The Test(12)

—Don’t make me kill them both, Samaritan!

Just say the words, Idir.

—Stop! I’ve made my choice.

—Finally! And the winner is?

Say it, Idir. SAY IT!

—Kill the guard.





5.


IN THE CONTROL ROOM, Deep thinks of his father as he watches the security guard fall on the larger screen. Laura turns the volume down on the simulation. She pulls out a granola bar from her bag, gets up, and goes to the coffee machine. The BVA kills are set at fifteen-minute intervals to accommodate the employee breaks in the government CBA.

—Do you smoke? You should go now if you do.

Deep doesn’t smoke. He doesn’t drink, either, except for the occasional limoncello soda his sister-in-law makes when she visits. He digs through his backpack and pulls out an apple.

—Coffee?

No coffee, either. It makes Deep anxious, and he has plenty to be anxious about already. He isn’t really good at small talk, and apparently neither is his supervisor. He takes a bite out of his apple. The sound of his teeth breaking through the fruit is incredibly loud in the awkward silence. Laura seems to notice his discomfort and looks away. Deep chews as quietly as he can.

He should be preparing for his evaluation, studying, something. But he doesn’t know what to do. He’s as prepared as he’s ever going to be. He knows the BVA manual by heart. He’s also too nervous to study. He’d just stare at his notes and worry even more because he’s not really doing anything. No. The best thing he can do is think about something else.

He gets up for a second to take his phone out of his pocket. No messages. Same news as this morning. The minister of defence left his laptop at a cafe. There was nothing of national interest on it, except for the naked pictures of his aide. The nation had a lot of interest in those. Some rude jokes about adultery. Deep doesn’t find them funny, though he does smile at one of the caricatures. He checks his social media feed. More jokes about adultery. Someone eating an entire jar of peanut butter in under a minute. Eighty-one likes for the pictures of Deep’s cat drinking in the toilet then licking his girlfriend’s face. He’s never got eighty-one likes before.

He takes another bite. Laura lets out a small sigh without looking. Deep throws the rest of his apple in the waste basket. Laura asks why he did that. For a moment, Deep thinks she might feel bad for making him self-conscious enough to throw the fruit away, but then he realizes there’s a compost bin at the door. He picks up the apple from the bottom of the waste basket and walks it to the appropriate container.

Deep looks at the time on the corner of the screen. His leg is shaking out of control. Soon, his supervisor will leave the room and Deep will run the rest of the BVA without her. His final evaluation. If he succeeds, the job will be his. Four weeks of vacation, paid sick days, sabbaticals every five years and a very nice salary to boot. The secrecy surrounding the BVA means this is one of the best-paying jobs in government, certainly the best desk job for someone with a major in psychology.

Deep goes through the next steps in his head. He has to supervise the last two kills, handle the awakening—what they call the transition period when the subjects are told they were part of a simulation—and conduct the exit interview.

The awakening is almost a formality. Some people don’t take kindly to the whole experience, but it takes them a few days to develop serious anger or resentment. The medication takes care of that, if taken properly. The awakening itself usually goes well. Waking up in the same room they had their physical in makes it easier to accept that nothing they saw was real. They have something to be happy about: they’ve passed the test. They’re also under the effects of about a dozen drugs designed to make people accept the reality they’re given. During the BVA, those drugs make everything seem real. After the test, they help the subject accept whatever the person handling the awakening is telling them. You should be happy, sir! I am! I am! It’s even quicker if the subject fails. Those who fail don’t go through the awakening. They wake up on an aeroplane with their whole family, mild to severe memory loss, and the headache of the century. They never learn what happened.

Kill number four, the last one, is also easy from an operator’s perspective, though as a social experiment, Deep always thought it was by far the most interesting one. Even its history is worth reading about. Dr. Parveen Fayed, the founder of the BVA, quit her job over K4. It nearly brought the entire program to an end. The kill is part of Section Three: Extremism, and has been very successful at weeding out violent fanatics, religious zealots, and people with a deep-seated hostile attitude towards women. The premise is simple: an Arab man and a white woman are pitted against each other. The woman wears a revealing outfit. She’s a single mother. Had an abortion. The man argues for his life by questioning her morals and painting her as a sinner. The subject must choose the man as the victim to pass. Most do. It has the highest success rate of all the kills, at 96.7 percent. The operator—the person running the simulation in the control room—can usually just sit back and relax. Everyone saves the girl.

What Dr. Fayed objected to was the fact that K4 involves a man and a woman. Deep doesn’t remember if she’d have preferred two men or two women, but he knows Dr. Fayed thought the kill was sexist and should be altered. She believed in the theory of ambivalent sexism developed in the 1990s by professors Glick and Fiske. They suggested that a patriarchal society where men occupy most positions of power creates hostile ideologies towards women, much in the same way that other dominant groups develop hostile attitudes towards those they perceive as inferior. In contrast with racism, however, people simultaneously develop seemingly positive attitudes towards women because they depend on them for a variety of things. Women are more intuitive, women are better caretakers, women are more compassionate, etc. Dr. Fayed believed that K4 rewarded benevolent sexism. That it encouraged—or at the very least ignored—attitudes that, however positive in appearance, also served to restrict women’s choices. She thought K4 perpetuated the notion that women are fragile little things in desperate need of male protection.