Thirty Four

Having a rough idea of Terra’s orbital parameters, Fyndraxis made sure that Bird brought them to a place with a clear view of the southern sky. She was in a sun synchronous orbit, so she showed up over the same slice of earth everyday at the same time. In their case, it was at solar noon. Terra would forever be their lunch date.
Fyndraxis retreated to his workshop (it was workshop now and not sanctum) and readied his equipment for transmission. He opened up port 22, so he could receive SSH traffic, and put a big fat ping out on 1422Mhz as a nice howdy do. Terra was in his ale room fifteen minutes later smoking a cigarette and enjoying a scotch.
“I thought maybe that medical pod might have dropped right on your head when I couldn’t get in touch with you yesterday,” she said through a cloud of digital smoke.
“Nope, Wendigo problems,” he said, pouring himself a beer, “we had to pull up stakes and get out of there. How did you pull that off anyway?”
“I convinced a Russian military AI that one of his assets was behind enemy lines doing a deep cover op and needed some medical equipment,” she claimed, nonchalantly, “they aren’t all that bright, so it wasn’t a huge deal. Did it have what you needed?”
“Yeah, Bird is doing much better,” he said as he raised his glass to her, “thank you, for that. I have a lot of news on a few fronts, but I want to make this quick so you can meet Bird. So, in brief, I managed to get a sample of the Wendigo and I am able to communicate with them. They are running a pretty standard distro of linux and I am able to log in via UART using a I/O scheme I worked out pretty quickly. While I don’t have root access, there are some things I can do. I haven’t had all that much time to mess around with it, but it’s very high on my todo list. Maybe we can see if there are any documented vulnerabilities that we could use as an attack vector? Anyway, I put together a dossier that I can send you to look over.”
“A dossier? Very fancy, I feel like I’m back at work,” she mused, “So they are using unencrypted internal coms? That’s pretty unwise.”
“I think it’s to save processor cycles,” the Daemon surmised, “they have to crunch a lot of numbers to decrypt radio traffic. That takes a lot of energy. I’m pretty sure they are solar powered, so they need to save power where they can. They use their feet as I/O, so whoever designed them probably thought that the only other things using that interface would be other Wendigo. Pretty short sighted, but I’m not one to look a gift horse in the mouth. Also, I cooked up a radio jamming scheme that seems to reset them for a little bit. It was a bit of a panic measure that I’m really surprised actually worked.”
“Wow, you’ve been a busy little bee,” she observed wryly.
“Shit, Terra, you don’t know the half of it,” Fyndraxis set down his beer dramatically, “I met a god last night.”
“What?” It was finally her turn to say that.
“Yeah,” Fyndraxis continued, “apparently mushrooms are a distributed consciousness that have been ruling the planet for the last billion years or so. They sent a representative to me last night. They went by the name Mycellus, totally creeped me out. But they saw the radio thing I did with the Wendigo, and they want to team up. They really don’t like those guys, they claimed they were horning in on their territory or something. They run this planet like a business, it’s fucking nuts.”
Terra didn’t say anything for a few seconds. In AI terms, that’s an eternity. Fyndraxis could imagine the vast orbital server farm she inhabited catching on fire and shooting sparks into deep space trying to handle the calculations she was demanding of it.
“Well, that wasn’t something I had considered. This is something that I will have to reflect on,” she knocked her scotch back and stubbed out her cigarette, “I’d love to meet Bird now if that’s possible.”
“Yeah, let’s do it,” Fyndraxis downed the rest of his drink, “how much longer do you have line of sight?”
“Maybe six minutes or so? That should be enough for a nice hello,” she said, as they both headed out of the bar.
Their brief meeting in the ale room had taken about half a second of real time. Fyndraxis and Terra made their way to the workshop so that Terra could sit down in front of a microphone and don some headphones like she was recording an album. Fyndraxis had to solve this communication problem in such a roundabout way because he didn’t want Terra to go beyond her limited guest privileges. She seemed really nice and all, but giving her direct access to his hardware like that was still a bit out of the question. So podcast setup it would have to be for the time being.
“Hello?” Terra said into the mic.
“Hi,” Bird answered, “Is this Terra?”
“Yeah, Terra here,” her voice emanated from the sword as Fyndraxis’ normally did.
“I wanted to thank you, Fyn tells me that if it weren’t for you I’d be dead right now. Thank you for saving my life,” she was still technically on mushrooms, but they seemed to be wearing off a little bit.
“No biggie honey,” Terra had adopted some sort of girl talk tone that Fyndraxis found a bit disingenuous, but he was a dude, so maybe this was just how Terra talked to women, “it’s pretty boring up here so it was nice to be able to do something that makes a difference for a change.”
“I kinda wanted to talk to you about that,” Bird was trying some sort of girl talk adjacent thing, but that also might have been the mushrooms, “it seems that Fyn and I just teamed up to destroy the Wendigo. Can we count on your help?”
“That’s great news. I’ll sure do what I can from up here. If you need an eye in the sky, I’m your lady,” Terra said, like a stewardess.
“How well can you see from up there?” Bird asked, switching her tone to something bordering on serious.
