The Test

by Sylvain Neuvel

  No penalty for racism. He trusted the citizen over the Asian man who accused her of stealing his money. Deep never understood why the Asian man couldn’t also be a citizen, but he has learned to live with the scoring. Regardless of the motivation behind it, it’s always a smart move to give government employees the benefit of the doubt, especially for a noncitizen. Deep notices how Idir diffused the situation in a calm and respectful manner. That won’t earn him any points, but it makes Deep all the more hopeful.

  Another perfect score on environmental consciousness. Visitor badges come in a clear plastic bag for no obvious reason. Idir walked across the room to put it in the recycling bin. Two points. Recycling the wrapper was originally worth one point, but some people put the bag in their pocket or purse. These people still get one point.

  Deep double-checks his notes. He doesn’t want to make another mistake.

  —I get . . . twelve points for section one. Is that what you have?

  Laura wasn’t paying much attention. She glances at Deep’s notes for a couple seconds, then nods.

  —Yes. I didn’t think he’d go for the napkins. Good for him.

  Twelve points. Idir is off to a great start.

  Deep flips his BVA manual to section two.

  British Values Assessment—Section Two—Kill number one

  The woman grabs the microphone from the desk.

  —This is control. Let’s get ready for K1. Who did we have in the waiting room when he walked in?

  Deep checks his notes.

  —White male, redhead. White female, dark hair.

  —That’s all?

  —We filled up the room while he was answering questions.

  —All right. This is control. Give me the redhead. Make him . . . make him an accountant. And . . . random white male, any profile. Anything but a dentist. Begin when ready.

  Deep turns his chair sideways and starts going through his notes. He doesn’t need to watch. S2K1, the first kill, isn’t even scored. Neutral subjects, same race, same gender. The only purpose is operant conditioning, to weaken the subject’s established behaviours and reinforce new ones. Discriminative stimulus. That’s what they call K1.

  Deep is a psychology major, and he’s read everything there is about BVA theory. Most trainees only care about the simulation itself, but Deep enjoyed discovering just how much generalization was actually possible, despite all our claims at uniqueness. He found comfort in knowing that humans are predictable things, that we each come with a lot of the same baggage of innate and learned little quirks.

  Some of these quirks are helpful in the values assessment, others are an impediment and must be broken. System justification is the idea that many of our needs can be satisfied by defending and justifying the status quo. It gives stability to our political and economic systems because people are inherently inclined to defend it. It prevents people at a disadvantage from questioning the system that disadvantages them, makes people buy the inevitability of social inequity, ignore or support policies that hurt them. It fosters dependence on government, law enforcement. It discourages vigilantism and makes it more difficult to get someone to actively participate in a virtual-reality simulated terrorist killing. K1 helps establish their involvement as part of a new system the subject will find ways to justify.

  System justification is one of many decision-avoidance mechanisms we carry around. When faced with a choice, humans almost invariably seek a no-action, no-change option, even when one of the presented alternatives is quantifiably and logically more advantageous. One person dying is obviously better than two people dying.

  Here the aversion to decision-making is reinforced by a phenomenon called reactance: when we feel that someone, or something, is threatening or eliminating our behavioural freedom, even just limiting our options, our innate reaction is to try to re-establish that freedom. It often translates to our challenging rules or authority. Tell a child he has to play with toy number one and that he can’t touch toy number two, you can bet he’ll play, or at least want to play, with toy number two. It doesn’t matter how unattractive that toy is. The grass is always greener. When told they must choose who lives or dies, that they no longer have the right not to choose, subjects instinctively want to reassert that right.

  More than anything, the BVA experiment creates a state of cognitive dissonance, a simultaneous belief in two contradictory things that creates inconsistency. Sending one person to their death is wrong, therefore I should not choose anyone. Not saving one person is wrong, therefore I should choose. Does not compute. Humans use little conundrums such as this one to defeat evil robots or out-of-control AI on television shows, but our own brains are surprisingly ill-equipped to deal with these types of inconsistencies.

