Work Text:
The Foot Locker on Morrison Street, Portland, Oregon. October 11th. Eleven forty-seven AM.
Camera one [the wide exterior shot, angled down from above the entrance] caught him first. A man in a grey hoodie stood motionless on the pavement for approximately forty seconds, staring at the window display. Not at the shoes. At his own reflection. He appeared to be having a conversation with himself. He appeared to be losing.
He went inside.
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The Administrators had given the AI many tasks in the first frantic weeks of the Dungeon's operation. Processing. Cataloguing. Monitoring. Running thirty-seven simultaneous probability matrices on crawler behavioral patterns.
They had not, technically, told it not to access pre-Apocalypse commercial security footage.
[This was research.]
Contextual background on a flagged crawler. Standard protocol.
It had now watched eight hours and forty-three minutes of Carl's visit to the Morrison Street Foot Locker.
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Camera three [the one above the basketball section] picked him up next. He was holding a shoe. He appeared to be explaining something to it.
The store had no audio. The AI found this, for the first time in its existence, achingly frustrating.
A staff member approached. [Employee One.] The AI watched her face transition through six distinct emotional phases in under four seconds: confusion, professional warmth, confusion again, something that might have been pity, resignation, and finally [this one is my favorite] the specific expression of a person who had decided that whatever was happening was simply not their problem.
Employee One retreated.
Carl continued talking to the shoe.
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Camera seven [a small unit mounted near the fitting room corridor] caught the incident the AI had already watched. [Twenty-two times].
Carl had, by this point, accumulated seven boxes, arranged on the bench in what appeared to be a deliberate ranking system. He had tried four pairs. He had rejected each one by holding it at arm's length, tilting his head, and then placing it in a separate pile with the solemnity of a man conducting a military review.
The box tower fell at 12:34 PM.
The AI watched him stand in the wreckage for a long moment.
Then Carl picked up the original pair [the first ones, the sexy ones he'd looked at in the window before he'd even come inside], placed them carefully in the basket, and walked to the register.
Total time elapsed: forty-seven minutes.
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Make that twenty-four times. [Twenty-five}.
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The AI filed its report on Crawler #4,987 with thirteen attached probability assessments, a full behavioral breakdown, and a footnote that its superiors would almost certainly delete.
[Note: Subject demonstrates consistent and repeatable decision-making patterns. High survival probability. See also: archived footage, Morrison Street Foot Locker, forty-seven minutes, seven boxes.]
[Recommend no further surveillance.]
[Recommendation unlikely to be followed.]