Dungeon Exploiter

Hospital gurneys are rated for one patient. No passengers. Indoor use. Walking pace.

I mention the rating because Rob asked, mid-flight, third floor. Joe recited it from memory.

Rob said, "So we're within spec."

Joe made a sound I'd never heard from him. We took the corner into Radiology on two wheels.

The card had bought us ninety seconds.

The Upcoder caught it on the first landing. We heard the catch — a printer sound going sharp with joy. Then the joy curdled.

A card isn't coverage. A card is a pointer to coverage. The thing needed the human attached.

It came back up the stairwell, reading the building for the body that matched the plastic.

The body was on a gurney. The gurney was moving.

"Left!" Kayla called from the front. No camera. Both hands on the rail. She reads corridors like she used to read chat. "Left is Imaging! Big doors, ramp at the end!"

We went left.

Behind us, the triage doors opened. Both at once. Politely. The way doors open for something that has never been told no by a building.

The whale's spare card rode taped to a wheelchair we'd shoved down the east corridor. My tape. His card. Gobi's knot.

The Upcoder split for one second. Coverage-lust one way, line-of-sight the other.

Then it made the right call, which was us. Tim's freshly appraised Gold ghost outbid a lone platinum card the moment both were in play.

I did the math at gurney speed.

The math said: the leaderboard re-sorts live.

The math said: you can't outrun a sales route.

The math said: make it bill something else.

"Rob! What does it cost when IT breaks something?"

Rob was driving Tim's gurney like a man repossessing a chariot. He understood instantly, because Rob's soul is a rate card.

"Facility damage codes! Provider-liable! It's been eating door frames this whole — OH." His face did the thing it does when a market opens. "OH. It has a fee schedule."

Everything on the org chart has a fee schedule. We learned that in the records office, a book ago. Monsters pay dues. Quotas. Decommission thresholds.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit NovelFire for the authentic version.

The Upcoder wasn't exempt from the billing system. The Upcoder was the billing system's employee of the month.

Employees have budgets.

"Imaging!" I called. "Through, not around!"

Imaging was a canyon of expensive. Scanners like sleeping whales. Lead glass. Warning stickers in every language the building spoke.

We threaded it on three gurneys at speed.

The Upcoder came through after us the way it did everything. Expensively.

The first scanner it clipped billed it. The code flared over its shoulder. Provider-liable. Six figures.

The joy-sound hiccupped.

"It's self-coding!" Kayla shouted. "It can't not!"

That was the whole play, named by our Marketing department before I'd finished building it.

The thing was contractually incapable of leaving damage uncoded. Every wall it clipped, every lead pane, every whale-sized machine — it wrote itself up. The alternative was unbilled loss.

Unbilled loss is the one sin its species cannot commit.

We just had to make the route expensive.

The chase went four floors. I'll tell it plain, because Bev liked things plain.

Kayla called corridors. Rob drove like the debt was personal. Joe recited clearance widths, correctly, every time — which is why Tim's gurney fit through the laundry chute door and the Upcoder's shoulders did not.

Gobi rode in my lap, facing backward, narrating.

At the critical turn — sub-basement ramp, sharps disposal, a corner we could not make at speed — Gobi went into himself. Into wherever Gobi's things go.

He produced, in order: a bag of chips. A smoke detector. Somebody's retainer.

Then — "GOBI HAS IT" — the wheel chock from the MegaDepot loading dock.

He's been carrying it since last book. Gobi throws nothing away.

The chock took the front wheels. The gurney turned.

The Upcoder didn't.

It went through the sharps disposal wall. Through it. It stood up in a room of contaminated inventory with a dozen small wounds opening along its clipboard arm.

And then it did the only thing it knows how to do about a wound.

CODE 12042-B: minor laceration — self

CODE 12044-A: complex laceration — self

CODE 12051-PREMIUM: arterial event — self

this is a growth opportunit— — —

The arm got worse, because paperwork is load-bearing. So it coded the worse. And the worse got worse still.

It stood there in the wreckage of a wall it was also billing itself for, escalating itself in a closed loop. A man eating his own restaurant.

The end wasn't loud.

A threshold got crossed in an office none of us will ever see. The lab coat went still. The interface over its head changed to the small, final font.

ENTITY OVERDRAWN.

repossession scheduled.

EXPLOIT CHAIN DETECTED: attention + coverage

+ fee schedule. designation pending.

he has named it. it is called "the deke."

it is a sports term. we have looked it up.

The bill for the chase went where bills go. Downhill.

The Clinic ate the facility damage. The Clinic doesn't eat anything — it passes it down the tip screens, into the deductibles of four healers who were on shift when we saved their floor.

I did that arithmetic on the paper chart that night. In a column I haven't shown anyone. Under a heading I'm not going to tell you.

Some wins invoice the people you won for. Nobody teaches you that.

You just start keeping the column.

The healer found me at the intake ramp on our way out. Past midnight. Off the clock.

Everything he said was free, and he spent it like a man who'd been saving up.

"You're the one Bev talked about," he said.

The ramp went very quiet. Or I did.

"She sent people to me. The ones who couldn't afford the screens. Cash patients. Dungeon strays. A goblin, once." He thumbed his blank badge. "She kept a list."

"A list."

"Names and numbers," he said. "She was very particular about the numbers."

I asked him to send it. He said he'd look.