Day 31.
The Silo, Sector 1.
Sauget, Illinois.
00:01 Hours.
The clock on the Command Deck wall hit zero.
I didn't blink. I didn't breathe. I just gripped the edge of the steel table, my knuckles white, waiting for the dissolve. I waited for the pixels to tear apart, for the world to fold in on itself, for the void to swallow the concrete, the blood, and the mistake of my second life.
I waited for peace.
It didn't come.
Instead, the sky screamed.
It wasn't a sound. It was a vibration that rattled the fillings in my teeth and cracked the reinforced glass of the observation deck. The black void outside, usually choked with the smoke of burning cities, didn't turn off.
It turned Green.
A sickly, radioactive emerald light flooded the Silo. It washed over the monitors, the maps, and the faces of the crew gathered around me. It made Helen look like a corpse. It made Ronnie's eyepatch look like a hole in a skull.
Text scrolled across my retina, burning in the same toxic green.
`[PHASE 1 COMPLETE.]`
`[SERVER WIPE SUSPENDED.]`
`[ANALYSIS: TOP 200 TERRITORIES IDENTIFIED.]`
`[PROTOCOL: ADVANCEMENT.]`
`[PHASE 2 INITIATED: THE EXPANSION.]`
`[DURATION: 30 DAYS.]`
`[OBJECTIVE: ELIMINATE 90 TERRITORIES.]`
`[ONLY THE FINAL 10 PROCEED.]`
The silence in the room was heavier than the concrete roof.
"We're not dead," Ronnie whispered, his voice cracking. He touched his face, then the table, as if checking he was still solid matter. "Jack, we're not fucking dead."
I stared at the text floating in my vision. Eliminate 90 territories. A culling. Phase 1 was about surviving the dead. Phase 2 was about killing the living.
"No," I said, my voice rasping like sandpaper. "We're not dead. We're just in a smaller cage."
A thud behind me broke the trance.
Travis hit the floor.
He didn't stumble. He just dropped, like a puppet with cut strings. His massive frame slammed into the metal grating, dead weight.
"Travis!" Helen moved before I did, dropping her cigarette and sliding across the floor to her knees beside him.
I was there a second later. I grabbed his wrist. It was wet, slick with sweat, but cold. Freezing. Like touching a steak just pulled from the freezer.
"Pulse is thready," Helen snapped, her fingers digging into his neck. She ripped his shirt open.
The veins in his chest weren't blue. They were black. Thick, spiderweb lines pulsing with a dark, sluggish rhythm, spreading out from his heart like root rot.
"Core temp is dropping," Helen said, her voice tight. She pulled a digital thermometer from her pocket, jamming it into his ear. She looked at the reading and swore. "Seventy-six degrees. His kidneys are shutting down. He's in septic shock, Jack."
Travis's eyes fluttered open. The whites were yellowed, the pupils blown wide. He looked at me, then at the green light pulsing through the window.
"Didn't… wipe?" he wheezed. Blood bubbled at the corner of his lips. It was dark, almost black.
"No wipe," I said. "We're still here."
"Fuck," he groaned, closing his eyes. "That's… inconvenient."
"Get him to the Lung," I ordered, standing up. "Ronnie, Boyd, grab his legs. Move."
As they lifted the Tank, a new notification chimed. It wasn't the global broadcast. It was a localized rule update. A patch note for the new phase.
`[NEW PROTOCOL ACTIVATED: USURPATION.]`
`[NOTICE TO ALL NULL CLASS SURVIVORS.]`
`[USERS HOLD LIMITED CLASS SLOTS. RESOURCES ARE FINITE.]`
`[RULE: NULLS MAY KILL USERS TO CLAIM THEIR CLASS.]`
`[COMBAT BUFFS ACTIVE FOR NULLS DURING USURPATION ATTEMPTS.]`
I froze.
I read it twice. The System wasn't just encouraging murder; it was gamifying mutiny. It was telling every person without a Class that the only reason they were weak was because we were hogging the power.
"Jack?" Boyd called out. He was holding Travis's ankles, struggling with the weight near the stairwell door.
Three of the new recruits—Coalition conscripts we'd picked up from the railyard last week—were standing by the door. They were meant to be guarding the stairwell.
I saw it happen in slow motion.
The notification hit them at the same time it hit me. I saw their eyes widen. I saw the look they exchanged. It wasn't fear. It was hunger.
One of them, a guy named Carter with a shaved head and a desperate look, stared at Boyd. Boyd, the Technomancer. The weakest combat Class. The easiest target.
"Carter," I said. My voice was low. "Don't."
