Survival Aptitude Test: Sound (The Extinction Odyssey Book 1)

by Sheriff, Mike

  “Narses is the same age,” the Unum said. “I’m well acquainted with the impudence of youth.” He sized up Daoren, eyes glinting like glass darts. “You’ve applied to sit the May S.A.T.?”

  Daoren sized up the Unum. The man had a habit of turning factual statements into questions. He used the tactic to pull sensitive information from people. He also used it to test whether they’d tell him what he already knew to be true.

  Daoren had applied to sit the test in May—Lucien must have mentioned it to the Unum in passing—but didn’t see the need to confirm it. As the son of a member of the Cognos Populi, he’d been in the Unum’s presence often enough to know that silence was the best answer.

  “Perhaps I’ll take your advice on the passing score,” the Unum said. “For your sake.”

  “No need.”

  “Oh? You’re a genius like your brother?”

  “Just well prepared,” Daoren said.

  Rasplaughter shook the Unum’s belly. “Such a spirited boy! Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to speak with Julinian before she goes into the Center.”

  “I’d wager you would,” Daoren said, censoring a smile. Julinian was as thick as the crystal columns gracing the Center’s façade. The fid’s odds of surviving the S.A.T. were slimmer than the most malnourished inhabitants of Daqin Guojin.

  “Of course, of course,” Lucien said, oozing the irritating eagerness he reserved for the Unum. “Good fortune this day, Julinian.”

  The smug fid ignored the platitude and plodded off with her uncle.

  Daoren caught a foul look from his father before it freshened and shifted to Mako.

  “You’d best get inside now,” Lucien said, taking Mako’s hands. They leaned together and touched foreheads. “I am your father.”

  “And I am your son,” Mako said, voice breaking.

  Cordelia clutched Mako’s hands and gazed upon her first-born. Her eyes welled.

  Next to the prospects, the S.A.T. was hardest on the mothers. Many refused to attend their children’s tests, leaving it to the fathers to bear the emotional burden. Whatever her past failings, Daoren admired Cordelia’s strength for being here—even when her tears flowed.

  She touched her forehead to Mako’s. “I am your mother.”

  “And I . . . I am your son.”

  Daoren squared off with Mako and pushed him backward. The challenge wasn’t a delayed retribution for the earlier shove; it was meant to rally his brother’s inner strength.

  It didn’t work. Mako swiped away his own tears, sniffling.

  Daoren masked his pity and leaned in to touch foreheads. Mako held on to a rigid, upright posture, leaving him hanging. Daoren raised his head and stared into his brother’s eyes.

  They brimmed red with raw emotion, but which emotion he couldn’t put a finger on. Was it anger? Resentment? Jealousy? Was it his fault Mako had to sit this damnable test today? His own S.A.T. was four months away, then it would be Mako’s turn to watch him sweat.

  “Mako, trade farewell with Daoren.”

  Daoren bristled at his mother’s intervention—ever the peacemaker—but her gentle goading worked. Mako leaned forward.

  Daoren leaned the rest of the way to make the connection. “I am your brother.”

  “And I am your brother,” Mako said, forcing the words through his teeth like crystalline bricks. He broke contact and trudged up the stairway.

  Daoren watched him pass families engaged in the same ritual of farewell—and the Indonoid father still rocking his daughter’s dead body. Beyond the pair, weeping parents and siblings looked on while their kin climbed toward the darkened archway. Other parents had to drag their children up the steps.

  The prospects clawed, kicked, and screamed all the way.

  3

  The January S.A.T.

  MAKO EMERGED FROM the archway and halted beneath the brightest light he’d ever encountered. Despite fifteen years of preparation, countless interactions with high-fidelity plasmonic reconstructions, and numberless hours of visualization therapy, stepping into the Center for the first time culled his breath.

  This was real.

  This was happening.

  This was his S.A.T.

  Climbing the northern stairway, he’d thought only of finding Teimei, Bushudo, and Zilian before finding his seat. He wanted no more than a brief encounter with his friends and enough time to wish them good fortune. The sight before him smashed that hope and slammed home the scale of the coming challenge.

