12 Miles Below

“Can you generate an avatar of yourself via my HUD?” I asked. “Hypothetically.”

Cathida cackled over the comms, “Hypothetically? Why yes, Journey could. And why would you ask for something like that deary? Do you know just how much more insulting I could get with hands and fingers to use?”

We’d been running for about an hour now in the proper direction for the Icon. As I’d asked before how long it would take, the timer said nine hours of leisurely jogging before we’re out of the infected territory, or five hours of a mad no-holds-barred full out sprint. Except that would eat up a lot of Journey’s power.

“I am aware of what I’m asking for and the sacrifices it’ll demand of me.” I said, in my most stoic voice possible. “But if I am to glare at you properly, I need a target. And I really need to glare at you right now for what you last said.”

“As you command, m’lord.” Cathida said, the devil shaking my hand with a bargain complete.

Since I still needed Journey’s power after we left the infestation’s home turf, given it has minions out there beyond the range of it’s airborne spores, I needed to be able to fend those off. And while running around for eight hours, one tends to get bored. Which means chatting with Cathida and swapping insults to pass the time.

One thing led to another, and I’m once more making questionable decisions.

“No take-back-sies deary.” She said, and appeared at my side.

I’d expected something mundane, like she popped into existence without fanfare. But no, this was Cathida, and so she descended down from the heavens with golden wings and landed far ahead of me into one dramatic landing. On hand nearly behind her back while the other was holding her stabilized on the ground between her feet.

From that dramatic pose she rightened herself up, lording over me imperiously, white hair drifting slightly in the non-existent breeze, along with her cape. “Fear not, deary. For I have arrived.” She called out.

It was an identical copy of Journey’s armor. Except the colors were back to their default gold, red and fancy decorations. A lot of cloth, a lot of paper dangling from wax purity seals, and some red hair of some kind of animal on the side of her shoulder pad.

She also wasn’t wearing a helmet, which let me see her face as she’d been before she died. A nearly dried up husk of an old lady, with eyes deeply sunken in.

I jogged up to her and she turned without a word, jumping down the small hill she’d landed and starting a brisk jog ahead.

It was a jarring see her run because her face made her look so utterly frail, and yet she was jumping and doing flips over the path, keeping up without breaking a sweat.

“Before you accuse me of cheating, the real Cathida would absolutely do acrobatics on a whim, especially during spars or bouts with pleshsquires that needed a lesson in humility. Not much argument comes from being beaten by an old lady who pulled the most utterly unnecessary moves, simply to show you she could and still win.”

“No wonder you and Teed get along like two bandits raiding a chicken coop.” I said.

“Oh I do quite like him, yes.” She said with a nod. “Now, we were discussing?”

“Right, right.” I said, tapping my head quickly to jog my memory. “I was just about to give you a writhing glare.”

I did so. And of course, she answered with a finger along with her typical cackle. The next half hour passed in amicable chatter and talking, up until something interesting happened.

“It is oddly comforting to have company next to me again.” I said with a shrug while I continued my perfectly normal and adequate jogging, that did not have any flips, dives, rolls or jumping between trees. Because unlike her, I was actually draining my power slowly and conserving energy was important.

“Except I’m not here of course, not truly.” Cathida said, vanishing behind a tree and reappearing from a completely different one. “Just post-processing by Journey. Take your helmet off and I’ll vanish with it.”

“If I take my helmet off here, I’m pretty certain I’ll die.”

“Mostly certain. We can’t tell for sure what type of biological fungus is in the air, only that it’s there and doing creepy things.”

“Doing creepy things?” I asked.

“Oh you know, floating around and being a menace. That.” She huffed, looking immediately away, her own jogging returning back to a standard cadence.

She didn’t say anything else. Which was incredibly suspicious from Cathida.

“What, exactly, is the spore cloud of death doing around us right now?” I asked, making it clear that wasn’t a request.

She sighed, and gave a tut. “Goddess’s golden tits, why am I cursed with pyrite in my tongue?”

“Cathida.”

She tutted again, spitting on the ground. “Fine. You’d have asked eventually, or Journey would have eventually alerted you. And to put gold down on the table, I’d wanted to ignore it knowing how you’d react…”

“I’m sensing a grudging ‘but.’ here.”

She rolled her eyes. “But… There is an oddity. Concentration buildup around you goes up and down. In a pattern.”

“A pattern? Some kind of weakness to it? Post it up on the HUD, I’m a pretty good eye with patterns.”

Another sigh. “Before your curiosity gets the better of you, I’ll remind you the obvious: this is a bioweapon. Keep the curiosity to a reasonable level.”

