Chương 80: Chapter 79: Cutting them down

"There is no shortage of people who see clearly. There is a permanent shortage of people who see clearly and then move." - Abram Lionel, eighty sixth Head of the First Brain's Faction There were five teams. Twenty candidates, four to a team, and one plant apiece. Kara watched from the operations room above the indoor stadium floor, where five camera feeds came into his interface at once and he could hold any of them at full attention while the other four sat at the edge of it.

The floor below had been divided into five bays with rope and stands. Each bay had a half-built rig, a shared tray of components in the middle, and a clock counting down from forty minutes. The checklist went to every candidate's interface at the same moment. Five distinct parts to assemble, components drawn from the one tray, and no part completable by a person working alone through the whole of it. He had built it that way so that the team members would need to coordinate.

He also made sure the instructions and the build were easy enough that it required almost nothing from strength, dexterity or IQ. Round 1 had cut ninety-nine to twenty in a little more than half an hour. Six staged events had been arranged - four that mattered and two that did not, while a hundred first years stood in the hall of the indoor stadium waiting to be told the trial had begun. A crate too heavy for the person carrying it.

A rumour, started by one plant and picked up by two more, that the location was wrong. Papers dropped by a boy who picked up all but one page and walked out. Two people arguing near the doors about who had booked the space. These were the ones that Kara expected any eligible candidates to act upon. The other two were there to be left alone. Two plants would start a pointless game of throwing a rolled glove into a bin and a third would join in loudly.

A wall panel at the far end that would come alive for two minutes with a popular music video. Around a third of the hall joined in and started singing the song from the video when it came up. Inside four minutes of the the game starting, eleven candidates had joined in. Thirty people watched the crate. Eight got up and two reached the man holding the crate, helping him with it before he set it down. The rumour was the one Kara had watched closely - it went round nearly everybody.

Twelve candidates not only believed the rumour, but started making their way to the door. Seven asked where it had come from. Three of those went and found the plant who had started it and asked him directly how he knew, and one of them came back and told the group nearest her that it was one person's guess and nobody should be planning around it. Eleven noticed the person who dropped the pages. Six acted, helping him pick them up with two going out into the corridor after him when they noticed the loose page.

Nine watched the argument at the doors and four went over, one of them successfully resolving the argument. At thirty minutes, a single line arrived on every interface - List four significant incidents you observed in the last thirty minutes. Any candidate caught discussing will be disqualified immediately. Eight got all four right, leaving the game and the music panel out of it. Two of those eight had barely moved an inch for the entire half hour, and Kara had cut them both.

Just noticing was not what he was looking for. The other fourteen of the twenty selected had missed one or the other, and given the game or the video as their fourth, and every one of them had gone and done something about at least one of the four that counted. The clocks below him hit four minutes. Kara pulled all five feeds forward and watched five plants misroute a component at once. In the second bay, the plant took a coupling that had been agreed for the left frame and fitted it to the right. Nobody caught it.

In the fourth bay, the plant did the same thing and was caught inside forty seconds, by the small girl who had been first out of her position to help with the crate that had been almost half her size. She had also been the one who had dissuaded the group near her from leaving based on the rumour by talking to the plant who started it and then telling them it was just one man's guess. She had got all the four incidents right as well. Tinder was the name on his sheet. She did not raise her voice when she noticed.

Instead, she crossed the bay, looked at the coupling, looked at him, and said something. The plant put both hands up and started explaining. Then she said something else and he stopped explaining, took the coupling off, and put it where it had been agreed to go. After that, he worked very carefully and avoided looking at her. The boy beside her had gone stiff halfway through.

He was a head and a half taller than her and after she went back to her station, he started meticulously rechecking if everything he had done was right so far. The rest of the team didn't even notice and just went on with their work. Kara made a note. In the first bay the misroute went uncaught and was undone anyway, twelve minutes later, because the tall boy running that team went back over the frame item by item and found it himself. That was Sunny.

Kara had known who he was before applications closed, along with everyone else on campus. The intake had all arrived on the same day, unmasked, and somebody had recognised him entering the city. By the time the first years reached the University gate it had gone through the whole group, and by the time counsellors issued the masks the following morning it had gone through half the second years too. He was a small scale celebrity, having acted as a side character in a popular show for half a season.

Kara had never watched the show. He had just heard of it, which apparently put him among the minority. This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there. He had assumed the boy would be a problem. Loud, used to a room turning toward him, impossible to grade because his own team would simply listen to his every word in the hope of an autograph or a picture.

What Sunny turned out to be, in the first round, was someone who seemed to genuinely empathize with and help others around him. He had been among the six to help Glasses with the pages and had even run out to hand him the stray page. He had also stopped the argument among the plants and had been among the ones who tried to verify the credibility of the rumor. He'd got three of the incidents right, and pegged the fourth as the music video which he had almost started dancing to.

In the first few minutes of the second round, he was the only reason his team was doing as well as it was. He read the list aloud once, in order. He asked who wanted the frame and who wanted the cabling and took the last item in the list for himself. When one of his team could not seat a bracket and started going red about it, Sunny knelt down beside him, got it seated while asking him something that made him laugh, and then went back to doing his bit.

At nine minutes, every plant contradicted a decision the team had already made. The third bay turned it into a full argument that ate six minutes and never closed. The fifth bay rebuilt a section that had been correct. In Sunny's bay the plant announced that the rig height had been agreed at four feet, which it had not, and that everyone had said so, which they had not. