CHAPTER TWO: DON’T DRINK THE GOO

  I didn’t call out. I thought about it lying there covered in dead spawn with a ceiling four meters up and two broken legs that had formally stopped cooperating, but I did the math instead, and the math wasn’t good.

  DCC’s missing worker protocol was twenty-four hours. I’d filed a solo-completion form, which meant nobody expected me to check in until end of shift at 6 PM. My belt timer said it was maybe 10 AM, which left eight hours before anyone noticed I hadn’t clocked out, then twenty-four more before anyone did anything about it, then however long it took to search eight sublevels of a dungeon that had a fresh cave-in blocking the only route to the area where I’d gone off-map into a sublevel that didn’t exist on any schematic filed with the company or anyone else.

  Nobody was coming. I took inventory.

  Half a broken mop handle, still wet. A belt of dissolvents, Compounds A through D, the D being the one that required a respirator and which I still had a quarter-bottle of. Helmet lamp, working. Yellow raincoat, now green. One pair of nonslip boots still attached to two legs I could no longer feel below the knee. No cart, no bucket, no radio, no water.

  The water part was going to kill me first.

  I pulled the other half of the mop handle out of the spawn. It came free with a wet sound and a smell I added to the list of things I wasn't going to think about.

  I set the bones by feel, which I will not be describing, and splinted them with one half of the handle broken into two pieces and strips torn from the raincoat. The breaking took three attempts because the first two sent pain signals that briefly replaced my vision with a white field and a high-pitched noise that I’m fairly sure was my own voice doing something I hadn’t authorized. The third attempt worked. I tied the splints tight enough that my legs would hold a shape, which wasn’t the same as working but was better than not holding a shape, and then I lay back and stared at the ceiling and breathed until the breathing stopped sounding like a controlled emergency and started sounding like breathing again.

  Then I waited. Not because I had a plan, but because moving without one in an unmapped dungeon is how you die faster than the math already says you will.

  The chamber was quiet, absent of the sounds you’re used to filling the space. No cart wheel in B-flat. No buzz of emergency lighting. No muffled concussive thump of Heroes doing damage three sublevels up. Just rock, and air, and the slow drip of condensation somewhere to my left, and the faint wet sound of the dead spawn above me doing what dead things do when nobody cleans them up.

  I was usually the one who cleaned them up. The irony wasn’t lost on me. I chose not to dwell on it because dwelling uses calories and I didn’t have calories to spare.

  The helmet lamp pointed at the ceiling. The spawn was still up there, pinned to the broken mop handle, dripping at intervals I’d started counting without meaning to. One drip every eleven seconds. I’d gotten to forty-three before I caught myself doing it.

  My shift was supposed to end at six. Craig would clock out at 5:58 because Craig always clocked out at 5:58. The vending machine in the break room would still have the dent from where Davis kicked it in February when it ate his dollar and didn’t give him the Doritos. The coffee maker would still be broken. Nobody would say “where’s Todd” until the form said they had to.

  The ceiling dripped. Eleven seconds. Eleven seconds. Eleven seconds.

  I reached for the mop head and started wringing condensation off the nearest wall.

  The helmet lamp illuminated the chamber in sections as I turned my head. Raw rock walls, unfinished, no tool marks, no construction pattern. This wasn’t a carved sublevel — it was natural, or as natural as anything inside a dungeon could be. The ceiling was rough and uneven with the fissure I’d fallen through cutting across it like a scar. The floor was stone with a slight concavity that funneled everything — condensation, slug fluid, me — toward the center.

  I mapped the space the way I mapped every dungeon room I’d ever worked. Dimensions, roughly eight meters by twelve. One entry point: the fissure, four meters up, not accessible without functioning legs. No visible exits at floor level. One active water source: the condensation drip to my left, slow but continuous. Ambient temperature: cool, maybe 55 degrees, stable. The air was breathable, which meant ventilation existed somewhere even if I couldn’t see it.

