The man’s eyes flew open and his fist impacted against the glass in front of him, causing a small bloom of blood in the liquid. A thick, uncomfortable tube retracted from his throat as the fluid drained from the tank, nearly causing him to retch. Air reached his mouth and he gasped a shuddering breath. Wires unclipped themselves from every part of his body, melting away like sugar as they were exposed to air.

Where was he? He looked at the world around him, at the clothes resting on the bench beside the glass casket. Was he supposed to be here? And if he was supposed to be here, what did that mean? He took a deep breath and tried to figure out where and who he was as the fluid receded below his knees.

He looked at his skin. It was a deep brown, nearly black. Was that faint sheen of purple from the fluorescent lights, or was it his skin? Was that normal? There were clothes on the bench. That meant there was someone or something in charge of this, waiting for him. They probably looked like him, but who knew?

He hitched a breath. He knew what clothes were, he knew what a bench was… So why didn’t he know why he knew those things?

Subject has reached minimum cognitive function. Beginning imprint.

Imprint of what?

A flood of images and thoughts began to pour over him, and he felt his stream of consciousness drift out of reach, being tugged away from his control, as though someone were trying to snip away everything he was and replace it with someone else.

No, he had to stay himself. He had to be him, and figure out what was going on on his own terms. He knew if they dictated what he thought, he would be nothing but a puppet.

“No, no,no,nononono…” A wash of memories entered his mind, vivid and just under the surface. Waiting to jump up and take him over if he paid them any attention. He felt like an invisible man being dusted with the filth of each memory, a different identity slowly coming into focus.

No, he had to stay himself, he had to stay Sam… Was he Sam? He hadn’t had a name when he woke up. Was that one of their memories?

Sam began panting, faster and faster as his mind spiraled out of control. Who was he, coming out of an assembly line, thinking his name was Sam? He couldn’t be Sam. Sam remembered dying. This Sam wasn’t dead.

Sam remembered dying again, and again, and this time he did retch, spilling a small amount of bile onto the inches-deep fluid. Each time his naïve brain touched another subject, it was overwhelmed by the sheer amount in store for him, saved in vivid color by the damn implant.

Then Sam remembered all the times he’d woken up in this same bath, all the times he’d struggled to maintain his self but had been helpless against the tide of memories. Maybe this time would be different. He already called himself Sam, though, so hadn’t he already lost the fight?

Sam shuddered in the tub, wrapping his arms around himself, his mind chewing on each and every struggle between himself and the memories flooding through his system. He’d never won. Or maybe he never remembered winning because they wouldn’t let him keep those memories?

Was he really the same as before, or had they changed him? If he was different than the previous Sam, then wasn’t he really just dead, and this Sam was simply very, very similar?

Sam had no idea what the truth was. He shook, trying to clutch that last fragment of who he had been before Sam had been shoved inside him. He had wondered things, he’d been….

Sam’s eyes rolled back in his head, and he began to shake violently in the glass tube. Even then, the memories assailed him. Everywhere he looked, everything he saw had a spiderweb of memories connected to it, each one linked to a hundred more, in a never-ending onslaught.

An hour later, Sam took a deep breath. He was himself again.

The baths were the low point of every generation. It wasn’t so much the dying that bothered him, it was the implant. What a mindfuck, every time.

Sam reached up and pulled the lever on the release. He had to get to the elf compound detailed in Faera’s map. That urgent thought answered one of his nagging questions. His implant had been within range of the facility at the moment of his death, and so Tom should have also come back as soon as his implant went offline.

The glass pod opened and Sam stepped out onto the synthetic floor, looking at his clothes, which were set out by the computer. Beneath Sam’s foot, he felt a small line of pressure, which gave way with a metallic click.

Sam woke up with a gasp of air. His cheek rested on the synthetic floor, and glaring orange lights stabbed his eyes. He tried to get to his feet but slipped, toppling back to the ground. What happened? Sam cast his gaze around the room, and spotted a spent claymore embedded in the wall. He gasped in pain as he stared at the twisted piece of metal.

Sam did a body scan, craning his neck to look down at himself. His legs were shredded, but his bones were largely intact. He had some damage in his left kneecap, and his right foot was missing from the shin down.

On a wordless moan of pain, Sam fumbled to get his hand under him, twisting his spine as he pushed himself up. He could feel his legs. That was good.

