12 Miles Below

His image generator sent a single image. One single image. Just an animated drawing giving a small wave.

“To’Orda. Explain the reason for your direct contact.” To’Wrathh sent back, voice ice cold. “Are you attempting to locate me for the other two? Tell them I’ve already eliminated their little trap on the fourth strata, and it was hardly inspired in the first place. I look forward to crushing their next ploy.”

Her trace was anonymous, with the sender IP address changing every ten milliseconds across the world. Finding her was impossible, and To’Orda could tell there would be proxy addresses behind the proxy addresses. Besides - she could fly very fast.

“Yep. That’s her all right.” His pet rock sighed, acting as his advisor and voice on the channel. “You think she’s still mad about streaming the attempt to murder her boyfriend?”

“We are not in a relationship yet.” To’Wrathh said, voice instantly switching to a far more flustered and warm tone. “That is still in planning… does it already appear that way?”

The rock sighed. “One moment she sounds like an actual Feather looking to rip, maim and murder everything in her path, the next she’s suddenly a blushing damsel from some romcom comic. You heard that, right boss? It’s not just me going crazy here, right? You need therapy lady. He's a human! Ew.”

“I am in full control of my faculties and do not require therapy. I am merely dedicated to my role in deceiving the Deathless into a false sense of security and appreciation for my personality.” To’Wrathh said, voice returning to her cold and collected cynicism. “The term is method acting.”

“Method acting, she says. Sure great acting all right.” The rock muttered. “If only I had actual eyes to roll.”

To’Wrathh sent back an animated image for her gently grabbing the pet rock, giving it a quick pat on top, and then crushing it ruthlessly in her hand. To'Orda was more worried about any potential viral attacks through this vector, but the official chat channels were clean.

It seemed fairly obvious what the rock had done, at least to To’Orda. It tutted, sending an image of spitting off to the side, upset at the lack of support and empathy.

“You’ve contacted me for a reason, and I notice this channel does not include the other two Feathers.” To’Wrathh said, voice artificially haughty. “Have you come to beg for forgiveness in private? Attempting to forge an alliance in secret?”

“We just need cooking lessons lady, save the drama for when you’re ‘method acting’ around your future boyfriend/betrayal target.” The rock sent back.

To’Wrathh stayed quiet for exactly one point three seconds, which was a small eternity for Feathers. She must have been stunned. “You want food knowledge? Really? Wait - why? Is this some convoluted scheme from your superior to ruin my future plans again?”

“Is cooking knowledge dangerous or something?” The rock answered back with a question instead.

If it had any kind of strategic use, To’Avalis would already be a master cook, just to cover his bases. To’Orda was mostly certain there wouldn’t be any issue in asking To’Wrathh for this.

She sent an image over, eyes squinting in suspicion, but ultimately ended up in a shrug. “Very well. This is harmless enough. What are you searching for in specific, To’Orda?”

To’Orda turned to his captive Deathless. The man was still trying to speak to the bird up on the treetops, whispering in a low voice. They were still stuck at basic wording.

He lumbered over, one foot after another leaving deep imprints behind him. Eventually he reached the quiet Deathless who was looking up with a steeled expression.

“Nnn… what do you want?” To’Orda asked.

Drakonis turned to the Feather, cracked his neck, then walked up until he stood closer to To’Orda than any human had done so before. “You mean to eat?”

To’Orda looked down at the tiny man and nodded slowly.

“For starters, how about a warm home cooked meal then?”

“A warm home cooked meal.” To’Orda said to To’Wrathh over the comms, the image generator followed it up with a shrug, it had no idea what to send.

To the Deathless, he said something else at the same time. “Nnn... I will ask.”

“Ask who?”

“Bugger.” To’Orda hissed, then sighed. Questions. His instincts warned him that answering would open up far too many topics to deal with. Unfortunately, it was a question and he had to answer. And To’Wrathh herself sent a few messages asking what he meant by a home cooked meal. She had a lot of options already, apparently.

“To’Wrathh. Nnnn… She is asking questions too.”

Drakonis seemed shell shocked for a moment, before a mask of iron came down. “And here I thought you and her were enemies. What, are you her pen pal or something?”

To’Orda tapped the pet rock in his palm in panic, as if asking it where it had gone off to. “I’m getting to it, quit bullying me already.” The rock spat out, turning its focus back to the Deathless. “They are enemies. Officially and unofficially. But it’s not like asking advice about food is gonna blow up in anyone’s face. Contrary to popular belief, we can be civilized with one another.”n/ô/vel/b//in dot c//om

“Why To’Wrathh?” The damned human asked. The rock had failed to pass To’Wrathh’s question along, and now Drakonis had queue’d up another question. To’Orda groaned, then shook his pet rock slightly, demanding it get through the talking faster.

