A Little Chilly

‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠

"A little chilly."

That was the first thing out of my mouth the moment I dropped into the Darkzone. EFD had always run ambient-temperature and body-heat systems, which meant a character could actually feel hot and cold — and that the environment came loaded with every flavor of buff and debuff.

A little dark, sure. Beyond that, nothing immediately life-threatening.

The instant I sealed the specialized gas mask over my face, a hologram bloomed beneath the transparent goggles: the current date, the time, the temperature. Swap in an oxygen filter and the remaining filter life would populate as well. A button on the side of the mask toggled the whole display on and off.

Fifteen degrees. No toxic spores in the air, no viruses, no radiation — not yet. For a completely random drop, this is a pretty clean zone.

Nobody knew a single hard fact about EFD's setting, not really, but the breadcrumbs the developers had been dropping for years had mixed with years of player speculation into something like a finished backdrop. The Darkzone was an extradimensional space the Korean government had first sniffed out beneath Seoul Southern Prison, then dug into and confirmed with their own hands. It should have been ordinary basement. Instead it went on forever — every kind of environment, every kind of structure — and out of it poured an endless flood of uncanny information and technology whose origins no one could pin down, along with a lot of smaller junk that was simply worth money. More precisely, anything you took would regenerate before long, or the environment itself would shift and spit out something new.

True to a government that lost its mind at the smell of cash, they immediately partnered with the mega-corps, stood up a joint colossus of a project to pry the place open, and that — more or less — was how EFD began.

I waited for my eyes to adjust, easing my body back into itself among the jagged, razor-edged rock formations. Before long the EFD project would spin up in earnest, and the quiet squeeze they were already applying with talk of Time-Limited Human Rights would harden into something simpler: they would strip the rights entirely, stamp every inmate with the same death-row status, and throw them in. If I wanted to ride out that season of chaos and despair in one piece, I had to be ready first.

Good. The body is adapting faster than I expected.

Dark adaptation was coming along cleanly too. I could make out the shapes of things around me, at least in outline. For a place called the Darkzone, it was never a true lightless black; most sectors you could walk once your eyes settled, no flashlight required.

If this had still been the game, I would have sprinted the objective the second I landed and vacuumed up every scrap of high-value loot on the way. This time I decided not to get cute. There was no assigned objective at all — just free farming until the clock ran out, then extract along a different route. That much, at least, seemed to work the way it had in the game: you could not leave by the path you came in on.

Finding my way isn't any harder than it was in the game.

However labyrinthine the Darkzone got, at its root it was still a co-op extraction shooter. In theory, any passage that actually went somewhere could connect to anywhere else. I eased out from between the rock formations and started toward where the tunnel continued, dropping my stance to waist height, keeping my footsteps as light as I could make them, hearing and sight wound out to their limits.

A pebble clattered away into the dark.

A thin thread of wind whispered through the stone.

I walked straight into that wind. The sector I had landed in was closer to a subterranean cave than anything else, which meant a long list of things to watch for.

First order of business: map it myself.

Using my drop point as the origin, I had to build a three-dimensional map in my head out of everything the environment would give me — every stretch I walked, every shape that entered my field of view, every sound, every trickle of water. EFD had never been kind enough to hand you a map with the layout already filled in. You explored, and you wrote your own guide. Looking one up online would have been easier, of course. I had done all of it myself anyway. Early alpha tester. Ten-year veteran. I had a little pride about that.

Which means the job in front of me isn't any different.

Through the clear goggles I kept sweeping a ten-meter radius, gloved fingers brushing the terrain, erasing the blank spaces on the map inside my skull. Then a savior walked into my field of view — something that would blow that mental map wide open in a single stroke.

Light.

Faint, but unmistakable. This was not a place people lived, and it was not sunlight. Ask me how a light source was supposed to exist down here and I would not have had a clean answer. In the Darkzone, though, running into one was nowhere near as rare as it sounded.

I eased around the bend in the passage and confirmed what I was looking at. The source was an EXIT sign — the kind you were guaranteed to find in any government building or apartment block. Under that washed-out, almost mint-green glow sat a wrecked work cart and a heap of dirt. Scattered around them were access-restriction barriers dumped wherever they had fallen, and construction materials that had already rotted through.

Busted plastic pallets. Metal sheeting left long enough to rust through. Broken tools.

This had either been a real construction site once, somewhere, or a space the Darkzone had rolled up at random. The toolbox was so far gone it was more rust than box; the slightest touch would have set it screaming, and I had no interest in finding out. Even if there were gold bars gleaming inside, forcing the issue would have been a bad call.

And stuffing it into a mid-size pack on a hunch would have been a worse one.

A shame. I passed on the toolbox.

