Leo

Leo paced towards the wall, his fingers tangled in his mess of brown hair. He stared hard at the anaesthetic white paint, hissed through gritted teeth, then turned and paced back to the terminal.

You are an administrator.

Ripping his gaze away, he went to the door and tried the handle. It didn’t budge. He slammed a fist against it, but it was sturdy and he only received a sore hand for his efforts. It was built like someone expected it to be struck—no, that wasn’t correct. All doors on Plato were built to withstand changes in air pressure, so they had to be sturdy. Growling, he turned and walked back to the terminal.

You are an administrator.

“Fine!” he shouted. After he spoke, Leo realised that he’d broken rule zero, and that he didn’t care.

He threw himself into the chair and whipped out his meus. Sixty-three minutes remaining.

It wasn’t that he hated being trapped in this room—okay, that wasn’t true; he was completely livid! Regardless, what bothered him was what they would make him do. He’d spent a long time speculating on the sorts of powers an administrator had. None of them seemed good for the students. Administrators and students were fundamentally different classes within the test’s hierarchy. And given the sorts of games King’s College liked to play, given the insanity of this test, he didn’t think it beyond them to pit students against each other in some twisted game. Leo could refuse to comply with whatever task he was given, but he worried that, once he melted that ice shelf, there’d be all sorts of nasty stuff inside and he’d have no choice but to play the bad guy.

Not like he had much of a choice. It was either sit here and let the class fail or try his luck and maybe not fail.

He let out a long breath, then dropped his meus in the dock beside to the terminal.

The dock’s cover snapped shut and a new message blinked onto the terminal screen.

You have been granted access to this administrator terminal. The following rules apply to your usage of this terminal:

0. You cannot unlock this room’s door.

Of course, he thought bitterly.

1. You can remove your personal terminal at any time by using the “Exit” button.

Well at least I haven’t been completely trapped, just mostly.

2. This terminal can be used to unlock a student’s personal terminal from their desk.

He blinked at rule two, then let out a long, “Huh?” Leaning in, he rushed through the rest of the rules.

3. A student’s personal terminal can only be unlocked once.

4. There is a ten second delay between unlocking terminals.

5. Up to twenty terminals can be unlocked.

Only twenty, he reiterated. It seemed like a lot, given that there were one hundred and eleven students by his count—eight rows of desks by fourteen, subtracting the one girl who’d fled before the test began. However, if twenty students out of the necessary fifty-six could be freely unlocked, that was probably because King’s College had predicted that a lot less than fifty-six students would pass on their own. But he didn’t want just the necessary fifty-six to pass, he wanted them all to pass.

Leo peaked over the desk and counted eight vacant desks on the floor below, nine if he included Alan who had decided to sit back at his desk for whatever reason. It looked grim. He had no idea which twenty were most in need of a free pass. Maybe he could have picked the students who held up the most fingers since they were the least likely to pass, or maybe unlock the students further along in their test since they were the most capable of helping others.

No, that didn’t track. The question difficulty tended to spike at weird moments. Question one could be brutally hard for one student while the rest were easy, whereas another student stuck on question eighteen might have even tougher questions at nineteen and twenty. It would make no difference if he passed students at random.

No, stop thinking in terms of numbers! he berated himself. What’s the broader picture here? What’s the strategy?

Leo leaned back, closed his eyes, and traced back his steps. There’s an administrator terminal. It can be used by a student—any student? No, it granted me access. I don’t know the conditions for access. The doors around the testing room are unlocked. There were weird hints that brought me here.

He didn’t want to admit it, but he was manipulated into the room, this trap. The thought of it made him bitter.

Hints were given both during the test and before it. Their purpose, as far as I can tell, is to guide us through the rules, which are both literal and subjective—

Leo bolted upright, his eyes almost popping out of his head. “Rule one: administrators cannot fail any students,” he gasped, emphasising the plural. “There’s more than one administrator!”

