None of the Above

Escape From Darkzone, or EFD for short, had never been just a matter of prisoners—users—dropping blindly into the Darkzone to survey its phenomena, catalog its environments, and haul out whatever items and intel they could carry.

As I'd said before, the game packed a serious crafting system and a whole buffet of content lifted from other genres. One of the more interesting pieces sitting in ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠that mix was the simulation element.

PVE was the main course, not PVP. That was why there was so much of this stuff.

Dating sims with pretty girls. Nation management. City builders. Grand wars. Life sims where you hijacked some specific human being and watched what they did. In other words, EFD had folded NPC interaction together with the prison's crafting systems and ended up with a surprising amount of simulation content as a result.

Interaction between users topped out at trading, founding a guild, maybe posting a party recruit. The ways a single player could engage with the game's own internal systems, though, were shockingly well developed.

The conversation I was having with the prison employee sitting across from me was one of those systems.

"So what's the Super Rookie from the underground floors—the one everyone's been talking about—want with a clock-watching deadbeat like me?"

"Even down in that sewer, Officer Park, your name came up more than once."

"My name? Well. I do take the baton to the troublemakers now and then. Beat 'em like rats."

"You're famous for that too, of course. But the stories I kept hearing were a little different. That you run private tests on the underground inmates who look like they've got potential—and that you do them certain favors."

Officer Park had been listening in a slouch. He let out a thick, liquor-soaked belch, then sat there with his eyes half-lidded, glancing at me sideways and never once pausing in his sipping, like a late-stage alcoholic who would seize if you took the bottle away for even a second.

This was a civil servant. A special prison that handled death row was still a government institution. Was he really allowed to sit there nursing a drink on the clock?

Of course he wasn't.

But he was.

He held a covert supervisory post, the man who quietly monitored and managed the connections running between the guards and the inmates.

On paper he's just a 7th-Grade Prison Officer. Actual authority runs closer to Grade 5, if I remember the lore right.

I held his gaze and kept quiet, waiting for him to take the bait. I was an inmate who had already dropped the word favors. He couldn't just wave that off.

I walked in out of nowhere and started talking connections. He's trying to figure out what kind of animal I am.

Ordinarily, an inmate from the underground floors could not set foot on the Ground Floor unless he met a specific set of conditions and secured a separate permit from the prison. No clearance, no elevator. And even if you cleared both hurdles and rode all the way up, almost nobody would know to come looking for Officer Park first.

Almost no inmate knows he's the middleman sitting on every connection between the prisoners and the staff.

Among the underground NPCs, the only people who had that information were maybe Vladimir and Ted Chan. On the inmate side, you'd have to be the head of a major outfit, or one of those old-timer lifers who'd been rotting in this place for decades.

And here was a guy who'd been inside a month, rubbing his hands together like a fly and angling for a hookup. From Officer Park's point of view, I had to be a genuine curiosity.

But he can't just shut me down cold.

One way or another, Officer Park was a middle manager. He ran connections himself, yes—but his first job was knowing the size and the source of every single one of them. A man like that, openly torching a connection request from a Super Rookie who had dropped out of the sky?

I'd have an easier time believing he was going to quit drinking.

"I've worked this prison a long time. I've seen a few of your type."

"Is that so?"

"Yeah. And when I say 'a few,' I mean even I can count them on one hand. Your kind is rare. Hard to predict. Harder to read. And on top of that, you look unnecessarily appetizing. Makes a man curious. Like some gorgeous poisonous mushroom."

He took another sip of the hard stuff, then pulled something from his desk drawer and tossed it at me.

It was an obsolete smartphone, the kind almost nobody used anymore. A model I knew far too well. The important part was this: even a relic in this era still came with iris recognition.

Tone it down, you lunatic.

I had no idea why Crazy Clock got so twitchy around other electronics. Was this some kind of hardware racism?

Officer Park kept talking as if nothing had happened.

"You didn't go to some ordinary guard. You came all the way up to the Ground Floor to find me. Which means you already know what I'm going to ask for."

"I heard you take a deposit of fifty million won. As proof of trust."

"That's right. When I decide whether a man in this prison has potential, the first thing I verify is capability. And the measure of capability is money. Whether you earned it yourself, shook it out of somebody else, or borrowed it—if an inmate in here can put together fifty million, that means he's got the kind of power that matches the number. Doesn't it?"

"That's a fair point."

Whether the process had been easy or hard didn't matter. What mattered was whether, the moment Officer Park named fifty million, I could produce it immediately—or close enough to immediately.

Put simply, he was telling me to cough up fifty million right now.

If I hesitated for even a second, it was over. Even if I thought it through and paid anyway, he would be deeply disappointed. And if I asked for time? He'd give me a little. But my evaluation would drop off a cliff. I'd have walked onto the Ground Floor without even fifty million to my name.

He liked capable people. He did not give generous scores to idiots who charged in with no plan.

"So? Can you pay the fifty million right now?"

"Not a problem."

I powered on the old phone at once and used the iris scan to transmit the money in my Prison Banking account as raw data.

The reason he took payment through a junk handset instead of any prison device was obvious: no paper trail. A recorded transaction between a staffer and an inmate was trouble for both sides.

He took the phone back, checked the sum the way you'd check a Bitcoin wallet, and nodded.

