Chương 106: CDM 2, Chapter 42: Holiday Hours

Day 4 of the S-ranked gate was the day before Christmas Eve. The crawlers had deduced that each control column influenced a unique set of rooms, meaning that you might have to activate one ruby and then go three rooms down and use the control column there to get the door position you wanted. The challenge became trying to figure out the exact combination of activations necessary to clear a path to the center of the dungeon, which was the boss chamber, presumably.

In addition to the distance between control pillars, testing permutations was made extra challenging because closing the doors to a room and opening them again reset the monster spawn. If the crawlers had to backtrack, that often meant having to run a room over again. For what may have been the first time in livestreaming history, chat was helpful. The internet was intrigued by the dungeon puzzle, so viewers followed along, tracking observations and grid states to decipher the solution.

That was an ongoing process that birthed a wave of new memes. Joining the puzzle memes were goofy still shots of Martin Kielar or George Baker as well as soundbites of funny quips the crawlers made while running the dungeon. A few of those quips turned into Most Interesting Man in the World memes with Kielar's face pasted over the original. A local S-ranked gate should have been an exciting time for me. I was a crawl fan, and it meant interesting work for the CDM. Instead, I was miserable, and Beth was too.

I was on RAID duty that fourth day with Enforcer Cortez and Dr. Guld. Guld's presence had become more intermittent, but someone from the Army was always present to look over our shoulders.

"Do you have visual on the stream repeaters?" Guld asked, breaking a long silence during one of his shifts. That was the tech that pushed video signals out of the gate. They looked like guitar amps, and you usually saw only one. With the S-gate, 7 in total were set up, 6 for the Army and 1 for the crawl team.

"Affirmative," Cortez answered.

"Anything disturb or happen to it?" I scrubbed back a few minutes in the footage while Cortez zoomed in with the live drone.

"No change here," Cortez said.

"Same for me too." Guld frowned and picked up his phone.

"Are you getting helmet signals? I have visuals for Brickman and Kurtz. No one else. The signal looks fine, but the feeds are black." …

"You're certain the repeater equipment is operating properly?" …

"Let me know when they have visual on the others." …

"Got it." He put his phone down and pondered the views on our monitors.

"What is it?" I asked.

"We do two status reports an hour. At the top of the hour, it's from the science team. On the half hour, it's from security. We are 3 minutes away from the next report but lost all but 2 feeds. That made it sound like someone prepared a summary every 30 minutes, but the status report was more like a data sync, updating the team outside the gate on anything trackable electronically, from the movements of team members inside to the current weight of samples in each of the carriers.

They could have beamed it out with the repeaters, but that would mean broadcasting potentially classified details. That sounded a bit paranoid, but repeater tech was new, and doing a memory card dump was easy enough. The verbal component of that status report was usually simple pleasantries. For the shifts I had during the S gate, I had never seen Guld's people miss a check-in. At 0900, the time for the next check-in, no one exited the gate. No harvesters had left the gate from the time Guld lost his feeds, either.

That by itself wasn't strange depending on where in a job harvesters were, but this wasn't by itself. Guld was back on his phone.

"Ready the extraction team" was all he said before hanging up again. Cortez and I just looked at one another. We didn't know what to do here.

"How can we help?" I asked as I sent a message to Enforcer Grensmith, updating him. He was Chapman's relief and was on duty at that time. Instead of answering me, Guld waited until Grensmith appeared. Cortez and I didn't have the rank to be worth talking to right now, it seemed. As soon as Grensmith opened the door, Guld began, "If the extraction team finds trouble, we'll need to clear an area in front of the gate as well as access for emergency personnel."

"I've already informed my people on the ground to be on standby for new orders," Grensmith said.

"We'll be ready to help if you need us." At 0909, ten Army crawlers entered the gate. I wished it was an appropriate time to ask about what gear and builds they used because they were tricked out in all kinds of enchanted gear. One of the Army crawlers exited the gate at 0916. Guld had him on speaker.

