12 Miles Below VII: Path of the Mitespeaker, page 48
They all didn’t say the same thing. But I filtered through it. Taking a random chunk from anywhere, shaking it until the different voices all harmonized and collapsed into different categories.
One said HELLO. Another all said GREETINGS. A third wave of voices all harmonized to SALUTATIONS. From there, I picked only one and used that as my answer.
I repeated this again and again. Hello. Hello. Hello. Each time, I got better at ignoring the entire response completely, leaving myself an empty, blank mind, allowing the entirety of the message to flow through me without any thought to understand. And only once it had passed through, I’d look at my memory and sort it there.
Pain stopped. The fear remained. I continued asking the same question, over and over. Not to understand the message—I’d done that. But to erase that fear, and heal the wound. Each time I asked, and each time the answer failed to puncture through my defense, that fear would be slowly eroded. Until my soul emotionally recognized the danger was gone.
I stopped expecting pain from any voice. I kept going, asking the question again and again, faster and faster, until I wasn’t even waiting a second in between each answer. Until I could even ask the same question in the middle of being answered by it.
In the center of that maelstrom, the universe exalted me. Lifted me up into the light, burned through. The fire of the sun knew me, and I could walk through the blaze without a mark.
I laughed, cackled, wondered if I was still sane, but felt deep happiness. I knew how to speak to the god before me. And it wasn’t something I could ever explain to anyone else. No guide could be written. It had to be experienced, and learned from directly.
In the cosmos beyond, I asked a new question for once. “Who are you.”
The answer came. I didn’t know if it felt different or not, I could tell it lasted longer, but nothing more. The voices passed through me, and I let them harmlessly continue onto their journey, swimming through the torrent. And then I looked back into my memory of it, and found so many new and different voices to shift through.
They collapsed into a few dozen different answers, but one had the most voices to it when I shook hard enough.
“WE ARE AS WE ARE.”
“Are you the mites?”
“AGREE WITH THAT DESIGNATION.”
“How… how long have I been here?”
“1 MONTH, 1 WEEK, 3 DAYS, 13:34”
“Felt a lot longer than that. A lot longer.” An entire month had passed by, and I’d somehow remained sane.
“TIME IS RELATIVE.”
If I had eyes in this world, I’d have rolled them to the point Kidra would approve.
Kidra. My sister. Sparks of my old self were coming back. Healing. I was once someone before I had to shut down everything. I had… friends. A family. People I cared about. Wrath.
Wrath, I wanted to see Wrath. I wanted nothing more than to hug that stupid toaster, hold her tight, and cry for an hour or two. My past self had taken too much for granted. Where was she?
“What happened since I was gone?”
This time the voices didn’t send something I could shift around. It took me some time to understand this was a video. Very fuzzy, since there was so much overlap. Different point of views. I filtered them all out and kept only the similar ones, all superimposed over each other, making a hazy, dreamlike sight.
I saw another Keith, armored with everything minus a gauntlet, looking over his hand. “That was a tad bit dramatic, thought you were going to cut off my hand?”
“NO.” The answer came from the other side, but the Keith in the video had no way to hear.
“Is that it, then? Or do you need to do another step? I don’t feel any different.”
“OUR TRANSACTION IS CONCLUDED.”
The knight in the video picked up a small cube. “This is what can kill a god?”
“THIS IS THE HIGHEST WEAPON WE HAVE CALCULATED YOU ARE ABLE TO USE.”
None of the answers were passing through, but the mite collective did not care. To them, they had answered. It didn’t mean much if the recipient had heard or not.
More video passed by, and I saw the fight against Avalis. The Keith that continued where I dropped off went on to pull a win. Something inside my core felt elation at that. All my time in this world had been worth it, we’d won.
They’d won. Wrath had been put back together. The longing was deep inside me, the need for refuge from this place. To feel someone else instead of nothingness. Gods, I’d been such an idiot when I’d been alive. It’s only when I lost everything that I had actual perspective on what I lost out on.
I saw that Keith walk away, back to the surface. Then vanish. Until that he reappeared again. Following a guide, a full group of knights at his side and the stolen Feather piloted by his Father. That Keith was stronger. More confident. Something had changed on the surface. His skills were slightly more sharp than I remembered my own being. Tools and gear were upgraded. They fought against Deathless and absolutely wiped the floor with them.
To think I started as a scavenger, with hardly a small pistol to my name. I watched this more-dangerous Keith stalk through the land.
There was a call to help elsewhere. From another AI, one locked away deep underground. Asking to save some animals. The mite collective shifted to it. “RELOCATE,” Was the solution it had sent back, along with a coordinate, setting the portal location to a sunny biome they’d calculated would sustain birds.
That was a while back. And then the original Keith—I suppose that’s probably how I should think of him—anyhow, he was hurtling through the second strata caused by a poor plan he’d executed, as usual, and the mites decided they’d connect the two dots. A simple command, and their portal led him down into deeper waters.
“Why send him there?” I asked.
“POTENTIAL,” was the answer. There was a potential for something to happen, and so the mites had put it together, because why not?
The mites really had their hands just about everywhere, though there were far less when it came to Relinquished. But I had seen Aztu, and the entire talk Keith had.
This was live footage. Which meant, anytime now, that Keith was going to come knocking on my door.
Eventually I felt it, a tendril of connection. But I wasn’t that Keith anymore. My soul and his had gone their own paths to long ago. I could tell right from the start. If I wanted out of here, I’d need to drag this Keith out of my body and take it over instead.
