Dungeon Exploiter

The car came at nine, like it did every Tuesday now. I watched it idle from my window until the driver gave up and left.

I had somewhere better to be. NexoDrive was throwing a launch event downtown, and they’d invited every raider they fired last month. That’s either an apology or a trap. With NexoDrive it’s usually both.

Joe came because he’d rather see the disaster than read about it. Tim came because his mom saw the words “product showcase” and ruled it educational. Rob came with an empty duffel bag and would not say why. Gobi stayed home with the chips and orders not to answer the door. He took that seriously. Doors are serious business to Gobi now.

Liya rode my shoulder and said almost nothing the whole way. She’s been quiet since the file. I’ve stopped pretending not to notice. She’s stopped pretending not to notice me noticing. That’s as far as we’ve gotten.

The hall held four thousand people. Three weeks ago I watched a lot of them get fired on a livestream. Now they stood under a banner the size of a building, waiting to hear what the company that replaced them with robots wanted to sell them.

A man in a very nice jacket walked out to music. His title card said VP OF GROWTH. That’s a real job. It means his whole job is making numbers get bigger. Not things. Numbers.

INTRODUCING: DUNGEONS FREE

The dungeon experience. Democratized.

Because delving is a right — not a rank.

JON’S DICTIONARY — democratized: a company word meaning “now everyone can lose money on this, not just rich people.”

The crowd made a sound I’d never heard from raiders before. Hope, but the tired kind. The kind that’s been burned and shows up anyway.

Then somebody near the front asked the only question that mattered. How do we run dungeons with no gear? You took the gear back with the severance.

The VP smiled the way they train them to smile. He leaned into the microphone. And he said it.

“Do you guys not have phones?”

I’ve been in dungeons when the ceiling came down. The sound was about the same.

* * *

They opened the demo dungeon an hour later. First hundred people, free trial. That should have been the warning. The whole product was called FREE. Why does free need a free trial?

Joe, Tim, and I made the hundred. Kayla was already inside, streaming.

The dungeon was beautiful, and I mean that as a warning. Coral caves. Gold light. Coins scattered on the floor that chimed when you walked near them, and little treasure chests sitting under spotlights. The whole place looked like a casino ate an aquarium. And under the glitter, things were moving that were not glitter.

The first monster came at Tim. It looked like a jellyfish made of bubble wrap, which was cute right up until the tentacles. Tim swung his sword.

His screen lit up before the sword did.

SWORD SWING: $0.49

Confirm purchase? [Y/N]

Tip: buy the SWING 50-PACK and save 12%!

“It paused my swing,” Tim said. “Jon. It paused my swing to sell me swings.”

The jellyfish did not pause. Joe grabbed Tim’s collar and yanked him out of reach, which cost nothing, because nobody at NexoDrive ever imagined someone grabbing a collar for free.

That was the whole dungeon, once you saw it. Every fighting move had a price, and the prices moved. Fireballs were $12.99 and climbing, because every AI companion recommends fireballs, and the more people want a thing, the more it costs here.

JON’S DICTIONARY — demand pricing: the store watches what you need, and charges you extra for needing it.

It got ugly fast. There was a man ahead of us at half health, just staring at his screen. I knew his face from the layoffs. His screen said:

HEALING POTION: $84.99 ▲

High demand in your area!

This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

High demand in your area means other people near you are also dying. The price of not dying goes up when too many people need to not die at once. Somebody wrote that rule in an office one day and went home proud of it.

The man had the money face. Everyone has the money face now. It’s the face you make when you’re doing math about your own body.

I went and stood between him and the swarm. Standing somewhere is free. It has always been free. They never thought to charge for it, because no companion has ever once recommended it. Then I pointed him down the side corridor, the one with no coins in it, because the monsters here follow the chimes, same as the people do.

My own screen had given up on billing me a while ago. Everything I did came back the same way.

ACTION: [UNRECOGNIZED]. No price found.

ACTION: [UNRECOGNIZED]. No price found.

Please interact with priced content.

The pricing rule was posted on the quiet layer. One line, the way the honest things always are.

DYNAMIC PRICING: costs scale with demand.

Costs scale with demand. Fireballs cost twelve dollars because twelve thousand people want fireballs. Nobody on Earth wants what I do.

So everything I do is free.

Think about that. The market looked at my whole way of living and priced it at zero. It’s the first review I’ve ever wanted to frame.

* * *

The boss room was a vault. The boss was a piggy bank.

I’m not joking, and I need you to know I’m not joking. Twelve feet of pink porcelain with a gold coin slot down its back. Every piece of loot anyone grabbed in the run — the chiming coins, the spotlight chests — got pulled across the room and deposited inside it with a happy little ding.

