The airlock door sealed behind me with a sound like a bank vault deciding it liked you well enough to let you in, but not enough to let you back out.
My wristband buzzed once, then lit up with a number that made me stop walking for a second longer than I should have in a place that clearly rewarded moving fast.
Sign-on bonus, credited.
Enough to make the six years of timesheets feel like a bad joke someone else had been telling at my expense.
I ran a thumb over the display glass, feeling the cool edge of the casing bite into my skin until the screen flickered once under the pressure, filing the balance away the way I handled anything actually useful: quietly, and with the full intention of checking it again later to make sure it wasn’t just an error.
Below the bonus line, a countdown had already started ticking down from 168 hours, and below that sat a small map, three glowing dots representing three cities currently live, out of nine I’d apparently need to survive.
Vhaldrèche pulsed brightest, being the one I was currently standing in the mouth of, and under its name sat a single line of mission text.
Objective: Neutralize King Orsane and disable associated royal links.
No further detail.
No difficulty rating, no suggested tactical vectors, nothing you’d expect from a job posting that wasn’t actively trying to get you killed.
I’d signed a contract with a company that thought “neutralize a king” was a complete sentence, and somehow that didn’t even crack my top five concerns anymore.
My top concern, at that exact moment, was the defect field on my power registration, still blinking open and unresolved on my wristband display, waiting for finalization the way the intake terminal had promised it would.
A second screen unfolded in front of me, translucent and polite in that unmistakable corporate way designed to ruin your life with a smile.
Power Definition: Programming.
Description: User designates a task with defined parameters.
User’s body executes said task via an isolated subroutine, independent of user’s direct control, for a duration and scope set at activation.
Mandatory Defect: Complete unconsciousness during execution.
I stared at that last line for a while, the way you stare at a lease clause you didn’t notice until after you’d signed it.
“That’s not a defect I picked,” I said out loud, mostly to see if anyone would answer.
Someone did.
“No, it isn’t,” Vassago said, her voice arriving from everywhere and nowhere at once, the way it does when a network doesn’t bother installing speakers because it already owns the air.
“You left the field open, which our system reads as a request for the platform’s discretion. And the platform, being staffed by people who’ve watched roughly 900 contestants try to negotiate their way out of a fair drawback, decided total blackout was the least abusable option on the table. Think of it as a factory setting. You’re welcome to feel however you want about it. You’re not welcome to change it.”
“So I hand off a task, and I go dark. Completely. No steering, no override, no watching from the passenger seat.”
“Correct. You’ll be about as useful as a coat rack for however long the routine runs, only less decorative and significantly more vulnerable to getting stabbed.” She said it cheerfully, the way a landlord tells you the heat’s included but the water isn’t.
“The upside, and there is one, is that your body will execute the task with a level of focus and efficiency you, personally, standing there right now, could never manage on your best day. Adrenaline’s a hell of a drug. Turns out cutting the conscious mind out of the loop entirely works even better.”
I didn’t love it.
I also didn’t have a counteroffer, and the countdown behind her little floating pop-up window hadn’t paused for my feelings, so I let it lock.
“Confirmed,” the system chimed, in the flat voice of something that had said the word a thousand times that hour alone.
“Beautiful,” Vassago said.
“Now, before you go charging off toward your first city, I’m going to steal thirty seconds of your time for our viewers, because frankly, you’re a good story and I intend to milk it. Don’t worry, everyone else is frozen too. This is what we call a set pause. Think of it as a commercial break where you’re the commercial.”
The street ahead of me, cobbled and narrow and lined with shuttered stalls, went the color of an old photograph, every shadow locked mid-fall, every distant figure suspended like a held breath.
I got the distinct sense I was the only thing in the frame still allowed to move.
“Folks,” Vassago said, and I could practically hear the studio lighting change behind her voice, “meet Veyr. Thirty-one years old, six years in a job that, and I’m quoting his intake interview directly here, involved, quote, filing timesheets for a company that couldn’t be bothered to spell his last name correctly on two separate occasions. Truly a wrong that only extreme personal risk and potential violent death can right.”
“That’s not why I’m here,” I said, mostly on principle.
“Sure it isn’t.” She didn’t sound like she believed me, and honestly, I didn’t blame her.
“He’s here for the money, viewers, same as everyone else, and unlike some of our more delusional past contestants, he’s not pretending otherwise. Refreshing. Say something inspirational, Veyr.”
“I’d like to never fill out another timesheet as long as I live.”
“There it is. Chills. Somebody clip that.” A short pause, filled with what I assumed was some kind of internal cue only she could hear.
“All right, back to your regularly scheduled peril in three, two—”
Color flooded back into the street before she finished counting, and with it came sound, a low bell tone from somewhere above the rooftops that had been ringing steadily since I’d stepped through the airlock, the kind of ambient alarm you stop noticing after the first minute.
It changed pitch mid-ring, dropping into something faster, more urgent, less like a church bell and more like a siren that had given up on subtlety.
