Before the System, it was just traffic - the kind of soul-crushing, brake-light-staring purgatory that Austin commuters accepted as the cost of living somewhere with good tacos. The highway bisected the city like a scar, and crossing it during rush hour could add forty minutes to a ten-minute trip.
Now it was worse.
He stood in the parking lot of his soon-to-be-deprecated building, backpack digging into shoulders that already ached from the fire escape descent, and looked west toward the highway. The elevated lanes were visible from here, a concrete ribbon cutting across the skyline. Cars sat frozen where they'd stopped, doors hanging open, some with the shimmer of deprecation warnings still flickering in their windows.
But the road itself was far from empty.
Even from half a mile away, Marcus could see movement. Silhouettes that didn't move like people. The System had turned I-35 into something - a spawning corridor, maybe, or just a place where entities clustered. Nobody knew why. The forums had been full of theories before the network went down: the highway was a high-traffic area pre-System, so maybe entity spawn rates correlated with historical population density. Or maybe it was just bad pathfinding, entities getting stuck in the open lanes because the AI couldn't navigate properly.
Marcus thought it was probably the pathfinding. He'd seen enough games ship with broken navigation to recognize the symptoms.
Either way, crossing was going to be a problem.
[Quest Active: Evacuation Protocol]
Objective: Reach designated safe zone
Progress: 0.2 km traveled (3%)
Time remaining: 69h 47m
The quest marker pointed northwest. UT campus. Where survivors were supposedly clustering, where there were resources and relative safety and people who might know how to clear a deprecation status effect.
Marcus pulled up his status screen.
USER: Marcus Webb
Level: 2
Status: Deprecated (69h 47m remaining)
STATUS EFFECTS:
- Exhaustion (moderate): -20% STR, -15% AGI
- Muscle Fatigue: -5% movement speed
- Sleep Deficit (minor): -5% PER
His STR was already garbage at base 8. With a 20% penalty, he was operating at effective STR 6. That was "struggles with a gallon of milk" territory.
Great. I'm racing a countdown timer while my body actively works against me.
He started walking.
The streets were wrong.
Not destroyed - that would've made sense, apocalypse logic and all that. No, Austin's streets were intact. Cars parked at curbs. Storefronts with windows unbroken. A coffee shop with chairs still arranged on the patio, like any moment someone might sit down and order a latte.
But it was all performance. Set dressing for a play that had closed three weeks ago.
Marcus walked down East 4th, past the barbecue place that always had a line, past the vintage clothing store his ex-girlfriend had loved. The smell hit him first - not barbecue anymore. Smoke, yes, but wrong. Chemical. Burnt plastic mixed with something organic that his brain refused to identify.
His Anomaly Detection pinged faintly. Background radiation, not an immediate threat. Just the constant low-level wrongness that permeated everything now.
A car sat in the middle of the intersection at Neches, driver's door open, keys still in the ignition. Marcus checked it as he passed - habit from three weeks of scavenging runs he'd watched from his window but never attempted. The interior was empty. No blood, no signs of struggle. Just an abandoned vehicle, like someone had stepped out for a moment and decided not to come back.
[Anomaly Detected]
Environmental inconsistency within range
Confidence: 41%
Low confidence. Whatever it was, it wasn't flagged as a threat. Marcus kept moving.
The deprecation timer sat in the corner of his vision, red text counting down. 69 hours, 43 minutes. Every time he glanced at it, he lost another minute. Time was hemorrhaging whether he watched it or not.
Three blocks in, his legs started to really complain.
The fire escape had been bad enough - eighteen floors of descent that left his thighs shaking and his grip strength shot. But walking was revealing new and exciting ways his STR 8 body was inadequate for apocalypse survival. His backpack, which felt reasonable when he'd packed it, now seemed to weigh approximately nine hundred pounds. The straps dug into his shoulders. His lower back was developing a sharp, specific ache that suggested he'd be paying for this tomorrow.
Assuming he survived to tomorrow.
One foot in front of the other. That's the whole job. You can do basic locomotion.
He could. But it hurt.
The first entity Marcus saw was six blocks from his building.