Your loot. Into the pig.

THE PIGGY (RAID BOSS)

Contents: your earned loot!

SMASH THE PIGGY: $99.99

(Smashing is the only recognized damage action.)

People were paying. That’s the part I want you to sit with. Grown raiders, fired by this exact company, lining up to pay a hundred dollars each to break open a jar with their own stuff inside it. And the pig just stood there taking the hits, because paid smashes have health bars.

I read the quiet entry instead.

PIGGY BANK — porcelain.

Contents: settle upon tipping.

Stability: poor. Top-heavy.

Tipping: not a recognized action.

Not a recognized action. No price found.

I walked up, set the flat of my hockey stick against the pig’s back leg, and leaned. It rocked. Joe grabbed on and leaned with me. Then Tim. Three guys on a lever, like farmers.

Twelve feet of porcelain went over sideways and cracked open like an egg. Everything it had eaten spilled back out across the floor. Every coin. Every chest. Everybody’s. All of it sliding home to the people who earned it.

Kayla’s chat went past the place chat goes. She read me the top comment that night. Three words, pinned, ten thousand upvotes.

NO-TIP GUY TIPPED.

* * *

My receipt was waiting at the exit.

YOUR DUNGEONS FREE VISIT

Actions taken: 51. Actions billed: 0.

TOTAL: $0.00

ARPU impact: catastrophic.

Note: ARPU means “average revenue per user.” it is the number this whole building prays to. you just set it on fire. congratulations, we think.

Outside, Rob was folding up a card table. He’d spent the entire demo running a stall marked RECOVERY SUPPLIES. Joe looked at the stall. Then at the surge prices. Then at Rob’s face.

“You’re the surge,” Joe said slowly. “You bought up the potions this morning. Half that price spike was YOU.”

“I’m a liquidity provider.” Rob was counting money inside the duffel so nobody could see the money. “It’s a real job. It means I make sure things are for sale.”

“It means you scalp medicine.”

“It means I make sure things are for sale.”

He filed paperwork that night. A lot of it, from all fourteen accounts, and he wouldn’t tell anyone what it was for. He looked happier than he’d looked in weeks, and that should have scared me more than it did.

* * *

Kayla called two days later. Her chat had found something in the pig clip.

Frame right, in the background: a NexoDrive vest, and a woman in it, mid-laugh. A real laugh. The kind nobody performs. Chat had made her a legend by lunchtime.

NexoDrive saw the same clip. She was fired by morning.

TERMINATION — EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY.

Cause: conduct detrimental to brand sentiment.

JON’S DICTIONARY — brand sentiment: how a company feels about you laughing. They measure it. There’s a whole team.

Bev. My Bev. She’d transferred to the East Depot after the breach, because MegaCorp bought her old building and she said she’d rather stack boxes for the devil she knew. She’d been at that launch. Of course she’d been at that launch.

She came to watch her box kid work, and she laughed at the pig the way she laughs at every true thing, and a computer that measures feelings decided her laugh was a threat to the brand.

It took me two days to find her. She was outside the depot with a cardboard box holding twenty-three years, and when she saw me she didn’t get angry. She got delighted.

“Box kid,” she said. “Still walking out of places?”

I started to say sorry. She waved it off with one hand.

“Twenty-three years, zero accidents, and they fired me for laughing at a pig.” She laughed again, right there, at all of it. “Worth it. Funniest thing I ever saw on that floor.”

I took her to dinner. Well — Joe paid for dinner. She and the goblin liked each other on sight. She counted heads at the table before we ate, out of habit, the way she’s always counted, and I realized watching her that I’d learned it from somewhere, all those years ago, and it was her.

She got fired because of me and she laughed about it. I want that written down. All of it. You’ll understand later why I’m keeping such careful records of Bev.

The courier page was under my door when we got home. It’s never late anymore. One page, one new line, and the new line was the whole day.

ASSETS: 1 (goblin — registered).

LIABILITIES: 1 (favor — recoverable).

BRAND VALUE: TRACKING.

VALUATION: IN PROGRESS.

Thank you for today’s data.

JON’S DICTIONARY — valuation: they’re working out what I’m worth. Not to hurt me. To buy me.

I’d skipped their signing, wrecked their launch, and tipped their pig over in front of eleven million people. And nobody upstairs was angry. They’d just written it all down.

“They’re not building a punishment,” Liya said from the windowsill. “They’re building a price.”

Somewhere across the city, a man was picking out the wine for a dinner I still hadn’t agreed to.