  A translucent floor supported forty thousand transparent seats arrayed in a two-hundred-by-two-hundred grid. Eight feet separated each row and each seat to prevent sneakcheating. Tens of thousands of prospects, Jireni, and Libraria filled the void spaces, venting a burble of tense chatterwailing, curt commands, and calm reassurances. Above them, cubic chronoglyphs strobed below the enormous convex ceiling. Their square, blue faces identified row numbers.

  Mako picked his way forward, threading pockets of weeping prospects. Hundreds more filtered through the eight archways encircling the floor. Jireni corralled the ones who tarried or succumbed to emotion and dragged them to their seats. He refused to suffer that indignity. He’d find his seat on his own, as would any man worthy of denizenship.

  It didn’t take long. He’d been assigned Seat 12 in Row 110 upon his application to sit the test. It was located in a central row, favoring the floor’s north end. Red letters floated over its integrated touch-screen.

  Mako al Lucien.

  He gazed at the hovering name, entranced by its naked luminance.

  This was real.

  Every drop of saliva in his mouth evaporated.

  This was happening.

  His heart’s accelerating contractions pummeled his eardrums.

  This was his S.A.T.

  The floor seemed to split open and swallow him.

  Mako clutched the seat-back. A vague clot of dread thickened, congealing to the certainty of impending doom. The primal urge to flee the Center, to remove himself from the environment, threatened to overcome his reason.

  He couldn’t let it win. He needed to fight through the panic. He needed to—

  “Are you Mako al Lucien?”

  He spun to the gruff voice.

  A Slavvic Jiren towered over him. Crosshatched scars and menacing black studs blighted the brute’s jaw and eye sockets.

  Mako’s heart rate doubled. He tried to respond—he wanted to respond as a man worthy of denizenship—but his desiccated tongue couldn’t form the words.

  The Jiren leveled her dart gun. She stabbed its muzzle into Mako’s chest. “Are you Mako al Lucien?”

  “Y-y-yes.”

  She thrust the dart gun forward. “Then for Sha’s sake, sit.”

  Mako keeled backward. He grabbed the touch-screen and swung into the seat with a jolting oomph.

  The Jiren secured flexglass restraining straps around his chest and legs, anchoring him in place, but leaving his arms free. She detached a halo from the back of the touch-screen and waggled it. “Don’t forget your crown, my princeling.”

  The halo inched down Mako’s forehead, stopping in line with his temples. Ten ounces of hardened glass compressed his skin. It felt more like ten pounds.

  The Jiren cinched the chest strap tighter and straightened with a joyless smile. “Only one way out of this seat now, prospect.” She slung her dart gun. “Oh, and don’t remove the halo before the test ends and the restraints unlock, unless you want to set off the nanocharges in your head.”

  The brute cacklebracked and lumbered away.

  Mako sucked shallow, rapid breaths, struggling to draw air past the chest strap. A familiar taste fouled his mouth, scorched and toxic. Tingling pinpricks numbed his hands and feet, divorcing them from his body.

  He squeezed his eyes shut. He needed to slow his breathing. He needed to calm his—

  “By Sha’s silica fingers, if it isn’t Mako al Lucien!”

  Mako opened his eyes.

  A craggy Asianoid fa
ce loomed above him. Silver-gray studs extended each eyebrow. They swept up and over the temples of a shorn scalp, lending an air of unbounded curiosity. A wispy gray beard veiled the lapels of a yellow lanshan tunic.

  Mako knew the face—he knew he knew the face—but the name took an eternity to pass his lips. “Laoshi.”

  Laoshi’s smile hiked his beard off his lapels. “So quickly this day arrives, my young pupil. So much at stake.”

  Mako swallowed. His throat burned slag-hot.

  “Did Heqet wish you good fortune before you came inside?”

  Mako shook his head. The motion served to remind him of the glass halo circling his cranium. “She didn’t come.”

  Laoshi’s smile dimmed. “She locked herself in her sleeping chamber when she returned from your abode last night. No amount of my coaxing could draw her out again. I trust there’s no problem between you two.”