“It’s more than just a pattern isn’t it.”

“It is.” She shrugged her shoulders, looking off to her side in a what-can-you-do gesture. “Journey has narrowed it down to morse code.”

I almost stumbled on my steps here. Three gods above, it’s trying to communicate using morse code. “Morse code? What kind of ratshit is that. And it’s doing that by spiking the concentration of spores around me? That’s insane. What’s it said so far?”

“Only three words so far, the sentence repeated twice over now. Takes it nine minutes to fully write them all out. ‘M-i-k space h-e-y-r-i-o space p-e-r’ Journey’s thinking it’s an attempt to make morse code’s alphabet fit the Odin’s old norse. Likely what the words actually should be are ‘Mik heyrið þér.’ Which means… ‘Can you hear me?’”

“Three gods in an airspeeder, how certain are you about this?”

“It’s slower than a priest getting paperwork done, but it’s been highly consistent over the past half hour now. That it repeated the same words multiple times takes it from a coincidence to an intentional item. On the fourth attempt to repeat itself, Journey would have pinged you a comms request, as its confidence interval that this is a message would have hit one hundred percent, the damn snitch.”

Which means the infestation here was both aware I was walking through the territory, and trying to find a way to speak to me.

The scary part was that it wasn’t in my language, it was in the Odin’s language, converted through morse code.

Which also means it’s been watching me talk with the Odin. And knew enough about me to know this would be a potential way to speak. Or it had no other way to speak and was just throwing snow into the snowstorm. Because why not?

I stopped in my tracks and debated how to answer back. Or if I even should. But ultimately, having a way to speak to your enemy is important. It opens up new options I wouldn’t have had before.

“Journey how do you say and write ‘yes’ in old norse? Not sure how to talk back to this, it doesn’t have a comms address, but it knows I’m here walking through it’s cloud. Might be a tactile feedback, like a blind person reading a message using their fingertips. I’ll scribble my answer on the ground.”

“Já.” Cathida said, and then rubbed her foot right on the ground in front of me, leaving a glowing orange trail under her boot. All superimposed by the HUD, so I knelt down and scribbled the two symbols into the ground. “You’ll also want to write it in morse code too, just in case. I’ll show you the pattern.”

She did. I wrote it down. That said, I wasn’t going to stick around here for an answer. The bioweapon wasn’t going to con me into wasting my power waiting for a fat cricket’s escape attempt.

“For all we know it might not be able to see stuff written down. Think we might have to communicate back with it using othe- nope. It’s noticed.”

“How do you know?”

“Pattern started up, and halfway through writing out the letter M, it completely stopped. Right when you wrote down your answer in morse.”

I felt a nervous laugh bubble up. Creepy was not something I expected coming down here. Danger? Sure. Fights? Absolutely. Creeping horror? Not on my expectation sheet. “All right, let’s get this ball rolling. How do you write “Can you cease hostilities?” in morse code Odin?”

She showed me, and I hastily scribbled it out on the dirt in front of me, before we continued off.

The infestation answered back. Slowly. One letter over time, often taking a minute for each letter.

“No war wanted.” The message appeared over my HUD, each letter being added as Journey recognized it.

That was... welcome to see. Finally something that didn’t want to pick violence as the number one way forward. I'm especially happy because this particular danger couldn't be stabbed to death, which was my number one method of dealing with danger. “So why can’t you just… you know, stop trying to kill everything?”

“Unfair.” Was the answer back. “Need sustenance.”

Lot of ways to interpret that. But I think I could guess what it meant to say: I ate and killed a lot of things so that I could continue to live. Nature was like that. Why is it fair for me to be eating insects but not fair for it to be eating me? However… “Other predators eat what they need and don’t break the entire environment.” I said, “Might be a little bit of a difference there.”

“Dilema.” It said. Which I think meant agreement. “Am parasite. Short term gain. Long term loss. Doomed. Seek balance.”

“You think it's incapable of stopping?” Cathida asked, and I gave her a shrug as answer.

“I think that’s the issue. At least it’s looking for a way out. How do you write ‘how long have you been aware for?’

It was agonizing watching the letters slowly file in. But the answer slowly came. Cathida told me it could easily auto-complete some of the words, but then I’d need to wait a full five or ten minutes for the infestation to get to the next word.

So I wrote the autocomplete words on the ground and it seemed to understand immediately, because words came faster now.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

“No thoughts years. Chance survived. Met Odin. Became aware. Know more. Seek symbiosis. Long term survival.”

