A handful of scientists are being held captive in a locked room with only some soylent “food” to keep them alive and some books to pass the time. Apparently an AI of sorts is ruining weird experiments on them like they were labrats.

Asimov's January/February 2025

Of course they try to find a way to escape, which involves some interesting oddities of Linux. While that aspect of the story was sort of amusing, as a whole the story felt a bit pointless. These people are thrown in a terrible situation, but we know too little about them or what is going on to really care about what is happening.

Read in Asimov’s January/February 2025
Rating: 2