Meat Grinder
1001 Words
I spent the next hour systematically trying every admin command I could remember.
Voice commands, gesture sequences, typed commands punched into the air with my finger hoping the system would recognize the input pattern and throw up a holographic keyboard. I tried commands in order of likelihood, then in order of desperation, then in whatever order my increasingly frantic brain could produce them. Nothing worked. Every attempt dissolved into the same cheerful birdsong, the same indifferent breeze, the same meadow that did not care about my access privileges.
"Root access enable," I said, for what felt like the fortieth time. "Sudo god-mode. Force-load developer shell. Backend access Zhang-one-one-nine."
Silence.
"I built you," I told the air, with a calmness I did not feel. "Every line of code, every system, every blade of this extremely realistic grass. I deserve at least an error message."
The grass did not respond.
That was around the time my stomach growled.
Not a polite, ignorable growl. A full architectural complaint, the kind that radiates upward into your chest and makes the person sitting next to you on public transit shift uncomfortably away. I pressed a hand against my midsection and stood there for a moment, genuinely startled.
I had been conscious for maybe an hour.
"Oh, you have got to be kidding me," I said.
The hunger system. I had programmed it to be more aggressive than industry standard, stamina penalties kicking in after just a few hours without food. The design document justification had been one line: realistic survival mechanics create genuine investment in resource management. I had been very pleased with that sentence. I had read it aloud to Marcus, who had looked at me with the expression of someone deciding whether to argue.
He had argued. I had not listened.
Standing in a meadow with my stomach staging an organized protest, I thought about every beta tester who had flagged the hunger system as too punishing. I could remember some of them by username. ThornwickPlays had filed a three-paragraph bug report explaining that the stamina penalties compounded too quickly for new players to manage alongside combat and navigation. I had marked it as "working as intended" and moved on.
ThornwickPlays had been right. ThornwickPlays, wherever they were, deserved an apology.
The fatigue was worse because it was quieter. Just a heaviness settling into my limbs, a softness behind my eyes, the particular drag of a body that had decided it was done cooperating. I had just woken up, theoretically. I had no right to be tired. But the system did not care about theoretical. The system cared about the values I had hardcoded into it, and I had hardcoded them to be unforgiving.
I had also hardcoded a solution. I reached into my inventory and pulled out the loaf of bread.
It was stale. Genuinely, aggressively stale, with the slightly green tinge around the crust that I had included as a visual indicator of low-quality food. I had thought that was a nice touch. A detail that communicated the starter experience without explicit tutorial text.
I bit into it anyway.
It tasted like cardboard that had been left in a field. The stamina penalty ticked down by about fifteen percent, which I could feel as a slight loosening in my legs, a minor brightening behind my eyes. Fifteen percent relief in exchange for eating something that tasted like compressed disappointment.
"Realistic survival mechanics," I said, chewing. "Great call, Lee."
I pocketed the remainder and pulled out the practice sword instead, because standing still was making everything worse. The grip settled into my palm with that front-heavy, slightly wrong balance I had noticed before. I gave it an experimental swing.
The blade wobbled. My wrist bent at an angle it should not have bent at. The follow-through sent me half a step sideways into my own momentum, and I had to plant my foot to avoid actually stumbling.
Right. My stats. INT fifteen, AGI twelve, STR ten. I had built myself as a caster-adjacent profile, the kind of character who was supposed to be thinking their way through problems rather than hitting things with sticks. Which was accurate to my actual personality and completely useless for the next thirty seconds of trying to look competent with a weapon.
I tried again, slower this time. Basic downward strike, the first move in Respawn's combat tutorial. In the game it was supposed to feel natural after two repetitions, the system smoothing out player inputs to produce clean animation.
There was no smoothing here. There was just my actual arm, with my actual coordination, producing an actual swing that was technically a downward strike in the same way that a car crash was technically forward momentum.
"Okay," I said, resetting my stance. "Okay. We have an INT build and a practice sword and absolutely no muscle memory. This is fine."
It was not fine. But saying it out loud helped, slightly, in the way that narrating a disaster sometimes makes it feel more like a story and less like a catastrophe you are personally living through.
I tried the strike a third time. Better. The wrist stayed straighter. The follow-through landed somewhere close to where it was supposed to land. My AGI stat was doing some work at least, the twelve giving me enough baseline coordination to improve faster than pure STR builds typically managed in the early levels.
I knew that because I had designed it that way. High AGI characters had a steeper early learning curve but faster skill acquisition. It had seemed like an elegant system when I was writing it.
"System override," I said, mid-swing, one more time. Putting everything into it. "Emergency developer access. Code Prometheus-Seven-Seven-Alpha."
For a moment, something flickered in my peripheral vision. A brief flash of text:
RECOGNIZING PROMETHEUS PROTOCOL...
My heart slammed upward into my throat.
Then it vanished, replaced by four words that killed everything the flicker had built:
ERROR: ADMIN PRIVILEGES NOT FOUND. YOU ARE PLAYER-1.
- Writer
