Discovering Myself (2)

THE RULES OF THE GAME (5)

Potential subjects are monitored from 6 years of age (1st year of compulsory education for ASEAN residents) as to their suitability for the Project.

Potential subjects measured in the top 1 percentile are further monitored in-person by recruiters starting at 12 years old.

Recruiters then assess the shortlisted subjects using various methods over three years. Subjects will be recommended for direct admission, given conditional offers pending completion of an “extraordinary feat”, or deemed unsuitable.

Unsuitable subjects have memories of their assigned recruiter erased. They are still allowed to sit for any of the national selection tests.

***

Taking a puff of vape in my office was Mizuhara Kohei, my ex-high school classmate and current boss. To be honest, either of those things by themselves was already extremely disturbing, so finding out he was going to be both nearly robbed me of my will to live.

“Don’t be shy,” he said. “Take a seat.”

Nevertheless, I continued with my new posting. It was equal parts because the pay was good, and equal parts because quitting involved a lengthy, drawn-out process which involved lots of NDAs and memory wipes. Compared to the sound of that I sincerely believed dealing with a manchild was less problematic. Maybe I’d grow to love the job, notwithstanding my boss’s propensity for unethical experiments. Or maybe I’d be able to control him and convince the man child experimentation was wrong.

“Mizuhara, this is my room,” I said flatly.

“And?”

“And you’re in it without telling me.”

“Hmm.”

He typed away on my terminal as he spoke, looking engrossed with something categorically unpleasant.

“Well Emi, to that I say I’m the head of the department that owns this room. So I’m not sure what you mean.”

“You do.”

“No, I don’t. I really don’t.”

Mizuhara’s second-favourite pastime was saying unpleasant things. Acting dense came in as his third-favourite. Without a doubt, his number one priority in life was finding shady industries to deal in: like eugenics, manipulation, or “experimentation”, and he dedicated a good portion of adulthood following these whims. Since he’d specifically requested for my transfer from Recruitment to Academics, it made me wonder which character flaw described me best.

Gullibility?

Spinelessness?

Loyalty?

“You know how I feel about effective communication in the workplace,” he continued. “So if you meant to say something like, ‘Get the fuck out of my chair,’ then you ought to just say it. ‘Get the fuck out of my chair.’ Is that what you meant to say?”

“Not at all.”

Suddenly, I thought of Mizuhara dying.

I gave him a weak but genuine smile, which he didn’t see, then sat in the guest chair. It wasn’t as comfortable as Mizuhara’s, because that chair I’d owned for multiple years and brought from my previous office. It was like the shape of the leather had adjusted to my body, or maybe my body had adjusted to the shape of the chair. This one, however, was from some sort of ergonomic gaming brand that Mizuhara randomly brought to my room one day. It was a bright, garish neon pink, and terribly rigid. Pink is a nice colour for girls, he said, even though we were both already in our mid-forties.

“Emi, dear, you sit down and listen to me,” he said.

“I’m already sitting down.”

“OK, I don’t need that sort of attitude.”

“OK.”

He was still looking at my monitor. No eye contact. I wondered how he conned the governments of two countries with such an appalling lack of soft skills.

“I don’t want to waste any more time. There’s a lot on the agenda to go through.”

He finally took a break from typing, then pulled out a stack of papers from under my desk. Meeting Notes: Sakura Emi was printed on the binder in a modern-looking English font. Stacking the papers absentmindedly, he glanced at me, and I noticed his bloodshot eyes and grey stubble.

I felt something akin to dread bubble in my chest. Paper was never a good sign.

“Does it have to do with my request?”

He arched his eyebrows. “Would I see you in person for something as trivial as that?”

…Yes?

“…No?”

“Maybe on a less busy day,” he admitted. “But I can always email you about work performance, even if it involves your personally recruited subjects being on the verge of suicide, and you wanting to transfer out at the first sign of difficulty.”

“…”

“We can talk about that any day. This issue is more personal and time-sensitive.”

On one of my monitors, the profile of a red-haired male student showed up. Well, ex-student. I saw a multitude of measurements and associated test scores appear: his 100m sprint timing, his TSA score, VO2 max, working memory score, bone density, muscle potential, LNT score, projected cortisol tolerance level, et cetera. I knew the processes for administering all of those tests like the back of my hand. Rows and columns of data and increasingly esoteric acronyms filled up the screen, then all of those letters and numbers aggregated to give a single composite score and grade.

C — 59.

Subject is eliminated. Data shown is historical and will not update. Click to expand and view individual breakdown of Affinity categories.

“Why are you showing me this?” I asked.

“You monitored this subject for a while, right? What do you think?”

“…I don’t know what you want me to say.”

I was with him for three, maybe four hours before he disappeared. The next thing I learned was that he was incapacitated in an altercation with a female student. There were hardly any opinions I could offer that the Affinity System hadn’t already considered, calculated, dissected, and then probably deemed irrelevant, not to mention the hundreds Mizuhara likely went through personally just because he found joy in hypothesising reasons for why children would attempt to kill each other.

