Day 30.
The Silo, Sector 7.
Sauget, Illinois.
The air tasted like pulverized bone and chemical ash.
My spine wasn't working. The realization was distant, clinical—a cold numbness spreading from the T-7 vertebrae down. My legs were refusing orders. They were dead weight, anchored in the rubble of what was supposed to be a fortress.
Runners swarmed through the breach in the eastern wall. They poured through the gaping hole where the Pus-Bomber had melted through the rebar like acid through butter.
Travis was dead. His corpse was cooling three feet away, his throat torn out. It looked like hamburger meat left in the sun.
Somewhere in the smoke, Yana was screaming. It was a high, wet sound that cut through the gunfire.
I couldn't turn my head to look.
`[SPINAL SEVERANCE DETECTED. MOBILITY: OFFLINE.]`
"Yeah, no shit," I wheezed. Blood bubbled past my lips, warm and metallic.
I should have reinforced that wall on Day 12. I should have listened to the Administrator and bought the structural upgrade instead of letting Miller use his cheap Red Faction patch-weld.
I should have executed Miller when his loyalty bar dipped to 23% after the scrip hike. I saw the numbers. I saw the rot.
But I had been chasing efficiency. I wanted optimization. I wanted to build the perfect machine in hell.
Rank 47 of 50.
Forty-fucking-seven.
A Runner landed on my chest. It smelled of sulfur and rotten meat. Its teeth sank into my shoulder, tearing the deltoid muscle like string cheese.
The pain was distant. System Sickness had my nerves so fried I barely felt the thing chewing. I just heard it. The wet sounds. The crunching of cartilage.
The obscene slurp of something swallowing chunks of me.
`[BIOMASS HARVESTED: 84KG.]`
`[USER STATUS: CRITICAL FAILURE.]`
`[MORTALITY INDEX: 100%. OPTIMIZING NEVER, APPARENTLY.]`
Blue wireframes flickered and collapsed in my vision. The entire Silo's infrastructure map unraveled like a corrupted blueprint—every shortcut, every ignored warning, every "good enough" decision lighting up in cascading red failure markers.
The Gutter was overflowing with zombie slurry. The Mudroom's decon cycle was stalled. The Lung's filtration system was clogged with corpse runoff.
I'd built a meat grinder and fed it bullshit.
Then the world started folding.
It wasn't exploding. It wasn't fading to black.
It was folding—reality peeling back in geometric patterns like someone was running a delete command on existence itself. The Server Wipe.
Thirty days to build a kingdom, and I had built a mass grave with a power plant.
Screaming erupted. Not just the Nulls dying around me. Everyone. Everywhere. Eight billion souls hitting the cosmic off-switch in perfect synchronicity, realizing there was no heaven, no hell, no respawn—just the void opening its mouth to erase us.
My last thought, drowning in my own blood, was simple:
Miller was right about me.
`[REGRESSION PROTOCOL: INITIATED.]`
`[SUBJECT: JACK MONROE.]`
`[RANK: 47. STATUS: PATHETIC.]`
`[GENESIS RIGHTS: DENIED. GET BENT.]`
`[ANALYSIS: STRUCTURAL HUBRIS. INSUFFICIENT RUTHLESSNESS. SHIT LEADERSHIP.]`
`[CALCULATING…]`
`[VERDICT: AMUSING FAILURE. ROUND 2 APPROVED.]`
`[WELCOME BACK, ARCHITECT. TRY NOT TO DIE LIKE A BITCH THIS TIME.]`