Cold Start

That night it was a 930E with a dead stick in the worst place it could've picked — halfway across the ramp, loaded, nose pointed downhill, blocking the line and pissing away the shift minute by minute. Steering fault, hydraulic pressure bleeding off, operator scared quiet on the radio. I got up there with my mug still in one hand and told dispatch to quit stacking trucks behind him unless they wanted a parade of expensive dumbass.

It wasn't magic. It was fittings, pressure, heat, and knowing which warning was real and which one was a machine being dramatic. I found the hose chafed raw where some bracket had been rubbing it for weeks. Temporary patch, cribbed safe, bled it slow, walked him down to the maintenance bay at a crawl. Shift kept moving. Nobody cheered. Good. If people cheer in a mine, it usually means something went wrong first.

Off shift, I went back to my trailer, took my boots off outside, and ate whatever could be microwaved without turning into a crime scene. I had one dented stainless coffee mug that had survived two layoffs, one divorce, and getting dropped off a service truck. I trusted that mug more than most people.

I played systems games until my eyes burned. Patch notes, spreadsheets, build planners, damage breakpoints, weird edge-case mechanics some developer forgot to sand down. I didn't play to be the chosen anything. I played because rules were honest if you could find them. You read close enough, tested hard enough, and the thing told you what it was.

I always picked my own build. That mattered to me, though I wouldn't have said it out loud. Most things in life came assigned — where you were born, what your old man drank, what your knees felt like after forty, who called and who didn't. In a game, at least, I got to choose the tool before I had to swing it.

My rule was simple: touch nothing you haven't looked at twice. Machines don't forgive assumptions. Ground doesn't care about confidence. You do the walkaround even when it's cold, even when you're tired, even when some superintendent with clean gloves wants to know why you're not already moving. Especially then.

That night, I climbed the ladder into the cab with my lunch cooler banging my hip and the mug hooked in two fingers. The seat took my weight. My boot found the brake. The ramp lay ahead under the lights, red dust hanging low over the cut. I turned the key. The engine turned over.

The room is too big. This is a cavern pretending it was built. Ribs of rock climb up into dark, meeting above in something carved like a shut eye — big enough to make a man feel like a bug under a boot. The light doesn't come from fixtures. It lies across the floor in slabs and angles that don't match, like shadows got drunk and forgot where the sun was.

I hear somebody gag. People. A dozen, maybe more, scattered over the stone — curled up, pushing upright, one woman making a noise between crying and trying not to. None of them are mine. No orange vests I know. No Morenci faces. No goddamn truck.

I get a boot under me, slow, crouched, weight centered, hands free. I scan left to right the way I'd check a work zone before moving iron through it. Edges. Walls. Exits. Threats. Overhead: bad. Always bad until proven otherwise. Those stone ribs look solid, but so does a highwall right before it sloughs. "Everybody stay where you are," I say, rough, louder than I expect. "Don't run. Check yourself first. Hands, feet, blood. Then look around." I have no idea if they understand me. Hell, I have no idea if I understand me.

I take one step toward the nearest darker break in the wall. The low not-sound changes. Not louder. Closer. Every hair on my arms lifts. The air tightens, and the whole impossible bastard room seems to stop being a place I'm standing in and become something aware of me standing in it. I go still. Because something has noticed me.

Paladin. The word sits there like a blown hydraulic line nobody wants to admit they can see. Bright. Final. Leaking consequences all over the floor.

COLE MADDOX. Summoned. Level 1. HP twelve out of twelve. Armor class twelve. Strength thirteen. Constitution fourteen. Wisdom sixteen. I know those shapes. I know them the way I know warning lights, tire pressure, slope grade, engine temp. Numbers with teeth. Whatever just spoke, it keeps a ledger, and it has my name in it. That should be the part that scares me most. It isn't.

The part that scares me most is the die. Rolling… d20 → 16. Assigned by lot. Committed. Bound. I did not roll that die. I did not pick the table. I didn't open a character creator, didn't choose race, class, stats, background. Some invisible bastard in the walls just shook the cup, threw bones, and stamped me with a job title. Paladin. Holy knight. Oaths. Codes. Heavy armor. Stand in front, take the hit, shine like a stained-glass window while everybody else gets to be clever. The class for people who want the rules welded straight into their spine.

I never pick paladin. And I get Charisma ten. Of course. Of fucking course — hand a man a paladin against his will, make him average at the one stat every rules lawyer back home would circle in red. Wisdom sixteen, though. Respect the ground. Listen before the machine kills you. Notice the hairline crack before it becomes a collapse. Maybe that counts as wisdom in whatever book this thing is using.

The operator part of me clamps down on the gamer part before it can start screaming loud enough to get us killed. Unknown site. Unknown hazards. Unknown authority with access to my skull. Panic later. Inventory first.

I have spent half my life finding the stress points in rulesets. But you can't optimize what you don't understand. You don't trust the berm because it looks solid. You don't crawl under raised steel because someone says it'll hold. So I do not assume I can heal anybody. I do not assume I can smite a damn thing. I do not assume there is a god, or an oath, or a sword coming with my name engraved on it. I have a word from old games and older stories, and the thing's flat declaration that the word now belongs to me.

The dice took my hand off the build. Fine. I stare at the stone, breathe through my nose, and let the anger settle into something usable. I'm lost. I'm registered. I'm level one in a world that keeps accounts. And now I'm saddled with a self I did not choose.