  Mako tried to voice an articulate answer. The partition erected between his mind and mouth prevented one. “I . . . she . . . we aren’t—”

  “It’s none of my concern,” Laoshi said, waving off the response. His smile rekindled, lighting up his eyes. “Did I mention I’ve been studying a most fascinating collection of artifacts?”

  “Um . . . no.”

  “An incredible find. A silica-sourcing team discovered the cache in the Great Eastern Regolith, six months ago. Can you guess what it contained?”

  Mako stammered. Laoshi had the vexing habit of injecting random, unanswerable questions into his meandering, free-flow conversations.

  “Artifacts made from carbon-based synthetic polymers,” Laoshi said, not tarrying for a guess. “They have the highest molecular mass of any synthetic polymers ever encountered. And despite being exposed to the elements, they show remarkable resistance to decay.”

  “They weren’t cryocached?”

  “No, boy. They were buried under six hundred feet of compacted sand.”

  “That’s, um . . . fascinating.”

  “Such wondrous resources the ancients possessed to construct their world, hmm? How limited ours seem in comparison.”

  “If life gives you sand . . .”

  “Make glass,” Laoshi said, completing the famous dictum. He leaned over and leveled a hypnotic stare. “That’s excellent advice, isn’t it?”

  Mako nodded, grasping the anecdote’s point. The old Librarian was telling him to make the best of an ill situation.

  “Remember my teachings and trust your instincts.” Laoshi straightened and tousled Mako’s hair. “And before you know it, this mop will be a memory.”

  “You promise?”

  “I’ll see you after the test,” he said, winking. “Your parents, Daoren, Heqet—we’ll celebrate your denizenship together.”

  Laoshi advanced up the aisle, pace brisk in spite of his limp. He paused here and there to comfort distraught prospects.

  Mako focused inward and cycled through his self-checks. The tightness in his chest had eased. The numbness in his extremities had faded. The depth of his respirations had increased. Laoshi’s calming manner and distracting anecdote had worked; the panic attack had subsided. Seeking any diversion to keep the anxiety at bay, he absorbed the setting.

  An equal split of male and female prospects resided in his vicinity, heads crowned with glass halos. The majority were Asianoids from Zhongguo Cheng or the eastern districts. The second-largest contingent boasted darker skin tones that pointed to Indonoid and Africoid lineage; they’d harken from Yindu Cheng and Feizhou Cheng, the city-state’s southernmost districts. A handful with Slavvic features hailed from Nansilafu Cheng or the other northern districts. He recognized no other prospects from Meiguo Cheng in the immediate area.

  Different lineages, different Chengs.

  The lesson had been pounded into his head at the Librarium. Daqin Guojin embraced the whole of civilized humanity, but held it in segregated districts that fostered little intermixing.

  Meiguo Cheng occupied a nine-square-mile footprint within the borders of Zhongguo Cheng, making it more like an island canton than an independent district. Ringed by four million Asianoids of the city-state’s most populous Cheng, Mako and his family were among sixty thousand Caucasoids who charted their origins to a nation that once existed in the west, across a body of water whose vastness eclipsed the Sea of Storms. The ancients had called it the Atlantic Ocean. Today, it was a sterile, acidic expanse whose name escaped him.

  A smaller, acidic expanse gurgled, demanding his attention. Mako slipped his hand into his waist pouch and pulled out a piece of grooll.

  He squeezed the springy torus between his fingers, reassured by its gritty texture and flesh-tone hue. He popped the piece into his mouth and let it sit on his tongue, allowing what saliva he could muster to break the bonds between the powdered silica and bitter macronutrients.

  An uneasy flutter buffeted the walls of his heart.

  The macronutrients had been harvested from prospects who once occupied these same seats.

  The flutter intensified and spread to his lungs.

  Whose flesh, bone, and tendon was he sucking on?

  Mako extinguished the thought before it flashed into another attack. He refocused on the surrounding prospects.

  Most had their eyes closed, lips moving as though offering petitions to Sha, the Sapient, Heuristic, and Adaptive. Some wept, stifling sobs with their hands. One prospect seated three rows away was the picture of serenity.

  Julinian yawned, hands folded atop her touch-screen like an elder riding a levishuttle on a hazy summer night.

