**This story contains sensitive content including suicide and violence**

Ellis Rowe awoke to the rhythmic toll of the digital timer that now appeared across his monitor. Oh, and the screeching ring of the alarm filling his cell.

“Ahhh, come on man, not today,” he said, his voice echoing off the metal walls of his twelve-by-ten cell. In fact, the entirety of the cell was metal. The bed, the toilet, the desk—all a shiny plated aluminum. Or at least he assumed it was plates, yet he never found a seam, not a single connection point. It was as if the cell was cast in place. That always messed with Ellis. Why go through that much trouble to forge an entire room out of metal?

Ellis’s eyesight was getting weaker as of late, and even while squinting he could not make out the text written across the display. He stood up and walked over to the black display screen on the wall opposite the short end of the bed. The display was a foot lower than Ellis. A mushroom-shaped stool emerged out of the floor a few paces in front of the display. Ellis sat down. Before reading the message, he caught a glimpse of himself in the deep black beyond the text. He examined himself for a moment. Under his medically bald head, he noticed a few new wrinkles. And under those wrinkles, he caught his own eyes and quickly turned his head. He couldn’t stand looking at himself now. Not since he volunteered to come to this place. Mostly because he wasn’t sure if he could ever forgive himself, if he would ever get out of this place. The thought passed and he turned back to the screen.

“Your partner has failed to enter code for Hour 1. Penalty to be initiated in: 4:02.”

Ellis watched as the timer slipped away, one second at a time:

4:01.

4:00.

3:59.

He slid off the stool onto the floor and scooted so his back fell against the wall. Ellis stared up at the only other non-metallic surface in the cell, a three-inch black circle. Inside, a small blinking red light. To the light he whispered, “Let’s get this over with.”

The green text ticked toward zero. Four… three… two… one. The final digit dissolved into the black of the screen, and the neon numbers were soon replaced with blood-red text: “INITIATING HOUR 1 PENALTY…”

Ellis’s head slumped back against the wall and he allowed a soft exhale to escape his lips. And he waited.

The first penalty would be one of two things. The room would either get uncomfortably hot, like you were left in a car on a July day in Florida, or frigidly cold, as if you were transported to North Dakota during the coldest winter ever recorded, butt-ass naked. To be clear—it sucked.

But when you’ve been isolated in a metal box for however long Ellis Rowe had been, a strange, curious part of your brain craves anything that is different. So even though the screen showed “penalty,” a distorted part of him saw it as a reward.

Ellis had guessed it would be the cold today. The last two experiences had been of the hot variety. Yet, he began to feel his face flush and his palms began to sweat.

“Three times in a row,” he thought. “Lucky me.”

He spent that hour mostly thinking. And sweating. And nearly dying from heat stroke. But the harder he thought, the easier it became, and he soon fell into a deeply hypnotic meditation.

He may have been surprised and extremely annoyed, but he held no resentment toward his partner for letting the hour pass without entering his code. In the years—he assumed—since they had been in these cells, they had worked out a sort of communication method. It was primitive, and obviously they weren’t divulging the deepest secrets of their various criminal activities, but Ellis felt confident they understood each other.

If either one of the two ever became so bored, so stir-crazy that they simply could not complete their task of entering the four-digit code, they would initiate the first penalty for three days in a row. Each day, once the hour was over, entering their code in the metal keypad and shutting down the sequence. If the other was equally bored, or maybe a little psychotic that week, he too would hold off entering the code, for the first hour only, three days in a row. They would leave a gap day in between. Then the initiator would fail to complete their task as long as they wanted to.

The reward for not completing your task?

A black-and-white, side-scrolling cartoon of a deformed mouse captaining a tugboat. That was all. The background would scroll from right to left, indicating the tugboat moving, and every three minutes exactly, the tugboat would let out three puffs of white smoke from its stack. The cartoon would cut off with five minutes remaining, and the same flashing neon-green message would appear on the initiator’s screen as it would on the soon-to-be victim’s screen: “You have failed to enter code for Hour 2. Penalty to be initiated in: 5:00.” And the screech of a siren would fill the room and the timer would begin to tick.

Ellis always wondered if his partner, his cellmate so to speak, felt the same urge as he did during those final five minutes. That tantalizing urge to ignore your job for just one more hour. He thought he had a good idea of how the other felt, since both of them often waited till the final seconds to enter their code and stop the sequence.