Carter didn't look at me. He looked at the wrench on his belt. "System says it's allowed," he muttered. "It says... it says I can take it."
"It says you can try," I said.
Carter drew the wrench. The two men behind him drew knives.
"Drop him!" Carter screamed, lunging for Boyd.
Boyd shrieked, dropping Travis's legs and scrambling backward. "Jack!"
Carter swung the wrench. A red aura flared around him—the System's 'Combat Buff' for usurpers. It made him faster, stronger than a Null had any right to be. The wrench smashed into the wall where Boyd's head had been a second before, cracking the concrete.
I didn't shout. I didn't negotiate.
I raised the Fang .45.
Crack.
The bullet took Carter in the throat. It didn't punch a clean hole; the .45 ACP round mushroomed on impact, blowing out the back of his neck in a spray of red mist and spinal cord.
He dropped, gargling blood.
The other two hesitated. That was their mistake.
I stepped forward, the gun leveled. "Who's next? Who wants the Class? Come take it."
The second man, a kid really, barely twenty, lunged with the knife. He was fast, buffed by the red light.
I didn't shoot. I pistol-whipped him. The heavy steel barrel connected with his temple with a wet crunch. He went down, seizing.
The third man dropped his knife. He threw his hands up, backing away, his eyes wide with terror. "I didn't—it was the System! The screen said—"
I shot him in the chest.
He fell back against the doorframe, sliding down leaving a streak of bright arterial blood.
The room was silent again, except for the high-pitched whine of the ventilators and Travis's ragged breathing.
Boyd was on the floor, hyperventilating, staring at the body of the man who had tried to bash his skull in.
"Get up, Boyd," I said. I holstered the gun. I didn't look at the bodies. "Move Travis. Now."
"They… they were our guys," Boyd stammered. "Carter helped fix the generator yesterday."
"Carter was a Null," I said, stepping over the corpse. "Now he's biomass. The rules changed, Boyd. Update your software or you die."
We got Travis to the Lung. Helen hooked him up to the last of our dialysis machines, but the look on her face told me everything.
"Ten days," she said, wiping blood from her hands onto her apron. "Maybe less. His organs are crystallizing. It's the System strain. He pushed too hard."
Travis was unconscious, his skin grey against the white sheets.
"Ten days," I repeated.
"If he's lucky." Helen lit a cigarette, her hands shaking slightly. "Jack, those men upstairs..."
"They made a choice."
"The System provoked them."
"The System revealed them," I corrected. "It's going to get worse. Every Null in this silo just got told that killing us is their ticket to godhood."
I turned and walked out. I needed air.
I climbed the ladder to the roof. The air outside was thick, humid, and smelled like sulfur. The green sky cast long, strange shadows over the perimeter.
I activated Decay Sight.
The world turned into a wireframe of heat signatures and structural weaknesses. I looked out at the minefield.
A single zombie—a Shambler—was walking toward the perimeter fence. It was fifty yards out.
I watched it. Usually, they walked until they hit a tripwire, exploded, and the next one walked over the pieces.
But this one stopped.
It stood three feet from the tripwire. It tilted its head, the green light reflecting in its milky eyes. It looked at the wire. Then it looked at the crater next to it where another zombie had blown up yesterday.
It didn't step forward. It turned. It walked parallel to the wire, searching for a gap.
A chill that had nothing to do with the temperature went down my spine.
"They're learning," I whispered.
I looked down at the courtyard. The Gutter—our biomass processing intake—was backed up. A dark, viscous sludge was bubbling up through the grate. The smell hit me even from here. One thousand, two hundred kilograms of liquified rot, backing up because we were killing faster than the machine could process.
I did the math in my head.
Ninety territories to eliminate. Thirty days. That was three territories a day.
Travis was dying. The Nulls were mutinous. The zombies were learning how to avoid mines. And we were drowning in our own kill-count.
I looked at the green sky.
"Expand or suffocate," I said to the empty air. "Literally."
`[INFRASTRUCTURE STRAIN: 87%.]`
`[EXPANSION REQUIRED OR BIOMASS PROCESSING FAILURE IMMINENT.]`
The System agreed.
I turned back to the hatch. We had work to do.
FOUNDRY PROTOCOL - DAY 31
SECTOR 1 (JACK MONROE) █████████░ 9/10 Nodes
RANK: 172 (Target: Top 50)
STATUS: PHASE 2 BEGINS
Casualties: 3 Mutineers (Executed)
Threats: Evolution (Zombies), Internal Mutiny, Organ Failure (Travis)
Next Event: Rot Backflow / Expansion Planning