Terminal Incompetence

Marcus Dunne spent twenty years in software QA: breaking things for a living, finding the exact place where the rules said one thing and the code did another, and getting thanked for none of it. Then he died in a parking garage and woke up forty-seven hours later on the Salt Maggot, a failing pirate sloop held together with jury-rigging, spite, and a navigation console that's convinced north is forty-five degrees to starboard.

He's also been bonded, permanently, to a System.

BONDED SYSTEM v0.8.3 [OUTDATED — UPDATE AVAILABLE]
STATUS: Alive. Probably temporary.
SURVIVAL PROBABILITY (72 hrs): 23%

The System is hostile, aggressively incompetent, and always technically correct in the least useful way available to it. Out here, fame is experience points. The galaxy scores your worth by how notorious you are, and notoriety is calculated from incident reports the System is contractually obligated to believe.

Which is a problem, if you're honest.

Which is an opportunity, if you've spent two decades auditing systems that were never built to survive someone actually reading the fine print.

The crew is broke. The crew is doomed. The crew has no idea the dead man they just hauled out of a bunk is about to start breaking the one System nobody else thought to check for bugs.

What to expect:
★ Dry, adult comedy LitRPG where the System is the antagonist
★ A middle-aged QA engineer protagonist who wins by reading the fine print
★ Space-pirate crew dynamics: broke, doomed, and bickering
★ Progression through notoriety, exploits, and creatively filed incident reports
★ Genuinely going wrong, on purpose, in the register of Dungeon Crawler Carl and KonoSuba

New chapters multiple times a week. Follow so you don't miss the next one.

Book 1 of Terminal Incompetence.