We’re gonna starve to death. Sam turned the thin plastic cup of tasteless yogurt over in his hand. The flavor had run out eight generations ago. One day the machine that made the yogurt would break down and they would be one step closer to finding out which of the three of them tasted the best. As it was, their diet was heavily milk-based since the meat fabricator died.

Sam pondered what they would do when the milk machine went tits up. The implant prevented them from damaging or tampering with the Facility while they were inside the living area, so they couldn’t even try to fix the machines. Sam could easily see them starving to death over and over again.

He rested his arms on the solid steel table, the pale light of the ceiling bouncing back into his eyes as he used a sharpened steel pin from a destroyed pistol to etch the mirror-like surface. Apparently doodling on the walls and tables didn’t count as tampering with the facility, but any time they tried prying away the protective covering over the fabricators, they were rendered immobile. Perhaps the machine could read intent.

In the distance, Sam could hear Tom and Ann playing pool, laughing between the clack of balls striking each other. Sam wasn’t sure why they played anymore. Usually whoever went first won. Sam looked down at the etching, a Technician he’d found attractive looking back at him, every detail captured in the steel.

The woman had simply failed to show up one day, along with everyone else at the facility, but the lights stayed on, the fabricators kept putting out food, and most importantly, the clocks kept running.

Five hundred years.

The clock had gone dead two generations ago and the implant had stopped them from fixing it, but that’s how long he estimated since the technicians had sealed them in. Now the only things that still seemed to work the way they were supposed to were mission-critical: the Baths, the weapons, and the sims.

Sixteen generations listening to Tom and Ann fucking in the other room made Sam wonder whether the technicians just wanted to torment him. What kind of sadistic fuck arranged him to be celibate for five hundred years? It wouldn’t be a problem if he didn’t know what it was, but the other two had boned in every corner of the facility, with or without him present. It looked like fun.

Sam set his pin down with a sigh and stood. He’d already completed his PT for the day, so all that was left was to get some rest and wait for the next sim, maybe draw on his bunk or masturbate. Sam scooped up the yogurt and headed for the bunks, stepping into the flickering light of the hallway.

On his way to the beds, motion caught Sam’s eye from the Rec Room. Ann straddled Tom atop the pool table, rocking the heavy wooden furniture back and forth, their long limbs spilled awkwardly off the edge of the green felted surface, applying nearly five hundred pounds of weight between the two of them. The two gave him a sheepish glance as he stopped and stared.

“Do you want in on this?” Ann asked for the one thousand three hundred and eighty-fourth time. Tom gave a thumbs-up for the six hundred and thirteenth time. Realizing that, Sam almost didn’t bother to respond, because he’d given the same response in the same way four hundred and fifteen times. However, it was his duty as their superior officer to enforce the rules.

“We’ve got one rule for the rec room,” Sam said for the four hundred and sixteenth time. “No sex on the pool table. When your heavy asses break it, we’re not gonna be able to fix the damn thing.”

The two of them clambered off the pool table, fixing their clothes as they went,

“Yes sir, Captain sir,” Tom said with an easy grin. “You sure you don’t wanna pass the time with us?”

That sounds amazing. “As your superior officer, it’s against the law for me to have sex with soldiers under my direct command.” Sam turned away, knowing they would wait for him to leave, finish on the floor and grab a shower before joining him in the bunks.

Instead, Ann caught his shoulder. “Sam, are we even under your command anymore? Who enforces that? We haven’t seen anybody in five hundred years. Tom’s pretty sure technicians don’t live that long.”

“Pretty sure,” Tom said, hooking his thumbs in his belt loop. “You saw Professor Simon’s hair start graying in just five years, didn’t you?”

Sam did see that. “I did, but there’s nothing to say that we aren’t still under the jurisdiction of the U.S. military, and until I see something that convinces me otherwise, we’re going to act as such.”

“Even if it makes you a nervous wreck?” Tom asked.

“Those are the rules.” Sam said, leaving them in the rec room.

Afterwards, he and Ann cleaned the facility while Tom did his PT, then Sam spent four hours lifting the heavy steel weights in the tiny room while Tom and Ann enjoyed each other’s company. When he was done, Sam grabbed a chunk of Tom’s cheese, a yogurt cup, and a baked potato from the fabricator. He walked to the Rec room and knocked on the door frame.

