As I came through the portal, I steadied myself with the outstretched hand of what appeared to be a younger, better looking version of Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the United States.

“Just squeaked in under the wire,” the ridiculously tall man said, and shook my hand. “Welcome to the Test!”

He looked at me, sizing me up, then beamed at me. “I’m sure you have a million questions and I’m here to answer all of them! I’ll be your guide to help prepare you for the upcoming…”

Sarge pushed past him. “No time Abe,” he said brusquely. “Where’s Grando?”

“As you wish, Sir,” Abe replied and pointed at a tall set of double doors. “He’s on the command deck. Sarge pointed to me. “Get him slotted then send him down.” He turned and started to leave.

“Sarge?” I asked. “What’s going on? And why does Abraham Lincoln look like he should be attending fashion week in Paris?”

He stopped and we both looked at Abe.

Lincoln wore his trademark black suit, long knee-length coat, white shirt, stovepipe hat, and black leather shoes, but it was his traditional garb in name only.

His suit was made of a shiny, high-gloss fabric that shimmered under the lights, with intricate silver embroidery high-lighting the lapels and the pockets. His knee-length coat had exaggerated shoulder pads and a dramatic tail that flowed behind him like a cape. His white shirt had a high, ruffled collar and his iconic stovepipe hat had a sleek, metallic band.

Even his shoes were different. They’d been replaced with highly polished black leather boots with interlocking buckles and pointed toes.

He towered over me, although that was mostly the hat.

Sarge smiled tightly. “To your first question, I’m not sure, but I’m going to find out. He looked over at the Balenciaga-looking Abe and sighed. As to your second question, that’s a long story and I’ll explain later.”

“Sir, all the teams are filled,” Abe reminded Sarge.

He hesitated for a moment in thought, then said, “He can be my sidekick”. He turned and when he reached the doors, they hissed open and then Sarge was gone.

“So,” I said casually. “Abraham Lincoln I presume?”

He bowed his head graciously. "May I have your name, Champion?"

“Everybody calls me Jonesy”, I said and the absurdity of my situation hit me squarely in the face. “Abe,” I said cautiously. “Am I dead?”

“All will become clear,” he said, and put his arm around my shoulder.

“So, Abe,” I said as casually as I could, pushing the madness down inside. “Where are we?”

We were in a round chamber about twenty feet across with gleaming metallic walls that hummed with energy. The rear of the chamber had an array of vertical panels that pulsed with a blue and white glow. There were 6 circles on the ground. I was standing on one of them.

Surrounding the pad were several control panels, almost like a professor’s lectern, each covered with hundreds of buttons, switches, blinking lights, dials, and levers. It was all very impressive but I didn’t have a clue what any of them did.

Abe guided me down off the raised platform I’d appeared on and I suddenly realized the entire place bore a remarkable resemblance to the transporter room in the original Star Trek.

Actually, it wasn’t just close, it WAS the transporter room from Star Trek, down to the last button, if my memories from my youth could be trusted. Hannah and I had been shuffled off to so many homes that most had just blended together, but one of our foster parents had all the original Star Trek DVDs and we’d spent hours planted in front of the TV watching them.

There was no point in trying to rationalize anything – I’d clearly either died or gone insane, so the best thing to do was to embrace the madness.

“Station 14,” he replied without hesitation and gestured for me to follow him. “About 250 miles from where you just left.”

“Station 14,” I repeated, as if I understood, and did as he’d requested, then the last piece of his sentence landed in my brain and questions started pouring out.

“250 miles? Did I just teleport? Did you beam me up? I know a transporter when I see one. What just happened to the bar? Why did you call Sarge ‘Sir’? Why are you alive? Why are you here at all?”

I had a million more questions but he held up both hands, palms out, in the universal gesture for me to slow down.

“Mr. Jonesy, all will become clear,” he reassured me. “In fact, once we leave the room, look to your right. That should answer a few of your questions right away.”

He winked knowingly and I frowned. “Just Jonesy”, I said.

“Jonesy,” he nodded agreeably.

