12 Miles Below

It felt like a rip in reality.

A new sense I hadn’t perceived before, or even contemplated, pulsed out from behind me. As if something fundamental to existence had been measured, and then twisted.

The room lit up in occult blue, casting an extra shadow of my armor on the wall.

The automatons halted, all those skulls turning to stare behind me, violet eyes showing confusion, anxiety, suprise.

A nervous energy grew between the four, the mechanical chittering flying around with increased intensity. As if they too had felt existence bend in that single pulse. And worse - the pulse had a distinct direction. I turned my head slowly, caught between monitoring the enemy and looking behind to see what, by the gods names, was happening.

What I saw sent chills down my spine.

Winterscar rose slowly, like a wraith from a tomb. Sparks of occult blue bleeding through the armor cracks. Flashing out like lightning, illuminating the room with each pulse.

One bloody gauntlet reached down to the boot, gripping the hilt of the knife. A flourish I had seen time and time again brought that knife out, back into the world, flawless in every motion. The blue edge of the knife tracing a halo in the air as it lit up, perfectly matching the color of light fading off the armor.

Journey’s HUD showed Winterscar sending error after error, almost frantic.

Everyone remained stunned. Tension hung, as if we had all agreed on a silent ceasefire. The feeling of wrongness faded as the occult glow burned out, plunging the room back into the gloom.

The error messages halted. “Connection to combat suit Winterscar, lost.” Journey chimed.

A dead man’s armored helmet gradually turned in the dark, locking onto the automatons staring from the doorway. The knife rose in its hand. The automatons took a step back.

Wordlessly, the revenant bent down and charged, breaking the frozen moment. The enemy responded a split second later, leaping forward with screams, all fear forgotten. Chaos descended into the room.

There wasn’t time to think about what had happened. It was do or die. I followed behind Winterscar as the wraith sprinted past me.

The first target opened up with a bloodthirsty grab for the revenant’s throat. With a quick duck and a head tilt to the right, the armor narrowly avoided the grasping hands with precision. Sparks flew as the metal claws scraped past the helmet.

Winterscar lunged forward in the same instant, knife seeking the automaton’s throat. Too fast for the automaton to avoid. Faster than I’d ever seen it move before. It cut deeply through, unerring.

The automaton’s lights snapped off entirely. Momentum carried the heavy, limp body forward. Winterscar expertly directed the machine’s remains away and onto the floor with a twist of its body. It continued forward losing no speed, the move as efficient as it had been swift.

That’s the full technique. I realized belatedly. The very first time we’d fought the screamers, he hadn’t been able to execute the complete range of motion required because of his arm. And now I saw the part that had been missing.

The screamer on the left leaped out to take me on. It only had a single arm, as I had mangled the other during their previous ill-advised plan. It still attacked the same as it would have with two - now only one hand lunging for my throat. This familiar opening attack... they really were predictable.

I ducked and tilted my head to the right in a pale imitation of Father’s movements.

The claws sailed clear past, as predicted, and my sword snapped up to punish the vulnerability. The machine tried to abort, attempting to throw itself to the side. I wasn’t as precise as Father. My movements weren’t efficient enough. The machine had enough space to weasel away from the blade, throat safe because of my inexperience.

I wasn’t alone in this fight, however. Journey silently tracked it, calculating that I would miss, forcing my arm further down, right where the creature couldn’t escape. With its additional compensation, the long-sword rammed down, stabbing clean through the neck.

The attack wasn’t as smooth and proficient as cutting the wires off. Lights hadn’t faded yet, but the creature spasmed with clear damage. I drew out my weapon and swiped down at the defenseless enemy beheading it. Now the lights finally went out, the entire head rolling off the limp body.

Winterscar sprinted forward in the meantime, ducking under an attacking swing, multitasking all the while. Mid-slide, it hurled the knife in expert motion.

The weapon flew with deadly accuracy, catching the fourth automaton right between its eyes. No time for the creature to dodge, dagger sinking deep into the skull. It reeled backwards from the impact, slumping to the ground. Darkness.

The relic armor turned the slide into a full shoulder roll, jumping back onto its feet with unmatched agility. The move avoided the last opponent’s effort for a clean stab.

The machine screamed in fury, lashing out again with a wide haymaker this time. Its long arm flew on a collision course with the armor’s helmet.

