by Sandi Gamble
My proctor was a slender woman of indeterminate age. She could have been twenty-three or forty-six. Advances in medicine made it hard to tell. Her face was pretty and friendly, and her dark black hair was cut in what was called a “pixie cut”. I would have thought she was in her twenties but for the stray gray hairs that highlighted her dark hair. Her eyes were deep brown, and she wore eyeliner. When she smiled, which she did often, the lines at the corners of her mouth and her eyes betrayed more years than I would have guessed.
I was waiting at the door when she arrived, promptly at 0900 hours, the time of our session together.
“Well then, you must be Arianna,” she said, extending her hand to me.
I took her hand and shook it. “Yes, ma’am.”
“I am Annette Polin,” she said with a smile as she continued to grip my hand. I had the feeling that she was not so much greeting me as assessing something about me. Holding me with her eyes, she added, “You may call me ‘Ann’.”
I smiled and nodded. “Very nice to … um, Ann.” I felt awkward speaking to an adult in such an informal manner. We were all taught respect as children, and that extended to our interactions with adults.
She smiled and released my hand. “Nice to meet you too, Ari,” she said, immediately taking my more familiar name. “Let’s go in, shall we?”
She opened the door and led me toward the desk. She indicated which chair I was to sit in and then took the opposite chair. As she did, she rested a small valise on the floor and took from it her tablet computer. She set that on the desk, turned it on and then looked up at me.
“All right then, shall we begin?”
I nodded.
“Let’s take care of the basics first, shall we?”
I nodded again, but I really wished she’d stop asking, ‘shall we?’ when she knew that we were going to do whatever it was she wanted. But maybe she was doing little things to annoy me; maybe this was all part of the assessment as well. My parents coached me before the session, telling me that the most important thing I could do was to just stay relaxed.
“There will be a lot of formal testing, of course. But a great deal of what you will be doing will be informal. Everything and I mean everything that happens in that room is relevant so just stay aware. You’ll be fine.”
I could tell that she was trying to keep me relaxed, but my father’s efforts were actually putting me on edge. My mother, however, did manage to relax me.
“It’s the easiest test you’ll ever take,” she counseled. “After all, you are only being tested on being yourself.”
That made me laugh. “And I can hardly fail that, can I?”
She laughed too. “It is impossible to fail at that.”
But then I stopped laughing. “Still, a lot is riding on this assessment.” I looked at my father, whose expression clearly showed that he agreed with me. My mother, however, continued to smile.
“Nothing is riding on this test,” she said simply. “What will be, will be.” She came close and kissed my forehead. “Worry about only those things you can control.” She glanced over at my father who, seeing the look in her eye, finally relaxed as well.
“Mother is, of course, completely correct,” he said, smiling warmly. “You are a remarkable creature...”
“I’m a girl, father!”
“...my apologies,” he chuckled. “You are a remarkable girl, and your exam cannot help but demonstrate that. Sleep well, my child. Get up refreshed and ready.”
I did sleep well. So well, in fact, I almost didn’t remember what it was that I was to do that morning. When mother came in to wake me, I was startled when she reminded me of the day.
“Today?”
She smiled. “Yes, today.”
I jumped out of bed, ate a good breakfast and got dressed.
“Would you like me to accompany you?” mother asked.
I shook my head. “No, I am fine,” I said. And even though I had flutterings in my stomach, I knew that I spoke the truth. I was fine. And ready.
Ann asked me to say my name and address, which she checked against the record that was in her file.
“How tall are you?”
“I was just over 175 centimeters at my last exam,” I said. “But I am quite certain that I have grown since then.”
Ann smiled and made a notation in the tablet. “And how much do you weigh ... or did you weigh at your last exam?”
I returned her easy smile. “Almost 63 kilos,” I said.
“Perfect. Okay, your home address?”
I gave her my address as well as the information about my parents and other family members. I told her about my family history which, I was certain that she already knew. But I could not help but swell with joy and pride as I shared with her the many walks my mother took me on when I was a small girl.
“How old were you on the earliest walk you remember?” she asked.
I described a walk when I was still carried in my mother’s snuggly carrier. As I spoke, she looked at me suspiciously.
“Are you certain that you remember this walk? Might you not be remembering being told about it?”
I shook my head. “No, I have a very specific sensory memory of that walk. The feel of the carrier’s material against my skin. I remember the color of the fern when she lifted me up to it.”
Ann simply logged into the tablet that she carried with her and accessed my chip. Ann could watch the recall of my memories on her screen, as could I on the table in front of me.
She listened closely with a twinkle in her eyes. “Okay, I think you’re right.” There was a moment of silence as Ann prepared my examination. I looked down to the table in front of me and saw packets unopened on the screen. “Before we begin, do you have any questions for me?”
I shook my head.
“All right, let’s get started then, shall we?”
