FATHOM (A Tactical Progression Thriller)

Matt Keller was supposed to spend launch night playing the most advanced tactical game ever made. Instead, he wakes wearing a gas mask inside Site Ten, a containment facility full of dead people. FATHOM was sold on realism, but the blood smells real, injuries do not reset, and the people dying around him do not come back. Whatever escaped below the facility is still spreading, and Matt has no military training or combat experience to fall back on. What he does have is a half-finished HVAC apprenticeship, years of bad jobs, and an instinct for how buildings work. Airflow, machinery, access routes, service corridors and locked systems make more sense to him than firefights do, and that knowledge starts keeping people alive. Then Matt discovers an interface nobody else can see, one that tracks far more than kills and survival. It records the routes he finds, the lies people believe, the conflicts he talks his way through, and the decisions he makes when somebody has to take responsibility. The deeper they go, the less FATHOM behaves like a game. The people inside know the corporations, soldiers and history Matt remembers from trailers and lore, but they are not waiting for players to arrive. There is a real war beyond Site Ten, and when Matt finally reaches the outside world, he discovers something worse. As far as that world is concerned, it already knows who he is.