting in a cave for the past few centuries. So they probably had access to all the relic armors, or a huge chunk of them.

There’s five possibilities I could think of that would live that long - a Deathless, a group of people passing down knowledge, a machine of some kind, the creator of the relic armors themselves, or the armors acting on their own - possibly bending their own programming logic in order to help us out the most.

A group of people would certainly try to get leverage from us in some way first, there are no free meals. Additionally, if there were more than one person who knew about administrator accounts and how to unlock them, I’d have heard rumors by now. You can’t keep simple information like that secret for centuries. Complicated information was one thing, but something simple to tell over a few sentences and a drink would inevitably leak.

That left a machine, the forgemaster, or the armors themselves. The machine theory could be tossed out, because they’d never help a human like so.

These armors hadn’t come from nowhere, someone had made them. And given there weren’t many differences between them all, the armors might have been all forged around the same time. Whoever created these armors might have some kind of immortality like the Deathless do. I can’t rule that theory out, but I certainly can’t prove any of it either - it’s all wild speculation based on gut hunches after all.

The armors themselves might have tried looking for wiggle room in their programming to assist us in more creative ways. Except that this theory could be disproven easily - if the armors were that altruistic, more people would have unlocked the administrator accounts already. If Journey tossed me the keys when it just met me, that means it’s primed to do the same for any other human. I can’t have been the first person to poke my nose into this.

Although, Father isn’t tech literate, and he would not know what administrator account means aside from the literal definition of administrator. He'd spent his focus on what he excelled at, tech stuff wasn't his theater. I knew only soldiers like him would wear these armors and they wouldn’t see much downtime for an engineer to sniff around. The problem with all this is that even if I really had been the first engineer with access to one of these relic armors, the undersiders had more armors then we did. It only took one city that allowed engineers to either wear or simply maintain the armor for this 'secret' to leak out. They’d surely have also discovered the administrator accounts at some point, and the pilgrims would have carried that knowledge up eventually.

A Deathless is currently the most possible solution as far as I could tell. It wasn’t a perfect fit and had its own holes, but at this point I was now either wrong on all five guesses or there was information I didn’t know yet that affects the options.

Focus on the task at hand first. I could come up with more answers later. Turning my head around, I glanced at Father. “Ask Winterscar to move your hand for you, see what happens.”

There was a hesitation in his stance, but he quickly moved past it and asked the suit to move his hand. Things went quiet again, Winterscar must be saying something to him. I couldn’t overhear what it was saying, but Father replied, “Confirm override.”

Excitement followed behind as we both waited with baited breath to see what happens next.

Nothing. The arm stayed limp.

“Keith,” Father said, “I… I’m not sure what the armor is asking me now. Translate for me.”

More troubleshooting? “All right. Journey,” I said, “Can you patch me into Father’s armor?”

A similar but deeper ethereal voice answered instead of Journey. “Connection established. Voice pitch modified to identify combat suits vocaly.”

“So... you must be our house armor, Winterscar then, right?”

“Affirmative.”

I felt a small bit of goosebumps speaking to the Winterscar armor itself. Despite the amount of times I’d seen it, the armor was still an outright legendary relic handed down in our House for generations. “Uhh, pleased to meet you for the first time.”

It didn’t answer back to that. These suits really weren’t much for small talk, Father had hit the target when he said they didn’t befriend anyone. All right, let’s get to the real meat. “Winterscar, can you repeat what you asked Father?”

“Please select between motion options: An autonomous combat sub-program or predictive modeling based on one hundred twenty thousand, four hundred forty-nine hours of logged operational use for user: Winterscar, Tenisent.”

Holy ratshit, that was a lot of hours. “Which would be better?”

“Option two is estimated to be more effective. Enough data logged to make simulation accurate to ninety-nine point nine nine eight six percent. An additional sixteen point seven percent power draw is estimated for single arm simulation.”

If this was what I thought it was… The way these suits moved was far too eerie and accurate. And Journey had only known me for less than an hour. So what could they do after spending a full lifetime of watching? The amount of hours Father had spent inside that armor was mind boggling, but it made sense if accounting for the years of daily use.

“Please select option two, Winterscar.”

“Remote override rejected. Insufficient permissions. Local user permissions required for any control override.” Winterscar chimed out.

“What th- oh!”

Had to be actually wearing the suit before it would take any orders. I couldn’t control Winterscar remotely. Made sense. Even with the new administrator account, the suit wanted confirmation from the current user as well. I wondered if that same safety feature prevented our elusive patron from messing with the suits while we were inside them. It most certainly prevented the enemy from messing with us if our own friend couldn’t.

I turned to Father, “Ask it for the predictive option, I think the suit can only take that sort of order from you.”

He still seemed mostly confused on what was going on, but shrugged and asked winterscar for the second option.

As soon as he had said his order, the armor responded. “Releasing safety locks. Loading predictive modeling. Isolating model to left brachium. Partial cognitive engram, online.”

A beat passed. Winterscar said nothing else.

“Is it done?” I asked the armor.

“Affirmative. Partial cognitive engram is currently online and functioning within nominal range.”