Doors along the street started banging open.
Not doors people were opening.
Doors people were fleeing through.
The first of them came shambling around the far corner in a loose, dragging cluster, their bodies warped into something far worse than dead meat.
Tattered remnants of guard uniforms clung to gray, distended flesh that looked boiled and stretched tight over thickened bone, purple veins bulging like thick twine across split skin.
Several of them had tendons exposed along their necks where the flesh had sloughed away, and their jaws worked in slack, unhinged rhythms as they muttered a continuous, wet stream of syllables in a language I didn’t recognize and had no desire to learn.
Six people were running toward me down the middle of the street, which told me two things at once: the dead things behind them were slower than they looked, and every one of these six had made the same instinctive decision to run toward the only living stranger in sight instead of toward an actual plan.
I didn’t reach for the wristband.
Not yet.
Whatever Programming could do, I wasn’t about to test it for the first time on six panicking civilians with an unknown blackout duration hanging over my head.
If I went stiff and unresponsive in the middle of that street with a horde closing the distance, I’d just be adding a seventh body for them to step over.
“This way,” I said instead, grabbing the sleeve of the nearest one, an older man clutching a bundle of cloth to his chest like it mattered more than his own legs.
“Storefront, now, go.”
They didn’t need much convincing.
I hauled two of them bodily by the arm toward a shuttered bakery a dozen steps to my left, the kind with a half-collapsed awning and a door that had, mercifully, been left unlocked by whoever ran it before deciding this was a good week to not be at work.
The other four followed close enough that I didn’t have to drag them too.
Inside smelled like flour gone stale and something worse underneath it, but it had four walls and one door, and one door was a number I could work with.
I got all six of them pressed against the back counter, out of sight from the street, and turned to look at the door itself, which was solid wood, old, and currently the only thing between us and a street full of things that talked without needing to breathe.
The bell tone outside doubled in speed again.
Closer now.
The shuffling had picked up into something closer to a shambling jog.
The door frame gave a groan I felt more than heard, wood flexing against a weight it wasn’t built for, and I understood, in the specific way you understand things right before they become undeniable, that it wasn’t going to hold on its own.
I raised the wristband.
“Program,” I said, keeping my voice level for the six people watching me with the kind of desperate hope that made my stomach hurt more than the sound behind the door did.
“Seal this entrance. Protect all visible living persons in this location. Duration: twenty seconds. If the task becomes impossible, release control back to me immediately.”
The wristband pulsed once, a soft confirming light, and the last thing I registered was the door beginning to buckle inward at its center hinge, one pale hand already forcing itself through the gap.
Then nothing.
Not darkness, exactly, not the kind you can describe from the inside, because there was no inside to describe it from.
One moment I was bracing against a groaning door with six strangers behind me; the next, I was standing in the same spot, upright, breathing hard, with no memory of the twenty seconds that had elapsed.
My right hand hurt.
I looked down and found a long, ugly laceration across my palm, already crusting at the edges, the kind of wound you get from grabbing something you shouldn’t have grabbed bare-handed and holding on anyway.
The door in front of me had been reinforced with two splintered shelving planks driven across the frame at precise, interlocking shear angles, notched into the jamb with clean, brutal leverage that owed nothing to my own clumsy hands and no experience in carpentry.
The six civilians were still there.
Still breathing.
One of them, a younger woman with flour dust still on her sleeves, was staring at me with an expression I didn’t have a name for, somewhere between gratitude and fear of the thing that had apparently just moved through me to save her.
The wristband buzzed against my wrist, and a log entry scrolled across the display in small, clinical text.
Task validated: six civilians protected, zero casualties.
Auxiliary routine executed during subroutine window.
Source unspecified.
I read that twice.
Auxiliary routine.
Source unspecified.
That was a phrase that belonged in a software update, not a description of what my own hand had just done to a door while I wasn’t home to watch it happen.
“Probably just some back-end jargon,” I muttered, mostly to convince myself, filing it away with everything else I didn’t have time to fully unpack yet.
Networks loved padding their logs with terms that sounded important and meant nothing.
I’d worked adjacent to enough corporate systems in my old job to know that half of what showed up in an automated report existed purely to justify some developer’s salary.
Outside, the pounding against the reinforced door had settled into something rhythmic and patient, less an assault now than a slow, testing pressure—like the things on the other side had all the time in the world and knew it.
The door held.
For now, the wood and the splintered shelving and whatever unconscious instinct had jammed them into place were doing their job.
But holding one door wasn’t the mission.
Neutralizing a king was the mission, and the only route toward the part of the city where a king might plausibly be found ran straight down the same street currently full of shambling, muttering corpses who had, apparently, learned to talk, even if none of it was worth hearing.
I looked at the six faces watching me from the back of the bakery, waiting for me to have a plan I did not yet have, and I looked at my bleeding palm, and I looked at the door that was going to hold for exactly as long as the things on the other side let it.