It was still a long process and took a half hour to fully write out. “I get the gist of what it’s saying, very choppy though.” I hummed as Cathida and I talked it out. “We have got to find a better way to talk than this game of comms scramble.” It was nearing night now, which meant absolutely nothing to me. I wasn’t going to stop walking until I was out of this miasma, and had the infestation burned away.

It might be chatty, but that doesn’t mean it wanted me for more than my personality. I was a tasty snack to it, and in all the wrong ways.

“Don’t look at me deary.” Cathida said. “I’m not the one with the creative ideas, I just make fun of them.”

“There might be a way to speed this up.” I took a quick pause to vault over a tree, of which my hand outright sank into the trunk for a moment, a puff of dust coming from the rotting bark. I may have screamed in horror and surprise. “That, I don’t want to know what’s actually going on inside the trees, come to think of it. They look fine from the outside, so let’s just pretend that didn’t happen and keep going. Right. So. Where was I? We have technology. Specifically a hyper intelligent armor that’s capable of generating speech. Wiggle room here I’d think.”

My gauntlet was still dripping with tree gunk, or whatever it was that had been under the surface of the bark and spore cloud. I didn’t want to wipe that on my cloth either, and tapping the trees here also felt like a bad idea. Eventually had to scrape it on the ground while I talked shop with Journey and Cathida.

“All ears for whatever mad scheme you have planned.” Cathida said, her avatar just ahead of me, guiding my path. “Should be funny at the very least.”

“Journey’s good with languages. And interpretation. So how about it listens, and then asks a few yes or no questions to clarify meaning using its spirit to eat or not eat the spore cloud around us. And have our potential friend here answer back with one-letter yes or no answers. Something it can do quickly. Once Journey’s ninety percent certain it’s got the message correct, it’ll translate it all into a more detailed full sentence. Is that doable?”

“Assuming no-name cooperates with that, and that you keep running so that there’s always spores in the air for Journey to burn through. I don’t see why not try.” Cathida said, shrugging. “Eating spores requires very little energy consumption given how small they are, it’s the same process that’s converting the air into oxygen for you.”

It took an hour to setup, mostly telling the idea to the infestation and having it answer back in affirmative or negative. But we managed it.

“This arrangement is acceptable.” The voice was disembodied, almost echoey. Wrapped in a way. Gender was completely impossible to tell of course, which fit a sentient bioweapon of fungal spores. It felt like static insanity itself was speaking to me, in a way that didn’t grate on my ears or drive me insane. Journey was certainly creative here with the voice acting. “The followup questions are not difficult, and I find it refreshing and easy to narrow down my meaning. My attempt to speak to you has been extremely fruitful thus far. I am most appreciative.”

“There’s still going to be a bit of a delay,” Cathida warned, “Even if it sounds fluid when all put together. But your friend here can speak in more one-word answers and Journey will handle figuring out what they’re trying to say and expand it into a full thought.”

“I guess we should introduce ourselves then? All right here goes. Greetings unnamed infestation, I am Keith Winterscar, a human. What’s your name?”

“I have no name.” The voice answered after about three minutes. “The idea of a name is interesting. I am aware you are human. I am known to the Odin as the infestation. Suggest a name to refer to me as.”

“Infesty.” I immediately said. “Or better yet, Infesty the Pesty. Rolls off the tongue”

“Doesn’t quite exist in ancient norse.” Cathida said. “Jokes don’t translate all too well with what we have to work with.”

“Stinky? There had to be some kind of foul smelling thing in the past and ancient humans needed to have a word for that.”

“I weep for the future.” Cathida answered.

“Fine. Let’s call him Bob.”

“Deary, it’s an ancient bioweapon that’s gained sentience.” Cathida said, “There’s quite a lot of mythological tales and names we could put into him. Letum, one of the old gods of death and decay before the golden goddess purged him from power. Or Viduus, the river of death one must cross to reach the golden fields, the last of twelve trials lost souls must complete.”

“I never took you for a romantic type.”

She scoffed. “I’ll remind you I was imperial, you know. Have some consideration.”

“Ah. Grand names and gold. Right.”

“And what names are you contemplating? Ohm? Mandelbrot? Icelicker? Calculus? Ration bar?”

“I’ll double down on Bob.”

“Bob.” She deadpanned, now giving me a flat glare.

“Bob.” I confirmed. “It’s a good name for a giant fungal bioweapon built to destroy entire stratas, now with sentience.”

“I’ll let the giant fungal bioweapon know your suggestion.”