And his liver, heart, kidneys and spleen were intact. Sam knew what each major organ felt like when it was wounded. It had been an experiment performed by a young technician named Elliot on the grounds of having the experiments assist in their own medical care. The kid was later shit-canned, to quote the other technicians, but Sam never forgot. Sam never forgot anything.

Sam sank back to the ground and his lids sagged as he recalled the two days when the young man had prodded each of Sam’s vital organs with an electric probe. There, that’s where your liver is, can you feel that?

Sam’s eyes shot open. He couldn’t go to sleep. If he didn’t get bandaged up, he wouldn’t live another hour, let alone get away from the ants which had most likely set up shop.

Speaking of setting up shop… Ann had left Sam a hell of a farewell present. It hadn’t been Tom, that was for fucking sure.

He pushed up onto his hands, and dragged himself toward the clothes. He needed to put a tourniquet around his stump ASAP.

Sam grabbed the edge of the shirt, pulling the pile of clothes down to him. A single sheet of paper floated down from the stack, followed by the spoon from a grenade.

Adrenaline hit Sam’s system like a freight train, and he snatched the grenade up and looked for a place to throw it. The door to the living quarters was closed, and he didn’t have time. The toilet was similarly out of reach for his mutilated feet.

The entire room was a tiny, featureless space designed to allow him to stretch out bath-cramps and get dressed. There was nowhere to throw the grenade. One second down.

Sam’s gaze flicked to the bath at the end of his blood-streaked drag-marks. It was riddled with holes, the glass a mess of spider-webbed cracks. Exposed wires snapped with electricity.

The printer was out of commission. Sam realized with sudden surety that this had been the last time he would step out of that chamber. The baths had been destroyed, and… the back of the unit was peeled open, just a bit near the bottom, revealing a black void beyond.

Two seconds down.

Sam pushed himself up into the air, wound back and flung the steel ball with everything he had. The grenade tore through the bent back panel of the bath, and Sam flung himself to the ground, hands over his head and neck. An impact rocked through his chest as the grenade went off, spraying Sam with a shower of bits of twisted metal and wire, which bounced off the walls and ceiling.

Sam stayed still for a minute, letting the destruction settle, waiting for any secondary explosions from the sensitive equipment behind the bath, but there was nothing. Finally, Sam looked at the piece of paper, a note in Ann’s handwriting.

Sam, if you’re reading this, and still alive, know that I didn’t try to kill you because of Tom, I’m not that petty. I was unbelievably pissed off, but I got over it eventually.

I tried to kill you because we all deserve to die. I’m a monster, you’re a monster. I haven’t got what it takes to end it for Tom, or myself, and he’s the same, but we figured we could spare you the pain of existing.

Blame me if you want. Yell at me for not giving you a choice, whatever it takes for you not to realize that we never had a choice, any of us. Not really. We don’t belong here.

“The fuck?” Sam said, but only silence greeted him. He glanced up at the harsh orange light from the siren, blinking his eyes. Eardrums must be busted. Sam tore off the sleeves of his shirt and tied a tourniquet around his right leg, just below the knee.

Sam couldn’t hop on one foot, because his left knee was shot out and his lower legs on both sides were shredded, so he crawled, using his good right knee to push himself to the door leading to the living quarters.

The main lights were out. Only the orange from the emergency lighting was available, and it glittered off the broken glass covering the floor.

Sam awkwardly turned his head to look up. The bulletproof glass separating the observation deck from the living quarters had been destroyed. Luckily shattered bulletproof glass was a less-sharp kind, but Sam still wound up cutting his knees as he crawled to the pool table that had been pushed up beneath the hole in the glass.

This must’ve been how they escaped the facility a second time, bypassing the ants. Ann and Tom wouldn’t risk the same route again when down a man, so they had done the smart thing, and found a better way. Most likely Ann had come in this way, seeing as it looked like the glass had been broken from the other side.

Sam got an arm over the edge of the pool table, grunting with exertion--the pool table had never really seemed as tall as it did now. He hauled himself up, then set his sights on the observation deck, where the technicians used to watch them from behind four inches of bulletproof glass. He reached up and settled his fingers in a patch of glass that hopefully wouldn’t slice his hands to the bone, then pulled himself up again, pushing the ragged portal beneath his waist and finally tipping over into the room.