They couldn’t push it relentlessly either. Up to now, the furthest level they had gone to was Hour 6. And although he didn’t have a calendar, Ellis felt certain it had been close to a year, at least, since they did that. He had been the one to suggest it, but after he went through Hour 6 himself—a thick noxious gas that made him want to tear his stomach out—he hadn’t dared to suggest going any further.

At the fifty-five-minute mark, the suffocating heat that filled Ellis’s room subsided. He nearly threw himself over the square metal sink, twisting both the hot and cold knobs so the water would release immediately once the code was entered and the water turned back on. Hot or cold didn’t matter. Anything would suffice at this moment.

But the water never flowed. He backed away, staring at the faucet in desperate desire and confusion. He leaned over that mushroom-shaped stool again to read the timer on the screen.

0:44.

0:43.

“Come on, man. Let’s get to it,” Ellis said. A cold twitch, like a spider made of ice, crawled up his sweat-soaked spine. He continued to stare into the screen.

0:20.

0:19.

“Nooooo. No. No. No. Not today,” he pleaded to the screen.

And soon those glowing green numerals transformed into red letters: “INITIATING HOUR 2 PENALTY…”

Ellis Rowe fell back to the floor, this time crawling into the corner of the room. He began to sob and buried his face in his hands. But soon those hands moved to cover his ears. He laid them as flat as he could so nothing could seep through. But soon enough it would.

It started as subdued buzzing, as if a mosquito was buzzing around his head. Slowly, but deliberately, the buzzing grew. It grew into a piercing whine, a needle-thin, shrill frequency that felt to Ellis as if an ice pick was steadily boring through his auditory canal. Soon he developed an excruciating headache. He fell over, curled into the fetal position, and with his hands squeezing his head so tightly that he thought it might burst, closed his eyes and prayed to a God he knew would not answer.

It took almost a full minute after the noise had stopped before Ellis opened his eyes and removed his hands from around his ears. But he did not move. He laid there, in the same place that he fell nearly an hour ago, blankly staring at the scuff on the wall beside his bed. The spot he would sometimes rub to soothe him before falling asleep.

Ellis no longer questioned “why” his partner had decided to skip protocol today. His only lingering questions were: “When is he going to stop?” and “How much pain would Ellis answer with?”

Ellis prepared for Hour 3 now, not allowing himself to hope that this may cease. He would be relieved only when he knew for sure it was over.

Hour 3 was electrical torture. At random time intervals throughout the duration, electrical shocks would pulse through the metal box. There was no way of being sure, but he was convinced from past experiences that the bed proved to be the spot in the cell that received the least amount of shock. Whether he was being smart about it or not, he didn’t care. That was another level to this punishment: the psychological pain of it all.

The incessant beeping of the alarm quieted. He heard the final ticks drift away followed by nothing. He gritted his teeth and curled his fingers around the curved edge of the bed as a force flowed over him, seizing every one of his muscles at once.

He suffered through Hours 3, 4, 5, and 6 comforted by a twisted sense of relief that he at least survived it before. Hour 4 was claustrophobia. The ceiling lowered until he pressed so tight against the floor he thought he heard a rib snap. Hour 5 brought a mist that rained down over him, causing his skin to burn. By Hour 6, he had nothing of note to vomit from his stomach and instead spent the hour dry-heaving, as if he could squeeze his digestive tract out his throat, like the last drops of toothpaste. Hours seven through ten blurred together. Ellis didn’t bother trying to anticipate what was coming next and at that point couldn’t even distinguish one pain from the other.

___

James Kovak awoke that day in a strikingly positive mood. Something he had learned to appreciate during this “rehabilitation trial” since moods like those didn’t come around so often. The supposed rehabilitation that promised to reduce his sentence almost completely if he just entered a four-digit code into the metal keypad that resembled an old pay-phone dial each and every day. That was it.

And while the boredom that persisted and hung over each day was certainly palpable, he felt a kind of excitement. A spark within his imagination that gave him hope that he might just be able to escape these four metal walls for the next few hours. Drift off to some fantasy land filled with space aliens or cowboys he could still recall from TV. Or maybe another version of reality altogether, one where he never murdered that man.

All this meant was that James was in no hurry to enter his code for the day. Maybe it was a little sense of entertainment that he enjoyed, imagining his partner in an identical metal cell—if there even was one—increasingly more anxious as the neon-green timer ticked away.

