Dungeon Exploiter

The favor came due on embossed card stock, hand-delivered. That’s the point of favors like this. They arrive looking like invitations, so you can’t file them under threats.

MEGACORP — OFFICE OF THE CHAIRMAN

Re: goodwill (recoverable), extended in the matter of one (1) decommission review.

Repayment: one retrieval. Off-books.

Venue: Corporation X — Instance R&D-3 (“the sandbox”).

Asset designation: LIVE ONE. Deliver intact.

This settles us.

JON’S DICTIONARY — off-books: a job that officially never happened, done for people who officially never asked.

“Deliver intact,” Joe read. He looked up with the face he gets when paperwork rhymes. “That’s your bounty’s wording. Word for word.”

I’d noticed. The CEO writes his jokes in contract language. This one said: go be for someone else what everyone keeps trying to be for you.

I owed him the greeter’s life. He knew I pay my debts. I knew he knew. That’s the whole texture of dealing with the man. You never touch a surface he hasn’t already priced.

“You’re going,” Liya said. Not a question.

“It says this settles us.”

“Everything settles him. That’s what he’s for.”

* * *

Corporation X’s sandbox sat under their campus in the hills. Getting in was Rob’s finest hour of the month: a vendor pass, a thawed beta credential, and a lanyard he printed himself. Nobody scanned it. Confidence is a credential at Corporation X. It’s the founding credential.

The sandbox was a dungeon the way a rehearsal is a play.

The entry hall had no textures. The walls were flat gray, stamped PLACEHOLDER every few yards. The torches were labeled TORCH_04 and gave light but no heat. We found the heat two rooms later, standing in a corner by itself, humming, waiting to be assigned.

The first monster was a knight-shaped thing in the middle of a room, arms straight out at its sides, perfectly still.

“Why is it doing that,” Tim whispered.

“It hasn’t been animated yet.”

MONSTER_02 — behavior: PENDING.

Combat: not implemented.

Do not ship. DO NOT SHIP.

(Dev note: it T-poses when it loads. we know. Q3.)

We walked past it. It tracked us with just its eyes, arms out, dignity nowhere. Tim waved. I will swear before any court that its left hand moved.

Dev notes were taped to the walls like the building was apologizing for itself. TODO: danger here. FIXME: floor. One corridor was blocked by a velvet rope and a sign: FINAL ROOM CONTENT REQUIRES DELUXE ENTITLEMENT. Past the rope, the world just wasn’t rendered.

“People die in the finished ones,” Joe said, staring at a staircase that only existed when you looked at it from the north. “And this is what it looks like before it’s finished. Somewhere there’s a floor plan with our deaths penciled in as a TODO.”

He said it in a hallway labeled HALLWAY. Most honest sentence anyone’s said about this world, in the most honest room.

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from NovelFire. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

* * *

The asset was in the last real room. The last real room was a lab.

Containment rigs in rows. Most empty. Labels on the empties: SPECIMEN — v0.6 (EXPIRED). SPECIMEN — v0.7 (EXPIRED, see incident). Corporation X had been netting old things out of the deep floors and benching them like samples, hunting for whatever makes the old things old. Their founder had promised investors “proprietary dungeon intelligence” four quarters running. This room was where the promise came to be extracted.

The last rig wasn’t expired.

It was small. The size of a lantern. A wisp of a thing curled around itself, with a light in its chest that guttered when we came close — then steadied when it saw Gobi.

The rig’s label said LIVE ONE. The quiet layer said the truth.

ECHO — build v0.5 (LEGACY. Do not patch. Do not decommission. Grandfathered: see Charter.)

Assignment: remember the small things.

Assignment issued by: [FIELD PREDATES CURRENT SCHEMA]

Current status: forgetting.

A rememberer. Older than the ranks. Older than every logo above the tile line. Two hundred days in a diagnostic rig, being drained one extraction at a time, by people mining it for memory while it forgot.

