Dungeon Exploiter

The second offer arrived the way winter arrives. Nothing dramatic. Just everything, slowly, closing.

It started with my job board. It had been thin since the badge video. Now it went strange. Every job at my level disappeared. And in their place came new listings, polite as a knife.

CONGRATULATIONS! You now qualify for GRADE-A dungeons!

Available now: Sector 31 (71% of raiders die). The Furnace (see extra waiver). Vault of Teeth (needs a 12-person team — current signups: you).

"They're not blocking you," Rob said, scrolling with the face he saves for truly elegant scams. "Blocking is illegal. They've PROMOTED you to death. If you take the work, it kills you. If you don't, you starve. It's beautiful. I hate it."

Then it was the building. New sign in the lobby, cheerful font: MEGACORP RESIDENTIAL WELCOMES YOU. They'd bought it. My rent doubled on the first of the month. Joe read the new lease for eleven minutes and said the scariest thing Joe knows how to say:

"It's airtight."

Then it was everyone else. All in one week, like weather rolling through.

Rob's fourteen accounts got frozen for review — all fourteen, on the same morning, across nine markets that supposedly can't talk to each other. Joe's little company got hit with a surprise audit. Kayla's channel stopped being recommended to anyone; her viewer numbers fell off a cliff nobody could see.

Even Tim got a letter. His raider learner's permit suddenly required a "licensed supervisor" at all times. And there's exactly one licensed supervisor left who will stand next to me. Her name is on a list in the CEO's desk, with her time zone written next to it.

No threats. Nothing you could point to. Just every door in the city, swinging quietly shut.

The one warm thing that week: the greeter versus the process server. A man showed up with an envelope full of official bad news, and met the greeter's podium, and learned that a creature officially labeled DO NOT ENGAGE cannot legally be engaged. He couldn't hand papers to it. He couldn't get past it. He stood in the invented line for two hours and went home.

This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

The papers came eventually. Papers always do. But it cost them a second trip, and the greeter wrote something in its little notebook, and I would pay real money to read that notebook.

* * *

Joe did the whiteboard on Thursday.

The whiteboard is Joe's last resort. He set it up in my kitchen, wrote down every option we had left, and then crossed them out one at a time, with evidence.

Take the gig work? The gig work is now designed to kill me. Work outside the system? Nothing outside the system is legal anymore. Go to the press? Already famous — fame is why they're doing it quietly. Move out? MegaCorp owns the vacancy listings too. Get a lawyer? Against which of their forty companies, with what money?

When he was done, the whiteboard was a graveyard with one sentence left at the bottom. Joe is honest even when it hurts, so he wrote it:

SIGN THEIR DEAL (they win) — survivable.

Everyone stared at it. Gobi ate a chip in the silence, and even the chip sounded apologetic.

"There's one door that isn't on the board," I said.

"No," said Joe, who knew exactly which door.

"It's the only one they don't own."

"You don't know WHAT it is. You know there's a stair, under a store, behind a lock nobody can open, on a floor where the cleaning equipment hunts people. Every part of that sentence is a reason not to."

"Everything up here has a price tag on it now, Joe. Every exit. Every job. Every lease. The one direction they don't own is DOWN — and whatever's down there scares THEM. I've read the System's notes. Down is the only thing in two years it's ever begged me about."

I picked up the marker and wrote the third option under Joe's graveyard.

DOWN — no price tag. Yet.

The room was quiet for a long time.

"Mom has a condition," Tim said finally, because of course the treaty applied underground too. "Nine o'clock still counts. She says the basement is not an excuse. She says ESPECIALLY the basement."

Somehow that settled it. If nine o'clock still applies, then you can come back from anywhere. That's not logic. It's better than logic. We took it.

* * *

The courier page came that night, uninvited, the way it does now. My file. One update.

ASSETS: 1 (goblin).

DEBTS: 1 (favor — can be called back).

MONEY: none.

REMAINING OPTIONS: 1.

We look forward to Tuesday.

They'd run the same math as Joe's whiteboard and reached the same answer. Somewhere in a tower, a patient man was waiting next to a contract, completely certain, probably choosing the wine.

Remaining options: one. For once, the machine and I agreed completely.

We just weren't counting the same door.