"Code Shattered Glass. I repeat: We have a Code Shattered Glass. This is not a drill." Since Guld and Grensmith were busy, Cortez and I had to wait ten minutes or so before Grensmith explained what Code Shattered Glass meant.

"Mass casualty event with an unknown cause," Grensmith said.

"This is now a search, rescue, and recovery mission for the Army and the NSF. Gray, Cortez, start mapping potential exit routes for the largest equipment. We need to clear as much space around the gate as we can. Enforcers on the ground will ping us for help directing that traffic." While we facilitated harvesters leaving the site, a small Army convoy went in. They erected an expanded command center, set up triage tents, and assembled an 8 ft wall around all of that.

The elementary school next to the park, which was evacuated the moment the gate opened, became an extension of the triage efforts at the gate. The crawlers inside the gate were asked to halt the run for the time being. Other than telling viewers that the Army told them to wait, no one revealed why. The three lead crawlers, Kielar, Baker, and the druid Lou Jackson, were noticeably shaken. For news to affect people like them so much, it had to be bad.

Eventually, we learned that only a handful of personnel out of the science, security, and harvest teams had survived. Understanding what killed them was difficult at first. Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings. Inside this dungeon, when a doorway was blocked by the appearance of a flat, stone surface, everyone assumed they were looking at a door. The dungeon puzzle didn't raise and lower doors. It raised and lowered rooms.

The majority of the NSF team and their escort were in rooms that raised, as were roughly half of the 50 or so harvesters working inside at the same time. Curiously, all of the equipment, as well as their tools and personal belongings, were undamaged. Every person, however, was crushed to death, as if the floor slammed violently into the ceiling to squish them all at once. In trying to solve the dungeon's puzzle, the crawler team unintentionally killed a mess of innocent people.

The few that lived happened to be in a different room that the control pillars hadn't affected. Their survival was pure chance. For a minute, I expected Grensmith to order Cortez and me down to the site to assist with recovering remains, but the Army had control and used their own people. I had cleaned up a few disturbing scenes in my short career, but that was the first time I saw men carrying shovels and shop vacs into a recovery operation. The crawl resumed 9 hours later.

The official statement at that point was that an accident had occurred with the NSF team, but neither the Army nor the CDM elaborated on that. For a while, the media speculated as to why they hadn't seen any wounded or any bodies exit the gate. Then one of the stations got a tip that they had been taking bodies out of the gate for hours by that point. The bags the media guessed were samples from the expedition were actually remains. No one expected a recovered body to be mostly liquid.

That was also what made the feeds go dark without losing signal. The user got smashed, and the camera ended up covered in human juice. The stream was more subdued, but the crawlers spoke as if the true extent of the accident was unknown. I suspected that was to preserve some semblance of levity for the sake of entertainment. If they admitted to knowing the scope of the carnage, the entertainment value of the broadcast would tank. As it was now, they could still make jokes.

Once it was confirmed they knew about all the deaths, those jokes would be seen as poor taste. Best to make them while they had plausible deniability. Business always came first. With harvesting unlikely to resume, the investment in the S gate had already suffered a massive blow. The stream was still a revenue driver, however. If they could keep that going, the Steel Alliance stood to make a decent amount of money from advertising revenue alone.

They also sold merchandise, promoted viewing parties at select venues, plugged a betting site, and hyped an afterparty. A national tragedy would totally ruin the mood. I wondered if Kielar and Baker felt bad about the deaths they caused. Did they feel differently about the deaths of people who weren't crashers? Did they feel any guilt at all? And listen. I hated both of those men, but I knew even then that I couldn't put those deaths on their heads.

No one understood how the dungeon worked, and the same accident would have happened no matter what crawl team was poking at dungeon buttons. They weren't responsible for this tragedy, but I still wondered where their hearts landed on an event like this. 12 hours after the bodies were discovered, we had our first real lull in activity where there was truly nothing to do. I was still in the RAID room with Guld and Cortez, and that moment of quiet helped me to remember something important I had forgotten to do.

