The gaunt man's hands settled gently on top of my head, and there they stayed, just resting on the stubble of my buzzcut. This would be the first time my power was reversed against me as someone else peered through the veil of personal privacy I so often disregarded. I could feel his psychic energy beginning to seep into my mind, but I chose to believe that it would be little different from a medical checkup. Psychics, much like doctors, had seen the private bits of enough people that yours really couldn't shock them, right? That made even the most intimate of exchanges mundane in the end. After all, it wasn't like I had a lot to hide.

Even still, having someone from the CIA steal the secrets of my brain was not an attractive thought. Yet, I was willing to pay almost any price to keep my feet grounded on the track towards becoming a hero. I sat patiently and waited for something to happen, then.

Only, it never did.

"Release your blocks," he ordered me, sounding displeased. "There is a barrier here that you are not lowering."

"I'm not trying to block you, sir." I was trying to make myself as open a book as possible. I had my energy relaxed and neutral, something I had gotten a lot better at controlling. But even still, he only became more frustrated. What little of his psychic field I could make out was a swirling amber hue.

Finally, the black-suited man gave an exasperated sigh and stepped back. He pulled out his phone and began to call up a number. "One moment, please," he said.

Well, I thought, guess my power cancels his out. I sure hope this doesn't affect my ability to graduate.

This was the Rig. They did their best here to get the least predictable human beings on Earth to act as predictably and reliably as possible using all the best means of modern psychology available. But with the nature of superhuman ability, there were always going to be hang-ups.

Speaking of...

The sound of an explosion wracked through the hallway outside.

Both the instructor and I leapt up and ran out to see what was happening, only to find Flashpoint wreathed in flames there.

I gasped. “My God…”

She was screaming and cursing as she stood over a charred, dead body. From her aura I could tell that she had totally lost it. When she turned to us then, her anger only heightened.

I could see the wild look in her eyes as her mind turned to further thoughts of violence. Right at the surface of her consciousness was the fact that she had just been rejected. She would be stuck at the Rig for another cycle; perhaps even forever, and she couldn't take the thought of that. The longer she was here, the less she felt like a hero, the more she felt like a freak.

It was narcissism that drove her after all. And when that identity broke, it caused her to snap, abandoning all hope of escape.

Flashpoint... no.

Right away, I knew something was off, but it's not like I could just turn away from my instincts as she hurled a flaming orb of fire towards us. I had to lunge to the ground and raise a hand in self-defense. With a blast of calming emotion, I struck her using a bolt of blue lightning and then watched as her body wavered, suddenly drunk on calmness. It wasn't to last though, as she readied up another strike, this time summoning a red wall that stood from floor to ceiling.

As I had already dove the opposite direction from the door, there was no way for me to dodge or escape again. I was doomed where I lay.

"I'm sorry," I said, but not to her. I wanted to make this work, but it would only be a sham if I kept on denying what was apparent to me. I sat up and waited for the flames to engulf me placidly. "I just can't buy this. It isn't something she would do."

Just as soon as I had spoken these words, everything came to a standstill.

I had magically lost track of the instructor in the chaos, but he was once again standing beside me now. "I see," he said. "Well, you are not the first to circumvent the test, but in your case it is extra unfortunate. I believe it’s your power. Those that do not augment the senses are easy to simulate for me because the subject imagines them exactly as they expect them to be, whereas powers that do augment the senses... These are tricky to account for using my own imagination. Where does that leave us? A standstill."

It was clever getting me to drop my guard up front, but it hadn't been my powers that tipped me off to the ruse. I knew right from the moment I saw Flashpoint that what was happening was an illusion.

Though the instructor had seamlessly brought me into his mental world, he believed that fear would override my certainty about my own intuition regarding her. The problem was that I knew her too well. I simply couldn’t believe she would go berserk like this, leaving only one obvious conclusion. The test was ongoing.