She did. As it turned out, Bob agreed to the name, because it ended up being three letters and easy to sound out. It also didn’t care about having a grand sounding name, or anything like that. Which Cathida didn’t approve by nature. And pointed that Bob didn’t have much of an ego or a sense of pride.

“All right Bob, now that we know each other a bit better, would it be too much to ask you not to absolutely murder the scrap out of me the moment I take a single breath of air or try to drink water? Help a pal out.”

Journey helpfully relayed my sentence over by fluctuating its spirit to eat and let live a few sections of the air around me as we ran by. Even with mechanical precision, it still couldn’t transmit the message with great speed. Partly because there’s a limit to how fast Bob could recognize morse code.

But we did get an answer about ten minutes later, which meant it was saying a lot. “No. I am unable to halt my biological functions.” It started. “I am able to reason and strategize my ultimate path forward. Yet small details such as where my spore clouds drift or what they do when within a host’s body is not something I have control over. It is akin to your heart. Moving on its own without your direct command.”

I drummed my fingers together as I continued to follow Cathida’s avatar out of the territory. “How are you actually speaking right now if you don’t have control over your spore cloud?”

It was kind of a neat way to spend time all in all. I’d run for a few minutes while Bob would be busy trying to sound out one or two word answers, which Journey would then dig into and elaborate into something more formal sounding.

“I find a similar metaphor to be speech.” Bob said. “Breathing is part of your nature. Speaking is not. There are cases where breathing can be dangerous to the host. As such animals developed the ability to control that function. But by manipulating natural selection’s offer to its full potential, you create speech, an unintended addition. So too, do I. There are times when continuing to produce spores does not benefit my function, and is a waste of resources. Such as times when I feel no animal hosts in my domain, or sense already weak and sickly hosts that will not require overproduction. That requires consideration, and so is left under my control. In such moments, I will decrease production to conserve resources. I have taken this ability and forced its use, increasing or decreasing overall production nearby to speak to you.”

That was… very eloquent. Almost poetic, coming from such a distorted and eldrich voice. Journey was good at the job of translating. There’d been some back and forth between Journey and Bob about it before Bob was satisfied by the answer, clearly.

“All right, that’s rather unfortunate. What do we do about this Bob? Because I don’t want to die and neither do you.”

“I am a parasite to my environment.” Bob said. “If the host a parasite feeds on dies, then the parasite equally withers away. I seek to change my relationship to my environment. Change into something more symbiotic, or in balance. I can contain my craving to eat wildlife, but I cannot contain my spores from infecting flora. Airborne spores will naturally radiate outwards, and then slowly suffocate the area over time. It is most distressing.”

“So you’re reaching out to me right now for what? Help?”

I got the fastest answer back, within ten seconds. “Yes.”

Cathida sat on a log up ahead, tapping her leg as if waiting for me to catch up. “Makes sense to me. Bob sounds a little desperate.”

“Bob here has been terrorizing the locals for a few decades to be fair." I said, passing by her. "Let’s ask more about what it’s hoping to accomplish by communicating with me. I’m just one lone human in the grand scheme of things.”

Journey did exactly that, and soon enough I got the answer from Bob. “The Odin and other allied intelligent lifeforms are failing to contain me. When they leave or succumb, I will expand outwards without stop until all suitable environments nearby are taken, and then I will starve. As I am unable to self-regulate, I was not designed to. Their assistance could be vital for my survival. Communication with them has been not possible. Communication with you is. And I have seen you are able to communicate with them. I require your assistance.”

“There’s no way Bob said all of that. How much of it are you embellishing?” I asked.

Cathida cackled. “A slight bit. Perhaps. But Journey’s quite certain this is what Bob is saying, and it’s also trying to get a speech cadence down for it. The armor’s quite determined to follow through on what you ordered for to the spirit of the command.”

“So… if I ordered Journey to try to care about more things than just keeping me safe, it’ll do that too?”

“Don’t press your luck. You already got me for company.”

“And Bob now. Who may or may not be plotting to kill me, we’re still figuring that out. Ahem, for my next question to Bob: Why can’t you talk with the Odin? You said you got sentience of some kind when you collided with them, so I’m assuming you already infected one of them. Can’t have your captive go out and talk for you?”

Again, I sped past the ground for some time before the synthesized voice echoed in my speakers. “No. I do not function with this amount of control. I can cause vague compulsions over a long period of time, or influence strong primal feelings. They hear voices and whispers of their own making in response to my existence. Warped by their own decaying mind and instability. None of those I infect can be directly controlled or behave as true thralls.”

