The System Eats First

Chapter Two: Survival Assistance Protocol

Somewhere close, a woman was screaming.

Wes came awake with his heart already slamming, the way it did on bad calls, before his brain caught up to why. He was on his back. The floor under him was warm. Not warm like a heated floor. Warm like skin.

"Hello? Anyone hear me?"

His own voice came out cracked. He pushed himself up onto his elbows and the light hit him wrong, dim and reddish, filtering down through something that should have been a ceiling and wasn't quite. He blinked hard, twice, trying to make his eyes agree with what they were showing him.

He was still in the building. He thought he was, anyway. He could make out the shape of a nurses' station a few feet away, a monitor cart tipped on its side, a wheelchair folded against a wall. But the wall wasn't a wall anymore. It curved. It had a texture like the inside of a mouth, ridged and wet-looking, though when he reached out and touched it, his fingers came away dry.

The screaming stopped. That was worse than the screaming.

"Hey. Hey, is somebody hurt?" Wes got his legs under him and stood, swaying, one hand out for balance against a support beam that wasn't a support beam. It gave slightly under his palm, like pressing on a bicep. He yanked his hand back.

A shape moved near the tipped monitor cart. An old man in a hospital gown, IV line still taped to the back of his hand though the pole it had been hanging from was nowhere in sight, was pressed into the corner with both arms wrapped around his knees.

"Sir. Hey. I'm a paramedic, okay, I'm not going to hurt you." Wes crouched a few feet off, hands visible, the way he'd been trained to approach anyone in shock. "Can you tell me your name?"

The man's mouth worked without sound for a second. "The walls," he finally said. "The walls were breathing. I felt them breathe."

Wes didn't answer that, because he didn't have anything true to say to it. He'd felt it too, under his hand, a slow give and release that had nothing to do with wind or pipes or any building he'd ever stood in.

Something chimed.

It wasn't a sound he could place, at first, bright and clean and completely wrong for the room, like a phone notification going off at a funeral. Then a pale rectangle of light unfolded itself in the air about a foot from Wes's face, hanging there with no visible source, and words scrolled across it in a calm, friendly font.

SURVIVAL ASSISTANCE PROTOCOL ACTIVATED

Welcome, Survivor. You have entered a Threshold Event.

Tutorial quests available. Complete quests to gain Levels, Skills, and Loot.

Your safety is our priority.

Wes stared at it. Reached out, slow, the way you'd reach toward something that might bite, and his hand passed straight through.

"You're seeing that too," the old man said, and for the first time he sounded less afraid and more furious, which Wes understood better. Fear alone made people freeze. Fear with something to be angry at made them move. "Some kind of screen. Followed me from the room I woke up in."

"Yeah." Wes turned in a slow circle. The panel turned with him, staying exactly a foot from his face no matter which way he faced. Below the welcome text, smaller lines had appeared.

QUEST: Find Shelter (0/1)

QUEST: Locate a Water Source (0/1)

Reward: +50 XP, Minor Healing Draught

"This some kind of prank." His voice didn't believe the word even as he said it. "Some kind of, I don't know, immersive thing, a drill—"

The floor breathed under his boots again, slower this time, deeper, like whatever this was had just noticed him standing on it.

A second chime, softer, almost apologetic.

Note: Structural instability detected in current zone. Recommend relocating within 4 minutes.

"Four minutes." Wes said it out loud like saying it might make it stop being true. He looked at the old man still curled in the corner. "Sir, we need to move. Can you walk?"

"I don't know where there is to walk to."

"Neither do I. But staying here isn't an option, the floor just told me that itself." Wes crossed to him, got an arm under his shoulders, helped him up. The IV line pulled taut and came free of nothing, no bag, no pole, and the man didn't even flinch, too far past normal fear to register a small one. "What's your name?"

"Frank."

"Okay, Frank. I'm Wes. Stay close to me."

Frank's grip on his arm was tighter than it needed to be for just walking, the kind of grip people used when letting go felt like the more dangerous option. Wes didn't try to loosen it. He'd held that same grip from patients before, in the backs of ambulances, in doorways where families stood frozen. It never meant weakness. It meant a person deciding, on some level under words, to trust the one steady thing in the room.

"You a doctor?" Frank asked, voice thinner now, like the adrenaline that had carried him this far was starting to run out.

"Paramedic. Close enough for right now."

"Good." Frank nodded like that settled something important. "Good. Paramedics don't leave people."

"No," Wes said. "We don't."

They moved toward what had been a hallway, Wes's paramedic brain running triage on an entire universe now instead of one patient, sorting what he understood from what he didn't. He didn't understand the floating panel. He didn't understand walls that breathed. He understood exit routes, though, understood keeping weight off Frank's IV arm, understood that four minutes was a countdown and countdowns didn't care what you believed about them.

The panel chimed a third time as they walked, smug and bright.

Quest Complete: Explore the Threshold (1/1)

+10 XP

Level Up! You are now Level 1.

New Skill Unlocked: Basic First Aid (Passive)

Wes almost laughed. Basic First Aid, unlocked, like he hadn't spent six years and four recertifications learning it the hard way, hands-on, in the backs of ambulances and the middle of strangers' worst days. Whatever this thing was, it didn't know that. It was scoring him on things he already had, handing him gold stars for a test he'd already passed a long time ago.

That should have made him feel better. It didn't. It made the whole thing feel colder, more calculated, less like an accident and more like something built on purpose by whoever, or whatever, thought this was a fair way to treat people who'd just lost their entire city.

The hallway opened into what had been an ER waiting room. Rows of chairs, half of them fused into the floor at strange angles, like the building had started to digest its own furniture and gotten interrupted. A dozen or so other people stood clustered near the far doors, all of them wearing the same stunned expression Frank had worn, all of them with a pale rectangle of light hovering near their own faces that only they could touch.

One of them turned when Wes and Frank came in. A woman, maybe forty, blood dried along one temple.

"Are you seeing quests too?" she called across the room, half hopeful, half like she needed someone else to confirm she wasn't losing her mind. "Mine keeps telling me to find a weapon."

"Mine told me to find shelter and water," Wes said, easing Frank into one of the chairs that hadn't fused to the floor. "Different quest for each of us, looks like."

"Great." She laughed, short and humorless, and wiped at the dried blood without seeming to notice she was doing it. "So it's not even the same test. Just whatever it decides we need to hear to keep moving."

A man near the doors, younger, maybe college-aged, spoke up without turning from whatever he was watching outside. "Does anybody else's thing have a level bar? Mine says I need two hundred more experience to hit Level 2." He said it like he couldn't decide whether to be excited or sick about it. "Like it's a game. Like this is supposed to be fun."

Nobody answered him. Nobody had an answer that wouldn't have sounded insane out loud, even in a room where insane had apparently become the baseline.

Before Wes could say anything else, the panel in front of his own face flared bright red, the friendly font gone sharp and urgent.

WARNING: Hostile entity detected.

Distance: 30 meters and closing.

Behind the woman, in the dark beyond the waiting room's far doors, something scraped along the floor. Slow. Heavy. Dragging, like it had more limbs than it needed and wasn't in a hurry to use them all.

The woman's smile dropped. The college kid stopped talking. Frank's grip found Wes's arm again, harder this time.

"Wes." Frank's voice had gone very quiet. "What does thirty meters mean, exactly, in a place like this."

Wes didn't answer. He was already counting the exits.