“Oh,” he said, very evidently annoyed I had nothing to add. “I meant, ‘Do you think it’s a waste?’”

“Waste?”

“Yes. A waste, Emi.”

“I still don’t understand. In fact, you’re getting more and more confusing.”

For someone who got angry at me earlier for not telling him to get away from my seat (a scenario he’d completely fabricated in his mind), he sure was taking his time giving me a roundabout line of questioning.

He sighed deeply. “OK, think about it this way. Based on his letter grade, you would expect this subject to survive much longer than he did. So perhaps there is a problem with how the system evaluates certain qualities. And on top of that, for the longest time, I’ve been feeling that the resources used for maintaining secrecy are a massive drain.”

I felt a pit in my stomach.

Oh, so I guess I was a fool to assume Mizuhara was referring to a waste of life.

“I don’t want to talk about this. This sounds like an executive level problem.”

“That’s why I said it’s personal.”

“If it’s personal, then you should know my opinion on all of this.”

He wasn’t at all derailed by my resistance. He just segued into his next point as if I was okay with everything, being the comically sociopathic person he was.

“So I’ve been considering a possible solution. They have nothing waiting for them on the outside anyway. That’s why, I was thinking, I should just have the subjects culled when they fail, and direct the money elsewhere.”

There was a pitch black liquid that oozed out of Mizuhara’s mouth whenever he spoke. Thick and viscous, like tar, and it spewed out smelling like vomit. One blink and it was gone.

“Very funny conclusion. Yes, I’m sure this is the only solution.”

“...Emi, don’t be ridiculous. They all basically kill themselves after leaving anyway.”

“You’re fucking ridiculous.”

“OK.”

“I can’t believe you thought this was a good idea to propose. ‘Something personal,’ you said. Just shut up. Get out of my office.”

“Now, now, wait.”

“Get out, Mizuhara.”

I stood up, grabbed his arm and yanked it as hard as I could. I didn’t know what I was doing. All I knew was that I hated Mizuhara, that I wanted him to stop talking, and that he’d taken the education system which destroyed our lives and was helping outsource it to more of Asia so it could corrupt even more children and governments. An army of exam-taking robots was far more preferable to the disease Mizuhara was promoting, reducing childrens’ lives and personalities into formulas and disposable composite letter grades. And yes, I was part of this vortex and adding more fuel for the ‘educational revolution’ to continue, one that would inevitably ‘trivialise education’ for the better, but I thought somehow my presence would let a more ethical version of it all seep through the sieve.

He slapped my hand away. I stood there like an idiot, sulking.

“It’s not a proposal. It’s already done.”

“What?”

“Failures are to be culled from now on. The board already approved my recommendation, effective for Batch 8.”

“So I recruit these kids for a better life, and now they’re going to die because of me?”

“Well, arguably, dying is not so bad considering their circumstances.”

“Shut up.”

“I said ‘arguably’. Complain all you want, change is already happening.”

“Stop talking, Mizuhara.”

“Anyhow, do you miss Abel Nguyen?”

It wasn’t like Mizuhara to address a student by name, much less acknowledge they weren’t just subjects or data entries in a spreadsheet. It caught me so off-guard that, momentarily, I ignored the dark liquid that was pouring out of his eyes and ears and looked straight at him.

“What?” he said. “Do you think I came here just to tell you about my finalised decision to kill teenagers you work with on a daily basis?”

I didn’t reply.

“I’m not evil.” He pointed to the Meeting Notes. “You should take a look at that.”

I begrudgingly picked up the pieces of paper because I was at a loss for words. Not knowing what to expect, I opened them, but all I saw was more tables, numbers, letters, printed in coloured ink for some reason, and then at the bottom was another summary.

B — 66.

Breakdown:

Memory: 50

Kinetic: 84

Logic: 67

Mentality: 62

Interpersonal: 65

Creative: 24

Aesthetics: 50

“What the hell is this?” I said. “It doesn’t even average out to 66.”

And how was this supposed to make me feel better?

“That’s the beauty of it. It doesn’t have to. Abel Nguyen picked the numbers arbitrarily after being fed his data. It’s what he thinks of himself.”

“What?”

“In a blind setting, of course. There are also evaluations for the other Group A subjects that we worked on all night. Speaking of Abel, would you like to talk to him?”

Mizuhara turned my monitor around. Affinity Scan v2. His eyes were still pouring black. In the distance, the tropical sun was rising on the rest of the school.

***

THE RULES OF THE GAME (2)

Out of the 240 subjects, 120 are considered “conscripted”. These are subjects who meet the aptitude and age requirements of the Project, but not all of the miscellaneous requirements.

There are 20 conscripts per group.

Before Orientation, all conscripts have selected portions of their memory altered to facilitate participation. The degree of alteration is made on a case-by-case basis. Selected non-conscripts will also have their memories altered in the case of significant trauma.