“We’re decent.” Tom called.

“That you know of.” Ann said.

“Much appreciated,” Sam said, flavoring the potato with the homemade cheese, using his knife to cut the hot starchy lump in half and make a sandwich out of it. He hadn’t had a real sandwich since the bread fabricator had failed.

“What’ve we got here?” Sam asked as he walked in, finding them unusually focused on their pool game. In the background, the jukebox was spilling out a thumpy song from the early two thousands.

“Tom bet he could beat me, best fifty one out of one hundred and one games.” Ann said, lining up her shot. With a swift, efficient motion, she put the seven in the pocket, the que ball miraculously backing up to rest directly in front of the eight ball. In the next breath, she’d finished the game and they’d begun racking for the next.

“Oh yeah?” Sam said around a mouthful of cheesy potato. “Who goes first on the last game?” Tom wordlessly handed Sam an aged quarter a technician had used to settle disagreements. “What’s the score?”

“Fifty to fifty.” Ann said.

Sam raised a brow. “You realize whoever wins the toss wins the game, right?”

“Just do it.”

“All right, turn around.” Sam said, taking the coin with his left hand and flicking it into the air with his thumb. Halfway into the air, Ann and Tom shouted.

“Tails!”

The coin landed in Sam’s hand, showing some kind of weird animal. He was still unsure why the technician had called it tails. Maybe that was what the animal was called. In any case, they had both called it right, probably guessing from the sound along with the last known position on Sam’s thumb.

“Ann was a few fractions of a second faster,” Sam said, reviewing the flip with his implant.

“Yesss!” Ann shouted, pumping her fist in the air.

“Crap.” Tom said, his face becoming pale.

“What were the stakes anyway?” Sam asked.

“That’s between me and my bitch for the next few weeks.” Ann said with a grin, breaking the rack and lining up her next shot. Three balls went into the pockets in a matter of seconds, and Tom was looking more and more distraught.

In a moment, Ann was lining up her shot on the eight ball with relish, giving Tom a mischievous smile that promised equal measures pain and pleasure. A bead of sweat rolled down Tom’s temple as his knuckles whitened on the pool cue, unable to even take a turn.

The lights turned red and a siren blasted through the tense silence, sending Ann’s shot wide.

“Oh, thank god.” Tom sank to his knees in relief as Sam shoveled the tasteless goop into his mouth, squeezing his eyes shut and swallowing before tossing aside the cup. Game abandoned, Tom and Ann strapped themselves into body armor. Sam followed suit, throwing his armor on in a matter of seconds.

“Tom, take a picture,” Sam called to Tom, who snatched up his submachine gun and leveled it at the pool table, initiating the recording device with his thumb.

“But Sam!” Ann cried, horrified.

“Don’t want you cheating,” Sam said, shrugging the stiffness out of his body armor before he picked up his shotgun. “Besides, it’s not like you weren’t going to enjoy either outcome.”

Sam flashed her a grin. “Besides, Tom might miss.”

“Outcome aside, winning is winning.” Ann said, hefting her twenty-five pound rifle with ease.

The three of them ran out of the rec room and barreled past the kitchen, where Tom’s cheese sat on the countertop, bathed in the pale light of the glowing ceiling.

“Line up,” Sam commanded, standing in front of the mission port. He reviewed Tom and Ann’s equipment, then had Ann check his. “You know the drill, we enter quiet, figure out which sim we’re dealing with, and then plan accordingly. Only use your grenades in the event of a Z sim or if the computer throws us a curveball.”

“Let’s get this done, sir. I’ve got a hot date tonight,” Tom said with a grin.

“Not if you miss,” Ann crooned into Tom’s ear.

“Cut that shit out,” Sam said, glowering at the two. “Until this is over, you two keep it professional. I hope I don’t have to remind you of why we’re on our current generation?”

“No sir,” Tom and Ann said, straightening their shoulders.

It had been a day like this, with Tom and Ann getting caught up in each other, when the computer decided to throw one of its infamous ‘curveballs’, unleashing a horde of zombies on a mission they’d expected to be an easy sweep. Tom and Ann had gone to each other’s aide and unknowingly left Sam in the cold.

Sam had gone down first, torn to shreds by the blunt teeth of the ravenous undead, and without his extra gun, Tom and Ann had been eaten alive shortly after. It was one of their most humiliating deaths.

