Today is the big day. The last five years of studying and preparation have built up to this. And the next 60 years or so of my life will be decided by this – if the Vision’s life expectancy estimations are correct, and they usually are. Nervous doesn’t come close to describe what I’m feeling. I feel like if someone stuck my arm in a blender, I would calculate the speed of rotation of the blades before wondering about my arm.
“What are you staring at Kyrian? You can’t afford to zone out at this time!” my step mother admonishes from across the dinner table. We’re eating a stew made from the leftovers of, perhaps, two days ago, calling it thrifty would be an understatement. But that’s what I’m studying to change.
I look around the ramshackle cube I call my home. Will I miss this?
No.
I don’t have to think hard about it. I’d probably even trade it for another cube in the Stacks. Too many bad memories here. No, I’d say the real issue is…too many good ones. My father was my real family. I never knew my birth mother but while my father was around Sandra, the step monster, did a pretty good job of hiding her monster tendencies. We were never close but we didn’t hate each other either. The last memory I have of my father was the two of us building a ratchet little robot to help Sandra cut the potatoes. That was five years ago.
“Hey! What did I tell you? Stop zoning out.” She takes my plate, even though I was going to go for seconds and puts it in the sink. “You have to get us out of this god awful place.”
When my father was around she didn’t think twice about the dust and grime. She ignored the stale taste of the food. She didn’t even complain when the water ran out in the middle of her shower. She would laugh it off and would never mention the fact that she came from a better place.
Then, she transformed. Barely two months after scattering father’s ashes she could no longer stand the Stacks. Her life was now an undeserved hell and mine revolved around studying hard for the Examination so we could do better.
Five years I did nothing but study, train, study and then train again. Why? Because the Government rewards merit and the Exam is what verifies it.
“Batch 182 of Sector D-1 of Falcon City, report to the Examination Hall in Inner Sector D within 15 minutes,” said an artificially beautiful voice. The voice came from my Communications Unit for Public, usually referred to as a Cup. Every citizen of the Continent has their own Cup. There are many different models from different companies. Mine, of course, is Government issued. Which means the only features I have are Cup to Cup calls, known as String calls and GovNet. And naturally, the basic apps like clock, calculator, GPS, multimedia etc.
“It’s time,” she says as she walks me to the door. “Do your father proud.” She invokes my father’s name so as to guarantee my cooperation. It’s like she thinks I would flunk the test on purpose just to spite her. Do your father proud, not her, who made me study in the first place.
I get into the rickety elevator and press the button for the ground floor. The Stacks is exactly what it sounds like. It is nothing more than cube like constructions 3d printed year after year, stacked on top of each other in a single compound. The poorest of sectors are made up purely of Stacks.
About three floors down a boy about my age gets into the elevator. He has a bread bun in his mouth and is wrestling with a smart black tie. He clearly doesn’t know how to tie it, so I open my mouth to offer help.
“Gory-fucking-hell!” His aggression startles my mouth shut but I recognize his voice. His name is Adam, he was part of the group I used to hang out with five years back. We weren’t the best of friends but seeing a familiar face calms my nerves a little.
“Need some help with that?” I smile at him.
“You know how to tie these things?” he looks at me questioningly. Knowing how to tie a tie isn’t something a kid from the Stacks generally knows. We don’t exactly get invited to shirt and tie events. But of course it was one of the things I was thoroughly tutored in by Sandra, ‘Dress like who you want to be’ and all that.
“Damn cuz, nicely done,” he says to me after I complete the hourglass knot.
We get to talking about what we expect our results to be. It’s not a bad conversation but it sputters to an end after I tell him I’m expecting to be graded at least at B-8.
The highest grade of any person living in these Stacks is a C-12 and the average is closer to a C-6. If your grade is lower than C-1 you are branded unranked which basically bars you from getting a job anywhere that requires more than two brain cells. Sector F-12 has the greatest unranked population, they either survive on Government rations or they pray to be lucky enough to get a janitorial job at some seedy bar.
Sandra was a rank B-8 coming from a family of B-10s. In her opinion I’ve had more preparation than she or any of her family did and that alone should enable me to crush their scores. She wants me to get at least an A-1. Like it could be that easy.
We walk in silence through the Stacks and make our way to the inner ring of the city. Falcon city is the largest city-state in the Continent. The city started out as only a ‘Capital Ring’, now known as the ‘Capital Oh’ and was expanded with time to add a ring with six sectors called the Inner Ring, and then another ring with twelve sectors for every inner sector called the Outer Ring. I live in the first outer sector of the inner sector D. Confusing right? It’s like the whole city is planned to baffle tourists and foreign aristocrats. Of course, you’d never catch a tourist or aristocrat of any kind in the Outer Ring.
Then again the entire geography of the Continent is equally messed up. It’s like they gave a three-year-old a map and some measuring instruments and a pen, and told him to go have fun.
The Continent is the only surviving landmass on earth, World War III really did a real number on our planet in 2020. Now a hundred years later, society has recovered and is stronger – mostly – than ever.