It all made sense now: the difficulty of the questions, the creepy principal, the odd rules. It was a test about defying rules. For the first time today, Leo found this test intriguing. However, knowing this meant nothing if he was trapped inside of a room with no way to communicate his discovery to the others. At this rate they would stay within their lowest entropy state, trapped within walls made of faulty interpretations.

Leo tapped on the terminal screen and an array of desks appeared before him. Some were marked as unlocked, others weren’t. No other information was given. He didn’t need it. What he needed wasn’t to unlock the right students, but the right desks.

What he needed was to send a message.

Morgan

What is wrong with him?

She belted her fists against the door for the fourteenth time, and she promised herself that this one would be the last. A few seconds later, another fit of rage took her and she slammed the door for the fifteenth time. That time was the last, she promised.

Her forehead tapped onto the door and her whole body slumped forwards. It was falling apart so quickly. If Morgan could not break the door down, if she could not get things under control, then the test was over. They were all going to fail and Morgan’s dream—her only dream—of becoming the finest President that Plato had ever seen, of being the light of this world, would come to a sudden halt. Who would let her near a position of leadership once they found out she failed her first and only test at King’s College? Nobody!

Her legs going weak, Morgan slid down the door and collapsed onto her knees. Her forehead felt raw from its passage along the plastic surface and her hands were finally starting to throb. She did not mind the pain; she deserved it, and more. She considered screaming out her frustration, but that would have been in violation of rule zero.

I did it again. I pushed someone away. Maybe if I had listened to Leo rather than berate him, we might not have been in this situation.

And he had been right, about everything. The entrance test, Class Euripides, the hints, maybe even Descension—okay, perhaps not that. There was simply no way that a school would have a student Descended for failing a single test. Descension was for damaged goods, not for students who failed to demonstrate they were not material enough for Plato’s best secondary school.

Conspiracies aside, she needed Leo. He was the only person who knew what was going on. Perhaps in that room he had discovered something amazing that could help everyone. Morgan knew she should not have been upset about that. She knew she had to remain hopeful. But without Leo she was useless.

How could you let yourself get trapped like that? How can I be a leader without a proper advisor?

But there was no point in staying here. The door could not be broken without the right equipment. There was hardly any steel used in Plato, but the reinforced polymers used in everyday structures were strong enough to make steel redundant. She had tried the handle, tried accessing the door with her meus, and a number of other experiments that Morgan preferred not to recall due to embarrassment. Leo was trapped. That was the end of it.

She knew she had to go back to the testing room, but then Morgan would have to admit to the rest of the students that they—that she—had lost their most valuable asset, and that she had not the faintest clue as to how she could get him back.

She knew it was pointless, though.

She knew she was going to fail.

She felt sick.

Morgan scrambled off the floor as a violent wave of nausea struck her. She found a nearby water fountain, leaned over, and hurled up the contents of her morning tea. Bracing herself on the fountain, Morgan remained stationary until she had coughed up every last bit of bile. Her legs trembled, her vision blurred, and her throat burned—thankfully, that helped her forget that her whole life was about to be ripped away from her.

Vaguely she recalled having eaten before leaving for King’s College on the chance that her day proved too busy to afford a quick bite. She should have known that overeating was a terrible idea. What a horrible day for her stomach to be playing up on her again!

Come on, get up, her mind pleaded.

Her legs refused to listen.

Eventually Morgan stumbled back to the theatre, still feeling miserable. Her normally-tanned complexion must have gone a bit pallid, given what she had been doing the last—she checked her meus—fifteen-ish minutes. Too long.

As the other students noticed her, they snickered her way and flashed signs to each other. From a distance, Morgan could make out some of them: gossip, and all about her and Leo. Her cheeks went red and she put her head down to avoid their gazes.

Fortunately, Lumia stepped in and gesticulated wordlessly at the distracted students to keep working, offering silent encouragement. Everyone responded rather positively to her display, as though her cheeriness were somehow contagious. That only further upset Morgan. How could someone be so happy in this situation? Was she not worried what would happen if they failed?