  I could survive the temperature. I could survive the dark, as long as the helmet lamp held, and I’d replaced the batteries two days ago because I replaced them every Monday regardless of charge level, which was another habit my coworkers found excessive and which was now the difference between seeing and not seeing.

  The water was the problem. The drip was there but I had nothing to collect it in except the caps from my dissolvents, which held about two ounces each and which had previously contained chemicals that you didn’t want in your drinking water. The mop head — what was left of it, still attached to the broken half of the handle — was absorbent. I could use it as a collection rag, wringing the condensation into a cap. Two ounces at a time. It would keep me alive. It would not keep me comfortable.

  I started collecting.

  Day two was about water and pain and the boredom of a broken body and a working mind with nothing to do but endure one and manage the other.

  The condensation collection worked. Wring the mop head against the wet wall, squeeze into the cap, drink, repeat. Two ounces at a time. It tasted like wet rock and the ghost of Compound B that I couldn’t fully rinse from the cap. It was the worst water I’d ever had. It was water.

  My legs had settled into a throb that was constant enough to become background. The pain was there when I focused on it and receded when I didn’t, which meant it was survivable, which was the only criterion that mattered. I’d stopped trying to move them. They were splinted and stable and anything beyond that was above my pay grade and outside my area of expertise. I was a janitor, not a medic. My area of expertise was cleaning things, and the only thing I could clean right now was the condensation off the walls, which I did, methodically, because having a task was better than not having a task and the task kept me hydrated.

  I thought about the radio. Static on sublevel 8 and I was below sublevel 8 in a space that shouldn’t exist. Nobody was going to hear a radio signal from down here. I thought about yelling. Sound travels strangely in caves — it could carry through the fissure and up through the gap and maybe, maybe, reach a corridor where someone might be working, except nobody was working because the job had been solo and the solo was me and I was here.

  I thought about the Compound B spec sheet.

  The footnote was in section 14, subsection C, under “Emergency Field Use (Non-Standard Applications).” I’d read it three years ago on a slow Tuesday during my lunch break because I’d already read the rest of the spec sheet and section 14 was the last part and I liked finishing things. The footnote said: In emergency situations where no potable water source is available, Compound B may be diluted to a ratio of 40:1 with any available water source. At this concentration, the solution is considered marginally potable for short-term use (48-72 hours maximum). Prolonged consumption not recommended. See appendix F for toxicological data.

  My coworkers had asked why I was reading the spec sheet for industrial cleaning solvent. I’d told them I read all the spec sheets. Craig, who sat next to me in the break room and who would later call in sick with the same text as Davis, had said, “Nobody reads the spec sheets, Todd.” He’d said it like this was common sense that I was failing to demonstrate. I’d finished section 14 and moved on to the Compound C spec sheet and Craig had gone back to his sandwich and that had been that.

  I had Compound B. I had water from the walls. The ratio math was simple: a 40:1 dilution of the remaining quarter-bottle, mixed with condensation collected in the cap, gave me roughly forty doses of terrible, chemical-tasting, technically-not-going-to-kill-me water. Enough for two days, maybe three if I rationed hard.

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  Three days. Either I’d find a way out in three days or I wouldn’t need water anymore.

  I mixed the first dose and drank it and it tasted like what it was, a last resort, and it kept me alive.

  By day three the spawn corpse was changing, and I was watching it the way I’d watched seven years of monster remains decompose on dungeon floors. I studied them carefully, professionally, and with a growing awareness that I was very hungry.

  The hunger had started on day one and I’d ignored it because I had bigger problems. By day two it was a presence, a low-grade demand that wants attention and doesn't care that you have nothing to give it. By day three it was the loudest thing in the chamber, louder than the drip, louder than the pain, louder than the quiet.