“This fucking guy…” he’d imagine his partner saying, and his cheeks would lift ever so slightly, forming the tiniest of grins across his face. That was the only thing he could control: to enter the code or not. And when to enter it.

What sounds simple often isn’t, however. For he was given a choice each day: enter the code, or don’t. If he didn’t, he would be allowed fifty-five minutes of a cartoon mouse sailing a tugboat. In the beginning, he hardly saw that as an incentive at all, especially when compared to the reduction of his life sentence, not to mention preventing pointless torture for his partner. But after some time, James began to crave seeing that cartoon mouse. Crave it like a junkie craves the prick of the needle in his arm. He would sit on the metal, mushroom-shaped stool in anticipation of the tugboat spewing out those bursts of white smoke. When all you have is shiny metal walls to look at, a fuzzy black-and-white screen might as well be the Mona Lisa.

“And who was this ‘partner,’ anyway,” he’d think to himself. “Definitely a criminal. Maybe even did something worse than me. He probably deserves an extra hour.”

As he rose out of bed, he glanced over to his screen at the end of the room. In watery, ocean-blue letters it read: “Your Partner has successfully entered their code today.”

“Thank you, sir,” he said, standing at attention, mockingly saluting the screen.

He moved over to the toilet to perform his morning constitutional. During which he peeked under the sink to see that his morning meal-replacement smoothie was ready in the small cubbyhole next to the sink. He finished his business, pressed the button against the wall to clean his ass, and rose from the toilet. He stood there for an instant. Then a full moment passed, and James Kovak just stood, his black scrub pants still wrapped around his ankles, when his eyes glazed over. Like a pendulum fixed to the floor, he free-fell away from the toilet, his head striking the metallic rectangle of a bed as the rest of his body crumpled against the floor. A noise like a gong strike reverberated through the cell. James Kovak laid motionless on the metal floor, a drop of blood running away from his brown hair, followed by a larger, darker, redder pool of it. Mr. Kovak left this world feeling nothing. A brain aneurysm, that had been ignored by the medical staff during pre-trial screenings, ended his life that day.

___

The door to Ellis Rowe’s metal confinement exploded upward. Even now, seeing where the door had opened, he would’ve still said there was no exit to that room. Two custodians entered frantically, dressed in white, medical-like coveralls. The top portion secured by three white buttons beginning above their left breast. Ellis was seated once again at the metal mushroom-shaped stool, staring hypnotically with bloodshot eyes into the black screen. A wicked, toothy grin plastered to his face. The black screen displayed a message he had not yet seen in all his time in that place. Understandably. This was the first time he’d ever reached Hour 11. In that same red text he became accustomed to over the past eleven hours, it read: “Enter Your Code and Your Suffering Will End, But You Will Die. The Choice is Your Hands Now.”

Underneath the message, four blinking underscore marks: _ _ _ . The first three already filled in with the digits of Ellis’s code: 373.

Ellis held his right arm extended. His index finger finger caressing the dial pad, his entire body violently tremoring.

“Just ho… hold on!” yelled the custodian with “Brennan” stitched into his white coveralls above his right breast.

“I will be free,” Ellis exclaimed through his crooked smile. His eyes were wide and bloodshot and he developed charcoal bags under each.

“It’s not what you think,” Brennan told him. “Your partner died… co… collapsed earlier today. His biometrics failed. We had no idea until now.”

“This is just another torture,” Ellis whispered slowly. “The torture of knowing I could have been free, and didn’t take it.”

“Woah… woah… woah,” Brennan said erratically. “It’s not what you think…”

His quivering finger lunged into the metal “3” on the dial pad. The text on the screen vanished and soon the word “Goodbye” appeared. Ellis Rowe felt a mechanical click in the back of his skull, and he collapsed over the left side of the stool. His head falling feet from where the two custodians stood.

“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” Brennan shouted. The other custodian bent over Ellis and placed two fingers under his neck and jaw.

“He’s dead.”

“I fucking know that. He tripped the kill switch in his brain.”

At that moment, an elderly white man, long white hair and a pepper-speckled beard, appeared in the doorway.

“Dr. Kress,” Brennan said in a weary voice. Both of the custodians straightened.

Dr. Kress examined the scene.

“Clean it up. I want these two rooms ready to start a new study first thing in the morning. And make sure you fix that bug with the biometric detection so this doesn’t happen again.”