It was perched on a rooftop - a two-story brick building that used to be a law office, back when law offices mattered. The thing crouched against the skyline, silhouette all wrong. Too many limbs. Proportions that hurt to look at.
Marcus froze mid-step.
[Anomaly Detected]
Entity: Glitch Stalker (Level 4)
Threat assessment: MODERATE
Confidence: 89%
Level 4. Two levels above him. The System provided a helpful tooltip:
Glitch Stalker
Behavior: Ambush predator. Tracks targets from elevated positions.
Weakness: Poor close-range combat effectiveness
Note: Engages only when target is isolated
Marcus was very isolated.
He looked at the Stalker. It looked back - or at least, the mass of geometry that might have been a head oriented toward him. It didn't move. Just watched.
Tracks targets from elevated positions. Engages when isolated.
This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.
Marcus started walking again. Slowly. Not running - prey ran, and running would trigger chase behavior. He'd learned that from a forum post two weeks ago, back when the network still worked intermittently.
The Stalker tracked him. Its head - if it was a head - rotated to follow his movement, but it didn't descend. Didn't attack.
After fifty meters, Marcus glanced back. The Stalker was gone.
[Anomaly Detection: Entity tracking ceased]
His heart was doing interesting things in his chest. The System registered it.
[New Status Effect: Elevated Cardiac Activity]
No mechanical effect
Note: Prolonged stress may result in exhaustion penalty increase
Note: go fuck yourself, Marcus thought. I'm being hunted by geometry that shouldn't exist. My heart rate is the least of my problems.
He kept walking.
By the time Marcus reached the I-35 access, he'd seen four more entities.
One was another Stalker, this one on a parking garage. It watched him pass, unmoving.
One was something the System classified as a Glitch Swarm - a cloud of smaller entities that moved like starlings, flocking and reforming. They'd been circling above 6th Street, maybe two hundred meters away. Marcus had taken a detour.
The other two had been corpses. Or rather, deprecated bodies. Human-shaped, unmoving, half-dissolved into the same pixel artifacts that entities left behind when they died. The System flagged them as "User: Process Terminated," which was its polite way of saying someone had failed their performance review.
Marcus had documented the locations on his phone. Data was data, even when it was depressing.
The I-35 access was at the end of a service road, near where the elevated lanes passed over East 7th. The underpass stretched ahead - sixty meters of shadow beneath several tons of concrete and rebar.
Marcus crouched behind an overturned delivery truck at the access point, catching his breath.
The pain inventory was getting long. Shoulders: burning. Lower back: sharp, stabbing complaint every time he shifted weight. Legs: generalized ache graduating toward "this was a mistake." Hands: still sore from gripping the fire escape railing.
[Status Effect Updated: Exhaustion (major)]
-30% STR, -20% AGI, -10% PER
Recovery: Rest required
Rest. Sure. He'd just set up a nice little camp here at the entity-infested highway underpass and take a nap. That seemed like a great plan.
Marcus pulled a protein bar from his backpack and forced himself to eat half of it. It tasted like cardboard extruded into bar form by a machine that had never been introduced to the concept of flavor. But it was calories, and his body needed fuel even if his taste buds protested.
While he chewed, he studied the underpass.
The structure was typical Austin infrastructure - concrete support columns every ten meters, road width enough for three lanes in each direction. Cars sat abandoned throughout, frozen in their last moments of normal traffic. Some had been there since Day One, Marcus guessed. Drivers who'd received the System initialization message while commuting and made the reasonable decision to abandon their vehicle and seek shelter.
That decision had probably saved their lives. The people who'd stayed in cars hadn't fared well. Marcus had seen enough rusted husks with deprecation shimmer to know what happened when you treated a vehicle as a safe zone.
But it was the movement that concerned him now.
Things were in the underpass. Multiple contacts. His Anomaly Detection was painting the whole structure in a low-grade warning headache - not immediate threat, but present danger. The entities were there, definitely plural, moving in patterns he couldn't quite parse from this distance.
[Anomaly Detected]
Entity: Multiple (5+)
Threat assessment: MODERATE (collective)
Confidence: 72%
Five or more. Moderate threat as a group, which meant individually they were probably low-level. Glitch Spawns, if he had to guess - the Level 2-3 trash mobs that traveled in packs.