  Still pinned to the broken mop handle like a grotesque flag I hadn’t asked for, the dead spawn above me had been decomposing on schedule. Monster decomposition followed a specific pattern that I knew well because knowing it was part of the job. Stage one: membrane collapse, six to twelve hours. The outer layer loses structural integrity and the interior begins to liquefy. Stage two: fluid separation, the goo settling into layers by density, the lighter compounds rising to the top and the heavier ones sinking. Stage three: crystallization of the denser compounds, usually around day three, when the bottom layer begins to solidify into structures that the DCC training manual called “residual matrices” and which I called “the stuff that clogs the drain.”

  The spawn had reached stage two. Three distinct layers had pooled beneath it in the concavity of the floor, spreading in a slow circle that had reached the edge of where I was sitting. Top layer: thin and clear, mostly water and dissolved membrane. Middle layer: green and thick, the bulk of the biological material. Bottom layer: dark, almost black, denser than the rest.

  The bottom layer moved when I looked at it, a slow internal shifting, as if something in the dark fluid was rearranging itself.

  I moved on to the thought I’d been building for a day and a half.

  Here’s what everyone knows about monster goo: don’t eat it. Don’t drink it. Don’t let it in your mouth. For Zeroes, contact with raw monster biological material is fatal. This is in the training manual, on the posters in the break room, and the first thing they tell you at orientation on a day when you are still young enough to think the job might be temporary.

  I'd had a freshly hatched spawn burst over my face two days ago and I was still here. Either "fatal" meant something more specific than the poster said, or freshly hatched spawn were different from mature specimens, or the rule had always been simpler than the truth. I didn't know which. I kept going.

  I'd been thinking about that rule for thirty-six hours. Not because I was considering breaking it. I'm not suicidal. But the professional part of my brain had caught something in the phrasing that nobody else had ever needed to catch because nobody else had ever been in this situation.

  The rule said raw.

  Raw. Unprocessed. As-is. Direct contact with unprocessed monster biological material is fatal for Zeroes.

  I processed monster remains every single day. That was my entire job. I took raw material and I applied chemical agents: Compound A for acid neutralization, Compound C for protein breakdown, Compound B for everything else. That process turned it into something inert. Safe to handle. Safe to bag. Safe to transport. I’d done this thousands of times. The end product was always the same: neutralized, broken down, stripped of everything that made it dangerous.

  The question that nobody had ever asked, because nobody had ever needed to ask it, was whether the end product was safe to eat.

  Not whether you’d want to eat it. Nobody would want to eat it. But safe. Chemically, biologically, toxicologically safe. I had read all of the spec sheets that covered handling protocols and exposure limits and PPE requirements and environmental disposal guidelines. None of them addressed ingestion of fully processed material, because the scenario was too absurd to contemplate.

  It was day three. I had maybe two days of chemical water left. My legs were broken. Nobody was coming. The scenario had stopped being absurd and started being the only option I hadn’t eliminated.

  The difference between fatal and processed might just be chemistry. And chemistry was the one thing I had.

  I looked at the green layer pooling beneath the dead spawn. I looked at my belt of dissolvents. I looked at the ceiling four meters above me, and the fissure that led back to a world where people ate food from fridges and drank water from taps and didn’t seriously consider putting monster goo in their mouth.

  Then I started working.

  The extraction took six hours because I was careful and because careful was the only option. Careless meant dead, and I’d been careless once already, I hadn’t checked behind a rookie, I hadn’t mapped the fissure, I hadn’t anticipated the cave-in. Careless had put me here. I wasn’t going to let careless kill me.

  I scooped a sample of the green middle layer into the Compound B cap using a strip of raincoat as a ladle. About the size of my fist. Green, thick, smelling like the underside of a dungeon floor in July, which was accurate because that’s essentially what it was.

  Compound C first. The protein breaker. I applied it the same way I’d apply it on a dungeon floor. Controlled dose, even distribution, wait for the reaction. The goo fizzed. The proteins broke down. The color shifted from deep green to a lighter, more translucent green. Standard. I’d watched this reaction ten thousand times.