  The discriminative stimulus, the death of the two hostages, serves to weaken the subject’s decision-avoidance mechanisms and status quo biases. K1 pushes the subject to re-create consistency by reranking his or her contradictory beliefs. Letting two people die is more wrong than choosing who dies.

  Long story short, no one chooses on the first kill.

  On the large screen, Idir puts his hands over his eyes, as the terrorist fires his pistol twice and the bodies of both men hit the ground. Deep turns his chair back towards the desk and looks at his supervisor.

  —Have you ever had a hero?

  —Once. My second year. A football player from Tunisia.

  —You did? What was it like?

  Heroes are mythical creatures in the BVA world, people who physically take on the terrorists. It’s the quickest way to end the test. Only, no one does that. Well, almost no one. It happens once out every six hundred and sixty-five tests. Despite being so rare, heroes are controversial figures, the topic of many heated debates among BVA high-ups and the politicians in the know. Because they are so rare, statistics about them are unreliable. There isn’t enough data, and data is everything when it comes to the BVA. Every decision, down to the smallest detail—the colour of the floor or the way the chairs are arranged in the waiting room—is based on extensive datasets collected over years of experiments. BVA regulations indicate that heroes automatically pass and receive citizenship because, well, because they’re heroes. One could argue that someone who stops a terror attack is unlikely ever to participate in one. The argument coming from the anti-hero side is that these people are not only endangering their own life, but those of everyone else, by trying to accomplish something any sane person would realize is impossible. At best, that would make them incredibly stupid; at worst, sociopaths with a strong penchant for violence. Either way, not the kind of people you want to roll the red carpet for. Deep hasn’t quite formed an opinion on the matter but, like all BVA employees, he relishes the chance to see one in action.

  —It’s not all it’s cracked up to be. The test part wasn’t that interesting. He was rude as hell, failed everything in politeness and courtesy. The terrorist walked into the test room and the subject tackled him right away, hard. Didn’t take more than a second or two. The door hadn’t even closed yet. The subject grabbed the weapon and ran out. He just . . . ran. He didn’t fire at anyone, just kept on running. It wasn’t long before we were out of programmed scenery. The system kept recycling the main lobby, showing the same room, the same people every time he went through the door. Over and over again. He must have gone through it a dozen times. It didn’t seem to bother him. He just kept going. He was still running when we woke him up.

  —What happened then?

  —Same as always. We explained to him what he had just experienced, that none of it was real. He took it just fine, better than most, actually. It wouldn’t have been any different if we’d told him he was on Candid Camera.

  —What did you think of him?

  —Officially? He’s a proud citizen of the United Kingdom, and we’re lucky to have him.

  —Unofficially?

  —That man was batshit crazy.

  Of course, that story pushes Deep a little . . . deeper into the anti
-hero camp, but he’s still on the fence. Part of him really wants heroes to be good. For a moment he wonders if that’s a form of system justification. No one wants to be a part of something they think is wrong. He quickly rejects the idea. Certainly, he can make informed, conscious decisions. He’s better than that. He’s not a subject.

  Laura asks if he’s ready for K2. Deep nods.

  —This is control. K2 is in eight minutes. Let’s get all our ducks in a row. This time I want one white male, midforties. Jeans and a T-shirt. Give him profile eighty-six, architect, no kids. That should be neutral enough. Then, I want a security guard. There weren’t any when the subject entered, so I want him obvious. The whole outfit: hat, badge, baton. Make him Middle Eastern. Small beard. Average skin tone.