Winterscar’s left arm calmly snapped up, palm out, catching the terrible hit with a massive crunch. Shields flared, but the arm held it at bay, giving only a few inches despite the savage hit. The automaton paused in sheer incredulity, as if it couldn’t process that the attack had been stopped.

The relic armor’s hands clenched down, the creature’s own trapped hand ceramic armor split apart in cracks and dust clouds. A half second later the metal parts of the machine followed, being bent and crushed.

The automaton screeched in panic, trying to tug the broken hand away and finding it impossible.

The relic armor’s right hand reached back and then dove into the ribcage, grabbing something deep inside. Unlike that very first fight against the screamers, this time it found the heart and yanked down with a brutal tug. Black wires snapped away, the relic armor’s hand ripping the automaton’s power cell straight out of the chassis.

The enemy fell limp, rolling off to the side, all lights off.

Winterscar remained standing in the darkness, a captured power cell held tight, snapped wires trailing from it.

The helmet turned to me. “K-k-k-keit-h-h-h,” Father’s voice cut through. Distorted, metallic and stuttering. The armor took a shuddering step forward, a hand reaching out to me. “F-f-f-rac-t-t-tal-l-ls-s-s i-i-in ar-r-r-r-m-m-m-“

All movement stopped. Lights around the armor went dark.

It collapsed onto the knees, arms falling down limply to the side, the machine power cell tumbling out of grip.

An unbalanced second later, the rest of the armor fell to the floor. Nothing stirred except for the dust.

I watched it like a hawk, uncertain of what I had heard or seen. “Journey, what... what the gods was that?”

“Unknown.”

“It spoke. Was… was that him?” A spark of hope flashed through my heart. An idea that Father hadn’t yet truly died.

“Speech impossible.” Journey replied calmly. “Predictive modeling engram applied to combat motion. No other data was input.”

“It talked with his voice.”

“Speech impossible.” Journey repeated.

“You heard it. Am I going crazy? You must have heard that too! Did he really talk?”

“Affirmative. Negative, no abnormality in user behavior or brain scan detected. Affirmative. Speech impossible.”

Fine. I needed to ask the source directly. Except the family armor remained completely silent on the ground. Even the HUD, the armor’s icon had been greyed out. Winterscar was out of commission, completely shutdown.

“What happened to… to Winterscar? It collapsed.”

“Low power automatic shutdown was initiated. Once all enemies were identified as destroyed, the hard-wired low power shutdown command superseded all other overrides.”

That… didn’t make sense at all. We still had plenty of power. Even with the elevated use in combat, it should have lasted at least two more hours. “How much was it using? It had roughly five hours left in the tank, if I remember right. Did the power usage spike up past…”

Five hours was three hundred minutes. In less than five minutes, the suit had consumed all three hundred-ish minutes of power it had. That was an over six thousand percent increase in power consumption. “Journey, where did all of that power go? Actually, scratch that. Tell me step by step what happened. Go into details.”

Gods, is he still inside there somehow? Did I bring him back, or a version of him back, from the dead?

“Combat suit Winterscar’s logs reported successful engram creation. One hundred seventy-four micro seconds later, a security breach was detected. Power draw by the engram increased by six thousand three hundred twelve percent for seven seconds by an unknown entity. Subsequent systems were corrupted and engaged without direct command.” Journey said. “Winterscar’s countermeasure suite was unable to defend against the intrusion. An emergency shutdown was attempted.”

“Attempted?”

“Command was overridden.”

“By who? The system hack? Where did it come from?”

“Unknown entity overrode the command. Affirmative. System logs register security breach originated from the newly generated predictive modeling engram.”

“... was it him?”

“Assuming ‘him’ as user: Winterscar, Tenisent. Answer unknown. Predictive model engrams do not operate in this manner. Security breach expected to have misled countermeasure tracking conclusion.”

So Journey didn’t believe the engram had been the source, rather whatever was taking over Winterscar had confused the system into believing it came from the engram. That wasn’t what I thought was going on. Especially with all the occult light coming off the armor. More likely, the reality might have been ‘impossible’ to Journey, so it had tossed that conclusion out wholesale. I think what was happening was beyond the armor’s understanding. It said speech was impossible.

And yet... and yet that was my Father, speaking.

“What exactly is a predictive model?” I needed to understand more about what’s under the hood here. I’d only learned the surface level.

“An algorithm designed to study a set of data, and generate predictions on future motion from current events. In this case, the data set was Tenisent Winterscar’s motion data in all situations.”

Okay. “So the engram was made purely from motion capture data?”

