Time ticks away. The tingling sensation of internal desire to move waited against the knowledge of the coming pain if he tried. His mind numb and he counts the pulses in his mind as the anxiety of questioning when will they return comes the moment they leave giving him his only peace when they are cutting out his organs as he remains awake too afraid to scream.

This is life for 03.

Pain brought relief besieged by near-constant fear. 03 had something he would do to pass the time. He would dream of colours and fragrances he remembered. Unfortunately, if he fell asleep the coffin would tase him back awake so he could never truly dream so much as he daydreamed.

He also likes to play with his heartbeat, speeding it up or slowing it down into musical rhythms that came to mind. He would have imaginary fairies listen to his heart music but he saved this for special occasions as the pain of heart palpitations occasionally caused him to faint if he didn’t dim his senses well enough but once more, he couldn’t cut out his ability to feel pain all together then he would be tasered to near death and that was if he was lucky so his dulling of his own pain was more of a mental thing then anything physical.

Something that gets 03 just as much as the pain does is the near-constant intervention required to keep his toe and fingernails from growing. It was a constant chore that needed his partial attention and it always prevented him from fully slipping into his daydream and forgetting his existence.

These simple pleasures were keeping together an unsimple mind.

Today 03 would turn 19, two years have passed since he met the current A and B for the first time but now they had become his regular company as per ‘great cycle’ as he had internally named it, first he would be brought out of his daydream when the lights turned on then he would be sent into the higher ‘plane’ before they would remove what needed to be removed before sending him back.

He has started to believe recently that perhaps they were taking the bad parts away from him and that removing these bad parts was necessary to be ‘forgiven’ for the crime or mistake he made to get put in here. He was unable to justify the notion that he was here due to back luck or a cruel world and so slowly he decided to start ‘making sense of things’.

So his first conclusion was that he must be here for a reason, although there was a part of him that asked why he didn’t know the reason he was here. There was also something inside that pressed on the back of his mind telling him that his conclusion made no sense as it didn’t have any logic to back it up but he dismissed those thoughts quickly in case they were part of the problem but also because they made him feel bad.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

Secondly, he decided that he might be forgiven if he stopped having… doing wrong.

However, when he tried to discover what it was that he was doing wrong he realises that he wasn’t doing anything at all.

‘But there must be a reason I am trapped in here.’ He was unknowingly desperate to convince himself of this. But this has another unknowing effect on his mentality.

This line of thinking led him to believe that his coffin was not the world, it was a cage. If he was trapped inside something then there must be something outside the trap plus he could see the walls and knew of the door beyond the higher room. He knew there was more, and a part of him wanted to be worthy of it. To feel worthy of… freedom.

Freedom, a concept he had just created for himself something he didn’t have before, he had just introduced himself to this new and seemingly wonderful idea of freedom followed by the idea one must be worthy of that freedom.

This was the first tool he would use to escape.

This idea was completely alien to 03 before this moment. His imagination and daydreaming had led him down a path to the creation of the idea, that one should strive to be free.

And then nothing, a new cycle happened and once more the two A and B came and cut him open taking a heart and a kidney this time before leaving them a period of dark before a new day and a new cycle and once more they came and took his lungs watched with curiosity as he nearly suffocated to death then left before once more he suffered a period of dark accidentally falling asleep and being woken up by a stream of electricity running right into his spine.

Then… he waited, forced to be both awake and focused for the lights to return and the cycle to continue. While this happened he worked on his eyeball dancing, he had self perfected his ‘art style’ by having his eyes resemble a falling leaf something drop from the pocket of the previous B. He had his eyes sway side to side slowly moving down to resemble that image in his mind so he could retell that day even though years had passed since then it was one of the most exciting days of his life.

He remembered that was the last day he ever saw that B, he also remembered how different that one was to the rest,

‘ She has two lumps on her chest. I wonder what they were about?’ 03’s mind asked only now caring about the oddity.

03 was unaware but the thing he was thinking about right now, being breasts was actually not that different then what most men his age would be thinking of.

Then he heard a screaming noise, an alarm had gone off and a red light was flashing up above. Then things returned to normal about thirty minutes later only to return to panic around ten minutes after.

03 was terribly terrified of this, it was as if the sky itself had fallen. Time passed before once more all the lights turned off and he was thrown into darkness.

Suddenly there was a horrendous violent shaking. 03 had a sudden idea trapped in his mind that this was the world overtly condemning him then suddenly he felt the electricity run through his spine, he smelt his burnt flesh then he was bathed in fire.

“Warning! Warning! The facility is under attack! Perform total memory whip of all facilities! I repeat the facility is under attack.

Immediately purge all ‘volatile’ subjects.” Suddenly a new voice was heard by 03.

It was similar to the old B however it felt mechanical to 03 like it was an immature imitation of a real voice however he didn’t have time to consider it much as suddenly a lethal stream of energy was running into his spine and throughout his entire skeletal system.

Then suddenly the shaking doubled in intensity and the lights went off before suddenly he heard a snapping sound before slowly the coffin fell before colliding with the wall.

The coffin had just been broken. 03 was now “Free”