When he'd moved to Austin three years ago for the Nexus job, he'd procrastinated until the last minute and then thrown everything into boxes without labeling them. It had taken him four months to find his good headphones. His mother had called him disorganized. His ex-girlfriend had called him a disaster. Marcus preferred to think of himself as "optimizing for later" rather than "planning ahead."
But this was different. This wasn't moving. This was evacuation. And evacuation, Marcus realized, had a very different set of requirements.
What do you bring when you're leaving forever?
He started with the laptop. Obvious choice. It still worked - mostly. Internet was spotty, but he'd been downloading documentation whenever he had connectivity. Wikis, forums, any user-generated content about the System. Most of it was garbage - conspiracy theories, power-fantasy nonsense, people trying to min-max their builds like this was a game - but some of it was useful.
The charger went in next. Then the cables. USB-C, micro-USB, Lightning cable even though he didn't have an iPhone anymore because you never knew what you'd need to charge.
Clothes. One change. Two? He compromised on one and a half - clean underwear, clean shirt, an extra pair of socks. His STR 8 meant he couldn't carry much. Every pound mattered.
Water bottles. Three of them, filled from the tap. The water still worked, which was one of those small mercies that made you wonder what the System actually needed from human infrastructure.
Food. He didn't have much. Protein bars, mostly. The kind that tasted like cardboard but had a five-year shelf life. He took six of them. That was probably two days' worth if he rationed.
The kitchen knife went in last. Not because Marcus thought he could fight anything - he was self-aware enough to know that his combat skills began and ended at "run away" - but because a knife was a tool. Tools were useful. And also, maybe, having a weapon made him feel slightly less helpless.
It was a delusion. But it was his delusion, and he was keeping it.
He looked at the whiteboard. Too big to carry. The thought of leaving it hurt more than he wanted to admit. Three weeks of documentation, observations, patterns. His entire analytical process mapped out in blue marker.
Marcus pulled out his phone - still at 67% battery, another small mercy - and took photos. Wide shots of the full board. Close-ups of individual sections. He took twenty-three photos total, including duplicates, because phone cameras were fallible and he didn't trust cloud backups anymore.
The whiteboard would stay. But the data would come with him.
He put the phone in his pocket, shouldered his backpack, and took one last look at his apartment.
It looked even worse now that he was leaving. The takeout containers seemed more pathetic. The unmade bed seemed more depressing. This was the place where he'd spent three weeks hiding from the apocalypse, and it showed.
Goodbye, shitty apartment, Marcus thought. You were a terrible place to live, and I won't miss you.
That was a lie. He'd miss the walls. The door that locked. The illusion of safety.
But illusions didn't survive deprecation notices.
Marcus opened the door and stepped into the hallway.
The hallway was quiet.
Not empty - emptiness would've been fine. This was the loaded kind of quiet, the kind that meant something was wrong but you couldn't see it yet.
Marcus's Anomaly Detection skill pulsed faintly, a sensation like a dull headache building behind his eyes. The UX was terrible - who thought pain was a good alert mechanism? - but at least it was functional. Something nearby was flagged as anomalous.
He looked down the hallway. Most of the doors were closed. Some had the faint shimmer that indicated deprecation in progress - other units in the building, already marked. Others were just dark.
4B - the couple who'd fought constantly about groceries - was dark. Marcus hadn't heard them in over a week.
4F - the old woman who'd always had packages delivered, back when deliveries existed - was shimmering. Deprecated. She'd probably evacuated already. Or hadn't. Marcus didn't let himself think about that.
4A - the crypto tech bros who'd argued about Ethereum vs. Solana in the stairwell - was shimmering too. Marcus wondered if they'd tried to buy their way out of deprecation with Development Credits. Probably. Tech bros always thought money solved problems.
His Anomaly Detection pulsed again. Stronger this time.
The stairwell.
Marcus approached slowly, each step deliberate. His STR 8 meant he wasn't strong, but it also meant he wasn't loud. That was something, at least. He eased open the stairwell door and looked down.
Four floors below, something was moving.
It wasn't human.
The System had spawned things - entities, though Marcus refused to use that sterile term for what they actually were. They'd started appearing around Day Five, and they came in varieties. Some looked like animals, low-res wolves or bears with broken animations. Some looked like nightmares, all teeth and limbs in wrong configurations. And some looked like glitches, errors in the rendering engine, humanoid shapes that couldn't decide what texture to load.
This one was the third type. A Glitch Horror, in the System's taxonomy.
It stood - if "stood" was the right word - on the landing two flights down. Roughly humanoid. Two arms, two legs, a head-shaped protrusion. But the proportions were wrong. The limbs were too long, the joints bent at angles that shouldn't work. Its surface flickered between translucent and solid, like a model struggling to load.
And it was between Marcus and the ground floor.