“Very well,” he said. “Let me explain a few things.” We were whisked away from the Rig and into an empty void of space. There, the instructor directed me to be calm and wait for a moment as he puzzled over what he wanted to say. "I have a simple job to do here. Do you know what that is, Adrian?"

I didn't respond at first. I was too awestruck with the vastness of the empty black all around me. I had tried VR a few years back, but this was certainly on a whole new level. It was as real as anything else, but I couldn't fully comprehend it. Like some kind of non-Euclidean realm of comprehension, it was a nothingness I could feel. My eyes told me one thing while my power told me another. What I saw was an open vault of sky above a plane of glass. But what I felt was this man's consciousness. His own inner universe.

I belatedly guessed. "To, uh, see if I'm trustworthy?"

The man chuckled softly for a moment. "No, we're not in the business of trusting. Rather, I am here to determine the exact way in which you are not trustworthy. That is the basis on which we conduct our operations. By understanding the weaknesses of our assets, we circumvent the need for trust entirely, and things go much smoother that way. The last three months have been about developing a psychological model of each of you. One that can predict your behavior and assess your general threat level."

The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

"You can turn people into equations?"

"More or less. Frankly, the science involved is above my paygrade too. All I do here is run the scenarios that test it. If your behavior matches what we expect in a very specific case of peak stress, then we know we have you figured. We've got a handle on your drawbacks. But if you act outside the model? Of course, it means we still have work to do. The problem with you, though, as Bigshot said, is that you're a troublemaker. That's our word for it, anyway."

I didn't like how easily he drug up information from my past. It told me he was reading me like a book as we spoke. He could access my memory seemingly just as easily as I could. I realized that he saw everything, including these very thoughts...

"Indeed, I do. Put more precisely, Adrian, your power makes you an unknown. You could be anywhere between zero and one hundred percent likely to go off the rails. This is why it is so unfortunate I cannot run any tests on you.”

“You’re talking about my influenceability,” I said.

“Quick, as always. Though you think you've become less prone to its sway, you haven't stopped to consider how much effect this place has had on you. You've become predictable only because you're surrounded by others undergoing intense psychological discipline. Most supers have a drawback which is easy to predict, you see. Straightforward psychoses like dissociation, phobias, personality disorders, and so on. But you... your problem is that you pick up whatever is around you. You’re a chameleon. A hollow nothing on the inside, really."

His words landed like a slap to the face. If that were true, I thought, how was I burning with defiance at hearing it? Shouldn't I have conformed? This bastard could certainly hear my disdain for him, but I didn't care anymore about respecting his rank. I wasn't about to just buy his bullshit point blank when I knew it was wrong.

"Perhaps I spoke too harshly," he began to backstep. "Hazard of my main line of work as an interrogator is that I tend to go for the throat. Let me rephrase.”

“Please do,” I hissed.

“At least you comprehend the problem, don’t you? We were hoping we could get a handle on it. The Administrators told me they thought they had found a novel approach around the issues with their math. My test would have revealed for us if that was true or not. But, as you saw, that didn't work either. This leaves us stuck, and stuck is not acceptable."

"You have access to all my memories. Can't you see that I have a conscience of my own? Maybe, just this once, you would settle for trusting that someone wants to comply instead of always making sure they have no possibility of doing otherwise?"

“Ha. No. Someone like you can’t be left to chance. The enemy is always trying to make spies out of our heroes, and you are just a perfect storm for them. You’ve got the perfect power and we can’t track your loyalty directly. That’s a disaster waiting to happen, and you know it.”

“Just look for a moment.” I had a hunch about what I could do, and I swiftly saw that I was right.

With a simple wave of my hand, I changed the landscape around us, exerting my power on it. He seemed annoyed at first, but he waited to see what I had to show him before shutting me down.

I took him back several years ago to a memory of mine. It was a cold and nasty night, and I was going for a walk to clear my thoughts. Exploration was one of my main forms of entertainment and since I didn't have any fear of being attacked, I frequently walked through the worst parts of New Marion. That night I found myself in a homeless camp, just taking in the sights when a fight broke out.