“Keep that in mind,” Sam said, glancing up at the defunct mission briefing board, now just a gray reflective surface. He took a deep breath, and punched the red button to open the gate to the training area. It was one of Sam’s greatest fears that one day the heavy iron plate would refuse to move, leaving them to starve endlessly to the sound of a blaring siren. The food processors stopped giving out food until the sim had been completed.

The heavy iron plate rolled aside, revealing bright, untarnished metal where it was inset into the wall. Had the door been that bright at some point? Sam could hardly believe it. Silently, Sam motioned for his team to follow, and the three crept into the darkness of the domed testing chamber.

Looking around the urban environment encapsulated in a massive dome, Sam signaled ‘C’ back to his team, identifying the location they found themselves in. The sims used an alphanumeric combination to denote the testing area, and the situation they were simulating. There were twenty-six different environments with one hundred variations for each of them, meaning a total of 2600 different scenarios. They knew them all by heart.

Sam glanced back at the portal leading to the living quarters, and saw the steel plate embedded in a blue and tan building labelled ‘Police’. Some urban scenarios had them emerging from black S.W.A.T trucks, which usually meant a surgical strike.

Coming straight from the police building was never a good sign, as many of those scenarios involved large numbers, such as riots or zombie hordes. Sam got low to the ground and crept forward with Tom, while Ann climbed one of the nearby building’s drainpipes before ducking into an open window.

Sam waited with his hand on Tom’s shoulder, watching the window while Tom covered the street. When Ann’s head reappeared and she gave them a thumbs-up, he squeezed Tom’s shoulder, setting them on their way down the road.

Sam caught Tom’s eye and gave him hand signals. ‘Search for objective until reaching Ann’s effective range, then rejoin.’

Tom nodded, and they separated, creeping down the street, checking the buildings one at a time while being mindful to stay in Ann’s line of sight. After sixteen generations, they could recognize the subtle signs the computer had placed a hostile in a building without even entering.

Sam came to the end of the row of buildings, and turned to Tom, giving him the clear sign. Tom fired back with ‘hostile around corner behind Sam’.

Sam dropped low and peeked around the last building. Indeed, there was a horde, standing silently, clumped together about thirty yards down the street. Sam motioned for Tom to stack up with him, and for Ann to take a better position.

The two of them waited for Ann to climb through the guts of the faux-furnished buildings, until he spotted her giving a thumbs-up from a window overlooking the Horde.

Zombies weren’t particularly smart, and as long as Sam and his team didn’t walk out onto the street and wave their arms, their targets would have no idea where the bullets were coming from. Zombies were much more of a problem when the sim distributed them randomly, or deployed a ‘rabbit’ to work them into a frenzy.

Sam glanced back at Tom, nodded, and pulled a grenade from his belt. It wasn’t a Z scenario, but there couldn’t have been a more perfect situation than this, and so Sam pulled the pin, keeping his thumb tight around the spoon. He sized up the distance, and threw the grenade before tucking his body behind the wall.

There were a few rising wails as the grenade skittered across the pavement, and a handful of seconds later, a percussive thud slammed through Sam’s chest. Shrapnel flew, and chips of concrete scattered from the opposite wall.

Sam counted another two seconds, then peeked around the corner. Most of the mindless undead lay still, a few of them giving gut-wrenching shrieks as they flopped about. Two were still standing, eyes rolling in their heads as they searched for the cause of their predicament. Uninterested in giving them a target for their ire, Sam gave the signal to Ann, and with two blasts from her rifle, the last two lay among their writhing brethren.

“It’s about time we got an easy one,” Tom said, his shoulders relaxing.

“Let’s not assume anything yet,” Sam said, hoisting his shotgun. “The computer could still throw us a curveball.”

Tom didn’t say anything, but his face soured, and he held his gun tighter. Sam still remembered his first orientation with perfect clarity, the men in the white coats who removed him from the nutrient bath and told him his name. All the information Sam had in his head, sports knowledge and lingo, idioms designed to make him more ‘relatable’, as they put it, was no good without some real-life interaction first.

They were designed to interact with humans on some level, as the team would have to coordinate with police units on-site. The technicians had given him a basic education, taught him lingo, and warned him that the computer was designed to throw the unexpected at them occasionally.