Marcus eased the door shut, slowly, controlling his breathing. His heart rate spiked - he could feel it, and probably the System was tracking that, because of course it was - but he forced himself to think.
Okay. Entity in the stairwell. Can't go down. Options:
Option 1: Wait for it to leave. Pro: No combat. Con: It might not leave. Con: 71 hours remaining on deprecation timer. Waiting wastes time.
Option 2: Fight it. Pro: Direct solution. Con: STR 8. Con: No combat skills. Con: Very likely to die.
Option 3: Find another route. Pro: Avoids combat. Con: Only other route is the fire escape. Con: Fire escape is eighteen floors down and you've never used it.
Marcus looked at the door to the stairwell. He looked at the window at the end of the hall.
The fire escape it was.
The window was older than the building had any right to be. Paint-chipped frame, glass that rattled when you touched it, a lock that probably hadn't been opened since installation. Marcus had walked past this window approximately three thousand times in the three years he'd lived here, and he'd never once considered that he might need to use it as an exit.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
That was the thing about fire escapes. They were theoretical. Decorative, even. You saw them in movies, places where protagonists had dramatic conversations or broke into buildings. Real people didn't use fire escapes.
Real people used stairs and elevators like civilized members of society.
But civilization had been deprecated three weeks ago, so Marcus guessed it was time to update his priors.
The window lock was painted over. Of course it was. Marcus dug at it with his thumbnail, scraping away layers of beige paint that matched the hallway walls. Beneath the paint, the lock was rusted. Because of course it was.
He tried turning it. It didn't budge.
The lock was stuck. Fine. He'd apply more force.
Marcus braced himself against the wall and tried again, putting his weight into it. The lock groaned. His hand slipped. He tried a third time, and something in the mechanism gave way with a crack that sounded way too loud in the quiet hallway.
The lock turned. The window opened.
And Marcus got his first lungful of outside air in three weeks.
It smelled like smoke. Like burning plastic and something organic he didn't want to identify. Austin had smelled like breakfast tacos and car exhaust before the System arrived. Now it smelled like a server room fire, acrid and wrong.
Marcus climbed onto the window ledge, backpack scraping against the frame, and looked down.
Eighteen floors. The fire escape zigzagged down the side of the building in a series of metal platforms and staircases, each one looking more rusted and precarious than the last. At the bottom, a ladder descended the final ten feet to the parking lot.
Marcus was not an athletic person. He'd skipped gym class in high school by forging doctor's notes. He'd never been camping without hating it. His STR 8 wasn't just a number - it was a lifetime of avoiding physical exertion whenever possible.
But the alternative was waiting in his apartment for four minutes and twenty-three seconds of shimmer, followed by a status effect that ended with "process cannot continue."
So Marcus climbed out the window.
The metal was cold.
That was the first thing he noticed. The fire escape railing was freezing under his hands, cold enough that he wondered if it had been this cold before the System or if deprecated buildings radiated some kind of thermal anomaly. He didn't test that hypothesis. He just gripped the railing and started down.
One step. Two steps. The platform creaked under his weight. Marcus weighed one hundred and forty-seven pounds - he'd checked his status screen for exact numbers - and the fire escape sounded like it was about to give way under that minimal load. Each step produced a metallic groan that echoed off the building's facade.
He pushed the thought away and kept moving.
He reached the first staircase. It descended at a forty-five-degree angle, metal grating for steps, no risers. He could see straight through to the ground, eighteen floors down, which did absolutely nothing good for his sense of balance.
Marcus started down. His hands gripped the railing hard enough that his knuckles went white. His backpack shifted with each step, throwing off his center of gravity.
He kept his eyes on the next step. Only the next step.
He looked down.
The parking lot was empty. Most of the cars were gone - evacuated with their owners, or stolen, or deprecated for all Marcus knew. The ones that remained sat at odd angles, some with doors open, one with its hood up like someone had been working on it when the world ended.
From up here, he could see more of Austin than he'd seen in weeks. The skyline downtown. The highway overpass half a mile away. The cluster of buildings that made up The Domain, where he'd worked, where he'd been when the System arrived.
Where he'd probably never go again.
He shook off the distraction and kept descending.
He reached the second platform. His legs were shaking. STR 8 was already showing its limits. His hands ached from gripping the railing. His shoulders hurt from the backpack's weight.
Sixteen floors to go.
Halfway down, Marcus had to stop.
Not because he wanted to. Because his hands were cramping, and his legs felt like someone had replaced his muscles with jelly, and his breath was coming in short gasps that suggested his VIT 11 wasn't enough to sustain prolonged physical activity.
He leaned against the building's brick wall, backpack pressed against the facade, and tried to steady his breathing.
This is why you're not a Fighter class, he thought. This is why the System looked at you and decided "analyst" was a better fit than literally any physical role.
His status screen flickered into view, unprompted. Probably triggered by his elevated heart rate or stress hormones or whatever biometrics the System monitored.
