Morgan

Thirty-five minutes. Only thirty-five minutes remaining. And not a single student had been released for the last twenty!

Morgan was doing everything within her power to avoid panicking: busying herself with other students’ questions, solving disputes between the increasingly restless helpers, and when she had nothing else to do she would take mental notes of which students were closest to completion and which students they might need to abandon. Unfortunately, none of those distractions could stop her hands from shaking.

Alan and Tock had abandoned her. Leo had been trapped, by his own idiocy. Raphael was stuck at his terminal. Lumia—Morgan clicked her tongue and sought out that stupid girl from the crowd. She was bent over another student’s desk, scraping at the screen with a stylus.

Finally! She finally decided to help another student answer questions. But it’s too late. A few extra questions answered is great, but what I really need is the helpers to actually help. Can you do that? Can you do anything useful? Choking moron!

Another hand rose beside Morgan. Eager for the distraction, she broke her prioritisation system and answered their question. The girl who flagged her wore the same uniform as Morgan and, as it turned out, she was one of the helpers who was answering another student’s question from her own terminal.

The question that the student was stuck on had something to do with pre-Ascension history: a topic Morgan was not well-versed in. However, an answer did come to mind so she hastily signed it. The student stared at her with her brows pinched, but Morgan paid that no mind. Then she trotted off to find the next student to help.

At least some people are listening, she thought. I suppose I can simply focus on the few students who want to pass. After all, the rest do not deserve a place in this school. They’re useless if they cannot pass a simple test. It took me, what, twenty minutes? If it takes these students more than an hour then they are just—

“Morgan!”

She whipped around and prepared a flurry of gestures for whichever inconsiderate fool had decided to call her directly, as though she didn’t have a million other things to worry about. However, it was not some inconsiderate student that had called her but Raphael. And he seemed worried. Not wanting Raphael to see her hands were shaking, Morgan folded her arms, tucked her hands away, and rushed over.

“I can’t answer this question,” Raphael said when Morgan was beside him.

She clicked her tongue, feeling a little disappointed. She had thought much better of Raphael. ‘Yes, plenty of people cannot answer their questions,’ she signed. ‘You will need to raise a closed fist to indicate that you are a helper who is stuck and wait for someone to assist you.’

“No, I mean,” Raphael said, tapping his terminal. “This question can’t be answered.” Morgan leaned over the desk.

Sea levels have risen by approximately thirty-four metres globally since 1900 CE (-287 AA). Determine how much further sea levels will rise in another fifty years using regression modelling. Use the data provided below.

Morgan swiped to check the dataset, then let out a gasp. The “data” was a set of three vectors pointing in different directions. No tables, no figures, nothing with which to cumulate or divide, just arrows.

She stepped back, still gaping at the screen. ‘But that’s not—that’s impossible!’ she signed.

Raphael buried his head in his hands. “I should have noticed it sooner,” he spoke. “I’m sorry.”

Morgan wrapped her hands around her body to keep her stomach from churning. All of it made sense now: the difficult questions, the strange hints and formulas. The problems they were facing had nothing to do with the incompetence of the students—okay, it had a lot to do with that—but rather the real problem was that the data they were given for their questions was simply wrong.

But why? Why would the school do this? It is like they were setting us up to fail. Did they really intend for nobody to pass? Is this some punishment for my past failures, because I have been a terrible student all of these years?

Morgan was broken out of her reverie when a girl spoke in dull tones, “Ah, that’s what I was trying to tell you before.”

The student that addressed Morgan was a girl with black hair that was most definitely longer than regulation allowed. She tried not to let that bother her. With her hands still shaking, she signed, ‘You should not be speaking.’

The student shrugged. “Too late. I already spoke.”

‘Still, you should prefer using sign language. If too many students are speaking it will encourage others to follow suit.’

Looking over her shoulder, the black-haired girl said, “Er, I think it’s too late for that.”

To Morgan’s frustration, it seemed the student was right. There were few helpers who had not spoken as of yet, and even a number of test takers were beyond help. Morgan had at first tried to encourage those students to keep answering questions, but most of the failed test takers either left their desks to speak with their colleagues, resigned themselves to their failure peacefully, or outright sobbed. The only positive Morgan could think of was that it had not got any worse than that.

So far it seemed that the only consequence to speaking was to lock the speaker into their desk. So far. She could thank other students and their arrogance for that discovery. Morgan, however, was still convinced that there was another trap waiting to be sprung, and she would not be the one to be caught in it.

Brushing a strand of hair from her eyes, Morgan nodded to the girl. ‘What did you want to say?’