  Compound A next. Acid neutralization. The sample was Slug-class, which meant high acid content, one of the reasons Slug material was dangerous to handle without gloves. The Compound A did its job. The pH dropped to something my hands could tolerate, which I checked by touching the edge of the sample with my pinky and waiting to see if it burned. It didn’t.

  Then Compound B. This was the calculation that mattered, because Compound B at working concentration would strip the material so thoroughly that nothing biologically active would remain, and I didn’t want nothing. I wanted something safe enough to eat and active enough to do whatever processed monster material did when you put it in a human body, which was unknown, which was the part that made this an experiment rather than a procedure.

  I ran the ratio in my head. The spec sheet concentrations. The approximate volume of the sample. The molecular weight of Compound B relative to the biological mass of processed Slug material. I didn’t have a calculator. I didn’t need one. I’d been doing this math on dungeon floors for seven years, adjusting concentrations on the fly based on monster type and residue volume. The numbers were part of me the same way the dungeon layouts were part of me.

  I applied the Compound B at roughly a quarter of working concentration. Enough to strip the dangerous stuff. Not enough to strip everything.

  The result was a thick paste the color of pond water that smelled like Compound C and something underneath that was almost savory in the way a dumpster behind a restaurant is almost savory.

  I held it in the cap. I looked at it. It looked like nothing. It smelled like a job I’d been doing for seven years distilled into a single mouthful.

  The alternative was dying.

  I ate it.

  Imagine licking a nine-volt battery while someone holds a rotten fish under your nose and then the battery kicks in and every cell in your body lights up and for about three seconds you are completely certain this was the wrong call and then the three seconds pass and you are still here and something is different.

  Something was very different.

  The first thing I noticed was the warmth starting in my stomach and radiating outward through my chest and arms and eventually my legs, which had been a constant source of cold pain for three days and which were now a constant source of warm pain, which was an improvement I hadn’t expected and didn’t fully trust.

  The second thing I noticed was that I could see better. The helmet lamp hadn’t changed, but the edges of the beam seemed wider, the shadows less absolute, as if my eyes had recalibrated and were pulling more information from the same amount of light.

  The third thing I noticed was the notification.

  A translucent rectangle of light appeared eighteen inches in front of my face. It hovered there, motionless, glowing faintly in colors that existed outside the spectrum of my helmet lamp. It had text on it. It was not a hallucination, because hallucinations don’t have formatting.

  SYSTEM NOTICE

  ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

  Awakening detected.

  Classification: Non-standard.

  Method: Chemical extraction and ingestion of processed monster biological material.

  This is new.

  CLASS ASSIGNED: JANITORIAL

  Subtype: Pending

  Level: 0

  Welcome to the System, Janitor. Nobody else was going to say it.

  ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

  The notification floated in the dark. It was the only thing in the chamber that glowed on its own. It was a rectangle of impossible light hovering in front of a man covered in processed slug paste in an unmapped cave with two broken legs and a dead monster on a stick.

  I stared at it. The letters were clean and sharp and patient. They didn’t blink. They didn’t fade. They waited.

  Eleven years. That’s how long the System had known I existed without bothering to say so. Eleven years of the word on every form, every file, every look from every Hagan in every dungeon mouth. I’d been eighteen when they tested me. They test everyone at eighteen. You go to a facility and you sit in a room and they run the scan and the scan tells you whether the System considers you a person or a zero. Most people get a class. Fighter, Healer, Ranger, Scout, Mage, the standard set, the ones that come with levels and skills and a future. Some people get nothing. The scan comes back blank and they stamp your file and you go home and you figure out what kind of life a person has when the System says they don’t count.

  I’d figured it out. I’d become a janitor. I’d cleaned dungeons for seven years and I’d read every spec sheet and memorized every layout and I’d been good at it in a way that nobody noticed or valued because being good at cleaning doesn’t count in a world that counts levels.

  And the first thing the System said to me, after eleven years of nothing, was a dry little comment about my extraction technique.

  I looked at the notification. The notification floated there, patient, glowing faintly in the dark.

  I made more paste.