We walked to the double doors and they hissed open automatically as we approached, each sliding into the doorframe next to them. We exited the room onto a metal catwalk, about twenty feet over the floor of an enormous rectangular room. Between my feet and through the lattice of the catwalk I could see a man speaking below me, a man I’d seen on TV countless times

It was the current President of the United States. He stood behind a podium on a raised stage and held a microphone.

“...and as you go forth into this great challenge, the hearts and minds of every human goes with you…” he said, his voice comforting and inspirational, just like he’d practiced.

Behind him, a row of VIPs in high-backed chairs watched attentively. Behind them hung the US flag, the Canadian Maple Leaf, the familiar green, white, and red of Mexico, and many more I didn’t recognize.

I started to walk forward to see who he was addressing when I noticed a window to my right.

A window!!!!! At least I could confirm where I was. I walked over and pressed my forehead against the cold glass but the sight that greeted me was so wrong it sent chills down my spine. If what Abe had told me was true, I was 250 miles up in space and the giant orb below me was Earth. But this? It didn’t look like the Earth I knew.

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Well, about a quarter of it did. The familiar blue and green hues, the twinkling lights, the bigger cities, sure, but the rest? It was totally gray with no features, no lights, no shapes, nothing at all. It was as if someone had taken an eraser and just wiped it clean.

With horror, I recalled the phone call with Hannah and the abrupt disconnect. She was down there. Or at least, she had been. Was she gone like the bar, like everything else? I grabbed the railing to steady myself.

I could make out the East Coast. The lights of New York shined brightly, the City that Never Sleeps. Yet, even as I stared, those lights began to dim, one by one. It was like watching candles being snuffed out during a blackout. And soon, not just New York, but Boston, Philadelphia, and all the cities down the coast followed suit. They all started to go dark too.

The vast expanse of the Atlantic, which had always been a deep blue whenever I'd seen pictures of it, began to shift. It looked ill, sickly. The oceans began to lose their color, slowly morphing and turning more like the gray of wet cement.

It felt like time was speeding up, or maybe it was just the sheer shock of what I was witnessing, but in what felt like no time at all, the whole planet changed. Every bit of color, every shimmering light, every defining feature was erased. Earth, once teeming with life and activity, now just hung there, plain and gray.

I pressed my hand against the cold window, the enormity of it all hitting me. My sister, my home, everything familiar, all gone. Nothing felt right anymore.

“Is that a force field or something?” I asked Abe unsteadily, hoping beyond hope there was some other explanation. “It looks like the entire planet is covered by something.”

He glanced over then frowned in confusion.

“No,” he said. “That’s new. We can ask Gabriel after you sign.”

I didn’t know who Gabriel was or what I needed to sign, but I stuck those questions away for a later time, as well as the one about why the Earth looked like a giant gray cue ball.

A rush of panic, fear, horror, and loss rushed in but I quickly “soccer balled” it.

Let me explain.

“Soccer balling” is a technique I invented when my foster parents did bad things. It was incredibly useful for compartmentalizing and restraining my emotions.

I’d just take whatever bothered me and imagine putting it into a metal sphere, then I would shrink the sphere until it, and the problem it contained, were too small to matter any more.

Hannah called it “soccer balling”, since my mental metal sphere had little panels on it like a soccer ball did, where the pieces of leather were sewn together.

In my mind, I’d imagine a metal soccer ball floating in the air, then I’d expand the ball out so that the “panels” were separated. Next, I’d visualize my problem, or whatever was upsetting me, as a red cloud, roiling and bubbling. My magical metal soccer ball also has some magical vacuum in the middle, so I’d turn that on and would suck in the problem. Lastly, I’d contract the panels until the soccer ball was seamless, containing all the badness inside.

I’d keep contracting it, making it smaller and smaller until it was too small to even see, then I’d mentally shove it deep down in the recesses of my mind where it wouldn’t bother me.

A therapist told me that was an absolutely horrible way of dealing with problems but hey, it worked and I was alive, unlike my former therapist who was presumably on the planet below.

I’d deal with the erased planet and my missing sister in due time, but for now, that awful experience was safely hidden somewhere in my brain where it wouldn’t cause a total meltdown.

Anyway, I digress.