“Easy, easy, pal! I’ll deal with it!” The rock said, and To'Orda stopped the shaking. “I got delicate parts inside. Surrounded by impatient people or lunatics. What a life.”

To’Orda narrowed his eyes and the rock quickly ceased its prattle. “Okay, quick answer: Feathers don’t usually do food. Like, at all. Only one of us that’s nuts enough to actually start dabbling in that for the first time in our entire kind’s history is To’Wrathh, and the only reason we know that is a single bullet point mentioned by our boss’s research. Public logs about cooking she shares with her lessers, but it’s literally one bullet point with nothing else.”

Drakonis gave a tut. “The first Feather that cooks, and you blokes see it like an insignificant quirk? Seems backwards to me.”

“It's cooking. And she’s a nutjob. Threatened to crush me earlier just for talking to her. Frankly, you should be thanking To’Orda here for putting in all this effort to get you that home cooked meal. If you’re looking for firsts, this would be the first time a Feather cooks for a human. There, feel special now?”

“Extra.” Drakonis said.

The rock scoffed. “We’re soooo glad you feel that way, now what exactly do you want to eat? ‘Home cooked meal’ is cute, but it ain’t descriptive. I’d cook up a rock in a pot of water for you and garnish it with a wad of grass at this rate.”

“I didn’t take you for a cannibal. Really shouldn’t be judging on first appearances.” Drakonis said.

“I leave a pretty good first impression until you get to know me.” The rock said, puffing up. “I have that effect on people.”

“You didn’t exist a few hours ago.” Drakonis said. “Somehow, I get the feeling you're pedaling pyrite.”

There was still talking happening, and no progress. To’Orda realized shaking the rock hadn’t solved the problem, they'd only started bantering with one another. Perhaps shaking the human would work instead. His hand reached out, grabbed the human’s midsection and lifted him up so they could see eye to eye. “Nnnn… Food choice.” He said to the human trapped in his left hand. Then turned his attention to his right hand, that held the little rock. "Talk better."

"Yeah, sorry my bad. Got caught in the moment is all." The rock said. "All right human, tell us what you want and quit getting me in trouble."

Other than a surprised yelp, Drakonis threw together his composure a half second later. He stared back, hands balled up in fists at his hips, right on top of To’Orda’s own grasp. “Grilled rabbit leg would hit the spot come to think of it. Don’t think you’d find any of the spices for the Capra’Nor style, but should be simple enough. Think you can do that?”

With the answer in hand, To’Orda finally sent the order to To’Wrathh.

There was a brief pause, and before To’Wrathh sent back an animated image of her making a V sign with one hand, pointing the fingertips at her eyes before pointing them back directly at him. She repeated the animation a few times over. “I do not yet know what you are planning, but I am keeping my eyes on you.”

Why is everyone so suspicious of him? He just wanted cooking information.

“What’s the rub?” The rock asked for him. “If grilled rabbit leg could beat you, I’d eat my hat.”

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

“You do not have a hat.”

“I gamble what I can lose lady, it’s called being smart.”

To’Wrathh didn’t answer back, but eventually sent an animated image of putting the issue aside. “In order to understand cooking and to successfully cook your first meal, you require the prerequisites to cooking. I will send you my collected data on this.”

To’Wrathh sent a packet of data to him. Fifty three gigabytes of data. He deleted it immediately.

“Nnn…” Well, that was a bust. To’Wrathh was another dead end. He’d need to do it himself it seemed.

The image generator gave him a shrug, and the giant Feather turned his attention to the Deathless. “Nnnn... what does grilled rabbit leg need?”

“Grilling. And a rabbit.” Drakonis said. “Real complicated stuff I know.”

To’Orda did agree with that. Finding a method to grill, and finding a rabbit would be effort. And, unfortunately, he had no other tasks that supersede this one. That said, his gut had a feeling there was a way out of this one. An his image generator ran with it.

“Har har, well if it’s as complicated as you say, then we’ll need a little help from you.” The rock said. “Only fair.”

Drakonis raised an eyebrow, then shook his head lightly looking down. “Guess I walked into that one. But I don’t have armor, so I can’t find a rabbit out here. You’re gonna have to do that part. I can handle the grilling. How about that?”

To’Orda nodded, lowering the Deathless back down onto the ground and letting go. His task had been divided into two already. The captive went off to get twigs and dry kindle for a fire, while To’Orda lumbered through the forest searching for rabbits. His infrared sight only spotted the large canines with weird colors and equipment prowling around. Cooking them up was technically possible, but a part of his gut found it distasteful. And they weren’t rabbits either.

