"Where were you from, Dad?"
"That's... a long story Rose."
"We have plenty of time."
"I probably have a diary or something you can look at. Let me see if I can find it.
I don't have any good memories of that place."

I landed. Hard. My leg now broken from the fall, I couldn't run anymore. The three gunshot wounds in my abdomen made me scream for air.
I was losing breath by the second. In two minutes, I'm not going to be able to breathe. Crawling, I try and escape the monster chasing me, but it's no use.
It's cold hand grabs my ankle and pulls. The pain is excruciating as it flips me over by my broken leg. The glare from the flames it spits scald my arm. I looked into its eyes, and let go of the dead man's switch.

Jolting me awake, the lock screen of my monitor glared blue at me, reminding me not only that I was sitting in the same hell I had been in since eight,
but also that I had made a critical mistake: falling asleep. My breaths were quick and deep, the nightmare that consumed me still fresh in my mind.
Why do they have to be so frequent? Continuing my work through the delirium, my mind struggled to think of something other than the terrible illusion I had just seen.
I'd never really known anything outside the complex. After all, that would totally defeat the point of making an eight-year-old from scratch.
It's a fast way to lose your work, and after another almost eight years of slave labor, these people did not want to lose their work. AI work had been my specialty over the last two years.

Who would blame them? When I turned fourteen, I had created an AI framework to surpass anything ever seen before.
It was worth billions. No, trillions. Nobody could network AI together in a manner to have them control each other.
I did it anyway. Nobody could force an AI unit to do anything. I figured out how. Nobody could trick them into wanting to kill.

I figured out how.

Not that I wanted to of course, but there's not much you can do to say "no" to someone when they can amp up your drugs to give you hallucinations.
Typically I was given a mixture of Methamphetamine and Amphetamine used to stay awake at all times of day.
If I had disobeyed, a little bit of Lisdexamfetamine got slipped in. Want to know a commonly known side effect of Lisdexamfetamine?
Hallucinations. Bad ones. It's not like I could just not take this devil's cocktail of stimulants either, I needed them to function with the lack of sleep.
They gave us about twenty hours of sleep a week. Every five days, we were all forced to stay awake for 48 hours straight and do simulations.
We were, repairable and controllable. In their minds, we were no more human than what we were building.

We built killing machines.

I didn't bother to remember my real name anymore. After all, if you were half as screwed up as I was, you'd be alright with being called Lazarus too.
It fit me pretty well. Six heart attacks, two seizures, and almost daily vivid hallucinations from the drugs made the others think I was constantly on the verge between life and death.
Minerva would frequently have to hug me back into reality. I hated it. No thirteen-year-old girl should have to do what she did, although I appreciated that she wasn't as rough as Vulcan.
Vulcan would frequently try to beat the hallucinations out of me,
although as of late, he had taken to just locking me in a cold shower and waiting for me to stop screaming about how the ceiling tiles wanted to eat me.
He'd been here longer than the rest of us, about nineteen years old, and couldn't be bothered to remember how long he had been inside.

He was quiet. Minerva liked him though. She thought of him as an older brother, always looking up to him.

I have to be honest, Minerva always seemed to be smarter than the rest of us.
Yes, we were all essentially raised to be engineers by our captors, but she was different. She was a natural.
The mathematics for calculating the stresses put on a leg were simple to her, to where she could do all of this advanced calculus in her head.
The word was that she was a creation of the laboratory, a genetically modified to naturally be better suited to learn math and engineering, based off of lessons learned from my generation of designer babies.
Naturally, she had been assigned as our mechanical engineer, creating the frames and bodies of our monsters.
Some of the others made fun of her white cat ears, but they always struck me as cute. They might have been a holdover from another genetic framework used to create her.
Her strawberry blond hair hid her eyes, grey and weary from the constant lack of sleep. Sometimes she smiled, a beautiful ray of sunshine, a gesture rarely seen in our prison.
Sometimes I would go weeks without seeing something as simple as a smile to offset all of the nightmares I saw. Even then, for her, the angel in darkness, a smile was rare.
Despite our age, despite our drugged mindlessness, despite how little we remembered of the outside world, we all understood this was hell.

The time every one of us looked forward to was our holiday leave.
It was a bit of a misnomer - we weren't allowed a party, and we never got to leave - we simply were allowed to not work and could thus stay off our wakefulness drugs for ten days.
Most used it to catch up on much needed sleep, some used it to get to know each other better, if only for little more than a week.
Something as simple as a few days to try to unwind after ninety days of brutal work was well appreciated by many.

In a just under an hour, this holiday would finally start. I had timed my last dose of stimulants to wear off right as the holiday started. Or so I had thought.

In reality, I had taken my pills an hour before I should have. Over the course of the previous hour, the drugs had been slowly wearing off.
By now, the effects were almost gone, and I could feel the last ninety days and nights catching up to me.
If I fell asleep now, I risked having an IV put into me until the holiday and losing a few hours of precious sleep.
At some point, I slowly realized someone was knocking on my door, and that I had yet again fallen asleep on my desk.

Shit.