A ‘curveball’, they had called it. Balls were already be curved, why call it a curve-ball? They had learned to fear them, though, as every generation seemed to end in bloody, screaming pain because of these men and women in white’s ‘curve-balls’.

Then the technicians had disappeared. No explanation, no warning, just thousands and thousands of training sessions, with the chips in their skulls constantly recording the neural pathways in their brains so that a new generation could be grown without the slightest drop in combat effectiveness.

Sam and Tom turned the corner, their gazes scanning left and right as they walked toward the writhing pile of flesh. Ann watched their backs from her high vantage point, ready to knock a zombie down if one lunged up at them.

Sam kept a lookout while Tom strode from corpse to corpse, diligently putting a bullet in each zombie’s head, moving or not. The zombies had been tagged by the computer, and the door wouldn’t open to let them out until each and every one was fully dead.

“It’s times like this I wonder,” Tom said for the three hundred and thirty-fourth time, punctuating his phrase with a bullet in a writhing corpse. “Where do they get all these zombies, logistically? I mean, they ran out of cheese, and flavoring for the food, and coloring. The only things that still seem to come just fine are these fucking things, guns, and bullets.” Tom shot a still corpse in the head. “I get the feeling that the bullets will run out before these guys do.”

Sam shrugged. “They probably grow them on-site, like us,” he said, eyes scanning the street for movement.

“So, they grow a perfectly normal human, and then turn it?” Tom said, frowning. He kept his lips tightly sealed with every shot, unwilling to allow back-spray into his mouth. “That seems… wrong somehow.”

Sam grunted his agreement, and Tom executed another zombie. As the echoing gunshot faded, a cracking sound tore through the enormous dome. The pavement slanted under Sam’s feet.

“Wha--” Tom’s voice was cut off by an exclamation of surprise as the ground fell out from under him.

Off balance as he was, Sam was only able to throw out his left arm. He caught Tom’s hand and his weight slammed Sam to the ground. Tom’s weight tore at the tendons in Sam’s arm, twisting them out of shape as Tom hung over the empty expanse. Sam dropped his shotgun and braced his right hand, letting out a cry of effort as he pulled, the muscles all the way down his back crying out in pain at the awkward angle.

Finally, after what seemed like minutes, Tom’s fingers found purchase on the edge of the hole. He hauled himself to the surface and the two of them rolled away from the hole in the ground.

“What the fuck was that?” Ann shouted from high above them.

Tom glanced at Sam, whose eyes were locked on the four foot wide hole in the center of the training area, then back to Ann. “Curveball, maybe?” he called up to her with a shrug.

The street lamps turned red and a chilling voice began to emanate from the entire facility. “Security breach, a lockdown is temporarily in effect.”

“I don’t think it’s a curveball,” Sam said, shaking his head and carefully retrieving his shotgun which lay near the hole. Sam stepped away and turned to signal Ann to keep her eye on the gaping chasm in the concrete while Tom and Sam checked out the alarm system to see if there was a way to turn it off.

A flash of light from Ann’s window dazzled Sam’s eyes and a gunshot rang through the dome, whizzing inches by them and nearly drowning out Ann’s scream. “Run towards me, now!” Her voice pierced through the alarm just before another shot rang out. Sam glanced behind him and saw motion through the blue afterimage of Ann’s muzzle flare, then turned and broke into a sprint, following Tom into the doorway beneath Ann’s perch.

A half dozen more shots rang out, and Tom held the door, slamming it closed once Sam barreled into the room. The two of them grabbed the fake refrigerator with practiced efficiency and slammed it down in front of the door.

“What was it?” Sam asked, blinking the afterimage out of his eyes.

“Some kinda bug,” Tom said, his face pale. “About eight feet long.”

“Bug?” Sam asked. Sam glanced up the stairs, where he heard more shots being fired.

“Hold the door.”Sam threw himself up the stairs and came to stand beside Ann.

Sprawled out below him were the corpses of a half dozen giant insects, with more pouring out of the hole and spreading out across the pavement.

Sam wordlessly tapped Ann on the shoulder, and she stopped firing. In the ensuing silence, Sam and Ann watched silently as the enormous red ants began picking up the bodies of the zombies and pulling them into the hole.

“We need to get the hell out of here, sir,” Ann whispered, her face ashen.

Sam didn’t know if she meant their current situation or the facility that had been their home for sixteen generations. In either case, the answer was ‘Yes.’