Okay. Assessment time. What do I know?
Fact one: The underpass is occupied. Fact two: I need to cross to reach the safe zone. Fact three: I cannot fight five entities. I cannot fight ONE entity effectively.
Therefore: I need either an alternate route, or I need a strategy that doesn't involve combat.
Marcus pulled up his mental map of the area. The I-35 crossing options were limited. This underpass at 7th. Another one at 4th Street, half a mile south. An overpass at 12th, half a mile north, but that meant climbing stairs and being exposed on the elevated highway where the Stalkers hunted.
Underpass it was. Which meant he needed to understand the entities' behavior before he committed.
He settled in to observe.
Fifteen minutes of watching taught Marcus several things.
One: The entities in the underpass were definitely Glitch Spawns. Small, hunched, roughly canine in profile but wrong in all the details. They moved in jerky bursts, like video playback with dropped frames.
Two: There were seven of them, not five. His Anomaly Detection had undercounted, which was concerning from a reliability standpoint. He made a mental note: skill detection range might not capture all entities in complex environments. Potential LOS requirement?
Three: The Spawns were patrolling. Not randomly - there was a pattern. They circled through the underpass in a loop, staying mostly in the outer lanes, occasionally crossing through the center but never stopping there.
And four - this was the interesting one - they seemed to be avoiding something.
Marcus watched a Spawn approach the center lane, where the solid white lane markings delineated traffic flow. It reached the marking, stopped, turned parallel to the line, and followed it for several meters before crossing back to the outer lane through a gap where the marking broke for a turn lane.
It happened again. Different Spawn, same behavior. Approach the solid line, stop, redirect.
One Spawn stayed at the boundary longer than the others - maybe forty-five seconds of circling, testing. On the forty-sixth second, it twitched violently and lunged through the line, crossing into the center lane before stuttering back out. Marcus noted the timing. Proximity duration seemed to matter.
Collision detection?
Marcus's QA brain kicked into gear.
Hypothesis: Entities are using road geometry for pathfinding. Solid lane markings might be flagged as collision boundaries in their navigation mesh.
It was plausible. Lazy implementation, but efficient. The System had to generate pathfinding data for millions of entities across an entire city. Using existing infrastructure data - road markings, sidewalk edges, building outlines - would save processing time. And if the developers had flagged solid lines as "no crossing" boundaries for traffic simulation purposes, that flag might still be present in entity navigation.
It was exactly the kind of shortcut Marcus had seen in every software project he'd worked on. Reuse existing data. Ship faster. Let QA find the edge cases in production.
Except this time, the edge case might keep him alive.
Okay. Testing required. Observation isn't enough - I need to verify the hypothesis.
Marcus looked around for something to throw. His backpack had a water bottle-full, unfortunately, so throwing it would mean losing water. But verification was worth the cost.
He stood up from behind the delivery truck, exposing himself at the edge of the underpass. Two Spawns' heads snapped toward him immediately.
[Warning: Entity aggression threshold increasing]
Multiple entities have detected your presence
Recommended action: Retreat or engage
Marcus ignored the warning. He unscrewed the cap from one of his water bottles, took a long drink - might as well get the hydration benefit - and then threw the empty plastic bottle overhand into the underpass.
His STR 8 meant the throw was pathetic. The bottle arced maybe ten meters and clattered onto the concrete in the center lane, right between two solid white lines.
The nearest Spawn lunged toward the sound. Crossed into the center lane. Reached the bottle.
And stopped.
It circled the bottle, agitated, head jerking in that stuttering movement pattern. But it didn't cross the line. It paced along the boundary, trying different angles, but something in its pathfinding refused to let it proceed.
After twenty seconds, it gave up and retreated to the outer lane.
Marcus felt a grin split his face - the first genuine smile in three weeks.
Holy shit. It works.
Solid lane markings were collision geometry for low-level entities. The System had implemented traffic rules as navigational constraints, and the Spawns couldn't override them.
It was a bug. A beautiful, exploitable, reproducible bug.
And Marcus was about to abuse the hell out of it.