The black-haired girl took a breath. “Everyone’s been talking about it for a while now. Each test has one question where the data or hints they give you are completely wrong. I don’t know for sure, but I think there’s a pattern to it.”

‘What sort of pattern?’ Morgan signed.

The girl shrugged. “I only know that everyone is giving up because of it.”

Morgan turned to Raphael hoping for advice, but he only stared at her with raised eyebrows. Great. She had no plan, no direction, and no clue where to go next. Everyone had abandoned her. Well, this student had not, it seemed. That was an opportunity—her only opportunity.

She straightened herself up and tried to appear sturdier than what she felt. ‘Please investigate these data discrepancies,’ she signed.

The girl frowned at Morgan’s hands. “Can you use simpler words? Or just talk.”

Morgan stifled a grimace. ‘Please find the data.’

The girl opened her mouth to speak, then snapped it shut and nodded, scrunching up her face. She turned and strode off.

Now what? Morgan thought. What else am I meant to do? What the fu—she screwed her eyes shut and reminded herself that she was not going to give up just yet. When she opened them again she stared at Raphael, pleading with him. Say something. Say anything. Or just—at least say that it will be okay. It will, right?

Raphael made eye contact with her for a fraction of a second then ripped his gaze away. He stood, and Morgan had to crane her neck to meet his eyes—and the tension that corroded his features.

“I’m going to go help the other students,” Raphael said. “No point doing this.” He gestured at his monitor.

‘Right,’ Morgan signed, turning her back to Raphael. ‘I had better do the same.’ She knew Raphael could not see her hands. Those words were not intended for him.

She went back to helping. Having a task before her ought to have made Morgan feel better—it was a distraction, something to keep her mind off of her worries—yet she could not rid herself of a horrible tightness that grew at her core. She should have been fulfilled, since by helping others she was, in a very literal sense, helping herself. But there were always more questions. Never ending questions. Her mind kept wondering back to the test, to the helpers asking for help, to her peers having abandoned her, to how it was only her, all alone, abandoned. Panic began to creep its way into her thoughts and she buried it by helping another student. It went by like a dream. The questions all blurred together. The lights from the terminals, the lights that hung above them, melted into ambience. She answered another question, and another. Questions and answers, questions and more questions. Until—

A collision. A student was standing between the rows of desks where he should not have been, chatting with his colleagues. He had stepped back without looking where he was going and crashed into Morgan. Everything went blank for a second. Next thing, she was lying on the hard synthetic floor with the wind knocked out of her.

She lay on her back. Sore, tired, hungry, stomach roiling. She didn’t want to move. Her vision was hazy. Everything was hazy. She heard laughter. At her. They were laughing at her. Yes, always at her. The laughter of crowds was always so discordant. When they laughed together it was madness. Best to pretend she couldn’t hear it. Best to go back to her soundproofed room.

There were lights above her. They dotted the ceiling at perfectly regular intervals. So many of them, so perfectly ordered. She stared up at them. The lights pricked her eyes. She wanted to close them and sleep all the bad things away. But the test was waiting.

A student stood over her and blocked out the light. Morgan recognised the symbol on his jacket—the same one emblazoned on her chest. She recognised that smug grin and buzzed scalp, from a student who earlier had been picking fights with another. It was Hervey.

Her throat seized up and she wanted to be anywhere else but there. She couldn’t, though. If she left they’d laugh at her. Besides, the test was waiting.

“Hello?” Hervey said in a mocking tone Morgan was all too familiar with. “You’re not sleeping, are you, Morgan? I thought you liked tests.”

Laughter. There was nothing she could do to stop it—she had tried. Oh, how she had tried over the years. Best to do nothing. Best to wait for it to pass.

“Hey, if you guys knew what she was like at Charlemagne’s you wouldn’t be listening to her,” the student continued. His shirt was untucked. That always meant trouble for Morgan. The ones with untucked shirts never listened. “She never used to sit with her classmates at mealtime. She always had a bench to herself in the cafeteria. We called it the Strange Seat.”

She was alone. She always was. But now more so than ever, now when she needed so desperately for people to listen. Why didn’t they listen? The test was waiting.

“One time someone scored higher than her in a test. From then on, every time she saw the guy who beat her she would get up and leave the room.”

It was hazy. She knew that something was waiting. But what? She needed to wait—let it all out. Something was in her that didn’t belong. Something she’d swallowed. Something she’d savoured at first but later it only brought pain. But what?

“Once she had to make a speech in front of the school and she showed up fifteen minutes late. Want to know why?” He paused for effect. “Someone caught her vomiting in the bathroom.” The students let out a chorus of ews.

Right. It was the fig.

Morgan retched over the toilet bowl, but there was nothing left to expel. That was her fifth time trying to vomit in ten minutes. Everything burned. Everything was miserable.

