October 19, 1976 --

` The feeling that washed over Jarod after they injected him with the drug was the most fantastic experience in his short life. The first rush was nearly orgasmic: he could practically feel the endorphins exploding out of every opioid receptor in his body, enveloping him in warmth, relaxation, joyfulness, raw pleasure. Then the mellower euphoria made him feel free, like his mind was not really owned by or even at the Centre anymore, every anxiety erased, at peace with himself and everyone around him. On some level he was aware that Raines was shouting at him, something about doing an exercise or test or blah blah blah; he didn't care anymore what they were ordering him to do or threatening to do to him, he was in the Now and Now was good.

And then the drug began to wear off, and the Now was not so good. Then it seemed every receptor had emptied itself of every endorphin and now could only dispense doses of pain, so that all of his muscles shrieked and stabbed him with every move, ripping to slivers at the cellular level. His mind swam around and around; he couldn't escape or stop or control it all, like he could normally control his mind. That led to agitation and anxiety, which tensed his muscles, which stabbed and sliced him even more, leading to an unending cycle of agony and panic. He was horrifically afraid that they had killed him, or even worse, not killed him but killed his capacity for all future pleasure, so that for the rest of his life he would be nothing but a dysthymic machine, and maybe that's what they wanted all along.

Then Raines came in and injected him again, and to his relief it turned out his receptors weren't dead after all. This time they gave him the original drug plus some other chemical intended to increase his motivation during the high, and indeed that did kill the buzz a bit. Not enough to actually do the blah blah blah, but enough to tell Raines to fuck off and leave him alone and let him enjoy his time with his receptors. That was a bit rude, Sydney would definitely frown at that and give him a disapproving Jer-rud, but Sydney wasn't there, so fuck him too. And then the drug began to wear off.

Around and around they went, for a couple of days or maybe a couple of years, he wasn't sure. Eight times they went around and around, all with the experimental drug combined with other things, whatever they thought could make him snap out of it and do some real work. It had worked in the rats, so why wasn't it working in the human lab rat? Then they gave up on the whole thing, and the drug really began to wear off. And he began to understand with intimate detail what Hell was like.

After Jarod came out of it for real, two weeks later and fifteen pounds lighter, he knew he would have to escape. It took him three years to work up the nerve.

*****

December 26, 1979 --

The lights would go out soon, so Jarod just got into bed and pretended to go to sleep early. The plan was in place, his pilfered supplies and money were in place, the lone infrared camera fritzed again so they couldn't see him very well in the dark. He had surreptitiously broken the camera at random intervals, to the point that the guards now simply expected it to die occasionally. They wouldn't come to fix it until morning, and by then he'd be gone. His script had been implanted in the security system, the letters to Sydney and the Director written. Now all he had to do was wait until it was late enough that whoever was watching the cameras began to get tired, and get moving. It was his last chance, he knew. The noose tightened around his neck with each passing month. If he didn't leave now, he feared he never would.

After Jarod had recovered from the infamous synthetic opiate experiment, Sydney had come back from "sick leave" -- looking pretty terrible, Jarod had to admit, but the timing was so suspicious he couldn't help mentally put it in quotes. Perhaps Raines had simply taken advantage of his absence, but the fact that Sydney had never said a word about it afterward indicated to Jarod that he either approved the experiment or tacitly allowed it to happen. Either way, whatever tenuous thread of naive hope that the Centre cared about his well being had finally been cut.

He had began dropping heavy hints that maybe now that he was legally an adult he should be allowed to live outside the Centre and be paid like a regular employee. He didn't know his exact age but it had to be close to eighteen by then. Sydney deftly deflected this as usual, but word must have trickled up because very soon afterward they moved him to dramatically improved living quarters. At the same time, however, the sims suddenly became much more complex, months-long analyses of some of the knottiest problems in world affairs. Guatemala. Argentina. Israel. Cambodia. The latest was Iran, which since the Islamic overthrow had kept him occupied for most of the year. And every one of these simulations had been preceded by lengthy dossiers of all the human horrors that had already played out in these regions. They wanted to impress on him as strongly as possible how important the work was, how many people could potentially die if he didn't come up with some novel solutions.

