"Fuck it, I'm in." Vulcan's face brightened at the sound of me joining the plot.
"Nice of you to join me, Lazarus. I didn't think you would show up today."
"What can I say, I'm a sucker for stupid ideas."
"Glad to hear it. Let's talk about training."
Minerva was elsewhere, likely trying to catch up on sleep.
"You'll likely need to learn some basic stealth skills, and get up to date on some equipment Minerva's been making. Additionally, you can't carry an electronic map of the tunnel system, so you're gonna have to memorize it. The critical thing is you need to keep writing backdoors into your code, and we all need to know everyone's ways in."
"Backdoors?" he couldn't be serious. Sharing backdoors? How much of a death wish did Vulcan have? If anyone found out...
"Three working to break the security system is better than one."
"You are out of your fucking mind."
"How else are we going to get out of here?"

I paused. He was right. There's no clean way to get the security taken down. Even if we managed to get into the tunnels, we still needed to keep them from seeing us. If they let out the machines on us, we were dead. We had to share backdoors. I sighed.
"Alright. Fine."
"Good to see we can find some common ground."
I glared at Vulcan. His eyes quickly darted to the corner.
"Alright, well, ah, I should also teach you some other things just in case. Land navigation, Wilderness survival, that sort of thing. None of us really know what's out there."

He glanced over at me. He didn't like this plan either. What I was going to do bordered on suicide. Odds are, if we got out, we would be too far to meet up - I would have to get out alone. I didn't know what he thought of me, but he clearly needed me to trust him. I didn't know how to feel about that. He clearly wanted to do this job himself, but why not wait and see if his leg got better? It made no sense. I don't want to do this, I don't trust him, none of this seems like a good idea, and I'm gonna fucking die.
"When do I start?"
"Now. Remember to talk about 'Soldier Psychology', that's what we're calling the plan." Vulcan lead me out of the chamber, and opened the door. "Let's start with land navigation. That's a critical one to understand when it comes to soldier psychology. You need to understand it when it comes to working on AI units."
"Of course." I stared bleakly down the hallway. This is not gonna go well at all for me.
"We'll want to stop by the storeroom though, a few bits of gear you're going to want."
"Come again?" Vulcan never mentioned equipment.
"Just follow me."

We walked down to the Quartermaster's office. Vulcan knocked on the glass to wake the officer dozing there. He groggily glanced at me and Vulcan, and pressed the intercom key.
"What do you want?" he demanded.
"We just need some components for when work starts next week. Here's the withdrawal paperwork." Vulcan waved a piece of paper with seemingly authoritative writing on it.

The man groaned. "Fine, come in." he flipped off the switch that kept the door into the room locked, and put his head back down to go to sleep. Unbeknownst to the Quartermaster, the paper was simply a proofing document that Vulcan had replaced every word on with the word 'Chicken,' which he kept exclusively for the purpose of duping people not willing to spend the time to check a piece of paper. After grabbing a few things that looked confusingly scientific enough to dissuade any questions, we walked down the corridor to a door hidden around a corner. Vulcan produced a keycard and opened it.
"We aren't supposed to be in here, so be quiet."

Vulcan walked over to one of the drawers and opened it. Inside were a large variety of knives, folding, fixed blade, even a weird one that looked like a curved machete. Vulcan noticed me eyeballing it.
"It's a Kukri. There's no way you could hide that thing, as cool as they are."

"What about that one?" I gestured to a knife that was about sixteen inches long, just barely shorter than the Kukri, but far thinner.
"I think that's a bayonet. Here, try it out." Vulcan handed me the knife, engraved 'M1905' on the handle. It's wooden grip fit into his hand perfectly, it's blade polished to a mirror shine that was obscured only by a thin layer of oil applied to the steel. The experience should have felt new, yet it did not, for some reason.
"I like it. A lot."
"Well, here you go then, I guess." Vulcan handed me the sheath by snapping it onto the knife still in my hands.
"As for the lighter, those should be over here." He began walking over to the set of drawers he gestured at. "Don't know why you would choose a piece of ancient history like that, but as long as you like it."
"History?"
"That bayonet you've got there is around a hundred and thirty years old." Vulcan explained as he opened up the drawer.

I slowly rest my arm against my side, now conscious of what the blade was - a miracle to have survived as long as it did. I put it into my waistband.

"You're gonna need a lighter as well. I think I've got something in mind since you liked that knife." he held a small, brass piece, slightly larger than a matchbox, along with a small tube with a threaded cap, knurling cut deep into it, made of brass as polished as the lighter.
"This is a Zippo. It's a little bit more finicky than your standard lighter. You need to fuel it frequently. That's what this container is for." he handed the set to me. "Take good care of it, and it will serve you well."
"Dude, I can't take that, it's too nice. Someone would notice."
"Too bad, because it's yours now. Just try not to use it to smoke. Then somebody would notice for sure." He placed the pair into my hand. "Treat them right."
"I don't smoke."
"You will eventually here."

