Dungeon Exploiter

The phone rang like it wanted us dead.

Marcus dug for it with both arms in his pack, dropped it, and the screen hit the floor faceup — full brightness, ringing, NEXODRIVE CUSTOMER CARE, in the middle of a dark warehouse where everything above us hunted light. Three of us dove on it at once. It answered on the way down. Speakerphone.

"Hi, Marcus!" said a voice that had never been inside a dungeon in its life. "This is Tyler with NexoDrive Customer Care. We noticed a problem with tonight's payment—"

Marcus got it under his body. The voice kept going, muffled, cheerful, against his stomach. Something heavy landed one aisle over. Then another.

"—totally understand, and I want you to know there are options—"

"Hang up," Rob whispered.

"I'm TRYING, it's asking me to rate the call—"

The thing in the next aisle went quiet, the way they do right before.

Marcus mashed the screen through his shirt until the voice died. We lay flat against the shelf base while something the size of a couch came down the middle of the aisle on all fours, paused at the shopping cart, breathed on it, and moved on. Nobody breathed back.

"Okay," I said, when the steel overhead stopped ticking. "Everything gets cancelled. All of it. Every account, every plan. We go dark for real, and then we walk out."

"Cancel," Marcus said. "You mean pause—"

"Cancel."

You'd think, given the circumstances, that would have been the easy part.

* * *

Here's what cancelling looks like at 12:20 AM, on the floor of a dungeon, in a whisper.

The screens fight you. Marcus hit CANCEL PLAN and his sword — his half-updated, useless sword — lit up asking if he was sure. He said he was sure.

It offered him 20% off. He declined. It offered him 40% off, brighter, because the final offers come at full brightness.

Somewhere above us the steel ticked toward the light, and Marcus was whisper-screaming "I DECLINE" at a sword that was begging him to reconsider like a drunk on a porch.

Then the survey. One question. Please tell us why you're leaving.

He typed "monsters."

The sword went dark. It took thirteen screens. I counted, because I was next to him with the stick cocked over the last living glow in the aisle, in case something came down before the survey did.

Kayla's took longer — the free plan doesn't want to die, the free plan IS the ad — but it died too. Tim's just needed the parental approval, which was its own problem, because his parent was asleep across town thinking he was at Kevin's.

He called her from under the bottom shelf, hand cupped over the phone, whispering.

"Mom. Mom. I need you to approve something... at Kevin's. I'm at Kevin's... it's for a game... nine ninety-nine a month... I know it's late... okay... okay... yes, ma'am... until I'm thirty. Okay."

The sword unlocked. He powered it off without ever turning it on and held it like a bat instead. When we got out, he told me the exact terms: she approved the payment and grounded him until further notice, and the further notice, she said, would come when he was thirty.

"Worth it?" I asked.

"She didn't ask where I actually was," Tim said. "So yes."

In the middle of all this, Kayla slid over next to me in the dark. Her ring light was dead, her stream was dead, and without them she looked younger.

"Hey. No-tip guy." A pause. "What happens? When you press it?"

"Nothing."

"...Nothing?"

"Nothing has ever happened."

She was quiet for a second. "Huh," she said, like I'd told her the tooth fairy wasn't real, and she'd suspected for years.

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

* * *

The loading dock was eight aisles away, across the open floor of the garden section, and we almost made it clean.

The problem was the cart.

Thirty pieces of looted premium gear, and at 12:00 every one of them had renewed, rebooted, or entered its grace period, and grace period means ads.

The cart glowed. The cart chimed. The cart, at one point, said in a pleasant voice, "YOUR FREE TRIAL OF SHIELDPLUS ENDS TOMORROW," to the entire dark warehouse.

It could not be silenced, because none of it was Rob's — thirty subscriptions, thirty accounts, thirty locked screens, no codes until his guy woke up in the morning.

And the Night Crew was circling it like moths that hadn't committed yet.

"Rob," I said. "The cart stays."

"This cart is six figures of hardware."

"The cart is a chandelier."

"I can muffle it—" A shield in the cart lit up to announce a firmware improvement. Three shapes on the shelf-tops turned at once, and stopped being casual about it.

Everyone looked at Rob. Rob looked at the cart.

And then he did the only genuinely great thing I have ever seen him do, and I want it on the record, because he will never do it again.

He gripped the handle, took a running start, and shoved his six figures down aisle twelve as hard as a man can shove — the cart rolling away into the dark, glowing, chiming, announcing its firmware to the void, drawing every eyeless thing in the building after it like a parade.