While that was great to hear, Father’s arm still wasn’t moving. Ahhh scrapshit. What was wrong this time?

Father turned his gaze to me, an almost confused look to his posture. “Is there another step to take?” He asked, moving his arms in a minor shrug.

…

Moving. Both. Arms.

He seemed to realize this at the same time I did. Immediately, his left arm raised up and his head snapped down to observe. The hand flexed its fingers, open and closing, twisting the wrists while Father gazed down at it, enchanted.

“I… how is this possible?” Father asked, lifting the whole arm up, amazed as the hand continued to move. “I know it’s not my arm - I can’t feel anything, and yet it moves as if it could read my thoughts! As if it was my own!”

The left arm continued to wave and move, fingers opening and closing as he gazed in awe. He kneeled down and drew out his boot’s knife, spinning it around in his hand, and then tossed it to his left. The left hand snatched the midair hilt of the knife, as if natural. Right hand free, he reached out for the occult longsword. Then he stood up into a full Ki-alor stance. The result looked like the man had nothing wrong, both arms working in perfect sync with one another.

He swung a few experimental moves, testing the waters. The strikes flew fast, growing more complex with each second. They flowed into each other like water woven into a stream. He mixed in ducks, feints, twirls and even weapon swaps. The ghost limb acted without flaw, matching his movements perfectly. Both the weapons lit up as he moved, surrounding him in an afterglow of blue following the path his weapons took.

He looked less like a man and more a force of nature, a whirlwind of glowing azure made manifest. I'd seen him once move like this. When he fought and reclaimed his title as Lord Atius’s right hand.

His flow of moves ended with a full body twist, extending his left hand at the optimal moment to throw his knife directly ahead, where the blade sank into the rock wall down to the hilt, aimed perfectly level to his arm.

He turned to me, chest breathing in and out quickly at the excursion. “This.. this is amazing! Keith! My arm is back! Look! It’s even moving when I speak!”

It had indeed been moving exactly like anyone would unconsciously move their hands. Father jogged forward to recover the knife, then sheathed the weapons. Next, he balled up his right fist and brought it down to the palm of his left hand. It had moved perfectly up to catch the fist. He pushed against it and the hand let itself be pushed slightly back. Then it overpowered his fist back. He continued this tug of war alternating speed and power.

“It feels like my left arm is still there, only numb. But it moves like it’s connected to my mind, how is this possible?”

“Predictive modeling, from what I can guess” I answered back, “It’s a long story but basically Winterscar has spent so many hours watching how you move and think, it can predict what you do next. That’s why it’s got ‘predictive’ in the title. And a model is a more technical term to say something like an engine, in this case.”

Father nodded, still in awe over the moving arm. He began a series of katas like I had been doing, testing how reliable the arm really was. It was night and day different to my own outright clumsy attempts at those same katas. This was how it was truly supposed to look like.

I joined in with him again, and we went through the katas together. It was downright eerie how well the arm moved. Since I couldn’t see the inside of the arm, it simply looked like my father was moving normally.

I'd done good. I'd definitely done good.

The next item on the to-do list was the other weapon the crusader had left behind. My scrapper gun had a massive handle which made it usable for my environmental suit but more than awkward for my new relic armor.

Fortunately, Cathida had owned a rifle as well, and it had been cradled in her lap before I’d donned her armor.

The ancient rifle left by the dead crusader was a lot more straightforward to work with, no permission issues here. I wasn’t surprised to find its ammunition was different from the scavenger pistol we currently have. I’d have to make do with the clips leftover on the crusader’s belt.

The design of the weapons hadn't changed, however. Ammunition clip into the rifle, lock and load, press trigger to shoot. Preferably while aiming at something disreputable. Different era, same humans. Don’t fix what’s not broken and all that.

I found where all the bells and whistles were, went through the motions and took an experimental aim. Nothing happened when I pressed the trigger. Rats.

“The weapon’s been too damaged by time. They don’t need to be well maintained, but some maintenance is still needed.” Father spoke from the side, making his way to my partially dissolved and ripped apart environmental suit. “You’ll have to make do with your scav pistol for now.”

I looked down on the ancient weapon with an odd sense of loss. And then frustration. The relic armor could disintegrate metals and organic matter to rebuild itself from thin air. This raw power that could just magic things out of thin air was literally centimeters away from the broken weapon. Could it really just be restricted to itself?

“Journey, is there any way you can fix the rifle?” I asked.

“Scanning… corrosion detected. Possible to disintegrate corrosion. Please keep the weapon near the armor.”

I brought the old weapon by my chest, and the familiar haze of black particles streamed from my suit and flowed down into the rifle. There, they slipped inside.

The process took only a minute before the particles streamed back out. “Repair complete.” Journey chimed in my helmet.

I primed the weapon once more, took aim and pressed the trigger. The weapon worked exactly as expected, bullets barking out, straight and true.

Father quirked his head to the side. “I hadn’t thought to ask Winterscar to assist in maintaining my own rifle. That’s… a novel use of the armor.”

“Calibrating targeting reticle.” The relic armor spoke, and then a more pronounced orange circle with tick marks appeared. It moved as I moved my aim.

