Simulated Demise by Alden Mercer

Merrick Baines is a clinical technician at the Global Medical Simulation Center, a high-security facility where he calibrates hyper-realistic medical mannequins. These synthetic bodies breathe, bleed, and simulate complex physiological traumas for elite emergency training. But Merrick's sterile, meticulously ordered world shatters when he discovers a terrifying anomaly in the newest batch of mannequins: their programmed injury profiles perfectly match the undisclosed forensic details of victims from an active, unsolved serial murder case.

Someone is using the cutting-edge facility to rehearse real-world kills.

When Merrick digs into the system logs to find the culprit, he uncovers a chilling truth: the lethal profiles are being uploaded using a cloned copy of his own security badge. Framed and trapped inside the locked testing ward during his night shift, Merrick watches in horror as the final mannequin on the assembly line boots up automatically. Its biometric settings are flawlessly calibrated to match his exact body mass and height, and its scheduled cause of death is a severed carotid artery.

The killer is in the room. Now, Merrick must weaponize the high-pressure hydraulics and surgical tools around him to survive his own perfectly simulated demise before the rehearsal becomes a fatal reality.