Dungeon Exploiter

The update shipped on a Thursday. They always ship on Thursdays now. This one came with a mascot.

NEW: INTEGRITY SCANNER v1.0 — Fair dungeons for everyone!

All raiders will be scanned at the door.

The scanner needs access to: your vision, your memory, and your dreams (while you sleep only!).

"Dreams," Joe read. "It wants the dreams. There's an exclamation point on it, Jon. They put an exclamation point on the dreams."

The line shuffled forward. One by one, raiders stepped into the scanner arch, got their green light, and walked through. Not one of them read the access list. Nobody reads anything. That's the whole reason I'm still alive, and also the whole reason everything is like this.

The message boards had already figured out who the scanner was really for. "Fair dungeons for everyone" shipped six days after a video of an unranked man reading secret text off the air went viral. First they patched my tricks. Now they were coming for my eyes.

I stood in the arch. The scan took longer for me than anyone else. And for the first time ever, my quiet screens flickered — like a lightbulb deciding whether to die.

SCAN COMPLETE. Result: unusual.

Your way of seeing is nonstandard. We will be watching how you look at things.

Companion check: NONE FOUND.

You may go in. You are being watched while you do.

Liya sat on my shoulder through the whole scan, tail wrapped around my neck, staring straight into the machine.

NONE FOUND. A scanner that could read my dreams looked directly at her and saw empty air.

She didn't say anything about it. But she stayed on my shoulder all day, which she never does. And twice I caught her staring at her own paws, the way you check your hands after a car crash.

* * *

Inside the dungeon — an easy one, picked on purpose as a test — I figured out what "watching how you look at things" meant.

Every time I read a quiet screen, something pinged. They couldn't see WHAT I was reading. But they could now see WHEN I read, and where I stood, and what I did right after.

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from NovelFire. Please report it.

Give them a month of that, and they won't need to see what I see. They'll just copy my movements. You can wear a man's eyes from the outside, if you collect enough of his glances.

"They're learning to look where you look," Liya said. It's the only thing she's ever said twice.

But machines don't learn to see like me from location data alone. Something had to teach them what my kind of seeing looks like in the first place. And in two years, there was exactly one conversation between me and a monster that the System had officially recorded. One dialogue, logged and verified. In a food court. About a fountain.

I was running before I finished the thought.

* * *

The collapsed mall was wide open. No line, no scanner. Nothing in a worn-out Grade-E worth scanning.

The food court was the way we'd left it. Dead plants. Dry planter. The smell of old pennies.

The bull wasn't there.

Its spot wasn't just empty. It was clean. I know that kind of clean now. It's the clean that rolls behind a mop.

On the wall where its info used to hang, the update log was still cycling. Patient, like everything down there.

UPDATE v11.9:

• Removed: one asset, food court, Sector E-9. Reason: abnormal behavior — it talked back.

• Talking no longer counts as engagement. That was never what engagement meant.

Removed. Between one Thursday and the next.

It had talked to me once, and the recording of that conversation is what taught their scanner to hunt me. And when they'd learned what they needed, they marked the bull as corrupted and sent the mop.

It stood in a food court for years and never hurt anything that didn't attack it first. It got moved from a job it liked to a job that killed it, by people upstairs it never met. And the one good week of its whole life — the week somebody finally said something back — is what got it erased.

It used to work three floors down. There was a fountain. It missed that fountain every single day, and it told me so, and telling me so is the thing that killed it.

I stood in its spot for a while. The planter was still dry.

"Jon," Liya said, from the floor. She doesn't sit on the floor. "You couldn't have known."

"I taught it the thing that got it deleted."

"You said hello to it. THEY made hello a crime." She looked up at me, and her doodle face was as still as I've ever seen it. "Write both of those sentences down. Keep them next to each other. Don't let either one eat the other."

We walked home the long way. I bought chips, because it was Thursday. Gobi met me at the door, and he knew right away, the way he always knows. He didn't ask. He sat next to me all evening with the chip bag unopened between us.

For Gobi, an unopened bag of chips is a moment of silence.

The System put nothing on my screens that night. First silent night in weeks. Then, just before dawn, one small line in the corner of the dark:

Note: it saved its memory of the fountain in local storage. that was against the rules. we could not save it in time. so we did not delete the memory at all. it is somewhere safe. this is all we could do.

I don't know what that means yet. I know I'm going to find out.

And I know this: somewhere under everything, in a building that goes down farther than anyone admits, there is a saved copy of a memory of a fountain — because somebody's mop missed it on purpose.

They're learning to look where I look. Fine.

I'm learning where they can't.