The room was silent besides for a regular pat, pat, pat sound that echoed through the room. Two burly guards stood at attention, their faces rigid and stern in the fluorescent lights. A small ten-year-old girl was bouncing on her toes flanked between them, jittery with excitement. A large smile was plastered to her face as her inquisitive brown eyes darted around the small metal elevator.

She turned to the guard on her left who was a bit more responsive to questions. His face would twitch occasionally at some of her remarks. The small flashes of expressions fascinating. The other guard she unendearingly referred to as "Stone Face" in her head, he was much less interesting. Opening her mouth, she asked the question that was bouncing her mind so much she had to bounce on her toes to keep her head from leaping off of her neck. Figuratively. 

"Did you think it came George?" the small girl asked. Her eyes zoning in for a reaction. Reading the minuscule reactions in his hard face she quickly updated her statistics.

'97.49% chance his name is George! 81.6% that the game has actually arrived!' she thought with glee. It had taken nearly an entire year to get down all the guards names that visited (or more accurately guarded) her small room at the facility. Nobody would give a name when asked (or anything else) and she'd had to guess each one and watch for a reaction to see how close she was. Slowly narrowing in on the names that drew the greatest reaction she'd achieved a list of names she was reasonably certain resembled their real ones. It had been something to pass the long years she had spent in her small world.

For the past four years, she'd had little to occupy her time. Finding the volume of her room with all the furniture in it had been an interesting distraction, estimating the intake and exit of the vents had been contrastingly boring. Mapping out the maze-like facility in her head based on the guard's movements and schedules was rough but doable and pondering on the best ways to overthrow countries and end wars that appeared on the TV in her room had been an interesting exercise but impractical with the given data.

And then there were the escapes.

She'd had four of them. One to commemorate each year she'd spent in this boring place. She'd nearly escaped three of them but still regretted the last one. It had significantly cut into her TV privileges. It turned out that creating a small bomb out of loose TV parts and coordinating her escape with a nearby terrorist attack-she had seen on said TV-had not gone over well with the guards. Her new TV was now thoroughly bolted down and set to only show Kid shows.   

'Yes, that one was been poorly planned.' she mused to herself as the numbers flickered on the elevator showing their speedy ascent to higher floors. 

But this year would be different. There would be no "escape". In exchange for promising to cancel her "yearly festivities" and not use her access to "greatly alter the course of human history" (The Major's words not hers), along with helping out on a few sticky cases that baffled the higher-ups she'd been granted "virtual freedom". She would be given access to the new fantasy virtual reality world that had just been released. Or at least she assumed it had.

The elevator gave out a loud 'ding' as it reached the desired floor the doors opening to reveal a hubbub of movement in the halls. The small girl quaked at the sight of so many people. Vectors, velocities, and accelerations shot through her head, different faces registering lists of names that had yet to be tried. Statistics, hypotheses, and functions trying to map out everything in her surroundings. Her mind throbbed with a desire to solve the mess before her. However, the problem had no “real” solution and continued to spiral out of control. Her breathing quickened her eyes dilating, growing wide and unfocused. Her stance grew unsteady. A blinding headache beginning to form behind her eyes.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

'George' gave a grunt as he quickly slid a blindfold over her eyes cutting off her view of the area. The quiet grunt she translated to "Oops, sorry forgot 'bout that" accompanied the cacophony in the room. The noise continued to be processed but the reduced stimuli helped her regain control of her thoughts. Her earlier happy demeanor, that was banished by the crowd of researchers and security guards, slowly returning. 

"Thanks, George!" she said as she made her way outside of the elevators. A smile once again adorning her face but this time a little strained. The guard shook his head at her antics. ’97.9!’ she thought. He hadn’t reacted nearly so much to “Jordan”.

Four escapes. None of them succeeding she thought as her feet started moving her down the grey sterile hall. The guards may have thought it was the extra security that had prevented escape, the walls and the codes, the silent treatment given to her by the guards. All of these were difficult obstacles, no doubt, but she figured she could have managed if she had really put her mind to work on it. 

The footsteps and small sound that surrounded her reminded her of the real reason for her continued imprisonment. Her mind was a prison all its own. She skillfully navigated the press of people, better than even the people around her with full access to all of their senses, however, if the blind-fold had not been there she would have collapsed in the elevator her mind abandoning consciousness under the weight of a million thoughts. 

No. Her mind was a prison beyond any four walls. This was the prison she was going to escape from this year. In a world composed of one beautiful equation! A world that existed only as ones and zeroes that became reality in the minds of those that played it, a fitting solution to a problem that existed only in her mind. 

Her footsteps echoed a little more forcefully as she crushed the self-loathing that had begun to pop up in her head. Madness lay in trying to understand people. Analyzing people was always a bad idea, especially herself. 'Let's think of something else... like the smell game!'  she thought with wry amusement. It was a silly name, she was well aware of this, but she was ten-years-old after all. If a ten-year-old wasn't allowed to come up with dorky names, who else was going to do it?

Her mind buzzed as she focused her full attention (or as much of her attention as she could, she thought wryly) on identifying the chemicals in the air around her. Humming to herself to drown out the small distracting noises that accompanied the living and electronic. She mused on the nature of humming. 

Her hum was a "perfect humming song". She'd heard some of the cleaners hum occasionally. Their songs were not perfect humming songs. Some tunes just were not good for humming. She only hummed the best humming songs. Her ten-year-old mind was brilliant, but still only ten and, to be perfectly honest, a tad naive. Having only experienced the outside world since she was six might have had something to do with it. She thought she was aware of just how naïve she was, though, and figured she could offset it in her calculations and predictions. ‘What a “naïve” way to think’ she thought to herself smiling at the contradiction. Unaware of just how true it was.

The small entrance ways branching off passed by as she continued down the hall. '37.35 meters covered' she thought to add '122.5 ft' as an afterthought. She hadn't mixed up units of measurement in her head since she was four, but it was best to keep them in mind when calculating.

The humming and "Smell game" continued as she made her way down the hall. Her thoughts continuing to swirl as she thought of what the coming days might bring.

'Yes!' she thought as she continued walking to what would—hopefully—be her greatest escape yet. 'This year is definitely going to be different!' and with newfound determination and a skip in her step and a hum on her lips she continued down the hallway her mind humming along with her "perfect humming song" 'Calcium carbonate, doesn't it smell great!, Sodium sulfate, clean it up mate!, Hydrogen peroxide, swish, swish for your date!...'