It didn’t take long for his heightened senses to find the nearest target: Hiding inside a hole. Which meant it wasn’t running away from him as he lumbered up, and dug both his hands into the dirt. A moment later, he scooped up the entire mound in one armful and lifted. The loose rocks and compressed dirt snapped the small animal’s neck and spine in an instant. After that, he let the soil down and dug through for his target.

To’Wrathh sent a message his way in the middle of his work. “Well? Do you require assistance with the modifications? Artificial taste buds are difficult to generate, however so long as your success rate is past one in three, the other two can be re-attempted. I can send you further data I collected when solving this issue myself.”

“He deleted your attachment first thing.” The rock said, giving a yawn. “Didn’t even read the name of the file. Do you think we’re stupid or something?”

“Deleted? Why wou- ah. I had forgotten my prior actions. It is understandable. In this case, I will guide you to the locations you require on the machine network itself. Send me a message when you’ve completed the proper modifications. There is much nuance to discuss.”

To’Orda’s eyes narrowed, violet glowing from the deep recesses. Something about this topic had gone under his little sister’s guard. She seemed almost… excited? Yes, excited and attempting to mask that excitement. She had rushed to send him the data packet without even thinking of it as a possible attack vector. His gut told him this was a weakness to exploit, old instincts bubbling up about deception and possible manipulation options. But he felt no need to do anything with that information and just thinking about it already felt exhausting.

All he was here for was to feed the Deathless so that he wouldn’t need to walk more. The image generator agreed with him, mostly because any attempt at deception or manipulation would require a lot of talking. Neither of them wanted more of that.

He lumbered back to where his tracker pointed that Deathless was lurking. The man assembled more animals around him now, those canines prowling and that bird that stuck around above. They were trying to discuss things, but it was clearly impaired by the language barrier. The moment he walked into view, the entire crew scattered off, once more circling around instead.

No real matter to him.

A little fire was going, along with an unhooked piece of flat human armor being used as a plate. The Deathless was realizing rapidly that the material was built to insulate already, and heating it up whole would take some time. The human wasn’t dumb however, he was trying to slice the metal up into a thinner slice with an occult blade.

To’Orda raised the dead rabbit in his hand, showing it for inspection. “Food.” He said.

“Yeah, that’ll do it. Gonna need to clean it up some, that’s a lot of compacted dirt on it. How’d that happen?”

Questions again. To’Orda poked the image generator. “It tried hiding in a hole. Bad idea.” The pet rock said as To’Orda dropped the rabbit and his rock next to the human.

While the rock handled that discussion, he followed up on To’Wrathh’s last message, lumbering over to a large enough tree where he could collapse down and lean his back into it without snapping the entire thing. It bent slightly but propped him up.

The machine archive would be the safest option, a neutral ground between their side and hers. She wouldn’t put a virus on the network itself. That would be too easy for To’Avalis to rope in a few dozen Feathers into finding the public attack, and have all of them report it independently.

Ultimately he reached a conclusion that satisfied him. “To’Orda agrees, but we’re watching you lady.” The rock sent back over the channel, mirroring her own animated image with those two fingers wiggling by the eyes.

She explained manually over the comms channel what public network to connect to. To’Orda followed the directions, inputting the right ports and domain location. It turned out to be some massive archive that several thousand lessers were all discussing and collaborating with each other on, even at this very moment.

Each topic was a food log of some kind? A few dozen images of the item in question, a video footage from her perspective of eating it, and a far larger data package of her taste bud logs.

Taste bud? Second time he'd heard that so far. To’Orda felt confused at the term. His image generator equally gave him a shrug as a return image. So they both turned their attention to the central post and instructions posted by an anonymous lesser going under the handle ‘Yrob.’

A name he would soon find just about everywhere in the archives here, and regarded by this small community as the best cook among them all. He opened a few more sections of this archive and found the food section had been only one sub-group among many. With topics such as music, artwork, games, sports, videos, architecture, theater, pets, clothing, furniture, animation and other random topics.

Each had an entire community of lessers all sharing and posting their additions. Machine culture? It wasn’t human culture, clothing alone was sown and made specifically to fit lessers of different models. But it was derived from them. A hat was a hat. What exactly had To’Wrathh started here?

The more he looked through, the more he felt like he had stumbled upon a small city. A small city of lessers all talking about the most random and useless of topics. The rock equally agreed, asking permission to scan through some of the communities spotted, predictably art and animation.

“It’s my..err, people, technically.” The rock sheepishly said after parsing through the entire archive. “Looks like To’Wrathh shared her own image generator with a bunch of lessers. It’s running in their heads and personalized for them. Ain’t nothing compared to what I can do of course, I’m running on a Feather’s hardware after all. But not too shabby for lessers. Not too shabby at all.”

