If this entry seems weird, that's only because it is. It is explained here.

If you want to read what comes before, go here.

The full table of contents is here.

My contribution is below:

Decisions

Gregory heard the whir of the electro magnets disengaging the bolts on the top and the bottom of the door and the click as the block on the latch opened. He put his hand to the handle, and paused. He had never believed his heart could beat so fast, and he began calculating fluid pressure conversion rates based on the time between beats and his average blood pressure. Fluid dynamics had never been his real passion, but it was a trick he had picked up to ward off the nausea and incredible boredom of mandatory PE class. Perhaps he should have put more into gym class, or maybe taken to time to run or do some pushups or something after college. He had a feeling he might regret being so physically frail. Already his heart was racing out of control and it took several minutes of frantic calculations to calm it down. He eased the door open one inch, and peered out through the crack, rapidly calculating the sine, cosine and tangent of both right triangles formed by the gap of 2.54 centimeter in the end of a 91.44 meter wide door. The hallway was clear.

There was a yellow sticky note, a regular, yellow post-it sticky note stuck to floor under the door, as if someone had tried to slide it under with the card and it had gotten stuck. Printed on it in block letters, as if a two year old had written it, were the words, "Done what I can. On your own. -12th floor. Patrols every 15."

"All right, Gregory," he told himself, taking the note off the door and stepping back into his cell. "You need to think. Someone went to an awful lot of risk to do this for you, you can not blow it." Now why would that occur to him right now? He was the one in trouble, why should he be worried about someone he had never met? But the thought of someone else risking their life to help him shored up his spirit wonderfully. He had to get out.

"Think. Calm down and think. You have an IQ of 165 for crying out loud. Even if you didn't learn to tie your own shoes until you were fifteen, for once in your life you need to turn that brain power on something that isn't abstract." He was talking to himself. Great. Not that unusual. Lots of geniuses talk to themselves, but he had always considered it an affectation. "Focus Gregory." He wondered if the drug was still affecting his ability to concentrate. "This is real, this is bad, you need to figure this out."

"I'll start with the note, what can I tell about that?" He whispered aloud. Meanwhile, he made sure he still had the key card and closed the door. In the movies the hero would have rushed out and kung-fu chopped everyone he met, but Gregory had never been the action type. No point in being discovered before he even left his cell. No point in leaving his cell without a plan. The words of the note were written at a typical mean forward sloping angle of elleven degrees, but the pencil had been pressed into the paper at an awkward angle, almost as if it had been pushed down and backwards towards the lower left part of the letters. What did that mean? People of only ordinary intelligence figured out things like that all the time and got paid for it. Cops who barely made it out of highschool solved problems like that, right? Left handed. The note was written by a left handed writer. It was written with a pencil, but the lines were thicker at the end than at the beginning and there was a scratch halfway through where the lead had broken. Whoever it was was deliberately trying to conceal his handwriting. They weren't going to help anymore, so he was on his own. Minus twelfth floor meant he was below ground. What building had twelve levels below ground? Seriously. Maybe he should have read more mystery novels. Maybe he should have read something besides science textbooks.

"Focus" he slapped his forehead. Patrols every fifteen minutes. So the halls were regularly patrolled. Okay, that sounded simple enough. Just keep track of the time and make sure he had a hiding place when the guards walked by. His heart was going again, a mile a minute. He didn't have a paper bag so he cupped his hands over his nose and mouth to decrease his oxygen intake. In doing so he noticed a smell, strangely out of place in his surroundings. He hadn't showered in however long he had been there, and his room reeked of body odor and the tempermental toilet, but there was another smell there. It was coming from the note, and it was soft, faint, and flowery. Perfume! The note had been written by a woman? He thought back feverishly. He had not been very with it during much of his stay, but he could not remember any women other than that horrible Susanna person, and somehow he couldn't imagine her smelling like this. She was tough and fierce and sneaky. She would use perfume as a weapon if she used it at all. This was different. It reminded him of his mother. It smelled clean. He held the note to his nose and tried to suck in as much of the faint odor as he could. The woman who wore a smell like that could not be a bad person. Plus she had helped him.

"It's a trick, don't trust it," some part of his brain told him.

"Yeah, right. What would they gain by letting me out? And even if they did they could fake the card and the note, maybe, but do you think they actually made it smell like perfume? It's not strong enough to have been sprayed. You can't even smell it unless your nose is touching it."

"Don't trust it."

Talking to yourself again? He asked himself. He froze and his heart jumped through the roof of his mouth as he heard footsteps walking up to the cell door, but they passed and slowly faded. Was that one of the patrols the note mentioned? Why hadn't he noticed them before?

I need to get out of here. Right now. I've wasted too much time. He slid the card again and stepped out into the hall with determination, as if he was afraid he would lose his nerve and change his mind if he delayed another second. "Left or right" he asked himself.

"The note writer is left handed," he answered.

"Left it is then." He turned and started jogging down the hallway, carefully slipping the note and the key card into his pocket. "I have no idea where I'm going. These people have guns and probably karate or something, and I've never won a fight in my life. I have to go up at least twelve floors just to get to ground level and from there I don't know what I'm going to do. But I can either stay and die, or take my chances." As far as he could tell he was making the right choice. As long as he was free he would make the most of it. After all, you never know what might be around the next corner.