“Are you okay in there?” a voice called from the bathroom.

Her breath caught. Had this girl heard her retching? Regardless, Morgan had to answer. If not she would definitely be caught, and that was one more stress which she could not handle, one more source of badgering which she did not want to hear. She braced the toilet bowl and stiffened up every muscle in her body to stifle her trembling.

“I’m fine. My stomach is just playing up on me.” Her voice was still hoarse—a dead giveaway if this girl knew what to look for.

There was a shuffle outside the door. “Educator Burton says if you aren’t on stage in five minutes, he’ll have to fail you.”

Morgan felt another trickle of bile climbing up her throat and she forced it down. “I understand. Five minutes.”

It took forever for the shuffling to disappear, and the door to slowly click shut. The moment it did, Morgan heard giggling behind it. The girl knew, she realised. She’d tell everyone now and there was nothing Morgan could do. She spat up the bile she had been holding back, coughing and sputtering as it seared her tongue.

In truth, she really did not want to go on stage. Every student in Charlemagne’s Secondary College hated her. Why? Because they were jealous! Because she was brighter than all of them. The very thought of going on stage and having to speak to all of her schoolmates made her want to—

But speeches were a necessary part of politics. They were necessary for moving the masses. But so was discipline, and she had lacked that earlier today.

She shouldn’t have eaten that fig tart. That’s what had set her stomach off. Morgan knew that was it because it was the only food she had eaten today that was outside of her strict code—a code she had spent the last few years establishing to prevent exactly this sort of thing happening. But that boy had asked her to try it, along with all of his classmates that pushed her so eagerly. Morgan had wanted to say no but they kept nagging and nagging and saying she would like it, saying she never ate anything and she had to loosen up. She should have been firmer. But he just kept pushing.

It was delicious, though, and Morgan had eaten the entire thing when she had sworn she would only take a bite. She regretted it now, and she had known she would regret it before she ate it, but during? She was alive.

But what was it that had set her off, the fig or the tart or even the pastry? A problem for another time; another needless experiment to undertake, and more time spent not studying.

Five minutes. She had to get up. She could not fail. Class Euripides was waiting.

“Go on, Guardian. Hit me.”

Morgan blinked rapidly as the downlights cast blinding rays across her vision. She grabbed onto the nearest desk and dragged herself up onto unsteady legs. She let out a long, weary groan.

Urgh, my head.

It did not hurt, it was just… wrong. Still, she was feeling a bit better than a moment ago. Now she had to—

“I will tell you one more time. Back down.”

At first Morgan did not recognise that voice. It was far too deep and far too cold. But as her vision cleared, she made out the back of gigantic dark boy towering over another student. Raphael. His hands were flexing sporadically, and he appeared to be mere zeptoseconds away from stomping on Hervey. For his part, Hervey was wearing a horrible smug grin, and pressing his face up to Raphael’s as best his height would let him.

Morgan watched in astonishment. Is Raphael… is he standing up for me?

The boys locked eyes for a full minute. The room was tense, like an electric charge ran between them making everyone’s hair prickle with static. Morgan wanted to say something but, at the same time, she also wanted to let Raphael go. She knew that was wrong, yet deep down she thought Hervey deserved it.

Eventually, though, Hervey scoffed and broke eye contact. “Can’t you take a joke?” he said.

Other students echoed his sentiment, and heat rose in Morgan’s cheeks. They thought that was a joke? How could they even think that? If Raphael had decided to hit that boy for real, then Morgan would have cheered him on. She would have—

No. Stop it, she told herself. That’s not how a good student behaves. If you fight him you will be just as bad as him, and everything he says about you will be proven right.

Once Hervey strolled off, Raphael stared at his hands in a daze. She needed to thank Raphael once this was all over. Bitterly, she added that to the growing list of things she owed. She was accumulating so many obligations, so many debts that she knew she would never fulfill, to Leo, to Raphael, and even to Lumia for not abandoning her. For now, she prepared herself for the rest of her impossible task and begged her legs to just—stop—shaking!

Leo

What is going on down there?

Leo’s face was still pressed to the glass long after the standoff was over. He’d only caught the last moments of it before that arrogant kid broke away without ceremony. But why was Raphael getting into arguments with his classmates?

The worst part about being stuck in a room with nothing but a test-limited meus, a dead terminal, and a giant window through which one could watch their classmates writhe in captivity was that Leo had nothing to do. Nothing besides take in the utter chaos below him. He was helpless, alone, unable to make even the slightest difference.