I stiffened at her words, but then simply nodded. Each packet on the screen in front of me had its own label. One said: NUMERICAL. Another said: VERBAL. Another said: NON-VERBAL. I couldn’t see the others, but I would come to know that they included, Shapes, Mechanical, Cognitive, and Memory.
CHAPTER THREE
THE ACADEMY/APTITUDE
You will have twenty-five minutes for each section on the aptitude test,” Ann explained. “There will be an optional five minute rest period in between the tests.” She looked at me. “Are you ready?”
I nodded.
“Okay. I will need you to lean forward scan your iris.” She reached across the screen and slid the first envelope toward me. “You may begin.”
The first envelope was titled SHAPES. As soon as I opened it, she said simply, “Time has begun.”
The first session had a series of shapes in a row followed by a question, “What must the next shape be?” Of the four choices, I chose one. On and on it went through twenty-five questions. Inverted stars. Octagons with corners bent. Mirror images to be matched. Odd shapes. Missing shapes. Ovals in concentric rings. The time passed so fast, as I gestured to complete the group of questions that had been put before me.
One after the other, I went through the questions. When I had finished the last question, I sat back in my chair and looked over at Ann.
She was watching me with curious eyes. “Do you want to double check your answers?”
I shook my head.
“Are you sure? You have time.”
I shook my head again.
“Okay.” She signed the packet off on her tablet, and we proceeded to the next packet.
Three minutes of the twenty-five allotted minutes had elapsed.
The next packet was NUMBER GAMES. This exam measured my quantitative abilities. I was confronted with numerical sequences, odd word problems in which there were eight siblings of varying relationships and I was to determine which was the youngest. One question I thought was so amusing that I couldn’t help but laugh out loud, had to do with pay amounts – a basic RTD type problem – but this one presented such ridicul
ously low pay that it had to have been taken from a century or two earlier.
Again I sat back in my chair to let Ann know that I was finished. Once again, Ann asked if I wanted to double check my answers. I shook my head. She noted that I had ample time to do so if I wanted. I shook my head.
Three minutes of my allotted twenty-five minutes elapsed.
So it went, through the word games, the VERBAL and NON-VERBAL assessments. I found the SPATIAL assessment to be a lot of fun. Hands turned this way and that, shapes in varying degrees of size representing distance and depth. Forms that could be constructed from presented bits and pieces.
The last assessment, the SPATIAL assessment, required the least amount of time of all. Two and a half minutes.
And then I was finished.
“Do you have any questions for me?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head.
She allowed herself a smile. “You know, you are the only one who did not ask me one very specific question,” she observed.
“Really?” I asked, finding that observation interesting. Not, mind you, that I had not asked something but that everyone else had.
She nodded.
“And what was it that they wanted to know?”
She cocked her head to the side. “They wanted to know when they would be getting their results.”
I sat back in my chair. That seemed a very uninteresting question. “That’s it?”
“Yes,” Ann said. “Why do you think you don’t find that a very compelling question?” she asked me.
I shrugged and responded, “Because I am already fairly certain what my result is,” I said this without any particular emotion. I was neither bragging nor being humble. It was a simple statement that I made.
Her eyebrows arched and her eyes widened. “You know what your result is?” she asked, her voice tinged with a chiding quality as if she found my statement to be amusing, like a statement that a small child would make after giving a star a name or something.
“I didn’t say I knew what my result is. I pointed out that I was fairly certain what my result would be,” I chided back at her.
“And what would that result be?” she asked.
“I am fairly certain that I answered each question correctly,” I said.
She leaned forward. “Ari, you are just sixteen years old, how can you be so ‘fairly’ certain?”
I shrugged. “I don’t see why I would have answered any one of them incorrectly,” I answered with an answer which seemed to infuriate her in a way I could not understand.
“That’s ridiculous,” she said. “The way you’ve rushed through the exams… there is no way…” She shook her head. “I’ve never had a student move through these assessments as quickly as you have done. It was almost reckless…” Then she checked herself. “In any case, we have more assessments to complete.”
She pushed another packet towards me on the screen. This packet contained photographs that I had to provide narratives for. Inkblots that I had to describe. Odd sorts of tests it seemed to me. After all, what had any of this to do with what I was or was not qualified to do?
Rather than think about how tedious the process of testing was, I started thinking to myself that Jace must have found this whole process to be mind-numbing indeed.
Which was funny because, when we saw each other afterwards we’d both been through the process, so we “compared notes”. Both of us had the exact same thought – that the other would find the whole process tedious.
“And could you believe how they doubted us about being correct in our answers?” Jace asked me incredulously. “And why? Because we finished in less than the allotted time?”
As it turned out, our exams showed nothing so much as the two of us were perfectly paired in our exceptionalism. Not only had we both scored one hundred percent – unheard of in its own right – but we had both done so in times that were equally unheard of. Mind you, we did not move through the exams at exactly the same pace. Jace showed exceptional speed in a different exam than me. He was incredible in the non-verbal assessment. Even so, every other exam took each of us exactly three minutes.