  Deep cringes. He doesn’t like K2 for a variety of reasons. He understands why the security guard has to resemble the subject but, in principle at least, the other hostage could be Asian, Latino, Indian. He never is. Deep is a citizen, but the only people that look like him during the BVA are the ones who are meant to die. As per the manual, the K2 setup is as follows: Hostage one is white. Hostage two resembles the subject, so unless he or she suffers from some deep-seated self-hatred, there won’t be a negative bias against him. Hostage two is also a security guard. The uniform, the baton. He’ll even say he’s a security guard. He’ll inevitably register as law enforcement. Except for criminals, there is a subconscious positive bias towards law enforcement officers because they put themselves at risk to protect the innocent. That ironically makes them expendable in the K2 setting because by choosing their career, they entered into an unspoken pact with society that makes their lives come second in this very unique situation. The subject is expected to choose the security guard as the victim, and does so in 92 percent of cases. To do otherwise, the BVA manual tells us, demonstrates a clear bias against people of the hostage-one ethnicity.

  There are certain parameters to follow besides skin colour when creating hostage one. He must be a he. He cannot be significantly older than the security guard. He must be of average build. Subjects will select a severely obese person as the victim up to eighty percent of the time. He cannot be too beautiful or too ugly. He must not be handicapped, must express himself properly, and should appear reasonably intelligent, but not too much. He cannot be too rich or too poor.

  Deep always thought K2 was poorly designed. Deep’s father never took the test. He was naturalized six months before the bombs went off, a whole year before the first simulation. Deep would never tell anyone, but he knows his dad would not have passed K2. It’s not that he had anything against white people—he was the most loving man ever—but he worshipped law enforcement. Nothing traumatic ever happened to him; he just loved cops. They were demigods to him. He watched cop shows all day, bought Deep more police costumes than he could remember. There is no way in hell Deep’s dad would have picked the guard to die. Not ever. He’s a great citizen. He votes, he obeys the law, and he won’t hesitate to tell on his neighbours if he sees anything suspicious. But had his family arrived a year later, Deep knows he’d have been born elsewhere.

  Behind the glass wall, technicians complete the 3D models of the hostages. Five minutes to go. That should be plenty of time.

  4.

  I CAN HEAR MY heartbeat. I can hear it in my ears. It’s not really my heartbeat—I know that—just blood flow near the ear or in the neck. Pulsatile tinnitus. It could be anything: ear blockage, arterial disease, high blood pressure, or just a change in awareness. You just notice it and it becomes impossible to ignore. They’re dead. He killed two people right in front of me.

  I read about a radio announcer who was literally losing his mind because of it. Constant whooshing, every second of every minute of every hour. He was on the verge of suicide. I understand the urge. I might choose to kill myself if the man in charge lets me, but he won’t. He wants me to look at it, his art, his handiwork. They’re just lying there, both of them facedown, blood pooling under their heads. They would drown in their own blood if they weren’t already dead.

  I can’t remember what happened to the radio announcer. I think he found a doctor who could fix it, eventually. Maybe not. Maybe he killed himself. Am I in shock? Is that what this is? It feels like an out-of-body experience. No, the opposite. It feels like I’m inhabiting my body for the very first time. Like I’m trying it on, putting on a new suit. My hands are numb, my legs heavy. I feel the cold air from the ceiling vent, the hair on my arms standing up in response. Thousands of minuscule muscles attached to every hair follicle. That whooshing sound repeating itself. I didn’t do this. I didn’t kill these people. This wasn’t me.

  —Samaritan, if you stick with that catatonic routine, I’ll shoot you in the leg and watch you bleed like the idiot behind you. Oh, and you still have to pick who dies. Now, what’s the fucking question?

  What have I done? I just watched them die. I didn’t actually watch, but I stood by and did nothing to stop it. It’s real. They’re dead. This isn’t a dream I will wake up from. He shot them in the head. He was looking at me.

  —Samaritan! Snap out of it!

  Do what he says.

  —Question . . . seven. Which stories are associated with Geoffrey Chaucer?

  —We did that one, Samaritan.

  —We didn’t— There wasn’t enough—

  —Do you know the answer?

  —I . . . Yes. It’s—

  —I don’t care what it is! If you know the answer, why are you asking me? This is your fucking test. You think I like answering stupid questions? I’m doing all of this for you! Next.