Our population in now less than one-eighth of what it once was. It is times like these that I believe in a God, albeit a rather dark humoured one – because we still have an over-population problem. You see the war made most of the planet uninhabitable. The Continent and its constituent City-States is the only enduring civilization on Earth.
‘The Government’ is the body that governs the City-States, but not in any real sense. Every City-State is an independent sovereign state, much like how it was during the Greek Civilization. The Government are just the middlemen. They’re job is to make sure everyone remains civil and that we don’t wipe ourselves from existence with another ill-conceived war. The Examination was their brainchild.
The Examination Hall is a depressingly dull building, all grey concrete and straight edges. It towers over the other building in the vicinity in a way that makes you wonder just what they use to test the applicants. As we enter the fifteen feet tall doors, we are hit by the strong smell of frequent sanitization. The immaculate interiors are flooded with teenagers.
The applicants were all the same age as me, all citizens at the age of sixteen are required to take the Examination. It not only scores your mental and physical capabilities but also judges whether you are fit to be a part of society. Every year in Falcon City, out of 40,000 applicants around 900 are deemed undesirable and are digitized along with some of the lower end of the unranked applicants.
The logic is that if you are unfit to be a part of society, or unable to provide useful contribution to society, you do not have the right to take up space and leech from the ‘meagre’ resources of the Continent.
“Applicants, it is now 1700 hours. Your Examination will begin at 1730 hours but first there will be a briefing,” says a woman in the front of the crowded lobby. She is dressed in a smart suit and is decorated with a few military medals and is standing on a podium. “As you are all aware, the Examination will decide which tier of society you will be a part of. I’ll be blunt, if you botch this up, you’re ruined for life. That said, there’s no real way in which you can prepare for this,”
What?!
“You will not even remember the testing process. Before you take the test you are required to sign a document insuring your secrecy.” She pauses. “The Exam will rank you from C-1 to A-12, any person lower than a C-1 will be considered unranked. The applicants ranked A-1 and higher will be eligible to apply to Elysium. Those deemed undesirable will be sent to the respective facilities in Purgatory.”
Elysium. That’s where everyone wants to be. Years ago the Government perfected virtual reality. Of course, this was no easy task so only one such virtual world exists. They named it Elysium. The world runs on a giant server farm of quantum computers and is fully immersive. They say if it wasn’t for the interfaces and fantasy elements, there is no way to differentiate between Elysium and the real world. Every single NPC is a true Artificial Intelligence. Heck even the mobs have individual A.Is.
Why would The Government make what is essentially a gigantic video game, you ask? Well, because they’re clever. What better way to make humanity satisfy their ego and violent inclinations than to only let them think they did?
Elysium, more than anything is a stage for politics. Prestige, respect, power are now all things you earn in Elysium. People stopped thinking of Elysium as a game decades ago.
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On the other hand Purgatory is the virtual equivalent of Shutter Island – an island for nutters in one of my favourite films of the early twenty-first century. There are different wards for different crazies, criminals, and other people judged undesirable. They are made to serve out their sentences and perpetual ‘rehabilitation’ in this part of Elysium with next to no hope of making it back to society. Some of the severe cases are completely digitized and their real bodies are disposed of. Making them entirely virtual existences. My father joked that, if there was still a functioning Church or religious sect, this would really grind their gears.
“Now,” she tilts her head down and stares at us from above her spectacles like a grade school teacher, “I suggest you spend the remainder of your time gathering your thoughts and preparing yourselves, rather than bickering amongst yourselves.”
So of course majority of the applicants turn to their friends and start bickering.
I shift my attention from the woman back to the people around me. When I first came in I noticed a number of people who were different from the rest of the crowd. They seemed centred somehow, confident. Like they knew what to expect – of course they didn’t really, I guess it was just a result of being confident of their abilities. They were the stark opposite of my buddy Adam here.
As I look at each of them in turn I take mental notes on each of them; they’re behaviour, who they’re talking to, their body language, everything I could notice – just like I was trained to do.
When my attention comes to the last of them I am surprised to realize that I actually recognize her. It was the daughter of the current Blade – the title given to the strongest and most skilled sword-master in the Continent. Tiberius Crandor picked up the mantle of Blade of the Continent from Miyamoto Hakaryu – or is it Hakaryu Miyamoto? I can never remember which his first name is and which his family name is – Who gave it up due to old age. Most people agree however, that Miyamoto is still the most dangerous man in the Continent.
The princess – her father had carved out a piece of Elysium for himself – was talking to a girl animatedly. Probably noticing me staring at her, she turns to face me and raises an eyebrow. More than a little embarrassed to have been caught staring, I look away quickly.
Unfortunately the damage has been done and a large boy shoves his way through the crowd to me and says, “What are you looking at peasant?” with an ugly sneer.
I roll my eyes at him. “What are you, the body guard?”
I see him look around the empty room he calls a brain to come up with some sort of reply when another boy says, “Know your place Outtie.”
He’s the complete opposite of the troll who spoke before him. Where that guy was over muscled and butt-ugly, this one was all lean physique and pretty faced. I recognize him as one of the people I scoped out. His name is Jason Stanbert and he’s from the Inner Sector B, if I overheard correctly.