"Do you know what happens here?" I asked him.

He nodded, fast-forwarding the memory a bit with a swipe of his own, as if it were a movie. We watched then as I stepped in to stop the fight, dropping my invisibility and putting my own life at risk to keep things from escalating. One of the fighters had drawn a knife and I couldn't bear to watch him use it as he beat the other man down. He wasn’t just going to accept a loss; he was going to take their life.

In that moment, it had been my own desire to help that lead me into action, even in the midst of so many people who couldn't care less. By all rights, their influence should have resigned me to apathy, but my own empathy broke through.

"See?" I said.

He scoured. "How about this?" The scene changed again to a different night walk of mine.

I was crossing the street alone when suddenly a woman sprinted out of the alley and grabbed my arm. She had seen right through my invisibility, and it scared the absolute shit out of me. Because she had been looking specifically for someone to help her, that motivation overcame the will to ignore me, which rendered me plain as day.

I recalled that she asked me to call nine-one-one. She told me someone was after her, trying to kill her.

And what did I do? I shoved her off and ran.

" I was living in a different world back then and somebody broke through it violently. This was only a few months since I became homeless. Even still, I regret it to this day."

The instructor was not buying my excuses. "You helped the homeless man because he reminded you of yourself. Just like with the Rampager, you acted to try and relive a moment you thought should go differently. Since then, you've just been caught up in the flow of what others expected you to be. But there is no telling when that will change or whose idea of ‘good’ you will suddenly adopt."

"Damn you," I said. Merely thinking it wasn't enough to make my point. He had to hear me say it. "You're giving no credit here, even though you know I'm not just some blank slate. Fine, let's say I did everything not out of moral compunction, but out of regret. That's still something. It tells you I’ve internalized a vision of myself as the ‘good guy’ that works for you."

"The problem is that we have no way of knowing how much this can change across time. Despite what you may think, peoples’ morals change, Adrian. Especially yours. Sheltered from human interaction for all those years you remained stagnant, but in just the span of a few days acting as a hero your entire outlook on life shifted. You practically became a different person."

"You're thinking about this all wrong," I countered. "Even if this is true, it's not going to make me unpredictable. Put me on a team of heroes like anyone else and I'll never stray a bit. I'll always be able to draw upon the best of those around me, just like I did during the attack on New Marion. I used that to muster far more courage than I had any right to."

He took a good long while thinking over what I said. I suspected also that he was reviewing those events to see if I was right.

"If I tend to take what works," I continued, "that means I'll be the most stable asset you could hope for. I mean, just look at what's happened here? I've been exposed nonstop to the riskiest supers in your disposal, and yet all I've picked up is their focus and drive to beat this place. My psych-evals will attest to that. Shouldn't this tell you everything you need to know?"

I am my own man, I told myself. He's wrong. I can tell when I'm being influenced. I can watch my own thoughts and choose what to let in.

The way I had learned to operate was almost a kind of nihilism. It was not that I didn't believe in anything, but I knew that beliefs and thoughts had their own ulterior motives. They were like living things. Like bacteria in my body, some were necessary and good, others were parasitical and bad, but none of them were truly me. And as long as I remembered that, I knew that he was wrong.

"You've made your point," he said, ending my internal tirade and reminding me that he was still listening to everything.

I simply laughed. "You're kind of a captive audience, I guess. Just… tell me you see my point."

"I've heard enough, yes. We’ve hit this test’s dead end. I will bring back what I’ve learned to my superiors and let them make the final decision.”

In a flash, everything fell away, and I watched as his hands withdrew. I knew we were back in the classroom. No tricks this time, just reality returned.

"I guess that’s it then,” I said.

The bald man in the black suit continued to be as deadpan as ever. "You may now exit the room. Send in the next applicant on your way out. There is nothing else for you today, so you may return to your quarters."

With that, I sighed and left. Only time would tell what the future held.

They're just going to have to trust me, I thought to myself. Yeah, right.