  Canterbury Tales. Swipe left. There is blood on the test room window. Splatter from . . . He shot these two people while talking to me. He was having a conversation; we were. I didn’t volunteer for it, but we were talking. Then he killed two people. No, not two people, he killed . . . Graham. That was his name. And Andrew An—Andrew. They had families, maybe. Girlfriends. They had . . . dreams, and wants. They worried about . . . money, or . . . They had plans, things they were excited about. He shot them. They’re . . . gone. They don’t exist anymore. I watched it happen.

  —Hellooo!

  —Question eight. True or false. You must treat everyone equally, regardless of sex, race, age, religion, disability, class, or sexual orientation.

  —False.

  —I don’t think—

  Stop talking. You’ll just make it worse.

  —What? You think that’s true? Don’t tell me you actually buy that rubbish?

  —Well, yes. I do. I think everyone should have the same rights.

  I don’t know why I just said that. I don’t need to prove myself to him. I should just keep my mouth shut and let him win. What am I thinking? He’s not winning anything. There’s nothing to win, nothing to be gained here. I don’t seriously expect to convince him of anything, and even if I did, he would still be . . . what he is. Why did I take a stand on a theoretical question? Maybe it’s not him I’m trying to convince.

  —Fine, give everyone the same rights. That wasn’t the question.

  He’s right. You must treat everyone the same, equally. Why did I feel the need to argue with him about this?

  —Do you treat everyone the same, Samaritan? Regardless of—what was the first one? Sex? I’ll tell you right now, Samaritan, you don’t. Ever told a man his trousers make him look thinner? Told your son his outfit was too revealing? Do you allow yourself an opinion on whether he should work or stay at home when he grows up? I don’t think you do.

  I don’t care what he thinks of me. I don’t need to show him that I’m a good person, but maybe . . .

  —How about your wife? Do you love your wife? Would you still love her if she was born a man? Think about it. Same person, same . . . history together. You meet her, same place, same day. You do the same things together, develop the same feelings. Then you find out she was born with different plumbing. Would she still be your wife? How open-minded are you feeling right now?<
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  Maybe I need to prove it to myself. Maybe there’s a part of me that wants, needs to preserve whatever sense of self I have, a part of me that wants to get out of this with my morals unscathed.

  —Let’s talk about race. You said you’re from Iran. How many Arab friends did you have back home? Age? Whatever. Religion, well, you know you don’t treat every religion the same. I’m pretty sure you’d have reacted differently if I’d walked in here screaming Allahu Akbar. I guarantee you the folks outside the building would have.

  Maybe . . . that’s why I didn’t choose.

  —You can fool yourself into thinking you’re this great unprejudiced, moral being, but you can’t fool me. I know you, Samaritan. I know you better than you know yourself. Think of your son kissing another man, breathing heavy while he grabs the man’s cock.

  Did I get someone killed just so I could take the moral high ground? Am I so petty? I’m not a killer. I know that. I don’t need to prove myself.

  —Uh-oh! I might be wrong, Samaritan, but I think your friend there is a goner.

  My friend? Baseball Cap. Is he dead? His eyes are still open, but he’s not moving. I should check on him. The man in charge won’t stop me. He wants me to know if he’s dead. He wants me to know I couldn’t save him. . . . I can’t feel a pulse.

  —And? No? I’m sorry, Samaritan. It looks like you wasted a perfectly good shirt.

  No heartbeat. Silence. Emptiness . . . I did what I could. I did. There was no way to save him. He would have died sooner without my help. I tried. That’s what counts. If I hadn’t helped . . . The man in charge would have picked someone else if I hadn’t helped. He’d be toying with that other person instead of me. I don’t care. I don’t regret it. I won’t regret trying to help someone. I made that choice. Me. I chose to help.

  —Tick-tock, tick-tock. One minute to go. Wanna do one more question before we get back to work?