Last year, for instance, he had been all set to implement his winter holiday plan and leave. The Egypt-Israel peace talks had finally broken through and succeeded, he was told. They neglected to tell him how much of his sims played into the negotiations, if any, but it still felt as if he had made some small positive contribution to humanity at large. But then they dropped Cambodia on him. The Vietnamese were planning a large offensive against the Khmer Rouge, and the DOD folks wanted to know how the United States could covertly assist the overthrow without actually supporting the dreaded communist Viet Cong, and keep the Soviets out of things as well. "Nobody's gonna publicly touch southeast Asia with a ten foot hot poker up our ass," one CIA analyst had curiously put it. The debriefing file on the Khmer Rouge was officially the most horrifying thing Jarod had ever read. Hundreds of thousands of people -- a number probably too low, Jarod estimated -- had been systematically murdered in brutal and monstrous ways, often for as little as wearing glasses or "sounding" educated. He finally had to tell Sydney he couldn't stand to read any more, and ask if he could go down to the exercise room for awhile. He ran for miles, trying to rid his mind of evils that, once imagined, cannot be unseen.

After that he agonized over whether to leave or not. Eventually he decided he couldn't selfishly disappear yet, not with mass slaughter still ongoing. The best window of opportunity for escape that year passed by. In February students of Ayatollah Khomeini overthrew old US-backed Iranian government, an event which apparently took precedence over the Cambodian killing fields as far as the Centre's government's sponsors were concerned. Jarod pressed the ranks all the way up to the Tower objecting to the reassignment, as much a defiance as he had over any sim since some of his pettier rebellions as a kid, and Sydney had gratifyingly backed him up for once. In the end they were overruled, though, and he was put to work learning Persian and devising strategies for a counter coup. In September radical student groups stormed the American embassy, a public relations triumph for the students and a disaster for the Carter administration, not to mention the hostages themselves.

Thus it was when the winter holidays rolled around again, Jarod found himself devising ways to free the 53 men still held captive at the embassy, while remaining acutely aware that he too was a hostage of sorts. He felt terrible about leaving the sim unfinished, as if he were personally keeping those hostages in limbo. He had worked as fast as he could to finish some reasonable scenarios for rescue before the escape deadline, leaving that work on the desk with the letters. But in truth there was always going to be some crisis in the world that they could use to guilt and manipulate him into obedience. Leaving the Centre meant leaving all of that behind, including any good work he might be doing. He would have to find alternate ways of helping people, on the outside.

Jarod had long ago observed that the week prior to the change of the calender year held some sort of major cultural significance. Sydney always went on his mystery vacation, and it seemed half the staff of the Centre was gone as well. The performance of those who did come to work tended towards the abysmal; many people seemed exhausted or irritable at having to be there, and they generally threw some food and books at him and locked him in his room most of the time. The staff was even more distracted on the first day of the year, but Sydney would be back by then, not distracted, so that day didn't work nearly as well for escape purposes.

Jarod's plan was fairly simple: Get out around midnight on the day when he was least likely to be attentively watched, giving him a lead time of at least eight hours; leave a script running in the security system that would misdirect them on the direction he was headed, giving him (he hoped) an additional couple of hours; and make a run for a town that he could find in the dark without getting lost. He estimated that he needed to secure a vehicle by 8 am to have a decent chance at escape. Over the past three years he had gathered as much intel as he could about the terrain around the Centre. The sweepers assigned to him weren't supposed to talk, but it had to be one of the most boring jobs in the world guarding him, and a lot of people liked to chat about their families, homes, vacations. He knew he was in Delaware somewhere south of Dover, that the south end of the building past the Tower ran parallel to an inlet on the Atlantic ocean, that Blue Cove was the nearest town and about 2-3 miles north up the coast, and that there were two other villages nearby manageable on foot. One of them was about twelve miles to the west, inland, and would be difficult to find without running along an easily monitored road. The other village, Sanderson, was on the coast about ten miles south. He knew that Delaware shared a peninsula with Maryland, and to really get away he'd either have to get north, towards interstate highway 95, or south through the Chesapeake Bay Tunnel. The northern route was more obvious and safer: Blue Cove was a lot closer than Sanderson, and there were more routes to get to the mainland in the north than the choke point at the Tunnel.

He opted for the unexpected route. South.

Angelo had been helping him gather materials, as he seemed to have fairly free run of the ventilation system. A watch, flashlight, boots, a coat, money. A few tools, to unbolt key ventilation shafts. Decent shoes were particularly hard to acquire, as people didn't exactly keep extras laying about at work. All they ever gave him were flimsy canvas shoes for walking the hallways, which he took off whenever he could get away with it anyway. The boots Angelo found appeared to come from a janitorial supply somewhere. They had both been taking money, a very little at a time and never everything in a wallet. Jarod felt a little bad about the stealing and kept a running tally in his head of everything owed, perhaps to pay it back one day, but it was a necessary evil. He hoped the couple hundred dollars acquired would be enough; he had no idea how much everyday items or food cost.