I hope he wasn't serious.
"Anything else we need?"
"Nope." Vulcan lead me out of the storeroom and closed the door.

"What's so cool about this lighter?"
"They never break, never go out in the wind, and are all around good lighters." Vulcan shook his head. Slipping the pair into my pocket, I still didn't get why the lighter was such a big deal. Like seriously, it's a fucking lighter.

We walked by the Quartermaster, still sleeping. "Hey, that guard left the secure storeroom unlocked again."
The Quartermaster grumbled, evidently unhappy at the ineptness of the guard, but refused to raise his head off the desk. "Could you lock it for me? I'm sick of cleaning up after him every other week."
"He didn't make a mess, he just left it unlocked. I took care of that already."
"At least someone in this place is competent."

The rest of the ten-day holiday, Vulcan taught me all kinds of things. Land navigation, how to start a fire, how to sharpen my knife, how to trap animals, but one thing always struck him - it was if I had done these things before. He flat out told me that I picked up fire building way faster than I should have. I was nearly an expert after a few hours when many people would be struggling to understand how to get a fire started. It didn't seem right. How was I learning this so fast? A few days before the holiday was over, I already learned everything Vulcan was concerned about. In order to take our minds off the upcoming working period, we had resorted to talking about what we could remember. One day, things changed. A lot.

"Lazarus, I need to tell you something."
"What?"
"I can't remember things anymore. It's been like that for a long time."
"Wait, what?"
"It started around ten. I've been forgetting things about who I am, where I've been. You can remember your real name, right? Not Lazarus, but your real name."
"Well, yeah, of course."

"I can't. I can't remember all sorts of things." Vulcan sighed and rested his face in his hands. "It was around ten, I think, that I forgot it," he sobbed and held up a fabric bound notebook that he kept under his arm. "I can't remember what I did last holiday or the one before it. I just have to go by this. I can't ever lose it. If I do, I'll forget the times I laughed, the things I've done, everything. It's all in here."
"Are you alright?"

"Of course not. I'm only having to hold my life in my hands every time I walk around. This is the only proof of my existence. I don't know who I am or where I'm from." Vulcan paused to put the notebook back under his arm.

I was shocked. Despite all my hallucinations and drug-induced nightmares, could remember roughly where I was from. Like many of the kids my age here, I was raised by a foster home controlled by the organization, though I didn't realize it at the time. Home to about five kids, several of which being older and stronger, beat me all the time. My old name, I had it written on the back of my own notebook. It meant nothing to me. The only people who called me it were the people who meant me pain. Once I had become slightly adjusted to the hellish crucible that was this place, I never tried to remember it again. I put it far away in my mind, and was reborn as Lazarus. It was based off of my official designation, which was a bit of a mouthful. LA-03-R-02. Lazarus was easier to say. I don't remember what Minerva and Vulcan's were. They had introduced themselves by the name they preferred, and I did the same.

Vulcan, however, suffered from a different kind of pain. In the chaos of being raised in this awful place, he lost what he was, and who he could be. He battled daily with conflicting memories and confusing notes that frantically tried to remind him of who he was. He was dying.

"That's why I need to get out. I'm certain it's the drugs. They make me lose my memories. It could be some of the hypnosis that they've been training me on, but I doubt it. That's not even how hypnosis works, and I've only started working with it this year. Like I said, I've been having this happening for almost eight years. That's why you have to do this. Even if I get better, I would never be able to memorize everything required to get out. It's a miracle I could teach you survival skills. I had to give myself a refresher from a book, and I'll probably forget them by the end of the week."

"You really can't remember your real name at all?" Being in the Isolation chamber, I knew this was the one place I could get a straight answer.

Vulcan stared blankly at the wall adjacent from him.

"There was a week when I wasn't even aware I had a name. I don't even remember when it was. Who knows, it might have happened twice. Three times even. All I know is it's happened before, and it might happen again."

He straightened up and looked me in the eye. For the first time, I could see true desperation in his eyes. I was looking at the face of a man who felt his life had no value, the melancholy frown of a human who had not felt happiness in a long while, the eyes of someone preparing to die.

"Please Lazarus, you have to do this. If not for me, then for Minerva. She has to make it out of here alive. I may not be able to risk my life getting us out, but if push comes to shove, I am fully prepared to give my life, and my suffering, to ensure that she is not harmed."

Was I prepared to die like he was? Could I trust him? It was time for me to choose. He outstretched his left arm, in a gesture to cement our understanding and trust. He looked me in the eye.

"You in?"

"Of course."

I laughed and shook his hand, because he was a friend. We needed to trust someone in these dark times. If I died out here, it sure as hell was going to be for fellowship, and not to disappear without a word from anyone, alone and without a cry of anger.

"When do we put it into action?"

"Hopefully at the very end of the next holiday is when we make our break. Plan on it."