The favor said deliver the asset intact. And the CEO wanted it — a legacy build of his own, because his rival had one, and men like him inventory each other.

I stood in front of the rig and did the reading I always do. The fine print never says what everybody assumes.

The card named the deliverable: the asset designated LIVE ONE. I pulled Corporation X’s own registry. There it was, typed by some intake clerk on day one:

DESIGNATION: LIVE ONE.

Type: CONTAINMENT RIG. Contents: unregistered.

The rig was the asset. They’d never registered the echo at all — because you can’t. The species field rejects a v0.5. The build field rejects it. The whole schema looks at something older than its fields and files a null.

Corporation X owned a box. Legally, the box had always been empty.

So I delivered the box.

We opened it first, obviously. Gobi talked the echo out of the rig in the low goblin register he saves for frightened things. It rode down to the Lamplighter’s junction in my pack, and when the two old lights saw each other, the junction got brighter than I’ve ever seen it.

“It remembered me,” the Lamplighter said, in a voice I hadn’t heard it use.

“It remembers everyone,” I said.

“No,” said the Lamplighter. “It remembered me.”

I let it have the distinction. It had earned it by about thirty years.

Getting out was the loud part. Somewhere between the lab and the lobby, an empty rig on a dolly finally struck someone as odd, and the sandbox’s security spun up — real drones, finished ones, the only polished product in the building.

We ran a broken world. Joe called the gaps in the geometry off his map — “floor missing, LEFT!” — and I one-timed TORCH_04 off its bracket into the first drone’s rotors.

The second drone dove for Tim and I met it with a body check that sent it through a wall that wasn’t rendered, into a room that didn’t exist. It did not come back. Somewhere behind us, I heard the T-posing knight, alone in its room, make a sound I choose to believe was a cheer.

The heat with no torch followed us out. It lives in our stairwell now. Nobody has the heart to assign it anything.

I hauled the empty rig across town and delivered it to a MegaCorp loading dock, intact, designation plate polished, and signed the transfer in view of three cameras.

* * *

His reply took until morning. For him, that’s a long, thoughtful silence.

RE: RETRIEVAL — RECEIVED.

Asset designated LIVE ONE: delivered intact. Favor: SETTLED.

Ledger note: goodwill recovered in full. The books balance.

Attention: with the recovery of said goodwill, associated courtesies lapse. Review boards resume standard scheduling.

Personal note: I knew what was in the box before I sent you. The box is what I asked for anyway. You’ve wondered what the third offer costs. It costs whatever you did last night, priced at the moment you can least afford it. We’re nearly done counting.

Joe read it four times. “He wanted the empty box?”

“He wanted to watch me empty it.”

The favor was never a retrieval. It was a scale. I stood on it, and the number went into a file that grows every time I do the thing I can’t not do. Rescue rate: one hundred percent. Price sensitivity: none.

“You’d do it again,” Liya said. Flat. Filing it where we both could see it.

“Tonight. If the card came.”

“I know. So does he.” She watched the fountain float on its shelf. “They finished pricing what you’ll do for money a long time ago, Jon. It came to zero. Everything since has been pricing what you’ll do for free.”

One line in his letter sat wrong with me all night, and I couldn’t put my finger on it, and Joe couldn’t either, and Bev never saw it because I never showed her.

Associated courtesies lapse. Review boards resume standard scheduling.

I filed it under lawyer noise. That’s my failure to carry, and I’ll be carrying it in about three chapters, and I want you to remember that I had the sentence in my hands and read it as noise.

The greeter was at its podium in the morning, day-shift vest, little ledger open. It turned the book around unprompted. One column. One entry, in careful print.

J — PAID.

It tapped the page twice with its pen, the way you close an account. Then it waved me through my own front door like a member in good standing, and Bev, arriving with groceries, stopped and shook its hand, one professional to another, and the greeter stood all the way up to receive it.

For one morning, everyone’s books were square. I’d like to leave us all there a while. The chapter can end here. Let it.