Dungeon Exploiter

Every dungeon in the city closes on Tuesdays. It’s the one merciful thing on the calendar, and like everything merciful around here, it exists for accounting reasons.

SCHEDULED MAINTENANCE — ALL INSTANCES

Tuesdays, 6 AM – 6 PM.

Dungeons will be unavailable. Raiders, enjoy a well-earned rest!

(Staff: this is your day off. Please stop asking whose.)

Raiders hate Maintenance Tuesday. The forums fill with people furious that the apocalypse takes a day off. Nobody up here asks the question I finally asked.

What are the dungeons like when they’re closed?

We went down through Gobi’s door to find out. I had a stolen file in my kitchen drawer with a dead woman’s face on it, and a tiger who’d promised me answers, and the safest day to go asking about the dead is the day the halls are off the clock.

Bev came. Her reasoning took one sentence: “Twenty-three years indoors. Show me the basement.”

The corridor of doors was open for business. Every door we’d ever crept past stood propped, and the hallway had turned into a market. Monsters off-shift, out of uniform, trading up and down the corridor like a farmers’ market that runs on office supplies. A shelf-thing had a blanket spread with staplers, arranged by size. Two goblins argued over tape. Something huge and mossy sold soup.

JON’S DICTIONARY — off-shift: the hours when a worker gets to be a person. Monsters get them. Ask your boss why you don’t.

Gobi walked in like a mayor. Every third monster knew him. The goblin who got out. The one with a human. The one whose fee is chips. He introduced us around with his chest puffed so far it arrived before he did.

The greeter came down with us. Its day off, and it chose to spend it here, with colleagues. It was wearing a second vest. A casual vest.

The greeter owns leisurewear. I noted it, said nothing, and will remember it forever.

Then it saw Bev, and Bev saw it.

I don’t know how to explain what happened except that two old professionals recognized each other across a species line. Forty cycles of door duty looked at twenty-three years of floor duty. The greeter straightened its casual vest. Bev straightened nothing, because Bev is always straight-backed.

“You run doors,” she said.

The greeter nodded.

“Anybody ever relieve you for lunch?”

The greeter’s tusks did something complicated. It shook its head, slowly, like nobody had ever asked the question in forty cycles.

“Criminal,” Bev said. “Sit. I’ll watch your line.”

There was no line. It was the greeter’s day off, in a market, underground. Bev stood post next to a podium that wasn’t there anyway, and the greeter sat, actually sat, on a crate, and the two of them talked shift work for an hour.

Staffing. Coverage. The old days. I heard the greeter laugh. I didn’t know the sound existed. It sounds like a filing cabinet rolling over gravel, and it’s now one of my favorite sounds in either world.

Tim taught a slime to bowl in a closed aisle, using a wood-stain can and ten staplers. The slime was terrible and radiantly happy. Rob set up a stall for two hours and accidentally founded a currency exchange.

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

Joe got handed a pamphlet by a badger-thing — WORKPLACE RIGHTS FOR LEGACY BUILDS: KNOW YOUR CHARTER — and read it, and went quiet, and laminated it on the spot with the little machine he brings. The badger held the laminated pamphlet like a relic and shook Joe’s hand with both paws.

That was the morning. Best one we’ve had all year. I’m writing it down because of what the afternoon was.

* * *

The Lamplighter’s junction was half-drained for maintenance. The old light rose when it saw us, and rose higher when it saw Liya, and bowed its whole enormous head. It only does that for her.

“You’ve come for the deep storage,” it said. “The memory that was carried down. And the file.”

“Both.”

“Same shelf.” It swung its lantern toward the drowned corridor. “Third door. Even the mops rest on Tuesdays. Go quiet. Come back quieter.”

Deep storage was a room of shelves, and the shelves held light.

Hundreds of small glass floats, each glowing faintly from inside. Each tagged in the patient, upright handwriting I know better than my own now. Memories. Kept against policy. A whole contraband archive of moments that somebody down here refused to let the mops have.

The fountain was on the third shelf, tagged in fresh ink. I held it, and it played in the air over the glass, the way breath fogs.

Three floors down, in a mall that still had people in it, a fountain ran. Coins on the bottom. And the bull — younger, but exactly the same — stood at the fountain’s edge while children threw coins past it and around it.

Nobody screamed. Nobody fought. A little girl handed the bull a coin so it could throw one too. It threw badly. The splash went everywhere. The children laughed, and the bull did something with its whole body that I understood instantly and can’t name.

Ninety seconds. Then it looped.

Before the counting, the Lamplighter told me once. You went down, you found what you needed, you came up changed. There was a world where a bull stood at a fountain and children handed it coins. Somewhere between that Tuesday and this one, someone built a fence around all of it, and the bull got a threat rating and a feed schedule and, eventually, a mop.

“They weren’t put down here to fight us,” Joe said quietly.

“Something was done to the doors,” Liya said.

She volunteered it. First time. The shelf room kept the words.

Bev stood in front of the fountain float for a long time. She’d never met the bull. She watched the loop three times anyway.

“We had a guy like that at Hartline,” she said finally. “Gentlest hands on the floor. They automated his job and the exit interview took nine minutes.” She touched the shelf, once, lightly, the way you touch a coffin. “Somebody kept this. Whoever keeps these — they’re the only management I’ve ever respected.”

I took the fountain float. Put it in my pack, next to nothing, because it didn’t need company. The Lamplighter watched me do it and raised no objection. Its light followed us to the stairs like a porch light somebody left on for late children.

* * *

Her file — Anomaly 6 — we opened right there, in the light of a hundred saved moments. There was never going to be a better room.

The name was faded off every page. Not censored. Faded, like the room forgets on a schedule. The photo stayed. Deadpan eyes. An orange smudge on her shoulder that whoever developed the photo couldn’t have explained.

The file was thick with what she’d seen. Quiet screens. True entries. Methods with no names. A woman who read the world the way I read it, fifteen years before me.

And in the margins, all through it, a second handwriting. Hers. She’d annotated her own surveillance file. Corrections. Jokes. On a page describing her “pattern of unauthorized empathy,” she’d written: you spelled unauthorized wrong. And they had. And the patient handwriting had corrected it. And initialed the correction.

They’d been talking. The watcher and the watched, in the margins of her own file, for years.

“She got the file the same way you did,” Liya said, very close to the photo. “Then she gave it back. That was one of the differences between you.”

“What was her name?”

“The room forgets on a schedule. I don’t.” Her tail wrapped all the way around her feet. “She used to say my name the way you say it. In kitchens. Like it was normal.” A long pause. “Ask me the rest after the assessment. If I tell you now, you’ll walk in there trying to save me instead of you. And that’s what she did.”

I put the file away.

On the way out, we passed the records window, and the seventh drawer’s working copy, and there was fresh ink on it.

ANOMALY 7 — ACTIVE.

ASSESSMENT: scheduled. See maintenance calendar, instance 001.

Margin (by hand): “Tuesday’s child. Fitting.”

The maintenance calendar hangs by the ticket machine. Laminated, by someone who isn’t Joe. He checked. Instance 001 had one entry. One window. A date.

Tim was home by 8:15. His mom asked what he learned, since it was educational Tuesday. Tim, who had spent the day teaching a slime to bowl in the closed basement of the world, said, “Monsters get weekends.” She said that was more than most companies gave, and approved the whole outing retroactively.

The fountain float sits on my kitchen shelf now. It plays when the light hits it. Gobi watches it most evenings, working through a chip, and last night, at the part where the coin splashes, he said, to nobody:

“I knew him. He was nice.”

That’s the whole eulogy. It’s still the best one I know. I didn’t know yet how soon we’d need another.