“I can’t believe undersiders have hundreds of these,” I breathed out. “The sheer amount of things relic armor can do... scraping bent metal pricks keeping us in the dark.” They had to know about all this.

Wait. Did they?

Journey still had the default settings - no administrator accounts setup. The same as Father’s suit. I could understand Winterscar might be untested, it had spent most of its life up on the surface as far as our history went for it. But Journey? That was an armor owned by Undersiders, a crusader even. If her armor still had the default settings enabled, then maybe the undersiders also didn’t know about the accounts? Or the root administrator didn’t hand out the keys like candy.

How the scrap are they supposed to have been using hundreds of these armors? They’d have to have figured out a way to create more…

To create more.

Oh, I’m such an idiot.

I’d seen the armor repair itself from nothing but scrap and power cells. I should have thought of this immediately. “Journey... can you create another armor?”

“Negative.” The suit replied, dashing my hopes instantly again. That really would have been a bit too broken. But again, I’m not out of the running just yet. I’ve wiggled out a few wins already from Journey, let’s dig into this. It’s pretty clear the armor doesn’t do anything creatively on it’s own.

“Why can’t you make another suit?”

“Grey goo protocol prohibits the creation of non-colony nanites.”

“I have no idea what any of that meant.”

“Specify query.” Journey chimed back.

“Ok, first - what’s grey goo protocol?”

“A protocol set in place to prevent a hypothetical global catastrophic scenario involving molecular nanotechnology in which out-of-control self-replicating machines consume all biomass on Earth while building more of themselves.”

I paused and looked around. The entire cavern had been sculpted by mad mites who had left untold centuries ago to do the same somewhere else. “I think the protocol failed a long time ago buddy.”

Journey remained quiet.

“See, since the protocol failed, why not give it a shot now?”

“Negative. This unit is physically incapable of breaching the grey goo protocol.”

“Physically unable to? I find that hard to believe.”

“This unit’s nanite colony was hardwired to be unable to create any nanite not connected to the colony.”

“Fine. What are these nanites? Is that nanotechnology? What’s Nanotechnology?”

“Nanites are an application of Nanotechnology. Affirmative. Nanotechnology is the use of matter on an atomic, molecular, and supramolecular scale for industrial purposes.”

This was making my head spin. All these words didn’t mean anything to me. I had to get some footing in the real world about them. “Can you give me an example?”

“This unit used nanotechnology to repair the rifle.”

Oh! Nanotechnology is the lost tech term for the armor’s spirit! “So you can’t create another black cloud unless it’s part of your own black cloud?”

“Affirmative.”

There’s got to be a way to twist this to my advantage. I could feel there was wiggle room here to tear in. I sat down and started to brainstorm ideas.

Father broke me out of my thoughts a few minutes later, working with specific knife forms that relied on swapping hands on the knife midfight. “We’ll need to go soon,” He said, putting the knife back into his boot with satisfaction. “Staying for too long in one area attracts automatons. You’ll have to get used to the suit on the move.”

“Sure, let me see if… if the pilgrims had anything on them.” I took a few hesitant steps to the dead bodies. I didn’t feel too comfortable with the idea of desecrating the dead bodies even more than I already had. As a scavenger, that was an odd thing to feel since part of our nature is to loot anything that isn’t bolted down... But these were pilgrims. There was a sense of desecration when I thought about trying to find anything else to pick from their corpse. Journey’s old owner, Cathida… well she had died protecting these two.

It looks like Father had the same thoughts as his left arm shot out quick, stopping me in my tracks. “That will bring down omens on us, boy. I understand your pragmatism, however the relic armor and weapons are enough. I’ll not take more chances by bringing down the ire of the gods on our heads.” Father said.

I found myself agreeing with Father’s words easily. Rather, I was hoping someone would tell me not do this.

We both started to take a few steps, while I gave the pilgrims one last look.

Journey highlighted the items they had without prompt, pinging something in the ground the moment it entered my sight. One skeletal hand lay clutching what looked like a black brick with a carrying handle. The armor was highlighting that item, insistent on it’s importance, a halo of orange surrounding it.

“Hold on. Journey’s trying to get my attention about that item.” I said, pointing at it.

Father glanced down, following my finger. I could almost see the gears running in his head. “I don’t recognize this.” He said. “I’ve seen and escorted plenty of pilgrims and pilgrimages, I’ve never seen this before.”

He didn’t stop me as I approached the item, kneeling down to inspect it. It was a black brick with a handle on it, a skeletal hand wrapped around the grip. The glowing halo of orange from Journey’s heads up display labeled it ‘Priority one’

“What’s this?” I asked. No answer came.

Right, I needed to get more used to these armor’s quirks about talking. There’s been a pattern I’d noticed: The armor stays real quiet unless it’s obvious I’m talking to it. “Journey,” I said, using its name to be as unambiguous as possible. “What is this thing?”

The armor chimed in my speaker, “Priority one.”

Yes I could read that, the HUD was making it abundantly clear. “Uh, can you tell me more about it... Journey?”

“No data found.” It answered back curtly.

“But, you’re highlighting it on my visor. Why?”

“Item designated as priority one by user: Langg, Cathida”

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