I quickly bolt up to the door and open it, hoping I don't get an IV.
"I couldn't hear you, music was loud. Sorry."
"It's fine. I just need to tell you something."
That doesn't sound like administration.
I rub my eyes to make sense of what I'm hearing.
"You alright Lazarus? Looks like you were a bit late on scheduling when to take your stimulants.."
Vulcan is standing in my doorway, looking only slightly less tired than me.
I groan and arch my back in an attempt to relax my exhausted muscles.
"Spot on, look like the same thing happened to you." I sigh a pained relief. Vulcan not working means the holiday has likely started by now.
I must have missed looking at the time as I got up. Sure enough, my watch reads just a bit past midnight.
"What did you need to tell me?" I'm already thinking about how warm my bed is going to be when I fall into it tonight.
"The watchword is 'Flood'. Meet at the normal place."
"I'm sorry?"
"See you tomorrow."

Vulcan was already headed down the hall. No point in asking him further. I knew where the normal place was.
Minerva's lab had a chamber devoid of all RF frequency. Nothing could record anyone there.
The three of us had met there several times already, mainly to complain about how our last 90 day period had been, or to hold me down to try and suppress my hallucinations.
I guess I'd find out what all the secrecy was for tomorrow.

I made my way down to Minerva's lab the next morning. she was doing the same job I had been doing a few years back - designing the chassis of the robots.
She had taken to it quickly, like I had from Vulcan. At the moment, she was experimenting with a unit that looked far more human. It had pale skin and even seemed to wear clothes.
Knowing Minerva's ingenuity, it was likely even the clothing was integrated into the sensor suite. Something caught my eye. This was not Minerva's work. The head wasn't on it, but it was still easy to recognize it wasn't from here. Was this the rumored Sangvis unit I had been hearing about for so long? Maybe, but I don't think it would have already gotten here. Supposedly Sangvis hadn't even gotten it into full production. Someone would have to have stolen it from them for it to be JAGER. I gently closed the door.

"Flood."
Minerva jumped a bit at the sound of the watchword.
"Vulcan's in the testing room. I'll be there in just a second."

What the hell was this all about? Why was everyone being so secretive about this? why was Minerva so nervous?

Minerva closed the door behind her as she entered the room with the others. Vulcan was leaning against the wall with his cane. Ever since he had broken his leg he had never really gotten back to who he was before. The Administration didn't care if he could walk, only if he could work. It was only at the insistence of the medical team that his leg was cared for at all.

"We're getting out of this shithole."
"Are you out of your mind Vulcan?" I was shocked. What Vulcan had just said could get him shot. No one ever escaped the complex.
"That last kid that tried to get out cried for his bullet. He begged for it."
Vulcan looked away from my gaze. He knew he was proposing something downright suicidal.
"That, that thing." I inhaled deeply. The memories of the robot I helped design torturing and killing my friend were too much for me.
It's hydraulic claws tearing apart his body. The snaps and cracks his bones made as they broke.
His screams. Oh god, his screams.
His death was a mercy, compared to what my abomination had done to him.
"Oh god." I crumpled into a ball on the ground.
"Lazarus?" Minerva was nudging my shoulder "Lazarus it's gonna be alright."
"No one's going to die."
Me and Minerva looked up at Vulcan.
"I mean it. We're all getting out of here alive. No exceptions."
Minerva helped me to my feet, shakily.
"There's a power substation. If we destroy it, the entire facility security shuts down. We get out. Pretty simple."
"I see a problem."
"Yes, Lazarus?"
"How the hell do we get someone those four miles to the substation undetected? The whole area around here is monitored by sensors."
"You know the substation I'm talking about?"
"You're not the only person with access to the maps of this place."
"There's an underground tunnel complex that goes through all the buildings. According to my research, the substation was never officially connected, but it's close enough.
The tunnels let you out in what is likely a sensor dead zone. It's not even fifty yards to it from there."
"And how would we get out after that?"
"Simple. The tunnel complex was built on top of an old mine. I was able to find where to old tunnels should be, and it looks like one of the water maintenance line leads out.
A small drone confirmed there was only one gate in the way, and it should open when the power gets cut."
"So who's going to the substation?" I asked
"You."
"Come again?"
"I was originally planning on doing it myself, but my current condition limits me."
Vulcan tapped his cane. It struck me that a kid who was only 18 needed a cane to walk as awful for a moment, but the feeling subsided.
There were far worse things here. I rubbed my temples.
"I don't know how I feel about this."
"I really don't like it either."
"Minerva…"
"What, Vulcan? You don't want me to admit that I think this is a bad idea?"
"I.."
"Someone is going to get seriously hurt. It's all based on guesswork and what we think will happen. There are no certainties in your plan, no accommodations in case things don't go as planned.
If one domino falls the wrong way, they'll make an example of us just like they did to Adam. I would rather not get tortured to death."
"Would you rather die here?"
Minerva fell silent. She may be young, but she still understood that every year you grew older really was another year closer to death.
Around when you turned 20, the administration would take you away, and you were never seen again.
"Sleep on it. If it helps, I've figured out our rough latitude down to about a mile. Minus 48 degrees and 26 minutes."
Vulcan stood up fully and opened the chamber door, leaving only the slow rhythmic clicking of his walking cane as he went.
"Time to go to breakfast." said Minerva, as she left.

What the hell am I supposed to do? I would be surprised to make it to twenty with my current health, so getting taken by The Administration didn't concern me.
Minerva and Vulcan...
could I leave them to that fate? To just die in this miserable place? I walked out the door and went to my room to grab my music player.

What the hell am I supposed to do?