Jarod had begged Angelo on several occasions to come with him, that they should both be free, but Angelo always just shook his head no. Maybe he was afraid of being able to function out in the real world. Jarod was a little nervous on that point as well, but thought he could manage it, Sydney's constant hand-holding notwithstanding. After all, if every secretary, sweeper and technician at the Centre somehow made their way through autonomous adult life without falling apart, it couldn't be that difficult.

He briefly flicked on the flashlight under the covers in order to check the time. 11:40. Close enough. He arranged the pillows and blankets to look like a body-sized lump and rolled out of bed, in pitch blackness. He crawled along the floor to the edge of the wall to the camera's slight blind spot, just in case they were able to pick up some residual movement. The vent cover was easy to get off the wall by touch only, in the dark, with years of experience under his belt.

The bag of supplies was hidden in the vent down about 40 feet and around a bend. Jarod had told Angelo to meet him here at midnight if he changed his mind and wanted to come. No Angelo, but no sweepers either. He didn't think Angelo would betray him, but sometimes it was hard to tell what was going on in that enigmatic head of his. A lot of the time. Jarod silently bade him good luck, then made his way to service shaft for the elevator, and began climbing the fifteen floors to get up to ground level.

After about an hour he made to the point of the building that was the very furthest he'd ever ventured. The line between known and unknown. There were no audible alarms going off, and he'd wandered this long many times before without getting caught, but it was an extra relief to make this far tonight. Angelo had given him a drawing describing how to get to the southern storm drain, which supposedly came out about 50 feet above the shoreline. He could only hope the distances on the makeshift map were accurate; Angelo's spatial awareness always seemed to be pretty functional, and he trusted his friend.

Jarod finally made it to the end of the drain and got the cover off at about two in the morning. Things were proceeding a lot slower than he expected, but he vowed not to turn back now. He wasn't going to waste yet another year of his life locked in a basement. He took a deep breath of the unexpectedly frigid air, salty and fishy and amazingly fresh. Looking around the beach, he saw that there were limited ways to monitor the beach once he cleared the edge of the building. This was the most dangerous part of the escape plan, as he had a lifetime of experience with the internal security system but knew nothing about the externals. The beach was helpfully rocky in this section, which would hide his tracks. He reattached the storm drain cover and quickly made his way down to the water, then began to run.

He ran and ran, incredibly slow and slogging work in the boots and sand and water. He'd run about two miles when the beach suddenly ended, and he had to climb along the rocky shore. He was wearing all the clothes he had -- two shirts, two pairs of pants, a stolen sweatshirt and light jacket -- but with the temperature dropping below freezing, water everywhere, and no running, he was beginning to shiver and slip on the icy rocks. Maybe a prison break in the dead of winter wasn't such a genius idea after all. Finally at about seven, with the sun just starting to come up, another beach appeared, and lights ahead in the distance. He began to run again, energized, faster than ever. His fingers and ears felt like they might freeze off any second, but he pushed through it, ignored every warning sign from his body, just like he had done on a million sims before.

The lights would be coming on in his room any minute now, and with it his sweeper team would discover he wasn't there. They would find the letters, and send out the alarm, and probably call Sydney back from wherever he went on his new year's vacation. The letter to the Director contained his reasons for leaving, and he specifically cited Raines' drug experiment as a motivating factor. Maybe for once there would be actual consequences for his despicable tests ... maybe. He wrote that as long the Centre failed to respect his personage and basic human rights, odds were they were failing to respect their clients or the public at large, and sooner or later would use his simulations to harmful ends. His letter to Sydney was more personal but essentially had the same content. He had no illusions they would change their behavior as a result of the letters, but at least he had said his peace.

He finally made it to the town at about 8:30 am, later than he'd hoped to be on the road south. The temperature was hovering just at freezing, and a light sleeting rain began to fall, soaking his hair and pants and miserably chilling him. He looked around, trying to decide which car to try and steal, and put to the test whether those army jeep diagrams were really applicable to commercial vehicles. He hated to commit grand larceny mere hours into his freedom, but he didn't see many other options. The Centre was probably sending out patrols even as he was standing there, so there wasn't time to figure out public transportation. He had to get into a moving vehicle to have any hope of making it any further.

As he was trying to decide on a course of action, a strangely rounded truck-like conveyance pulled up beside him. The driver was a young woman with long light blond hair and an enviably cozy knitted hat, and there was another woman reading in the back seat, disinterested in even looking up at him. A young man with shoulder-length shaggy dark hair and an improbably colored purple jacket rolled down the window and stuck his head out.

"Hey, pretty, need a lift?"