When I was a kid, my older brother would constantly pick on me. I knew he cared about me, but we were so close in age that picking on each other was just a way of life. I think my parents knew that I was a bit smarter than him from the get-go, so they enlisted me into a private school (my family is pretty well-off) when I was around 12. At first it was pretty great, all the staff was nice, I made some friends, and they put me in courses that challenged me. After awhile, things got weird. A few of my friends just left, without even saying goodbye. I wrote an email to their families telling them that I hoped they were happy and that I missed them and how we were friends and such. Just reaching out to them because in my formative years, their children were really important to me. We were like a gang for awhile, always hanging out at any time of the day, sneaking into the abandoned unfinished basement to goof around and shoot the shit. Anyway, I didn't hear back from the families, except for one mother. She wrote me back, and it was very cryptic and vague. It sounded like a warning, but I couldn't really tell. The tone was the most unsettling part. I was confused and didn't know how to respond. As I got older, my brother and I got much closer so I reached out to him through email to let him know how weird the situation was. He wrote back and told me to document everything. I responded that I was and that otherwise, things were fine. I think I was about 17 at the time. My brother was corresponding to me from medical school, which he was a few years away from graduating from.

A few weeks after I sent that last email, I was put in solitary confinement at a location they never disclosed to me. I was there for the better part of two years. I don't really remember much, because they would bring these doctors and nurses in that would run tests. I always had some kind of nodes on my head or IV's in my arm. I don't really know why they were doing something that drastic, to keep me in there, but I do know what they were doing. Every day they would run tests on me in these weird dream simulators. They would force me to participate in these combat situations and see how well I did. I was always more of a books kid, so I was out of my element. The most familiar thing I had at that time was the sensation of light being shined into your eyes, because they did that every day. I'd wake up with stitches in the back of my head, or on my stomach and not know how they got there. The facility was a maximum security building and I thought I would spend the rest of my life as their guinea pig.

I kept wondering if someone was going to help me. My parents. My old friends. My brother. I wondered if he was waiting for me to send him another letter. I was so exhausted from the tests they were running I never had the energy to plan an escape, much less attempt one. I know this sounds ridiculous, and even remembering it, it seems like a dream. Something my mind has tried to box up and put away and forget about. One day as I was in a simulation, I heard his voice. I had been hearing his voice for the better part of two years in my memory, but this was different. It was crisper, more clear. Like I was in his head or something. And then all of a sudden I was awake. He was in front of me. He had snuck in and disposed of the other people in the room. Before I could blink, I knew I was free. There was an access tunnel that lead to the roof of the building. We used this pulley system in it to get to the roof. Then he put me in a box, smuggled me onto a ship, and the show about my life was cancelled after one season. Rude.