“Negative. Situational awareness data was also included, as that data is directly relevant to motion choice.”

“Any voice data on how he spoke?”

“Negative. No audio data was transcribed into the completed model.”

Well, it had spoken. If the predictive modeling engram literally didn’t contain a single shred of Father’s audio data, then it really could not have been the prediction model itself that had come to life like that. I see why Journey was so adamant that speech wasn’t possible. Something else had somehow emulated my father’s voice - or it truly was his ghost somehow manifesting inside the digital environment?

The occult. “There were steaks of blue coming off the armor at the start. Did you see that?”

“Affirmative.” Journey said.

“Any idea what that was?”

Journey quickly dashed my hopes. “Negative.”

Come to think of it, I hadn’t yet heard anything from the armor about that topic. “Do you know anything about the occult?” I’d seen glowing inscriptions inside the relic armors already, all glowing that sickly occult blue. The armors must have some parts of the occult built in.

“Occult. Noun. Supernatural, mystical, or magical beliefs, practices, or phenomena.”

Heh. It clearly didn’t know what the occult was. Maybe some of its sub-systems are as abstracted from the armor’s full control as the beating of my heart is to my mind. The body simply knows how to repair a cut, the same might be applied to relic armors.

“What about that… that pulse at the start?” As if reality had been bent. I’d seen the automatons also stop in their tracks, I’m guessing they had ‘felt’ it too - if machines could even feel. “Did you… uhh, feel that Journey?”

The armor stayed silent for a moment, as if processing the request. Then it spoke. “Affirmative. Warning. Anomaly detected. Historical archives report additional data relevant to your question. No source of relevant data found on integrity check.”

“Uhh, I’m not sure I understand. Can you clarify that?”

“Log file size of the last three minutes reports seventy two gigabytes of information. On accessing the log, eighty-seven gigabytes of data is loaded into memory.”

“Let me get this straight, when you access your logs, there’s an additional bit of information about the pulse. But when you run a check over the actual files, that data is missing?”

“Affirmative.”

“What is this additional chunk of information?”

Again, Journey went silent for a moment before it answered. “Natural language predictive transformer unable to generate acceptable solution to the query. All answers fall below twenty percent confidence threshold.”

Well now. Something was seriously off. I know from experience, and what everyone had told me time and time again - the occult and technology do not mix together well. I’m starting to see why now.

If I understood that right, Journey could understand the data package - the memory it had of the event - but couldn’t find a way to word it in English. What in the gods was going on?

“What’s the next highest acceptable solution to the query?”

“Highest solution generated at twelve percent confidence: I felt the pulse across my soul.”

Holy scrapshit.

There was massive context to uncover in those seven words. It’s the first time I’d heard Journey refer to itself. The implications of that were enormous already, even not factoring the other parts. Were these suits as intelligent as machines? Sentient? Did Journey have a soul? And it hadn’t used words like ‘sensed’ or ‘detected’ the pulse. There were a lot of words for that report but the language model Journey used had specifically picked out ‘felt.’ That was deliberate.

The discoveries were coming too fast and furious for me to keep up. Every answer I got only opened up three more. Magic, souls, consciousness, a dead man returning from the grave - everything pointed again and again to the occult.

A warlock was going to be needed to make sense of any of this.

I put that thought on ice and moved onto my next question. “How in the frozen wastes did Winterscar override the security lock for motion?” To move a suit, the currently logged in user must accept. If there wasn’t a user, I’d understood root level permissions were required. Just administrator wasn’t enough to move another armor remotely. I thought those were hard-wired. I wasn’t thinking too straight during the heat of the moment, but that should never have worked.

It had stubbornly refused to listen to my pleas, only to turn around at the last second. Programming doesn’t do that. If it had already decided not to unlock the engram in the first place, no amount of begging would have changed that fact.

“Security locks are active if a user is currently logged in. Security locks are active if the armor has no current occupying user.” Journey answered.

That didn’t seem helpful until I spotted the hole in the logic.

“... there weren’t any rules in place for a non-living user technically occupying the suit.”

“Affirmative. This logic is undefined and rated low on the original intention of the wording. Winterscar reports it had detected this logic exploit as a viable means of continuing main objective, given certain conditions. It manually reset all systems and selected you as the source of intention on reboot, as you possess administrator rights. It then calculated that had you defined these rules in the immediate moment, the highest percentage match would include this logical ambiguity, intentionally.”