“Barricade the window,” Sam said, and they slid a filing cabinet in front of it as quietly as they could, leaving just a sliver of window open for them to watch the ants below.

“What’s the deal?” Tom whispered when they came down the stairs.

“Ants,” Sam said, leaning against the wall of the apartment building, his eyes scanning the house for things they could use. “Really big ants.”

“What’s the plan, then?” Ann asked, sitting beside Tom, who settled on his haunches, placing a hand affectionately on her shoulder.

“The plan is,” Sam said, his gaze settling on the wooden furniture. “We’re making a smoke screen, and we are leaving.”

“Back to the living quarters?” Tom asked.

Sam shook his head. “We’re leaving the facility.”

Ann and Tom stared at Sam wide-eyed. “What?” Ann said. “How are we gonna do that? There’s no exit, and the implant--”

“The behavioral restraints are passive outside the living quarters,” Sam said, his eyes turning to the barricaded door. “And the exit is right in front of us.”

“No fucking way,” Tom said, glancing toward the door “It’ll never work.”

“Do you wanna wait?” Sam asked, his gaze locking onto Tom’s. “You wanna wait until some critical system fails and we get trapped inside the living quarters and starve to death forever? You wanna to wait until the ants make holes in the living quarters? Or better yet, the baths? Do you wanna wake up just to be cut into pieces by giant mandibles over and over, forever?”

Tom’s expression hardened. “Can we kill them?” he asked, leaning forward. “All of them?”

“Maybe,” Sam said. “But then what? Go back to waiting around to get killed again by a sadistic computer? We haven’t seen the technicians in thousands of runs, and this represents our one chance to do what we were meant to do.”

“Kill zombies and training robots?” Ann asked with a raised brow.

“Save lives,” Sam said.

Tom sighed, his gaze wandering toward the door. “Well, when you put it in terms of escape, or die horribly forever, it really clears things up. I’m in.”

“How about you, Ann?” Sam said, shifting his gaze to her.

Ann put her hand on Tom’s knee. “I’m going wherever Tom does, or he’s going wherever I do,” she said firmly. “It sounds like we’re gonna finally get to kill something other than zombies, which is a plus.”

Sam chuckled. “Alright,” he said, rubbing his hands together. “We need to make some preparations.”

The dome was covered in a thin layer of smoke. A repurposed air vent collected the smoke and forced it into the hole in the floor, pumping smoke into the ant’s tunnels and smoking them out. It had taken days to break back into the living quarters, widening holes made with Anne’s rifle. They had nearly died of thirst, with the constant, droning voice of the alarm reminding them of the lockdown every moment of every day as they dodged the ants.

After they had gotten back inside, one of them stayed in the testing ground to prevent the test from resetting while the others gathered food and supplies. Sam had taken the first watch, his body aching with the need to drink but comforted by the pale blue glow of the living quarter lights shining through the shattered concrete wall.

Ann returned with a bottle of water, and Sam drank greedily before handing it back. After getting food, they stocked up on ammo, and staged the backpacks just outside the reach of the ants bustling about the street.

Finally, they climbed up to the top of the dome and secured a pipe to one of the vents pumping air into the dome before lighting a bonfire of soaked wood furniture and plastics under an improvised intake.

“Ready?” Sam asked hours later as they assembled around the hole in the floor, shining the light attached to his shotgun down into the cavernous opening in the pavement.

“Yep,” Tom said, taking a deep breath.

“Yes,” Ann said, fixing a wet rag over her mouth.

“We go as fast as possible without losing sight of each other,” Sam said. “If you lose the group, stay there and make some noise.” Sam rapped the butt of his flashlight against the steel of his gun, creating a distinct clang.

Tom did the same, and Ann followed suit, each of them confirming the sound the other two would make.

“Tom, watch the rear,” Sam said. “Mark dead ends with the red,” Sam said, handing phosphorescent red spray paint to Ann. “The chances of getting into a firefight are high, so don’t be stingy with the paint. I want to be able to see at a glance where we’ve been already.” Here we go, Sam thought.

Sam turned back to the hole, found the bottom with his flashlight, and jumped in. The tunnel was filled with a smoky haze that stung Sam’s lungs even through the wet rag. As Tom and Ann jumped in, Sam began to creep forward, his shotgun trained in front of him.