If Leo was down there he could have deescalated it. Well, if that other guy had kept pushing and Raphael lashed out, he’d deserve whatever happened to him—who would be stupid enough to fight Guardian-in-training? Did they have any idea what sort of regimen those students went through? But Raphael wasn’t in a military academy. He was in King’s College, and throwing his weight around would only get him a ticket straight to the surface.

Prying himself from the glass, Leo tried the terminal once more. He placed his meus in the dock, tapped the screen, removed it, tried again. Nothing. This had to be the tenth time. The tenth failure. The screen continued to mock him:

This terminal is no longer operational.

“Choke you, do something!” he screamed.

He slammed a palm into the monitor and felt a crack. When Leo removed his hand, a crooked scar ran along the centre of the monitor, passing right through the word “no”. He felt something warm trickle down his palm. Blood. Clenching his teeth, Leo wiped it hastily on his alert-red blazer. It blended in.

He leaned back and tugged at his hair, whimpering for a few short seconds. After performing another fruitless lap of his prison, Leo slumped down against the glass wall and let his hands flop to the floor.

“What’s the point of this?” he asked no-one. “As far as I can see there isn’t one. Why would there be? Answer questions? Computers can do that. Why make it so difficult? Why add all these strange rules? It doesn’t test anything except—”

He lunged forward as realisation struck him. “Us.” He checked his internal logic. “Of course! The point of this test isn’t to see if we can pass, it’s to see how we react to an impossible situation.”

Grinning, he shot up and paced around the room, around and around in his tiny cell. “Throw us a few easy questions, let some students pass early, and everything seems fine. Then throw out some harder ones and let the pressure build. Give us vague rules, make us think we’re free, and people stop taking the rules seriously. Put them in a situation where they must work together, then sit back and enjoy as they blame each other when everything goes to Hell.”

He tipped his head back and roared, “Well are you watching? Welcome all to the Leo show, a one person play to satisfy all your sadistic fantasies!” Leo thrust his hands ahead of him as though trying to rear an invisible audience. “But don’t leave just yet! In our final act we’re going to torture Leo by taking away everything he ever cared for. You don’t even need to bring your knives, because we’ll be trampling on his heart, crushing all of his hopes and dreams. All for your entertainment!”

Leo broke out into raucous laughter. Tears welled in his eyes, and he spent so long laughing that he developed a stitch in his side. He had to hold his gut to keep the pain at bay. Finally, he stopped, lowered his hands, and let the last chuckles leave him for good. His anger slowly resurfaced. His face twisted into a scowl. His whole body trembled as fury wracked him, crashing through his insides relentlessly.

“Savages,” he hissed. “You’re all savages. No, even the humans that turned back to their tribal ways would be more civilised than you. Only a psychopath would do what you did to Milli.”

His hands balled into fists, and like a switch had flicked he remembered.

Control. You promised her you’d stay in control. You promised.

Then methodically, step by step, he checked over his body: first he unclenched his fists, then relaxed his shoulders, then unlocked his knees, untightened his stomach, and finally Leo released his scowl. Exhaling, he donned a smile.

Control.

When he looked up, he noticed something that had escaped him so many times before: something so natural in the anaesthetic scenery of Plato’s internals that it had never even occurred to him that he could use it. Camouflaged on the wall, painted the same hospital white as the rest of the room, was the hard casing of a switchboard.

His smile stretched into something wicked, something genuine. Oh, you want your show? I can give you one. I can give you the thing you crave the most.

He rushed over to the desk, picked up the lone chair, then with a grunt tossed it at the box with all his might. It crashed hard against it and left a dent before clattering to the ground. Leo picked up the chair and raised it high.

“I can give you chaos.”

He brought it down again and again, twisting legs, twisting plastic, until the box’s door bent open. Leo wedged one of the bent legs into it and levered it, throwing his weight against the twisted furnishing over and over until the door popped right open. He tossed the chair aside and chuckled to himself.

“Grade this, you cats!”

One by one he flipped the switches with a satisfying click. One by one the lights winked out of life.

With all the force he could muster, with every molecule of hate and misery he had welled up inside of him, he bellowed, “Fuck your test, fuck your rules, fuck your cameras, but most importantly, fuck this school!”

Once the last switch was turned, the theatre, the control station, and all the madness it restrained was left in darkness. Baring his teeth, Leo stepped back and admired his ingenuity. He felt relieved, emptied of whatever horrible substance had been simmering inside of him. But as his eyes adjusted it dawned on him that there was still a source of dull light beaming onto the wall before him.

No, it’s not true.

He turned stiffly, like his neck had rusted over, and when his eyes settled on the desk Leo’s worst fears were realised.

This terminal is no longer operational.

Leo’s jaw dropped. “Are you serious?”