STATUS EFFECTS:
- Exhaustion (minor): -10% STR, -10% AGI
- Elevated Cardiac Activity: No mechanical effect
- Deprecated (70h 34m remaining)
Great. Even the System was judging him for being out of shape.
Marcus looked down. Nine floors to go. He could see the ladder now, the final descent to the parking lot. It looked impossibly far away.
He looked up. Nine floors behind him. The window he'd climbed through was just a dark square, indistinguishable from all the other windows in his soon-to-be-deprecated building.
You're halfway. That's progress. That's something.
His Anomaly Detection pulsed.
Marcus froze.
The skill was flagging something. Close by. He scanned the fire escape above him - nothing. Below him - nothing. He looked at the window next to the platform where he was resting.
Movement inside.
Something was in the apartment. Something that triggered his Anomaly Detection. Something wrong.
The window was dark, but Marcus could see a shape moving behind the glass. Humanoid. Too tall. Proportions wrong.
A Glitch Horror. Inside the building. On this floor.
Marcus's brain ran the calculation: If it's in the building, it might come out onto the fire escape. If it comes out onto the fire escape while I'm on the fire escape, I have nowhere to go. Can't climb up fast enough. Can't climb down fast enough.
Move. Now.
He pushed off the wall and kept descending.
The last four floors were a blur of aching hands and screaming leg muscles and the constant awareness that something might be behind him.
Marcus didn't look back. Looking back meant losing momentum, and momentum was the only thing keeping him moving. His hands found railings. His feet found steps. His brain went into a fugue state where the only thing that mattered was the next platform, the next staircase, the next ten feet of vertical distance between him and the ground.
At the second-to-last platform, his foot slipped.
Not badly. Just a momentary loss of traction, his shoe skidding on the metal grating. But his heart spiked, and his hands clenched the railing, and for a half-second he was absolutely certain he was about to fall eighteen stories minus two.
He didn't fall.
He gripped the railing hard enough to hurt, steadied himself, and kept going.
The ladder was worse than the stairs. It was a straight vertical drop, ten feet of rust-pitted metal rungs that swayed slightly when he put his weight on them. Marcus climbed down one rung at a time, hands shaking, backpack swinging.
His feet hit concrete.
Marcus stumbled, caught himself, and stood there in the parking lot of his deprecated building, breathing hard, hands cramping, legs trembling.
He'd made it.
Not to safety. Not to anywhere that mattered. Just to the ground.
But that was something.
The parking lot smelled worse than the air had from eighteen floors up. Smoke, rot, and something chemical that made his eyes water. Marcus adjusted his backpack and looked around.
His building - Structure ATX-E-4471, according to the System's database - rose behind him, all eighteen floors of it. In 70 hours and change, it would shimmer and stop being a valid location. Anyone still inside would be garbage-collected.
Marcus was not inside.
Small victories, he thought. That's how you survive. One small victory at a time.
He pulled up his status screen.
STATUS EFFECTS:
- Exhaustion (moderate): -20% STR, -15% AGI
- Muscle Fatigue: -5% movement speed
- Deprecated (70h 11m remaining)
The deprecation timer was still ticking. Being outside the building didn't cancel it - he'd suspected that, but it was good to confirm. The System had flagged him personally, not just his location. He'd have to figure out how to clear the status effect.
Or, more likely, he'd have to figure out where to go so that when the timer expired, he wasn't in a deprecated zone.
Marcus looked at the street. Empty. Silent except for the distant car alarm and the low hum that might've been the highway or might've been tinnitus from stress.
Somewhere out there, past the deprecated buildings and the Glitch Horrors and the collapsed infrastructure, there were settlements. Clusters of survivors who'd banded together. People who'd leveled up, who'd unlocked skills, who'd figured out how to fight back against the System or at least exist alongside it.
Marcus had avoided them for three weeks. Avoided people, avoided quests, avoided risk. He'd stayed in his apartment and documented bugs and convinced himself that analysis was a valid survival strategy.
But you couldn't analyze your way out of a deprecation notice.
He started walking.
The street was littered with debris - abandoned luggage, broken glass, something that might've been a car door. Marcus picked his way through it, heading south. The highway was south. People said the settlements were near the highways, where travel routes converged.
Marcus didn't know if that was true. He didn't know much of anything, really. But he knew that standing still was death.
And he knew that someone, somewhere, had built this System. Someone who used camelCase and version numbers and hard-coded timeout values. Someone who'd looked at humanity and decided to implement aggressive QA on the entire species.
Marcus wanted to find them.
And then he wanted to file the most detailed bug report of his life.
Because if this was software - and all the evidence said it was - then it had bugs.
And bugs could be exploited.
Marcus Webb, Level 2 Logician, STR 8, deprecated but still breathing, walked toward the highway and whatever came next.
Behind him, Structure ATX-E-4471 stood silent in the morning light, counting down the hours until it stopped being real.