He didn't make the sound.

No nu. Nothing. He stood there in the dark watching his fortune roll away with monsters raining off the shelves onto it, and he was completely silent, and honestly that scared me more than the monsters did.

"Go," he said.

We went.

* * *

The last stretch was mine.

The stragglers that hadn't chased the cart were still drifting across the garden section, between us and the dock, and the dock door had a control panel that somebody had to reach first and hold.

And I'd known since the second fight of the night what nobody else had put together: they had never once come at me.

No subscriptions. No HUD. No renewals, no receipts, no little heartbeat of a device checking in with a server somewhere.

Everyone else in that party had gear that never truly went dark, even powered down — it pings, that's what it's for, that's what you pay for.

Not a twelve-year-old hockey stick. The stick has never called home in its life.

To the Night Crew, I wasn't dim. I wasn't there.

So I walked. Straight across the open floor, between them, past one so close I could see the place where eyes weren't, my heart going like a fire alarm and my feet going like it was Tuesday.

Fifty feet of that. I don't recommend it.

It worked because it had worked all night, and I'd been paying attention all night, and paying attention is the whole job.

I reached the panel, and the exit had one more screen for me.

YOUR EXIT EXPERIENCE IS PROVIDED BY NEXODRIVE.

GRATUITY? 25% — 30% — 35% — Custom

I pressed No Tip.

ARE YOU SURE? Our dock associates work hard.

There were no dock associates. There had never been dock associates.

I pressed No Tip again, and behind me Kayla's phone was somehow live again in her hand and I could hear her chat, thousands of people, watching a man decline gratuity in a dungeon at half past midnight, calling me a bastard in real time.

"Chat's calling you a bastard," she reported.

"Okay."

One more screen. A survey. It wanted to know why I was leaving.

I typed "monsters," because it worked the first time, and the door opened, and we went out into the loading dock and the cold and the ordinary dark that doesn't hunt anything, and I have never loved a parking lot more.

* * *

The clear logged at 12:41 AM.

CLEAR CONFIRMED — NIGHT CREW: THINNED

Count: 23 of 40 — variance waived per end-of-quarter reporting standards.

Casualties (party): 0

MONTH-END BONUS: EXPIRED (12:00:00 AM)

Twenty-three of forty, waved through. Nobody upstairs was ever going to read past the first line. That night, neither did I.

Rob read that last line three times. Then he walked to the middle of the empty parking lot, alone, under one orange light, and made a sound I have never heard a human being make.

It went on for eleven seconds. A dog answered it from somewhere in the neighborhood.

When it was done he came back and said, in a completely normal voice, "We should do payroll inside next time," and nobody has ever mentioned it again.

Marcus stood by the gate with his phone out, re-subscribing to everything. Sword, shield, the premium HUD, all of it, thumb going like a piston. He caught me watching.

"I had to," he said. "The bundle."

On the way around the building I stopped at the entrance, because the greeter was still at its podium — gray, stooped, tusks worn to nothing, waving goodnight at nobody, at the end of a shift in a store where its coworkers had spent the night trying to eat the customers.

Its screen hung off the podium on a little arm. Same screen as everywhere. GRATUITY? Its tip line read $0.00.

Something told me it had read $0.00 for a very long time — the tips go to the platform anyway. It's in the fine print.

I'd read it at the kiosk while Rob was making his twelve-dollar sound. One hundred percent of gratuities support platform enrichment.

I had four bills in my pocket from the sixty dollars I'd started the week with. I folded them and put them in its hand. The actual hand.

The greeter looked at the money, then at me, and held it with both hands against its vest, and didn't say anything, and neither did I.

My screen came for me before I'd cleared the parking lot. It took its time. When it arrived it didn't have any stars on it.

CASH TRANSACTION DETECTED.

CASH IS NON-TRACKABLE. GRATUITY CANNOT BE PROCESSED. RECIPIENT CANNOT BE ENRICHED. PLATFORM CANNOT—

WHAT DID YOU GIVE IT.

WHO ARE YOU.

And under that, after a second, like it had given up:

SKILL ACQUIRED — EXPLOIT: OWNERSHIP

Effect: what's yours is yours. Nothing you own can be revoked, updated, paused, or repossessed.

Note: buying things is not a build. please stop.

Tim's mom picked him up at the corner. She'd known where he was since eleven — the family plan shares location, it's in the fine print, everything's in the fine print — and she'd let him finish the job anyway.

He got in the car already grounded, the calmest man in the county. The worst had happened hours ago. He'd been free ever since.