A cabinet had toppled against one wall. The outside was rusted, but the door hung open, which was something. Inside: dust-caked work coveralls, a small pouch, and a scatter of miscellaneous supplies. "Miscellaneous," in this context, meant the kind of odds and ends that felt like they ought to be worth money and mostly were not — except when they doubled as crafting materials, in which case they could actually help.

I started with the inner pockets of the coveralls. If these had belonged to someone on a construction crew, they would have stashed something in there.

There it is.

A single worn keycard, a flat, featureless white, purpose unknown. I slipped it into my jacket before anyone — or anything — could see. An old wallet came out after it. The cash inside was a handful of bills in shapes and colors I had never seen in my life, plus what I had to assume was an ID, the portrait completely painted over in black. The lettering on that card was unreadable, smeared the way pixels get smeared in Photoshop, and it did not look anything like the ordinary identification people used on the outside.

After the coveralls I took the small pouch and the usable scraps. Anything already too old or too broken to yield was a write-off; I packed only what I could carry out in one piece and filled the backpack with that.

Last, the pouch itself.

Nothing in it — but it clips to a belt. That'll do for pants.

In EFD, pants was the house insurance policy. Fail to extract and you lost everything you were carrying — except whatever you had stashed in your pants, which came home with you. A sliver of risk mitigation, nothing more. They were shaped like little pouches, so everyone called them pants.

Not a bad first haul.

That was the thing about games that leaned on their RPG systems: even when the loot itself was trash, the simple act of farming it started to get you going. I dropped my stance again, low as a stray dog nosing after rotten meat, and pushed through the door beneath the EXIT sign.

The space behind me had been a cave and nothing else, as bleak as a cave could get. The moment I crossed that threshold, the entire register of the place changed. Instead of rough stone underfoot, the first thing that filled my vision was tile — the kind any modern person would know in their sleep. The whole sector seemed to be one enormous building.

A low, familiar hum crawled into my ears. I cocked my head and tracked it ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠to the source.

Emergency generator. Running, somewhere below.

The fixtures along the corridor ceiling were dark — power cut, or the bulbs dead, I could not tell, and I did not care. That was good news. If this place had been strobing like a nightclub I would have abandoned the farm without a second thought. A generator running and the lights still off, though? That was a mandatory sweep.

A glance around was enough to put the building's original purpose in a fairly tight range: a hospital, or a dormitory of some size. The corridor was long and wide, and there were a lot of rooms. At intervals, thin reinforced-glass doors sealed one zone off from the next. That was a building that had cared about security and sanitation in equal measure.

Sticky mats and UV lamps between the glass doors, small but deliberate. A makeshift quarantine lock, then.

It tracked either way — hospital or dorm. Maybe the original site, wherever and whenever it had stood, had needed a layout like this. Maybe the Darkzone had just Frankensteined something together that looked the part.

Before I committed to the quarantine lock I cleared the rooms nearest the entrance, one at a time. Most of the doors were locked, which did not leave many chances to look inside, and I was not about to start putting my shoulder through them. The ones that stood open, though, paid reasonably well. I picked up a few pieces of consumer electronics that would fetch something on the outside, and a handful of ampules filled with drugs I did not like the look of.

The rest was paperwork — files whose lettering had shattered into unreadable noise, photographs painted over in black. Of those, I took only the ones whose covers had been brushed out in black. In EFD, that was the unwritten rule when you were farming expensive classified intelligence: you prioritized whatever had the title or the cover blacked out. The in-universe reason was that the AI riding in the prison-issue gas mask redacted the goggles on its own, so a user could not actually ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠read anything sensitive. The reason I could not make out the text or confirm the photographs now was the same piece of corporate hardware sitting on my face.

If the AI has already learned to blind sensitive material on its own, that ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠means the mega-corps and the Korean government have already pulled a serious amount of intelligence out of the Darkzone.

This was still the early game. The fact that the people in power already had that much in hand also meant the real erasure of inmate rights — and the half-forced Darkzone drops that would come with it — was not far off.

I said nothing. I tore the contents out of the folders, folded them with care, and slid them into my pants. Classified intelligence that important you kept separate. That was just common sense.

Part of me wants to rip the mask off right now and read the damn things. This isn't a game, though.

Unlike the game, I had one life. I wanted that life — mind and body both — kept as intact as possible, and I wanted to survive it as cleanly as the situation allowed. And if I could manage it, I wanted out of this world entirely. I was just a standard-issue Korean guy who liked video games and fried chicken.

A dull clunk carried from far down the corridor.

"......!"

I dropped into a crouch on reflex and had the knife in my hand before the echo died. A thin line of cold sweat rolled down the back of my neck. In the space of a heartbeat, a tension I could not name kicked my pulse into a sprint and blew my pupils wide.

This was why I had worked so hard not to make a sound in the Darkzone.

It was about to show itself.