"Hey, I'm sorry for your loss," I said to Guld. His features looked hollow, like the life had been sucked out of him. He inhaled.

"Thanks. It's not real to me yet."

"Let us know if you need anything." He nodded. A few minutes later, he stepped out of the room.

"I'm going to see this shit in my sleep," Cortez said when he was certain Guld wouldn't hear.

"All we've done is watch them carry people out. All day, all my attention. Fuck, dude." I hadn't thought about it that way.

"This is a tough one, for sure."

"Merry fucking Christmas." Beth and I had planned to spend Christmas day drunk out of our minds, grazing on an assortment of cold takeout, but the S gate ruined that. I was on overtime for the CDM, and Milly's had been open 24/7 since the gate opened, so Beth had to work as well. She had stopped at her apartment to grab some things, but otherwise she slept in my room or on the couch for the few hours she got to sleep.

"Merry Christmas," she said, raising her mug for a moment. I joined her on my couch.

"Merry Christmas."

"Have you heard from mom and dad?"

"I muted mom's notifications a while back. Should I look?"

"Probably not."

"That's probably the smartest choice," I said, "but now I'm curious. Oh man."

"How many?"

"Guess." Beth thought.

"17." I shook my head.

"43." And I opened them. I knew I shouldn't, but I watched helplessly as I did it anyway. I closed my phone and tossed it on the floor.

"Shouldn't have done that," I admitted.

"Sorry."

"It was all the usual stuff. Nothing new."

"Guilt?" she asked.

"Yep."

"I'm skipping to cookies. Is that allowed?"

"There are no rules on Christmas." Beth opened the tupperware container of chocolate chip cookies. She offered them to me. I took three. She got up and opened the refrigerator door.

"No milk, really?"

"I accept the shame that is rightfully mine."

"Hard lesson."

"Next Christmas we'll do this right," I said.

"I'm sorry that I can't drink with you."

"It's fine," Beth said.

"It's not like I'm off anyway. Was it rude that I turned Megan down for going to her folks' place?" I shook my head.

"I tried it the other way, going to other families for the holiday, I mean. This is better. If you decide you want to try it, try it, but don't go because you feel like you have to."

"I like the idea of Christmas at the guild house, though. That sounds nice. Everyone together like that."

"I was worried you felt forced into saying yes to the house plan." Beth looked at me, dumbfounded.

"I was worried I forced my way in." We laughed.

"We're terrible," I said.

"I think it sounds nice."

"It sounds amazing, but hey. Where is Lil' Dorion?"

"In Nathan's room."

"You should let him out if you're home."

"Did Nathan put you up to this?" I asked.

"I'm just being humane." Beth abruptly left the room. I deflated when I heard Nathan's door open. She returned and set Lil' Dorion on the table. Her face wrinkled.

"Do you think Taiwan was the most interesting thing that will ever happen to us?"

"What makes you ask that?" Beth thought.

"Because we're normal people. How likely are we to end up on a billionaire's boat twice, you know?"

"Once was a surprise to me."

"The world is so big, Dor. We should go see it. All of it. But I know that's not possible."

"If you could go anywhere, where would you pick?"

"It doesn't have to be far. That trip you sent me to Erie? Even seeing close stuff like that would be amazing."

"If the channel keeps growing, we'll probably get to travel," I said.

"I don't want to put that kind of pressure on you. It isn't fair, and I know internet success is gone overnight, sometimes."

"Nathan thinks we should do content that's more like a ghost hunter show but with monsters. That way a boring monster could be more exciting."

"How would that work?" I forwarded the link for the doorbell camera footage of the maybe-troll.

"There's a chance Pittsburgh has a troll problem. We could go out and investigate and shit. That's what we've done in our other videos, but this is a smaller, more repeatable scale."

"I bet as long as a woman was with you or Nathan, everyone would assume you're like the assistant. Not a Diva." My alarm went off.

"We should keep talking about this, but I have to get back to work." Beth hugged me.

"This was a nice Christmas," she whispered.

"I mean it."