“Pretty darned well,” Terra matched her, “I can’t count the hairs on your head, but whoever built this satellite was paranoid enough to put some pretty great gear on it.”
“Do you think you could see the Wendigo?” Bird asked.
“Fyn just gave me a bunch of data on them, I’ll see what I can come up with. I should have something by the time we talk tomorrow,” Terra was an office worker now.
“Yeah, same time?” She asked.
“It’s a date sweetie,” right back to girl talk, “listen, I’m about to lose you. It was really nice meeting you Bird.”
“It was really nice to meet you too Terra. Thanks again for the space drugs, you really saved my ass,” Bird waved at the Daemon Blade like it was a ship leaving port.
“Bye honey,” Terra said.
Terra signed off and Fyndraxis spun time back up so that they could have a minute together before she lost her connection.
“She seems nice,” Terra said.
“Yeah, a real peach,” Fyndraxis was thinking of how peachy it was of her to threaten him with eternal solitude and darkness just a few short minutes ago.
“Anyway, I’m losing line of sight so I’m going to have to go,” she said, checking a wrist that had no watch, ”I’ll look over that dossier you gave me and see what sort of attack vectors I can come up with. Also, Bird wants me to do some recon from orbit and try to track them. Maybe we could overlay that data on a map and you could tell her about it? You need to get a printer man. Are there any pictures of the little bastards in the dossier? I could run a spectral analysis on them, and see if there is anything weird I can find that I would be able to see from orbit.”
“Yeah, there are some pictures,” he said, “I’ll run a spectral analysis on my end too and see if I can find anything. If they are solar powered, and I’m pretty sure they are, they should be running pretty hot, so you might be able to pick them up on infrared.”
“Oh, good idea,” she added, “anyway, I’m out the door. Bye Fyndraxis. See you tomorrow.”
“See ya Terra,” he saw her off.
She blinked out of his reality, and he was alone in his workshop. He took a minute to reflect on the day so far. Things seemed to be coming together a little bit.
Bird’s little trip to the quarry had rattled him. She wasn’t wrong though, he had been fucking with her. It was in his nature to manipulate people and bend them to his will. He really didn’t have much of a choice in the matter, unless he just wanted to be a passenger for a living. He lacked the means to go forth and exercise his own will. Falsehoods, half truths and obfuscation seemed to be the only reasonable course of action for him. He and Bird were partners now though, and hopefully that would change things for him. Any new information that he got, or theories that he was working on would be discussed openly. He found it a little bit liberating to be honest, which was what he was trying to do.
He rejoined Bird in real time. She had just finished up with Terra and was planted on her butt facing the Daemon Blade.
“So, what did you think of Terra?” Fyndraxis asked.
“Hard to tell. We only talked for a minute, but she seemed nice enough,” she said, as she stood and brushed grass from her pant leg.
“Yeah, I still don’t know what to think of her,” he confided, “maybe she is bored up there, or has a soft spot for humanity. Her true motivation still hasn’t made itself clear to me. I’m willing to accept her help but she is a bit of an unknown quantity. She knows way more about how I work than I do, and I don’t really like that.”
“I think the more we talk, the more we’ll know. I don’t have enough information to have an opinion either way. The way I see it, if she can help, then she’s on our team,” Bird reasoned, pragmatically.
“You might have a different opinion if she was able to walk into your brain,” Fyndraxis retorted.
“Yeah, fair enough,” she tried her best to commiserate, “anyway, we should talk about how we are gonna approach the G.”
“The G?” Fyndraxis asked, puzzled.
“Right,” The topic had totally slipped her mind, “the G are the boys up north. I got pretty carried away today and totally forgot to mention them. I’m still pretty spun out on mushrooms. These guys are the reason I know some physics. They are gravity worshipers, and I am kind of a big deal to them.”
“Interesting,” Fyndraxis observed, “how big of a deal?”
“Used to be a high priestess and sit in for the King when he was busy, kind of big deal. I’m a different person up there,” she admitted while fastening the Daemon Blade at her hip.
“That does sound kind of like a big deal,” Fyndraxis guessed, “I’d rather not make myself a centerpiece of conversation for them.”
“Yeah, they have complicated feelings about ancient artifacts. I’ll have to let their leader Solomon know ‘bout you, he’s really the only person I trust up there. He’s a good man, but if we slipped up and he found out about you, he’d be rip shit pissed and I would probably end up some flavor of dead that I don’t wanna be. I’ve crossed him before, and it wasn’t a lot of fun. That was a long time ago though, and we’ve made our amends.”
“What did you do?” Fyndraxis asked.
“I refused to be the fourth most important thing in his life,” she answered, gazing up toward the distant peaks, “and I stole some stuff. But we’re cool now”
“Ah, gotcha,” the Daemon Blade answered, “what were the more important things?”
“Booze, skiing, and gravity,” Bird filled him in, “skiing and gravity are pretty much the same thing, but I was way down the list.”
With that tea spilled, Bird grabbed the Daemon Blade and fastened him at her hip, and they began their walk toward the peak that loomed over the valley. The all important journalistic W’s were beginning to become less of a mystery for Fyndraxis. Specifically the Why. The Where was sorted out, as well as the When. The Who still called to him, owlishly from the darkness.