Iterative Design

You wake up alive, throat tight with resigned horror but no understanding of why.

You're in a bed surrounded by obscurely familiar medical devices. Half a second before you finish sitting on it, you know what you will see. It's a cell, its function clear regardless of the unusual fittings. There's a closed door, no windows, cameras everywhere but beyond your reach. There's also a table with weapons and parts to build other weapons.

Your hands itch with knowledge before your mind remembers the training. The knife could cut your throat if not for the strange tension you know is a subdermal armor mesh. There's a solid plate between the skin and your medulla, the other place for a quick kill. And your reinforced intestines would seal themselves before you could kill yourself by opening them up.

The gun, then. But your skull is a synthetic metamaterial covering redundant neural tissue. Your armored heart has enough computer-controlled redundancy that it could survive a shot even with the hyperdense tissue around it. You could shoot your remaining biological eye, but what would be the point?

No toxin could ever work, but you grab one to idly play with.

There's no rush. The engineers watching through the cameras will wait: they know you want to kill yourself as much as they want you to. The point of disagreement is about what happens next.

Calmly, you start assembling a miniature electromagnetic bomb small enough to ingest. With the right sensor configuration it'll explode at its closest point to your heart. With any luck, that'll knock down the computers that keep it beating. It's a half-hearted move: even if it succeeds, it'll be easy for them to bring you back. Your last three attempts were similarly tame. One or two more and they'll tweak your neurochemistry again. A subject that's not really trying won't give them as much information as they want.

You smile, only in your mind and hopefully beyond their software's ability to decipher what they can see of your brain. The last three times were part of your trap. The bomb you're making is actually two: the electromagnetic pulse that'll kill you, and a secondary nerve gas that might kill one of the engineers as they open you up to rebuild you again with one vulnerability less.

It's been a while since you've tried this, but there was an engineer who worked on you back when they still dared to enter the cell when you were alive. You enjoy the thought that maybe he's still alive - intermittently.

With no pause or ceremony you swallow the bomb and die.