"Fifty million, sure enough. From what I looked into, you've got no backer and no private fortune on the outside you could cash out through a broker in here. So how the hell did you pull together this kind of money in so little time?"

"There's a Darkzone here, isn't there? That's all I need."

He said nothing.

A Darkzone, plus a ten-year veteran of the game. That was plenty. If I ever decided to tear through the place in earnest, I could push my annual haul into the billions of won. I was only waiting because it wasn't time yet.

"Then are we done?"

"You passed the paperwork. Now comes the interview."

I'd just thrown down, without a flicker of hesitation, the fifty million I'd broken my back earning for a month. That was enough potential for him. He moved on as if there was nothing left to see.

"You've got three options. First: your space expands from a cell to an entire cell block. Second: tacit permission to carry weapons and commit murder inside the prison, so long as you don't cross the line. Last: the right to deal directly with the guards."

Exactly the conditions that popped up when you formed an ordinary first connection with Officer Park. I'd been expecting them.

Picking option one because it felt like an extension of the crafting content was amateur play. Most newbies with no information made that exact mistake and took the trap without thinking.

You can expand your space gradually anyway, just by paying tribute to the prison and clearing quests. So why would you?

Burning fifty million to swallow a whole cell block looked attractive on paper. In practice it was all sizzle and no steak. A beginner with no foundation couldn't do anything with a cell block even if you handed him one. A newbie was never going to have the management skill, the backing, or the organization—the guild—to run the thing.

And option two?

Wow. A guy who came to prison for a crime gets to walk around armed and kill people out in the open.

If that was your thought, you only had half the picture. Or you were the kind of mark who never checked the boxes on a contract and kept getting taken to the cleaners.

The guards will look the other way. That's all. The prison AI slaps sanctions on any serious statutory violation the second it finds one. This option is meaningless unless you've built a connection with the Warden himself.

Every inmate in this place already used violence and murder when they needed to. They just did it out of the AI's sight. It was something they were already good at. Start telling yourself the guards have your back now and run wild like a maniac? That was a guaranteed bad ending: a newbie's skull getting caved in once every twenty-four hours until there was nothing left to cave in.

And now that everyone's been converted to death row status, the AI's enforcement threshold has loosened anyway. Option two is a pure loss if you take it.

So option three, then?

Not a chance.

The auction house already let prison personnel and Darkzone operators trade freely with anyone. What was this even supposed to be worth? If you were hoping that dealing with the guards would get you something special, you needed to kill that thought early.

Don't forget. This is an interview. A capable inmate drops fifty million to prove what he can do. Then they slide him three decent-looking choices and watch what he picks. It's an intelligence test.

The ones whose thinking ran in a straight line—the so-called one-dimensional types—would chew on it for a bit and take whichever of the three looked best. Congratulations. You just paid fifty million for a failing grade.

Sorry. I wasn't one of those people.

"I don't need them."

"What?"

"Forming a connection is the point, yes. But if I pick one of these and word gets out that the prison is openly doing me favors, people are going to get suspicious. They're going to start digging. If I wanted that kind of attention, I would have gone to any random guard on the block instead of coming to you, Officer Park. So I don't need these conditions."

Choosing any of them risked snapping the already-thin thread between staff and inmate. So I was refusing them. The connection itself mattered more to me than any blatant favor.

That was what I said, to Officer Park's face. A freshman Orange, one month in.

"Interesting. Genuinely interesting. Where the hell did a guy like you even come from?"

"This place feels as comfortable as home. I suppose I was born for it."

"You've got a hell of a nerve, but somehow it doesn't come off as rude. Maybe you're right. Maybe this place really is in your blood."

He nodded and held the old smartphone back out to me.

Ordinarily, the moment you picked an option, he would either smile that meaningful little smile or sigh in open disappointment and snatch the phone away. Refuse every option, and he gave you the fifty million back as a hidden reward.

It was a kind of token: proof that this particular NPC had acknowledged a prisoner. But I had to play ignorant to the end. Right now I wasn't a man hiding his real power. I was just a reasonably capable inmate with reasonably sharp instincts.

"Why are you…?"

"Take the phone. It can sit on the money stored in your biometric data like ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠a digital vault. On top of that, anyone else using one of these can trade information with you in real time."

"Do the prison staff use them as well?"

"You're quick. Unlike PrisonNet, which is inmates only, anyone who owns one of these is on the network. Anonymity's guaranteed. That's what they were built for in the first place."

"Thank you."

"Don't mention ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠it. I just offloaded a piece of junk that was taking up space in my drawer."

He tipped the bottle—already showing its bottom—and looked at me with eyes far too clear for a man that drunk.

"Plenty of the ones stuck underground have taken one of these off me. I wasn't the only one handing them out, either, so the total volume over the years hasn't been small."

He flicked the empty bottle into the trash and pulled a pocket flask from inside his uniform.

"The ones who actually made it up to the Ground Floor after that, I can count on one hand."

Officer Park fastened his mouth to the flask like it was ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠sweeter than any liquor on earth and drank greedily.

"What's it going to be for you? Stuck on the third floor. The very bottom of the underground."

I stood up quietly.

"I don't know what you're hoping for. But I can promise you one thing."

Ten years. I had poured ten years into this game, and this time I intended to see the ending.

"You're going to see something so entertaining you'll want to pay admission."

If I was having fun, they would too. I'd make sure of that. Whether they liked it or not.