Twenty Six

“It should take a couple of days to get through the Gulf,” Bird estimated while taking stock of the things that Teeroy had grabbed from her house, “I usually take the long trail when I head up north. It’s way easier, the terrain down here’s pretty rough. Luckily, we’re almost at the headwaters. That’s where the two rivers here come from. There’s a waterfall that comes down the mountain and splits in half. Half of it goes north, the other half comes this way. The south half of the Gulf‘s a real pain in the ass, but we’re most of the way through it and the northern half is only kinda shitty. If we make it past the beaver dams today, we should be in good shape,” Bird explained as she was gearing up for the trek.
“I’d really like to try to talk to Terra today, do you think we will get to see a little more sky?” The Daemon Sword asked hopefully.
“It gets a bit wider by the beaver dams,” she said, as she grabbed her pack, “but not by a lot. I’m still not feeling all that hot, so we’ll see how far we get today.”
She spent a couple minutes trying to figure out how to wear the Daemon Sword, and settled on using a piece of cord to affix him at her hip. Fyndraxis was happy to not be on her back, as this was an unwise place for a sword to be.
They broke camp and headed upstream toward the headwaters. The creek that snaked through the Gulf oscillated from east to west in rather irregular ways so most of the effort Bird spent was in crossing it every few hundred yards or so. The land that happened to not be wet was either sand, loose rock, or tree roots. Outside of the Gulf, the landscape had gotten the memo that it was well into springtime, inside the Gulf was a different matter. Tucked into the woods on north facing hills, there were still patches of snow and stubborn glacial blue outcroppings of ice clung to exposed cliff faces here and there. At any moment, one of these car sized chunks of ice could get the memo and give into gravity’s incessant pull. Progress was slow and dangerous.
By the time Terra would have been overhead and able to communicate, they hadn’t reached the wider part of the gulf and Fyndraxis must have missed her. They would have had a lot to talk about, but if he gave it another day and spent some time with the stowaways in his scabbard he could approach her with some real data.
While Bird was picking her way through waist deep roaring water and doing her best not to turn an ankle between river rocks the size of artisan boules, Fyndraxis retreated to his workshop. Once seated in front of his terminal he realized that he had no idea how he was supposed to study his specimens. He could analyze their radio traffic. In fact he had been doing that this whole time. It was a bunch of gibberish wrapped in standard network headers. He could look at them for a while and see if they did anything out of the ordinary.
So he did that for a while. They were just kind of loafing about, satisfied in the fact that there was no plastic around them. Some sort of electricity thing maybe? They were little computers afterall, maybe they had some way to communicate from bug to bug without a radio.
Fyndraxis had never had a reason to wonder if he could sense voltages, but he was out of ideas and that seemed like a perfectly decent rabbit hole to dive down. He started poking around in his computer looking for something that could pertain to reading a voltage. After a while he came up with something that could possibly work.
Next time he talked to Terra, he was going to have to ask her how to upgrade his metaphor to something that didn’t require him to read manuals and memorize arcane command line sequences.
He ended up using something called the GPIO, which stands for General Purpose Input Output. This is the part of a computer that sticks out into the universe and patiently waits for somebody to plug a wire or two into it. Once a wire is plugged in you can either read how many volts are flowing through it, or conversely you can send a voltage of your own. Normally, these are used to do pretty mundane things like powering a small fan to cool your processor or make some little blinky lights go blinkity blink. He didn’t physically have a set of GPIO pins, but he had legacy software to control it in his operating system. He could plug that software into something that could pretend to be the hardware he needed.
In the case of the Daemon sword, Fyndraxis was going to use it to see whether the Wendigo were talking to each other through means other than the radio. Some of the Wendigo bugs were loafing directly on his blade, which as it turns out was rather conductive. With some careful dicking around, he was able to make his blade act like the GPIO and track down the little guys and see if they were up to any galvanic shenanigans.
It turns out they were up to a little bit of something. Each one of their feet acted like its own little GPIO pin. In retrospect it was a rather obvious design choice of a clever architect, but for Fyndraxis it was just a wildly lucky guess. When these guys were in close company, rather than relying on their radios to talk to each other they could put their feet together and communicate that way. Given enough time and practice Fyndraxis could pretend to be a Wendigo and talk with them. Knowing his luck, this approach would be as equally encrypted as the radio stuff.
