She gave me a wry look. “How about you re-hydrate first? You look like you could use some water. Here’s your snack bag.”
She handed the bag to me, and I grabbed the water and cracked open the lid, downing the whole bottle in seven long gulps. The hydration helped me feel a little more human, and a little more confident about continuing this conversation without snapping at Anna. My nerves were shot, and I had to be careful I didn’t end up saying something I would regret. As insane as that experience had been, I couldn’t lose sight of the fact that she was the key to saving my parents.
“Come with me to the control room,” Anna said, gesturing toward the door.
I followed her out of the chamber, to the second door that stood in the small corridor outside. We stepped through it and emerged in a small, round room whose walls were lined with tables and dimmed monitors. She pulled up a chair by the door for me and I slumped into it, my muscles grateful for the rest.
When she seated herself in front of the largest monitor, I noticed a pair of black goggles strewn across the desk, next to a bottle of water. They were identical to the type I’d seen those men carrying earlier in the hallway.
“So,” Anna said, drawing my attention back to her face. “Before we get to the significance of the modules, I think your results will be a better place to start. If you failed, there’d hardly be point in discussing details, right?”
I opened my mouth to respond, but she was already swiveling around in her seat. She touched a button on the keyboard in front of the monitor, and the screen flickered to life.
It was blank, except for a small spinning disc in the center. “Ah, still loading,” she said.
I had been about to respond to her rhetorical question that yes, even if I had failed the screening, I damn well wanted to know the meaning behind the screening’s modules, given that she’d put me through them. But I held back, knowing the retort wouldn’t help me right now.
“You should eat the waffles now, by the way,” she added. “While they’re still warm.”
My eyes fell reluctantly to the contents of the cloth bag. My stomach was still too twisted up for me to possibly be hungry, but I knew that downing some calories would do me good. I hadn’t eaten breakfast, and I had just burned through a ton of energy.
I reached for the foil-covered food and unwrapped it, taking a deep bite into one of two crispy waffle pieces and feeling the warm cheese ooze into my mouth.
“It’s done!” Anna announced. My eyes shot back to the computer screen to see that it had lit up green—the same shade that little screen had done down in the water tank.
“Aaannd, I’m please to say you passed!” she said. She tapped a button on the keyboard and a bunch of complex looking charts popped up.
“Oh,” I managed, gulping down my mouthful quickly. I should have felt more enthusiasm, given what this could mean for my parents, but somehow, I could barely even muster relief.
“There is definitely room for improvement,” Anna went on. Her large forefinger tapped another button and she scrolled further down the screen. “But I think you’re at a good starting point. You passed my minimum requirements, anyhow. Your physicality and reflexes are good, your ability to cope under stress decent, and your decision making workable.”
“Your computer is seriously telling you all this?” I asked, then remembered I still had those pads stuck to my body. I set my food down to pick them off.
“Mhm,” she replied with a smile. “And, of course, I was watching, too.” She pressed a button on a keyboard and several screens on the walls lit up, revealing all angles of the chamber next door, along with the underground water room. I could make out the large shadow of the beastly fish lurking in… what was now one large, single tank. The fish had broken the glass that separated the upper tank from the lower one.
It felt like my heart skipped several beats. “Wow. So my life really was in danger down there?”
Anna chortled. “Oh no, hon! Do you honestly think I’d let you die in a pre-screening?!”
That was what I had been hoping, at the back of my mind.That the whole time I had been in there, I had never been in real danger, despite how real it had felt.
But seeing that glass actually broken meant that my lifehadbeen at risk. The creature had been fully capable of reaching me.
“What if I hadn’t gotten out in time?” I asked, my voice hoarse. The ceiling had opened for me with barely thirty seconds to spare. How accurately could they even predict that glass breaking? The computerized voice had said “approximately” five minutes. What use was “approximately” when someone’s life was at risk?
“We have sensors on the glass,” Anna replied, waving a dismissive hand. “If the sucker got too close to breaking through before you got out of there, another sheet of glass would have shot out beneath it and you would have been let out of the tank.”
I gaped at her. That still felt like an incredibly dicey position to put someone in without prior warning. What if the technology experienced a glitch? What if the new sheet of glass shot out a few seconds too late, or the ceiling got jammed?
“What about that thing that was chasing me through the maze?” I asked, my throat tight. “Was that real too?”
“Ah, that,” Anna replied with a canny look. “That particular element, I would rather keep up my sleeve for now…”
“What was it?” I pressed.
“A topic we may or may not revisit another day,” she replied firmly, her lips forming a line.
I stared at her. If it hadn’t been a simulation, I couldn’t begin to wrap my mind around what it could have been.