The lessers all operated through proxy connections, and their names were so random he couldn’t even think of a way to track any of them down. Likely the reason To'Avalis saw no further use for any of this. Anonymized names, proxy addresses, and nothing to do with Deathless or Feathers.

He saw it slightly differently than other Feathers would have however. What he saw was an entire community going out and doing all the work, returning with only the results to share with others.

To’Wrathh was a master of delegation. It had a certain… appeal to it. Perhaps once he was back in his strata and finished with his debt to To’Sefit for breaking him free of the mite containment cube, he could start a small community of lessers like this to do his work for him.

Although when it came to food, only a Feather could do that work. None of the lessers had taste buds, or nanoswarms to generate them. The closest they’d discussed was on the general forums, about finding a mite forge and asking for the modification there. None had yet taken the gamble.

He read over Yrob’s guide, and developed the proper reading software himself to unpack To’Wrathh’s food diaries. That way he was certain it contained nothing To’Avalis would yell at him for. “Plus that paranoid bastard probably already looked through the source code here just sniffing for possible virus vectors.” His image generator added, drawing said Feather looking through the tiny community with every tool and magnifying glass possible.

There was nothing bundled in the open source he could see. So he assembled it, and started consuming the posted logs.

It was as if he was being hand-fed everything, from the comfort of his seat by the tree. And he could replay the log anytime he wished. Food was interesting. Too much work to cook, but downloading and running the taste logs was quite nice.

Many of the logs were of the same food type, but every single one was different in small variations that could be noticed. It was chaotic, always new. Either setting, amount of food, the texture and feel, all of it. The rest of the discussion topics were similar. All of it ended up with slight differences when made into the real world compared to their idealized blueprint. It added a certain amount of uniqueness to each experience.

“I take it you understand human food better now?” To’Wrathh said, a paired image of her puffing herself up proudly. “I am very meticulous in updating my archive sections, and have many admirers due to it.”

"Yeah, yeah, little miss popular.” The rock scoffed. “It’s gonna take more than a few plates of food to convince us abo- wait. Nevermind.”

To’Orda was busy replaying the logs, finding out he had favorites and not-so-favories. Odd. The only thing he liked thus far in his lifecycle was his shawl and his shield.

“Ahem.” The rock coughed.

And the image generator as well. But those were anomalies. Errors in his programming, small leaks that Mother hadn’t quite burned out. He was supposed to have no care for anything at all, and yet he was generating new things to appreciate again.

To’Orda opened up Yrob’s section, in which the lesser logged his attempts at cooking. This was useful information since it showed the lesser working from the ground up. A few logs showed the process from direct hunting of animals, butchery required, and every step in between. He lacked a lot of tools and basics, but there were a few variations to the grilled rabbit leg. And one of them was possible given the herbs and flora around him.

Ah. He realized the trap then. The rock agreed. “Yeah, welp. Now that you know how it’s done, and what it is, you gotta actually go out and do it.”

“Do what?” Drakonis asked from the fire. He’d completed the butchery using an occult dagger. A weapon To’Orda felt little threat from, given the human was stripped of armor. The actual threat, was the blasted questions again.

“Nnnn… gather herbs.” He said, sighing. He couldn’t hide in ignorance anymore. The herbs were nearby, and the instructions to cook were there. The Feather rose from his nook by the tree, eyes scanning around the forest.

Immediately, the same heat sources came into view, hiding among the bushes. The wolf-like creatures were all watching him, now including the pup he’d let run off. And the bird was on the top of the tree, equally watching over them.

They weren’t bothering him, so no reason to pay any attention to them. A sensor sweep for edible plant materials was started, as outlined by Yrob’s guide.

The lesser’s writing was truly excellent work. Concise, direct, and leaving To’Orda with all the hard work done for him. The problem, as both To’Orda and Drakonis soon discovered, was that picking herbs with two giant fingers would usually end with them crushed, or mangled.

They solved that problem by having Drakonis be the one gathering items, while To’Orda padded along behind, pointing out where the herbs appeared in his sensor sweep.

It was relaxing in a way.

And yet, he still felt like there would be an easier way to do all this. He lumbered through the forest slowly, taking in the scenery as he passed. His eyes roved back up, infrared showing him the bird was following him above the treeline.

Earlier his instincts were telling him those creatures could be the key to making his life easier somehow. And To’Wrathh had enormous success with delegation.

It all suddenly clicked: Why get food for the human, when he could get these animals to do it for him?

“Minions.” The pet rock gave a dark chuckle. “Excellent idea boss.”