“And you must be the secretary,” I say with a faux smile.
Somewhere in the middle of the altercation, Adam slipped away, the slimy rascal. People from the Outer Sectors generally prefer to stay out of the way of the Inters. I’ve never really interacted with one before – mostly due to me five year hiatus from normal life – so I guess I’ve never really understood why.
He mimics my faux smile, “Pray we don’t meet again little Outtie.”
Little?! I’m taller than you numbnuts.
Inters tend to call us ‘little’. For the most part they would be right, the Outer Sectors don’t get access to the same quality food and supplements as the Inters. So generally we’re on the smaller side. Sandra of course, wouldn’t stand for that and somehow – I really don’t want to know how – procured for me the same physique and cognizance enhancers that the Inters take.
I wait for Leia Crandor to tell her lackeys to save their breath, or to shut up, or something, anything. But she doesn’t, instead she just stares at me with curiosity in her eyes. I didn’t expect her to be the kind of person who let people speak for her. Her father being who he is, she being who she is – supposed prodigy with the sword and all that – I expected more of a fight from her. Instead she just walked away. That’s odd, I’m not usually wrong about a person’s character.
My musing is interrupted by an announcement, “Kindly line up at the gate mentioned in your personal Cups and wait for further instructions.”
Obediently, for the most part, we all line up at the allotted gates with surprising civility. Then, one by one we are taken through the gates. Usually at an interval of about five minutes but sometimes as quickly as several seconds. I can’t even guess at why the time intervals vary like that, it seems completely random.
I don’t have to wait long before it’s my turn. I walk through the door into a dark corridor. Not knowing what’s expected of me, I continue to walk till I reach another door. I stop there for a second, take a deep breathe to compose myself, and push. I’m blinded by the bright light of the room ahead of me, my eyes had adjusted to the corridor.
I wait for my vision to return but it does not.
When my eyes finally come back to focus, I find myself sitting in a chair in front of the military woman who briefed us. “If you remember your name, state it for the record.”
“What? What’s going on? Where am I?” I mumble groggily.
“If you remember your name, state it for the record,” she repeats herself with the professional patience you gain when you find yourself doing the same thing repeatedly.
Taking that to mean this is part of the norm I answer her, “Kyrian Akhilleus Darko.”
She raises an eyebrow. Probably didn’t expect me to use my middle name, most teenagers would shy away from it. But my father chose it for me and so I’ll wear it with pride.
“Mr. Darko, you have completed the Examination. We are going to ask you a series of question and with the aid of a lie detector we will ensure that you have no memory of the process of your assessment. Do we have your consent?” She pauses, “Note that if you do not give said consent you will be sent to Purgatory until such time as we have consent to perform this interview.”
She says the words in a practiced monotone which tells me there’s really only one way in which to reply.
“You have my consent.”
Ten frustratingly confusing minutes later I find myself back in the lobby with the rest of the applicants. Apparently I was the last to come out.
The Suit, as I had come to think of her, was back on the podium in the front of the lobby. “Your results will be sent directly to your Cups, feel free to share your results, or keep them private – whichever you prefer. You are now citizens of the Continent,” she gives a respectful nod, “With exception to those of you deemed undesirable, of course,” she says humourlessly.
I start hearing little pings over the din of the crowd, signalling messages on people’s Cups. The seconds tick away as I wait for my Cup to ping. I look around nervously and once again my sight latches onto Leia, she hasn’t got her grade yet either. I take that to be a good sign.
Still more time passes and people are now celebrating and crying. A dull pain begins to build in my chest. Slowly it spreads to my neck and I start to feel lightheaded. Am I having a heart attack?!
No I’m having a panic attack.
Oh my god. That’s so pathetic.
Then a ping comes from the Leia’s direction. She squeals in joy and gives her friend a bear hug. I was not expecting that and it seems neither was her friend. Her smile is beautiful and contagious and I find myself forgetting about my pain and discomfort. Her red hair glows like embers, lit up from behind by the setting sun through the windows. Before the Examination I was so high strung that I only saw her as a potential rival. I feel like I’m noticing her, really noticing her for the first time.
And then my Cup rings.
Excitedly I look at my Cup, for some reason I’m full of hope. For some reason after seeing her smile like that, I feel like everything will go my way. I feel like the universe itself is shifting in my favour.
I have never been so wrong.
Where my grade should be, I see a big red ‘U’.
Undesirable.
I think that maybe it means unranked, at least that wouldn’t be as bad. But no. I know that the unranked applicants are sent home with the letter ‘D’.
Undesirable.
Sooner than I can object I can hear people screaming out, soldiers have come to apprehend the undesirable applicants.
Before I know it a man grabs my arms and puts me in handcuffs.
“Come on Pug, move your ass,” he grunts as he pulls me toward the door I went through for my Examination.
I struggle to break free but his grip is like iron and with the cuffs in place it’s impossible to do anything of significance.
And so I am dragged away unceremoniously all wide-eyed and scared. The last thing I glimpse is a confused expression on Leia as if she doesn’t understand why we’re being taken, and a smug and satisfied expression on Jason.