“Basically,” the headmaster said in presenting our cases to the Ministry, “their times were a function of the mechanical need to actually type the answer down or for their proctors to do the same. They processed the information and came to the correct answer significantly faster than that.”
When it turned out that Ann was my instructor in an ancient literature class, she took the opportunity to hold me after class to apologize for having doubted my confidence that I’d gotten all the questions correct.
“It was really quite a remarkable experience, proctoring your exam,” she said, smiling at me. “You are a special young lady.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” I replied, never presuming to call her ‘Ann’ while we were at the Academy, no matter the circumstances.
“All of your instructors share my pride and admiration,” she added. “Keep up the good work.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” I said again.
“I was wondering…” she began, somewhat hesitantly.
I straightened up. “Yes, ma’am?”
“Well, as you know, generally speaking, each student is assigned a senior advisor to help you progress through your course of study. As I say, generally the advisor is assigned. However, this year two students have demonstrated such exceptional potential that they will be given a say in who their advisors will be…”
“Jace?” I cried out excitedly.
She sighed and smiled. “Yes, your friend Jace is one of the two. And, of course, you are the other. So, I was wondering, well I’d like you to consider me as a candidate for your senior advisor,” she said.
I smiled. “I’d love that, ma’am.”
She returned my smile. “That’s wonderful. Really wonderful.”
CHAPTER FOUR
THE ACADEMY/APTITUDE
And how is it going for you both?”
Jace and I sat across from Ann Polin, in the same office where I’d taken my aptitude exams a week earlier. Right after I took the aptitude test, I met with Jace in the gardens by the administration building. We had agreed before the test that we would meet after. It was a coincidence that we happened to finish and come out of the building at exactly the same time.
“Well, what did you think?” he asked as we turned toward the quiet spot we had discovered on a small lawn behind the building.
“I liked the shapes,” I told him as we sat down.
He shrugged. “I liked the mathematical questions.”
“Yes, those were all right. Wasn’t the one with the hands turned all different ways curious?”
He smiled. “I know it wasn’t supposed to be, but I thought it was fun. I kept imagining arms and people attached to those hands. In my mind, I made up little stories about the people I imagined attached to those strange limbs.”
“Me too!”
“And those bloody ink blots! They were the most ridiculous things!”
“Did your proctor become impatient with you for answering so quickly?” I asked.
He laughed. “Yes, absolutely infuriated I would say!”
We were both laughing about the exams, comparing notes as it were. We knew that we were not to discuss the test with anyone who had not yet taken them, but we did not think there was any restriction on our talking about them with each other.
Jace looked at his watch. Technically, we were both still scheduled to be taking the exam for another two hours. Both of us had finished that quickly! So, we reasoned that the time we had right then was our own.
We talked for about an hour about the test, certain that even if we had not done as well as we presumed, we had done exactly the same as one another. Still, neither of us could think of a single question or challenge we’d had trouble with or which posed any sort of a real challenge.
Of course, that’s exactly what we learned from Ann several days later when she called us
both to her office.
Although she had not proctored Jace’s exam, she had introduced herself to him in the days immediately after the test, asking if he would consider her for his advisor as well as mine. He said he would certainly think about it.
“I am Ari’s counselor,” she then added with a smile.
His face brightened. “Well then,” he said. “You should be mine as well!”
So it didn’t particularly surprise us to be called into the little office and have her greet us. Still, I was a little concerned by the serious expression on her face.
“Please have a seat,” she said to the two of us when we came into the office.
We looked at one another and then sat down. We didn’t say a word as we waited to find out what was going on.
Ann was quiet for several moments. Then she cleared her throat.
“Is there anything you’d like to tell me?”
Jace and I looked at one another, our eyes widening in surprise. Her voice seemed to suggest that we had done something wrong but neither one of us could figure out what she might have been referring to.
It was not often that either Jace or I was dumbfounded and almost never that we were both dumbfounded, but this was one of the occasions. “I don’t understand,” I said. “What do you mean?”
Her eyes registered a curious recognition. “You really don’t know, do you?” she asked.
We shook our heads.
She laughed, which surprised us both more than anything else she could have done.
“I’m sorry,” she apologized. “It’s just that you have really astonished me now. I have finally come up with a question that you don’t know the answer to!” She continued to chuckle. “Come with me,” she said firmly. It was impossible to tell from her tone if she was angry or amused.
She stood up from behind the desk’s screen and went to the door. Jace and I looked at each other. She paused at the door, her hand pressed against the scanner that allowed for entrance and exit.
“Well? Are you coming?”
We clamored to our feet and hurried after her. She walked quickly through the tiled hallway, her face was focused straight ahead. Her eyes looking neither here nor there. She did not pause as she exited the building and walked down the steps and onto the flat stones of the pathway.