  Mako shook his head. How could she be so calm? You’d think she was—

  A soothing, maternal voice filled the Center. “Welcome, prospects. Your Survival Aptitude Test will commence in one minute. A score of twenty-two thousand points is required to pass and confer upon you the rights of denizenship.”

  Despairing groans escaped the adjacent prospects. The morose chorus swelled and resounded off the ceiling.

  Mako sucked a breath to fend off the icy tongues licking at his fingers. Daoren had spoken the truth—the passing score had been raised by two thousand points. Why had his parents denied it? Why hadn’t his father warned him before he was strapped into a transparent seat?

  The icy tongues lapped his hands and slathered his forearms. Mako lowered his gaze to his bruised knuckles. Fixating on a single point sometimes helped to mute the anxiety. “Focus . . . focus . . . focus . . .” He flexed the hand, making a fist, and repeated the mantra in his head.

  He could do this.

  He could write a stellar S.A.T.

  He could prove to Heqet that he was Daoren’s equal.

  The technique worked. His nerves relaxed, freeing his mind from their all-powerful grip. He raised his head, took another deep breath, and found Julinian staring back at him.

  She smirked, as calm as before, but her bestudded, upturned lips carried another emotion.

  It took a moment for Mako to recognize it.

  Smugness.

  * * *

  MAKO SWIPED HIS forehead and looked up from his touch-screen.

  Thousands of prospects manipulated their own screens, faces frozen in concentration. A few buried their heads in their hands and wept. Knots of Jireni hurled taunts at them, encouraged by their colleagues’ cacklebracking. Libraria strolled the aisles, but none stopped to defend the prospects. Above them, the chronoglyphs relayed a countdown. Blood-red digits ticked off the seconds.

  04:00:56 . . . 04:00:55 . . . 04:00:54. . . .

  Mako lowered his gaze and ran a finger across the touch-screen, skimming the eighth set of equations. He tapped the screen; another set of equations opened. As he proofed the solution, a chucklebuck shook his body. He knew there’d be a question on Zhaoling’s Fractal Conjecture for Shadow Analysis on the test.

  Why the archaic method for determining latitude and longitude using localized dune shadows was considered valuable technological knowledge in modern times wasn’t his concern. He simply
needed to make sure he’d selected the right datum and sun angle and calculated the correct dune heights—accurate to seven decimal places—to earn the two hundred points assigned to the question.

  His finger traced the last line. Another tap brought up a new screen.

  Submit Answer?

  Mako flexed his hands. For the hundredth time today, he asked the question. Was he sure? For the hundredth time today, he gulped a spine-bracing breath. “Yes.”

  A new question opened on the touch-screen, its glut of text too compact to take in all at once. He glanced up at the nearest chronoglyph.

  04:00:02 . . . 04:00:01 . . . 04:00:00. . . .

  The maternal voice filled the Center. “Four hours remaining.”

  Mako refocused on the screen and scanned the question. It listed five endothermic processes used for sintering liquid hydrogen from low-pH water and asked for a rigorous proof of which was most efficient. The last line triggered a shiver.

  The question was allotted thirty minutes and worth nine hundred points.

  * * *

  TWO WORDS FLOATED over the touch-screen.

  Test Complete.

  Mako smeared his hands against his face, rubbing them up and down and back and forth, massaging away eight hours of stress. He plucked a piece of grooll from his waist pouch and placed it onto his tongue. A smile formed while he chewed.

  After nineteen years, eleven months, and six days of preparation, it was over.

  A mouthful of grooll couldn’t block the rasplaughter bubbling up from his belly. Its effervescence jetted from his nose.

  Not only was it over, it was easy. The four prep-tests he’d completed last year had been much harder. Laoshi had prepared him well.

  He searched the floor for his tutor, but the restraining straps restricted his movement and limited his field of view. No matter; they’d soon be celebrating his denizenship together.

  Another bout of rasplaughter rocked his body. Heqet would change her mind once she learned of his score! It had to be at least twenty-nine thousand points out of the thirty-thousand maximum. None of his prep-tests over the past five years were any lower.