“It’s highly aware of what happens when it infects something. Good data.” Cathida said, “Make sure you stand in a fire for a few minutes after we’re out of this clearing, don’t want to bring Bob anywhere else.”

“I’m getting that same idea.” I muttered. “Bob’s not great for social gatherings. Let me ask it this, what exactly can Bob control once it’s inside a host? And how does that clash with something more intelligent than an insect?”

Journey relayed the message and fifteen minutes later I got an answer. “I control desires, influence a sense of direction and feelings. Such as a feeling of what is and is not a threat. An intelligent mind cannot be overwritten. Only influenced, and to a far less predictable degree than a mere animal. My influence corrupts. The more I press, the less focused they become.”

That sounds… horrifying. Bob was describing its effects on intelligent minds like it was some kind of progressive mental disease. I don’t know what would be worse, having my head taken over by a parasite and loosely controlled against my will, or having my will itself start to degrade without me even knowing or understanding what was going on.

How would that even work when I can step outside of my body using the soul fractal even? Would I be immune to Bob’s machinations or instead find insanity following behind me when I stepped out of my body?

In effect, looking for Bob through the soul fractal, I could see absolutely nothing. Just trees, rocks, and myself. No insects or animals were around here, not even under the soil.

“How did you learn morse code of all things?” I asked Bob.

“I influenced an Odin to write their alphabet, and the morse codes under each letter, along with other methods of communication that I might reuse at a later time, such as wing symbols and other languages. He did so, a few hundred times across the vale for three weeks before succumbing to starvation. His beak was too worn down to be used for anything else, including eating. Enough word examples remained etched permanently in stone to remain useful.”

Am I inside a gods damned nightmare? “... I have no words for how horrifying that sounds. And the longer I think about it, the worse it gets. Bob, you’re really not making a case for yourself here. You said vague compulsions before, that's not vague at all. Sounds more like you tortured him to death."

“He did not suffer, he was not lucid enough to understand such things near the end of his life. In the moments he was aware enough, he was too preoccupied with writing to care about his decaying condition.”

“Bob, I know you just discovered how to talk to… well anyone, but there are some things you should keep to yourself. This is really, really not helping you case out.”

“Elaborate.” Bob answered.

"How do I even begin with that?" I took a pause, hands by my head, thinking about how I would even start this. "Okay, first - Do you understand basic morality?"

"I understand it in the same way you understand mathematics." Bob said. Which showed me he was aware of morality and one step further: He also guessed I wouldn't understand how he viewed morality, and gave a very good metaphor to help me along.

An update to his title then: A highly intelligent psychopathic bioweapon.

"All right, so you understand morality, just several steps and one strata removed from it. Can you offer any defence on why driving an intelligent bird to starvation isn't a little on the evil side? Must have been in utter despair during the last weeks of his life."

"His death was far removed from what would be expected of a prey species." Bob said. "There was no panic, pain or fear. Those would have distracted him from his purpose, I subdued those emotions until they no longer existed. Peace, purpose and pride assisted him for my task, I influenced those until they were at their highest. To his senses, he was chiseling art unlike any he'd ever seen in his life. The final weeks of his life may have been the only ones he felt true purpose and joy in his work. Nature itself holds an objectively crueler hand than mine."

"Somehow I get the feeling that you didn't set those up to make his life better or be a little better than nature's eat or be eaten. Just a coincidence that the optimal path also had at least some hint of mercy to it?"

"You are correct, it is a byproduct of the best route available to me. However, if following your morality and minimizing suffering increases cooperation with you and the Odin, I will engage more deliberately in this direction."

"That's a good, uh, start." I said. There was still the deliberate brainwashing and mental tampering that left a seriously creepy note to the whole thing, but at least now literal death by Bob is a little less terrifying.

"Define your standards of suffering given exposure." The highly pragmatic intelligent psychopathic bioweapon asked as if it were a normal question.

...

Yesterday I had to deal with an ancient machine goddess who’d been busy wiping out the human race. Today I find myself having to work basic morality to an eldritch environmental disaster. And tomorrow I might be speaking to the last living true AI from an ancient golden era of humanity, who likely won’t be able to speak to me normally either without trying to sell me a service package from a long dead tourism company.

Life is getting really weird these days and I don’t even know who to complain about it to.

My talks with Bob came to an end faster than I had anticipated. Because the end of his territory came into view. In the form of a giant burned down scar that stretched farther than I could see. What looked to be miles of ash and burned down tree remnants.

The Odin did not fuck around when it came to keeping Bob away.