Winterscar had looked over the rulebook when I’d begged for help. And then it had squinted. Really, really hard.

That both awed me and troubled me. These armors were way more than they seemed. Here, it had tried to accomplish every bit of creative weaseling in order to help. I don’t think I’ve figured out even half of what they truly are.

I shifted gears to what the ghost of my father had told me. The last words. If that was really my father speaking to me from the grave, what he had said must be important.

The words played through my mouth. “Journey, do you have a recording of Winterscar’s words?”

Journey confirmed it did, and then replayed the audio file.

His speech had been garbled up, hard to make sense with the stuttering and distortion. It had to be something similar, adjacent.

Frak talin arm? Talen’s arm? I played the recording again and again, trying to make sense of it.

The ‘frak’ part of it threw me off. What if it hadn’t been an ‘f’ but instead another letter? Hack? Hack talen’s arm? Track? Track talen’s arm. That could be it.

The ‘arm’ might have been a word cut in half. Army? Armament? Armory? Armor? If I assumed the ‘f’ was intended, then it could be ‘Fractals in armor.’ The rest of the arm-starting words didn’t quite make as much sense.

Too many options. ‘Fractals in armor’ made some sense. The only armor he could be referring to were the relic armors. Or to track something belonging to talen. But what the scrap did that mean?

“Journey, what’s the best idea on what the words meant, all put together? Give me your top three ideas.”

“Compiling. ‘Fractals in armor’ noted at sixty-one percent confidence. ‘Fake it all in arm’ at thirty-two percent confidence. ‘Track talen’s arm’ at thirty percent.”

I shook my head free of thoughts. One thing at a time. There was a laundry list of tasks to do, majority of those are asking questions about what the fuck just happened. First thing’s first.

“Winterscar to search party.” I pinged the comms. There were reports and paperwork to fill out about my grossly overstated death.

Kidra answered it, frantic. “Keith?! Hold on, we’re almost there!”

“Whoa, whoa, Everything’s fine and under control now, you can relax! Turns out I came up with a last second scheme. And it worked.”

“Targets eliminated?” Atius asked, an impressed note in the timber.

“Affirmative. I… I had the Winterscar armor replicate Father’s combat movements.”

“Wait, that’s possible?” Atius seemed genuinely perplexed. “I’ve never heard of this before. How is that possible?”

“I did say engineers had a different viewpoint on the armors. I’ve got a long story to tell you, sir.”

“This mission keeps getting stranger and stranger.” He muttered, “Is this what Tenisent mentioned was priority one?”

“Uhh, partly. There’s more.”

“Of course there would be. Never anything simple when it comes to Winterscars.” He chuckled.

“Don’t report over wide range comms, lad. We don’t know what’s listening in. We’ll have plenty of time once we reach you. ‘Till then, sit tight.”

“Understood.”

“Search party out.”

It clicked shut, leaving me alone in the silence.

“Journey,” I asked in that gloom. The wording of Father’s final message still rang in my head.

Journey had been convinced that the security breach didn’t come from the engram, only that Winterscar’s subsystems were being fooled. The armor was failable. That meant the top result of Father’s last words - Fractals in armor - that could be wrong. The best solution then, was to investigate all the directions. The second highest made no sense, but the first and third results were both plausible. “Do you know what Talen’s arm is?”

“Negative.” The armor responded.

“An undersider city maybe?”

“Naming conventions follow wording. Correlation plausible. Estimate seventy-four percent match to possible city. Twelve percent match to a possible unknown religious sub-group.”

“If it wasn’t ‘arm’ that the armor implied and the word got cut off, do you know any matching item for Talen that has a second word starting with arm in it?”

“Seventeen instances of Talen found within compound words, pulled from diction in Winterscar’s data base. None contain arm in them.”

Father could have told me to track this down for some reason. I don’t know why, or what it was. If it was really Talen’s arm, it had to be something he’d discovered while outside his armor, else Winterscar would have had it defined in it’s dictionary.

I had to find out more about Talen, find something that was either named after that god or belonged to him.

And I needed to open up one of these armors. See what these fractals inside are supposed to be.

I slumped back against a wall, suddenly exhausted. My biometrics were everywhere, all sorts of fractures and muscle contusions painted in red over the HUD. Damage had been accumulating with each override Journey executed against my movements. If the suppressor drugs weren’t in full action, the pain would have been debilitating.

Somehow, I was still alive despite all odds.

Next chapter - The supernatural tag