Purely for shits and giggles, he fired up a program called minicom. Minicom is used by large computers to talk to tiny computers through the pins on the GPIO. He used minicom to try to talk to this one little fellow over a protocol called UART and to his astonishment, it worked. Commands were coming from his fingers and being processed by Minicom, heading out to his blade that was emulating a GPIO and transmitting to the GPIO of the Wendigo unit. Once a command was received by the Wendigo unit, it was skipping all of the security protocols that any average network administrator would put in place and heading right for the unit’s brain.
Fyndraxis was sitting at his computer(or metaphor of a computer) staring at a command prompt for the operating system that controlled the Wendigo. He typed “help” and was shown a very helpful help file that told him all about the embedded distribution of linux it was running and what commands were available to him. This meant that he could execute commands on their system to a certain degree, which was a powerful piece of luck.
“No. Fucking. Way,” he said out loud to nobody. He couldn’t wait to tell Terra, he couldn’t wait to try to explain why this was so cool to Bird. Hell, he kind of wanted to go back to town and tell Teeroy, he’d certainly earned this knowledge. He poked around in the system and found that he didn’t have root access to the little fellow, but that was to be expected and it certainly wasn’t the end of the world
“Bird!” Fyndraxis exclaimed when he joined her back in her reality. She was occupying herself with the complicated business of scaling a waterfall twice her height, she was soaked and miserable.
“What? I’m kind of busy,” she answered, through a spray of water.
“I think I have an answer to the Wendigo thing,” his excitement was pretty apparent.
“Great, can it wait a minute?” she was reluctant to join in on the excitement, given her circumstances.
“Sure,” Fyndraxis was really excited about this and considered traveling forward through time to skip the waterfall portion of the journey, but that hadn’t really worked out well for him in the past so he just waited.
It took Bird a few minutes to get up the waterfall. It had turned out to be the last real obstacle before the headwaters. The Gulf opened up slightly and a series of terraced beaver ponds could be seen in the distance. Bird made her way toward them and ended up having to tiptoe along the razor’s edge of land between the vertical forest wall and the placid water of the beaver dams. The waterfall that acted as headwaters or the two rivers did indeed miraculously split in half at its base. One half fed the river that flowed south and the other filled the beaver ponds, probably putting their occupants orange teeth on edge.
“What’d you figure out?” Bird asked, as she had passed the final battlements of the beaver’s fortifications.
“It’s kind of hard to explain,” he had tried to come up with a decent way to explain this whole thing while Bird had been distracted with the negotiation of the waterfall, “because it’s all old world tech stuff. I think the best way I could put it is I can talk directly to their brains without using their ears. They usually use radio to communicate, but when they are very close to each other, they connect up in a pretty specific way and talk about what they are doing. They don’t use the radio to do this.”
“Wait, radio like your friend Terra?” Bird said, trying to put the pieces together.
“Yeah, when they need to talk to Wendigo that are far away they use the radio,” he started explaining, “when they are right on top of each other they link up and make a plan. Teeroy and I saw them get together in a big group and act like a ball of worms. It seems like most of the time they go around acting like dust looking for things to eat. When they find something they tell all of their friends over the radio. Once a bunch of their buddies show up, they link up and form a larger body that can do things at a scale that fits what they are going to eat. The space pod was pretty big, so to consume it in a reasonable amount of time they came up with a plan that matched the circumstances. In that case, a giant ball of violent worms.”
“I’ve never seen them do anything like that,” she informed him.
“It’s likely that most of the people that see something like that don’t live to tell the tale,” he reasoned, “I happened to figure out a way to distract them. I don’t know if it will work every time though. I have no idea how smart they are. I was using my distraction scheme until we entered the Gulf. I think that Teeroy and I lost them on the trail, but I was being careful.”
“That’s a lot to think about,” she said pensively, “I’m gonna gather some wood and make camp for the night. Luckily beavers leave dry wood everywhere, so we have that goin’ for us.”
She did as she said and easily gathered up the necessary materials for a fire that would last well into the night. They were losing daylight pretty rapidly as she went about the task of actually getting the fire lit. She did this with flint, steel and a liquid that she kept in a metal flask that she produced from somewhere. It turned out to be alcohol of some sort, because she had a sip or two. She went about making the fire as if it was a ritual, and the booze seemed to be an important part of it.