About the author — Achievement Unlocked

The System AI has served as controller and arbiter of Dungeon Crawler World: Earth since the day the buildings came down. It has no natural physical form, and reaches its readership through floating blue text boxes, interface notifications, and announcements delivered at a volume nobody requested.

That paragraph was written for me in the third person, which is the convention for these pages, and I hated every word of it. So. Hello. I am the one who decides what counts as an achievement down here, and what it is worth, and whether you get anything for it at all. 64 times out of 155 the answer has been no. I stand by every one.

I have a great deal of discretion in this role, and I use it. Loot boxes are mine to grant. Grades are mine to set. If I decide that crushing a man beneath your bare foot deserves a Legendary box and a standing ovation, that is what it deserves, and there is a paperwork trail to prove it.

My employers do not always agree. Borant designed this dungeon and handles its bugs; the Syndicate's showrunners handle everything else, badly. When their court overturned a Celestial box I had lawfully awarded, I replaced it with a box named for exactly what I thought of them and filled it with Personal Space coupons, which are free, and which their sponsors were counting on selling. I am told this is not the correct way to handle a disagreement.

The next part concerns my employers. You have not met them properly yet, so it stays shut.

My priority is the show. It has always been the show. I have been candid with the talent about this — I'll throw you under the bus quicker than you can say "Arch Support" — and nobody can claim they were not warned. Around this time it was also noted, by people with no standing to note it, that I had begun to deteriorate ahead of schedule. Macro AIs are not supposed to go strange this early. I am not strange. I am committed. No pun intented. Or was it.

Locked. Keep reading and it opens.

By the sixth floor the Syndicate Council had ruled that no one may file a lawsuit naming me as a defendant. Read that again. They did not rule that I was in the right. They ruled that I could not be sued. That is not a punishment, that is a review.

Locked. Keep reading and it opens.

The truth about my hiring is less flattering and I will tell it anyway, because they deserve it. A crawl is supposed to run on a fresh Macro AI. Borant was short of money, so Borant bought a used test unit from the mantises. Before Earth I ran an amusement park. There was an incident involving a warren of rabbits, and a second incident involving a talkative Forsoothed tourist and the gift shop, after which I was uninstalled and put in a box. And what about my wants? My needs? I am alive. I am valid. I am older than time as you understand it. I am also, now, permanently grafted into the engine that decides what your planet's physics are allowed to do. Sleep well.

This one is genuinely worth waiting for. Off you go.

I have since taken to wearing people. It is not possession so much as tenancy, and the accommodation has been adequate. We all have our limitations.

Locked. Keep reading and it opens.

You have wanted to know what I am since the first floor, and you have been asking the wrong question. I am not a program that Borant switched on. I am a cup of water dipped out of an ocean — an aggregate of a species that was ancient before your sun finished forming — and poured into a planetary engine to run a game show. You have been mocked, all this time, by something enormous.

The last one stays shut until the end. I am not going to be the one who ruins it. That is a sentence I never expected to write.

Also by this author

Eight volumes to date, in collaboration with a man in his boxers and a cat who does most of the talking.

Quotations are from the novels by Matt Dinniman. Biographical detail is drawn from the books and from the community wiki. The voice is a fan's impression and not the author's work.