Dungeon Exploiter

They buried Bev on a Tuesday. She would have hated that. Tuesdays were inventory.

The funeral home was called Passages, and it had a showroom.

Not a room. A showroom. Track lighting, a greeter in a gray vest. The apocalypse never met an industry it couldn't franchise.

The caskets came in tiers.

The LEGACY package had brushed steel handles and a screen at the head. The screen played a memorial slideshow "in perpetuity, terms apply." REMEMBRANCE PLUS had the same handles and a longer warranty.

Nobody asked what happens when a casket's warranty runs out. Nobody wanted to know.

At the far end, under weaker lighting, sat STANDARD DEPARTURE.

"That one's ad-supported," the vest said. He said it the way you mention weather.

I read the plaque. During the service, at tasteful intervals, the casket would display messages from local businesses. There was a sample.

It said REST EASY — MATTRESS BARN.

"We'll take the middle one," Joe said, before I could do the thing everyone was worried I would do.

I wasn't going to do anything. I was doing math. Bev spent twenty-three years on a warehouse floor without losing a single person. At the end of it, her options were a subscription or a sponsorship.

We paid for the middle one. Rob handled the money.

I need to say something about that.

Rob took the estate paperwork. The fees, the plot, the transfer forms, all of it. He did it in one afternoon, and the whole time he didn't make a sound.

Not one.

Rob has a sound. Everyone who knows him knows the sound. The bigger the loss, the longer it runs. We've all learned to price damage by the second.

He sat there with a stack of forms that would have hurt a stranger to look at, and he was quiet the way a closed store is quiet.

Nobody said anything about it. Some numbers don't go on the board.

Mrs. Kim ran everything else.

I don't know how. Nobody asked her to, and nobody would have dared either way. Tupperware started arriving Monday night, in relays, labeled in marker.

FOR AFTER.

THE SPICY ONE IS NOT FOR THE TABLE.

By morning she had organized the parking, the seating, and a schedule for who was checking on me. I was not supposed to know about the schedule.

Tim wore a suit that fit him the way a tent fits a flagpole. He had combed his hair with actual water.

He stood by the door all morning, showing people to their seats. He did it like it was the most important job anyone had ever been given, because his mother told him it was. Tim believes his mother the way other people believe in gravity.

Gobi wore a tie.

Nobody bought Gobi a tie. We didn't ask.

The meadow staff came. All forty-one of them.

They filed in through the side door in ones and twos. The flower-folk had their petals closed down like fists. The hedge-things walked careful on the carpet. The old music-box fairies dimmed themselves to a polite glow.

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None of them had ever been to a human funeral. All of them had researched it.

Somewhere out there, wrong guides on human mourning exist. The hedge-things bowed to every third chair. One of the flower-folk shook hands with a coat rack for a full minute.

Nobody laughed. They were trying so hard it bent the air.

The hospitality mimic came last. She brought a dish.

She carried it to Mrs. Kim's table and set it down with both hands, the way you set down something that matters. It was a casserole, in the sense that it was in a casserole dish. It was gray-green. It moved a little.

It smelled — and I want to be fair — almost exactly like food.

Mrs. Kim looked at the dish. She looked at the mimic, standing there with her hands folded, wearing her best approximation of a face.

Mrs. Kim took a serving spoon, put some on her plate, and ate it.

So then we all did. That's how that works.

Joe gave the eulogy, because Joe had prepared one, because Joe prepares. He read it off a laminated card.

It was short and true, mostly about counting. He said Bev counted people. Other people count money. He said everybody in this room had been counted by her at least once.

He said being counted by Bev meant you were coming back. She didn't run totals on people she planned to lose.

Halfway through, every screen in the chapel lit up at once.

WE'RE SORRY FOR YOUR LOSS.

Grief is hard. Coverage doesn't have to be.

Ask about our BEREAVEMENT TIER — priority

counseling, memorial hosting, and MORE.

[ LEARN MORE ] [ REMIND ME LATER ]

The screens dimmed on their own schedule, the way screens do. He picked up exactly where he left off, because the alternative was letting them have the room.

Nobody reacted. Nobody even sighed.

That's the part I'd explain to someone from before. You live here long enough, and the machine talking over your dead is just weather. Bev would have said so herself.

She'd have said it while writing down the timestamp.

After, at the reception, people said the things people say. A few of the meadow staff tried human phrases they'd practiced.

The sad unicorn stood in the corner the whole time. One by one, people went and stood next to it.

It turns out that's what it's for. It's very good at it.

Somebody asked me what her last words were.

The room got quiet around the question. Everyone had been wondering. Somebody finally spent the courage.

"Numbers," I said.

"Numbers?"

"Numbers."

I didn't say the rest. The rest is that I wrote them down that night, on the paper chart, the one that doesn't sync anywhere. I've been reading them before bed like they might rearrange if I catch them tired.

Some things you don't hand around a reception.

Kayla came late and stood in the back. It took me most of an hour to figure out what was strange about her.

Then I got it. No camera.

No ring light, no drone, no little lens on her collar. First time I'd ever seen her frame nothing.

She found me by the coat rack.

"I'm not going to film today," she said. "Some things you keep off the record."

Then she handed me a drive. A little gray drive, warm from her pocket.

"Every clip she's ever in. Four years of streams. Background, mostly. Loading docks. Inventory days." She shrugged with one shoulder. "She argues with a vendor in one of them for nine minutes. She wins by attrition."

"Somebody should keep the record," I said.

"Yeah," she said. "That."

I put the drive in my inside pocket. The one over the sternum. We stood there not talking, which was the right amount.

Toward the end I did the thing I'd been not-admitting I was going to do.

I walked the room, and I counted.

Forty-one meadow staff. Six of us, if you count Gobi, and you count Gobi. Eleven neighbors from the building.

Four gig healers, off the clock, unpaid. Their time is the only thing they have left to give anybody, and they gave it to her.

Mrs. Kim. Jane, who came on her own time and stood where she could see the exits, because some habits are load-bearing. The vest from the showroom, who slipped in for the service and left before I could decide how I felt about it.

Sixty-five.

I counted twice, because she'd have counted twice.

I'm not going to explain why I did it. There isn't a version that survives being said out loud.

But somewhere between the door and the coat rack, walking her room the way she used to walk her floor, it stopped feeling like grief. It started feeling like a shift I was covering.

Somebody ran the count for this table for a year, and none of us ever noticed the clipboard.

Noticed now.

The invoice came the next morning. Itemized, certified, because of course it did.

Casket, mid-tier. Chapel, half day. Catering surcharge — outside food.

That one took me a second. Then I thought of the casserole, and decided not to be angry about the funniest line item Bev ever generated.

At the bottom, above the total, in the small print I always read:

ATTENDANCE-BASED FACILITY FEE: 66 GUESTS.

I stood in the kitchen for a while.

I counted the room again from memory. The door, the chairs, the corner with the unicorn, the coat rack, the back wall. I did it slow. I did it twice more with my eyes closed.

Sixty-five.

I don't miscount. It's the one thing I've never done in my life. The machine knows that better than anyone. The machine has been grading my counts since the day I walked to an exit instead of a fight.

Sixty-six.

Somebody was at Bev's funeral that I didn't see.

And I see everything.

payment received. thank you.

our records show you had a good turnout.

she would be pleased.

we are not supposed to say that.