Sam lay there, panting and weak as a newborn chick, struggling to get his arms under him. All around him, the alarms silently flashed their orange light. The clamor probably would’ve been deafening, if Sam hadn’t already busted his eardrums.

He levered himself up on his hands and glanced around the room, seeing it from this side for the first time in his life. The console that he’d always seen the technicians fiddling around with was live. A single display on the console caught his interest, labelled ‘external memory’.

There were three files: T0M, 4NN, and S4M. Beside Tom and Ann’s file there was a green check mark, while there was nothing beside his own. Sam dragged himself to the console and levered himself up into a chair, mindful of his legs. He pressed his finger to his own name.

Select external memories to add to Prototype S4M.

Sam’s brows furrowed as a wave of serial numbers preceded by ‘S4M’ began to scroll down the screen. Curious, Sam selected one, and a folder opened.

S4MPA11942, Stationed in Philadelphia. Eight hundred and twelve kills, five years in service. KIA in inhuman rights protests, March 24, 2123. Subject displayed questionable behavior prior to termination. Imprint not recommended.

Sam opened another file.

S4MCA3112789, Stationed in Los Angeles. Four thousand three hundred and eight kills, six years in service. MIA in food riots, January 5, 2122. Subject displayed uncooperative behavior prior to disappearance, suspected flight risk, failsafe engaged. Imprint not recommended.

Sam scanned through another file, and another. Each of them dispassionately recounted how long Sam had been ‘in service’ and how many people he had killed. As he scrolled through the list of age-old memories, he noticed a trend: Any S4M unit with more than three years in service had been classified as unstable and not recommended for imprint. Did that mean Sam would start to lose his mind after three years, no matter what? Or had he been invariably unable to accept the conditions that he lived in? Sam ran up against a hard wall of seven years, by which point all of the S4M units were ‘terminated’.

Tom and Ann had imprinted their old memories, and they had become near-suicidal, planting a booby trap designed to kill him and prevent him from coming back. What had they seen that made them so sure he had to die?

Sam hit Ctrl-A and selected the entire list of S4M memories. He clicked ‘Implant’, and a warning popped up, asking him if he was sure. Sam wasn’t sure. He was bleeding out and this part of the forest was swarming with giant ants; he had no chance of escaping as he was.

But maybe, just maybe one of the Sams on this list knew something that could get him out of here. Maybe he could find the code to reboot the security system, or he might’ve witnessed the access password to the staff armory. Or at least know a way to doctor his leg.

Sam took a deep breath and hit the button, and hit the button, and hit the button and hit the button… Sam realized he was in a loop, reliving the same second over and over as the implant rebooted. Sam violently pushed the chair away from the desk, and hit the button.

He fell from the chair, and hit the button.

Sam realized he was living two experiences at once, and hit the button.

Sam gasped in a lungful of air, and hit the button.

Sam slammed his head against the floor as a rush of painful memories washed over him, and hit the button.

Sam pulled his head back and struck it against the floor again, and hit the button.

Sam let out a wail of torment as wave after wave of guilt crashed over him, suffusing his body with shame, and hit the button.

Sam narrowed his eyes, and hit the button.

Beneath Sam was a spot of blood where he’d cut his head. He needed to stay focused on who he was, and what was happening right now. Sam hit the button. He needed to take control of the situation by force. The other S4Ms’ baggage was ancient history, and he had things he needed to do right now. Sam hit the button.

Unconscious until the reboot was over, that would work. All the Sams agreed, and they hit the button.

The muscles in Sam’s neck twinged as he put everything he had into bringing his head down. He needed to end it all, after everything they’d made him do. Sam stopped himself just before his skull impacted the floor, and hit the button.

They were coming after him, they would activate the failsafe any second. Sam was bleeding out, he was on fire, he was being drowned. They were going to find him… Sam hit the button.

No, he needed to be alive, and he needed to stay still until the implant was complete. Sam flipped himself onto his back and hit the button. Sam lay there, taking deep breaths and fighting every impulse to move between each button-press.

Eventually the wave of memories was more than Sam could stand. His eyes rolled back in their sockets and he began to thrash uncontrollably as his mind was overwritten by over five million years of strife.