From Billionaire to Lab Rat: My Cyborg Life

Break Pt 2

The battery charge was good. Range limited to sub-three meters. He’d need to get close to each lock, one at a time. That meant physical movement. That meant risk. But it also meant control. He could open what he needed to open, when he needed to open it.

His first goal was not to leave the station. It was to slip into the guts and stay hidden until the facility’s hunt passed. He needed time. Time to access caches, to move parts, to gather real tools. Time to think without the collar shining against his neck.

He looked at the grain of the metal and let the hours stretch. The sun never reached this far; the light that filtered through service vents was electrostatic and blue. He was used to it by now. He had slept under flickering fluorescents for a long time. This was just another dark place.

At 07:00, the siren cut through the station like a knife.

His ears pricked. The sound was different from normal alarms. This was a full facility alert. The manhunt has begun.

He had been waiting for something like this, and he wasn’t surprised. Fear climbed his spine anyway. He couldn’t count on his device running forever. He had to think fast.

Messages poured onto his implant overlay. He didn’t connect his implant—he’d learned not to—but the terminal’s radio picked up feeds he had cached. Security: Integrity sweep in sector 3. Roll call failure registered: Subject 46 missing. Cameras last point: Dormitory Eleven. Tactical units' en route. Drone sweep authorized. Manual search teams assigned.

They found the false trail fairly quickly. A pair of gloves idly left near an outer door, a smear of mud on the stairwell, a door left ajar on the lower maintenance deck. It was as if someone wanted them to follow. Someone wanted them to look outside.

He had meant that. Good. If they were out there looking, perhaps they would miss him deeper in.

But the response was surgical. Patrols multiplied. Drones hummed and swept in arcs, thermal scopes probing vents and heat sinks. K9 teams with filtered suits pushed into lower corridors. The facility’s AI began prioritizing sensor feeds, shifting attention to corridors. He saw the algorithm’s behavior patterns as he had mapped them: attention moved where the loudest anomalies were.

He had to be quieter than the anomalies.

He kept his weight on the metal spars. He listened to boots and voices moving above, metal on concrete, metal on keyed metal. He watched the camera feeds he had looped still appear on his hacked buffer. Some of his loops held. Some had already been taken down and reinstated by the main watchdog. He adjusted his plans on the fly.

A drone passed over the elevator shaft. He felt its vibration through the metal and knew it was scanning. The drone’s thermal field cut across the shaft; he braced himself in a shadowed notch where the drone’s line-of-sight was briefly blocked by piping. He held his breath, counting down heartbeats. The drone banked away.

Below, a team kicked through a panel two decks down. They flashed lights in patterns, waved infrared scanners, called out identification tags. The commands echoed up and down the shaft like a chorus.

“Subject 46 was last seen in dorm eleven!” someone barked. “Sweep all maintenance shafts!”

Good. Let them sweep the shallow shafts. They were blind to a certain depth of conduit. They assumed no one would go that far. They assumed no one could live in the heat of the server bed, the noise of the turbines, the metal taste of the air.

Damian crawled deeper.

He moved from maintenance ladder to cable tray, from vent to service platform. He used the device sparingly, opening single doors to clear his path. He didn’t blast circuits; he whispered to them. He mimicked identification handshakes and replayed a few maintenance tokens to make doors think a technician was on the other side. He opened a locked service door, ducked through, and slid the latch behind him. The drone passed overhead and did not dip. The camera had been looped.

He found a cavity beneath a server rack where the airflow was turbulent enough to hide his heat signature. He slipped in and jammed his sack beside him, shoving the food and blanket under a shelf so they wouldn’t rattle. He pressed himself flat and listened.

For hours the facility hunted. Voices came in waves, sometimes loud, sometimes distant. The building’s audio array piped siren warnings over the halls: “All units respond. Subject 46 unauthorized exit detected.” The voices were methodical and professional. They smelled less like surprise and more like duty.

The guards were thorough. They had checklists. They had patience. They had an algorithm that made them patient.

A pair of technicians came into the maintenance bay at 10:30 to do a routine check. They moved like they’d been taught to move—slow, deliberate, eyes on tablets, scanning codes. One of them stopped near the server rack and frowned.

“Strange thermal signature,” he said, tapping the screen.

“Probably a transient motor load,” the other replied.

“Run a sweep anyway.”

Damian felt his chest tighten. The sweep’s pattern caught on the edge of his hiding spot. He stayed flat. The air in the cavity tasted like metal and condensation. The scanner’s sweep passed over him and the temperature reading flickered. The technician adjusted the algorithm, ran it again. Fiona.

He realized his breath was too loud. He sucked it lower, smaller. The scanner passed again. Nothing. The tech shrugged and moved on. For now, he was clear.

He could hear them talk as they walked away—plans, quotas, the name of the boss, the chance of promotion if they turned in an escaping asset. They sounded more like corporate accountants than hunters. They would get a bonus. They would get a plaque. They would look at the screen that night and say they caught a criminal. A shallow victory, and someone else paid the cost.

Damian thought of the two names that showed up in his file: Elias Carden and Damian Veyron. He thought of the bastard contract that had signed him away. He thought of his mother’s face in the scanned photo and felt a sudden, ugly close thing in his chest.

He was tired, but he didn’t want to sleep. He wanted to plan. He wanted to push further in the hours when the shift changed, when attention split and tiredness crept in.

At 02:00 at night, after the bulk of the roving patrols had run their scheduled sweep, he moved again. He used the device at low power to open a maintenance hatch in a corridor two levels down. He slid through and found a narrow ladder leading to an older maintenance crawl, one the forensics models had long ignored.

He found a low, floodproof pipe access that led toward a lower service deck. It smelled worse than the ventilation, stale and tangy. Water dripped from rusted seams. The pipe led to a chamber where redundant coolant lines passed through, and beyond that, a service corridor that ran under the server cages.

It was dangerous. It was wet. It was not monitored by the usual patrol routes. For the first time since he woke in the dorm, he felt like he had more options than the men who thought they’d trapped him. He felt for the first time since the alert a small, dangerous relief.

He crawled into the pipe, feeling grit grind under his palms. He kept the device off. The cooler air felt like a promise.

Outside, somewhere above him, men ran and shouted. Drones swept and then moved on. Sirens wailed. The manhunt had begun in earnest.

Damian stood inside the belly of the floating prison, the sack of food beside him, the small device sleeping against his thigh. He listened to the world search for him. He planned his next move.

He knew he had days at most. He had a narrow window to do what he needed. He had to stay one step ahead. He had to be quieter, cleverer, and faster.

Because now the whole facility was looking for him.