When I looked over the railing down, I saw a bunch of people in rows, like they were about to graduate college. From my viewpoint, the formation stretched away from me and the group the farthest to the left of the formation were closest to me.

They were all standing at the position of attention, feet together, arms straight by their sides, looking directly ahead.

The soldiers (if that’s what they were) didn’t all dress the same, so whatever was happening, it wasn’t a normal military operation.

Come to think of it, were they soldiers?

The people at the front of the formation had the same clothes as the people directly behind them, but totally different from the people directly to the right or left. The closest column to me wore red jumpsuits with a large white and blue stripe across the front, white cowboy hats, and white boots.

Suddenly, it hit me. Each row was like a mini-international delegation.

The five people in the column to the right of the first group wore blue pants, an orange jacket with a blue stripe across the front, and orange shoes. To their right another group wore yellow blazers over white pants or skirts and all of a sudden it hit me that the formation looked like a giant rainbow, with each stripe a group of five people.

I was about to ask Abe if they were teams or something but the objects behind them caused me to change my question.

Whoever built this place must have been a huge Star Trek fan, because behind the formation were five portals, side by side, portals I recognized from the famous episode where Kirk and Spock go back in time and have to let a lady die. Each was about 10 feet tall, irregular, and I could see the wall through the middle, so they didn’t look like they were turned on.

“Abe,” I said cautiously, pointing at the weird looking rings, not wanting to make assumptions. “What are those?”

He looked over to where I was pointing and smiled. “Just a few minutes more and all will become clear.”

“You can tell me,” I said, and smiled a hopeful smile wanting to hit him in the head with a brick.

“Actually,” he replied chuckling, “I can’t. Not until you sign and that’s where we’re going.”

He beckoned and I followed him down the catwalk to a door with a brushed steel number 1 in the top center of the door. As we approached, it slid open with a hiss.

The room was small compared to the hanger-looking-place, maybe 10 by 20 feet and it was utterly bare inside except for the pictures on the left wall, headshots with no names.

As I entered, two heralds who looked like they’d be right at home welcoming the Queen of England flickered into existence in front of me, raised their trumpets, took a deep breath and…

They vanished as Abe waved his hand.

“No time,” he said in response to my unasked question and made another gesture with his hand.

A luminescent scroll flickered into existence in front of me, suspended in the air. It pulsed softly, its surface glowing with an electric blue light.

“Take it,” Abe suggested helpfully.

The electronic parchment was artfully aged, etched with myriad glowing symbols I couldn’t read, and as I watched, inscriptions flowed across the curved surface in some language I didn’t recognize. As I looked closer, the symbols started to reconfigure, gradually morphing from moon runes or whatever they were to recognizable letters.

“CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR SELECTION!” it said and I looked over at Abe uncomprehendingly.

He gave me a thumbs-up and nodded encouragingly.

“My selection?” I said and reached out with my right hand, realizing I was still holding the boomerang I’d picked up in Sarge’s bar, the one that had poked my leg. I tucked it carefully into my belt, then reached for the scroll.

It unfurled instantly and as it floated in front of me, I began to read. “Wherefore the undersigned…”

“Go to the bottom,” Abe said helpfully. “I’m being told we’re on a tight schedule and have to accelerate your in-processing. Besides, no one reads terms and conditions anyway.”

At this point, I’d given up trying to understand what was going on or even how a guy from the 1800s knew about “Terms and Conditions” but made a mental note to sit on Sarge until he explained this. And what did he mean “being told”? I didn’t see any headphones, so who was telling him?

I skimmed through the document quickly, seeing words like “Rights to Likeness in perpetuity”, “Perma-Death Indemnity”, but since I wasn’t a lawyer and out of options, I obediently scrolled to the end and saw there were two buttons, “Accept” and “Reject”.

“How do I click accept?” I asked.

“Just think about it happening,” he said. “The system will take care of the details.”

I mentally clicked on the big green button. The word “CONGRATULATIONS” appeared in front of me in glowing red letters, and I heard a triumphant fanfare.

“WELCOME CONTESTANT," a voice said in my head, warm and comforting, but entirely too loud.

PREPARE FOR INITIALIZATION

“Prepare for what now?” I said and suddenly everything in my field of view exploded with information.