Just thinking about Lumia triggered a spike of jealousy in Morgan’s gut. It was unfair! How could a Prospect have finished faster than her? At her previous school—previous, assuming she passed this test—Morgan’s grades were not just better than everyone else’s, they were completely unmatched! But to be trounced by a Prospect? And not just a Prospect, but a complete ditz with an annoying grin! It was irrational. Morgan still bared the crest of Charlemagne Secondary School: to be surpassed by a Prospect made her feel that all her struggles were for naught.

Sighing, she scanned across the room. Everything was exactly as she had left it, which was both good and terrible at once. The good part was that Raphael seemed to have taken up the slack while she had been gone, organising helpers and keeping things orderly. Really, it made her happy to see someone help her so diligently.

The terrible part was that no other students had passed their tests since Morgan had tried to stop Leo from being a cat.

Sixty-three minutes remaining. Half their time chewed up. And only nine students had passed. Thinking about it made her stomach churn again.

Come on, get it together. This is not the time to be sick and miserable.

She drew a deep breath and raised her chin. How Morgan felt did not matter; there was a test to be completed.

That was when she spotted Alan buried amongst the raised hands, seated at his desk. Frowning, Morgan marched over to him.

As she approached, Alan poked up from his meus and cocked an eyebrow. ‘You alright?’ he signed.

Is it really so obvious? Morgan thought. She drew herself up and drilled Alan with a hard stare. ‘Of course. Why are you not helping the other students?’

‘I’m trying something.’ He picked up his meus and waved it around as if to demonstrate some point. ‘I saved a screenshot before. Been trying to find a way around restrictions. No luck.’

‘What screenshot?’ her hands whirred. He was most likely going to give some poor excuse for his laziness but she would hear it nonetheless.

‘When we were watching the video—principal,’ he added, ‘I saw something in the corner. Tapped on it and it showed—’

The clack of a desk unlocking echoed through the theatre, making every head turn. A student sitting in the middle row, a girl in a brown blazer, snatched up her meus and stood abruptly. She stared at her device in disbelief. Slowly her gaze shifted around the room, catching sight of the dozens of faces all watching her intently.

Then the girl spoke. “I didn’t do anything.”

Rushing over, Morgan pressed a finger to her lips to indicate silence to the student—it was good timing, too, as a few other students had turned to each other as though they were about to speak. When all was settled, Morgan glanced around the room to see if there were any consequences for the girl’s speaking, but everything seemed exactly as it was before.

Satisfied, Morgan signed to the student. ‘Tell me what happened.’

The girl hesitated, then in broken sign language said, ‘Questions, not finished.’

Morgan checked the student’s terminal but, like all terminals with no meus docked, it showed only a blank screen.

Then another student’s desk unlocked, and a grey-coated boy snatched his meus up. Morgan rushed over to him as students flashed gestures excitedly. Upon questioning him, she found that his story was the same: he had been released despite having not finished his questions.

Another student was released, then another, and another. Morgan sprinted back and forth across the room, ordering the students to assist others, building upon that system of helping that she had stitched together over the course of the test. Some of the new releases she made to help students with more fingers raised, or in other words those students who had the most questions remaining. This would allow them to bring up the total number of questions answered, which could raise their chances of passing more students.

This will work, she thought, feeling like the earth was rising under her feet. With this many helpers we can easily pass!

There was a brief moment of euphoria, about eighteen students in, where Morgan truly believed the students would never stop being released. She almost forgot to assign a student their helping duties on account of her elation. Almost. Not once did she bother to question these events: what mattered was that she could see the light.

However, once the twentieth student had been released, it all came to a disappointing close. She waited, giddy, knowing for certain that there would be another. But after a minute had passed she resigned that it would not be the case. Sighing, she resumed her role as director and the room returned to its usual ebb and flow.