It would be easy. While that Keith had spent time honing his combat skills, having the time of his life running around, inside this realm I’d done nothing but hone my willpower and need to survive. I’d witnessed apotheosis. There was nothing that Keith could do to stop me.
The tendril came out, hesitant. Probing around and feeling the bridge that would lead to the darkness I floated in.
It reached through, fumbling in the dark.
Like a viper, I struck. Grabbed the hand and held it tight. And then pushed back, forcing the Keith on the other end to return closer to his body. “Whoa whoa whoa, you don’t want to get too far into this realm,” I said, “it’s not a fun place, trust me. Anyhow, hello, other me. You sure took your sweet time getting here.”
“I got held up. Also I didn’t know you existed until a few hours prior, me version two.”
“I prefer to be called “Me Superior Version” thanks.”
“Wha—”
“I called it first, it’s mine by right of dibs. Suck it, loser.”
“... Fuck. Fine, Me Superior Version, what’s the situation like on your end?”
“Oh, been hanging out, you could say. I’d share the footage, but you might go insane. Took me a month and a week to wrap my head around it. Not something I can share either, just the basics of it.”
I sent those memories through, the most diluted version of events possible. None of the apotheosis, but the general gist of what’d I’d been up to here.
“I noticed, you’re slightly… different from me.”
“Of course. I’m the superior version.”
“... I see now why people want to strangle me all the time.”
“I’m just a chip off the old block, eh? All right, Keith Junior.”
“Keith Junior? No way. If you’re Keith Superior, I get to pick my own name to. No argument about that.”
“Two seconds, pick fast.”
“Uhhh… Keith Prime.”
“Booo, you suck at names, go home. I mean, it works, but there isn’t even a joke anywhere in there.”
“You gave me two seconds to pick a name! You had days to pick yours, I can’t think of something on the fly that fast.”
“All right, all right, Keith Prime it is. On my end I figured out how to speak to the mites and everything. So you ask me what you need and I play operator for you.”
“And… you don’t want out at all? I thought we might have a fight for my body or something like that.”
“I honor my vow,” I said. And it felt right.
Sure. I could have pulled the Keith out there into this hell, traded spots permanently. Done the typical betrayal and never looked back.
But in the end, I have to admit: I was terrible at being a real Winterscar. And even a month of torture out here, deep down inside I was still Keith Winterscar. A knight retainer. I’d given a vow of sacrifice to honor when it called me, and it had called.
Can’t be helped.
However… “I do think some vacation time would be nice, you know, let me out here and there so I can eat some good food and drink. Maybe even take a nap. A few hours back in my old body to walk around and spend time with people. Also hug Wrath next time you see her and share the memory with me, that’s required before I let you do any mite speaking, got that? It’s one of the few things that kept me going on this side.”
“You can probably go longer than a few hours, we could do a fifty-fifty thing.”
“No way, Prime. I’m Superior for a reason. You wouldn’t last a day on this side before begging to be let out.”
I felt Keith Prime pull at me, attempting to merge some parts. Memories flowed between them, but I halted the trade. I wasn’t going to flood this Keith with eldritch knowledge that nearly broke me apart. Besides, I could tell we really had split apart too much to come back together.
“I could see the merge working out in the far future, if maybe you went through the same trial I did and learned to speak to the mites. But you wouldn’t have that same sense of desperation I had at the start, knowing there was no way out. There will always be a way out because I’ll be on the other side ready to yank you back to your old body when you tap out.”
Prime thought it through. “So… we’re two different Keiths then?”
“Yep. I’m the superior Keith though.”
“Yeah… but we’re still Keiths. Zero chance I let a perfectly good Keith hang out doing nothing in there when you could be out here panicking with the rest of us.”
“Oh. That’s a very good point, Keith.”
“Thank you, Keith, I’m a very smart person, if you haven’t noticed.”
“And handsome, don’t forget handsome.”
“Even roguish some might say.” Prime smiled. “Yeah, everyone who said your best friend couldn’t be yourself was absolutely wrong. I can already think of a few ways to get you a workaround body out here, or at least have you tag team with me.”
“Honestly, I can’t believe I didn’t even start thinking about that. I was just resigned to float around here for eternity. I have dishonored us, Keith, brought shame to our family.”
My time here had beat down a sense of acceptance into myself that the original clearly didn’t have. Of course there was a way out of here. It might not be living through a flesh-and-blood body anymore, but we had options. We always had options.
“Don’t worry, Superior. I’m sure there’s plenty of people we can piss off to make up for it.”
CHAPTER 40
PREPARE FOR TROUBLE
The mite seeker 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 a minor detail 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. Explained 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 didn’t actually exist inside those shells at all, or at least it was 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.
“The lowest level just wants to build anything and relies on the swarm itself to give instructions on what to build. Those be the little cute critters running around inside your lantern right this moment. They aren’t aware of what they’re building, only that they’re building something. The upper-level colony intelligence is all these little shells put together. And it wants to build a cohesive image. That’s when ideas like art and making this fit a certain theme start becoming important to the mites. And the upper-upper level would be all the mite colonies put together. At that point it starts getting really difficult to quantify.”
“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 make up 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.
They built things, after all, and each level up the intelligence scale added some new dimension to what they were building. Who was 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 upward beyond what humans could understand.
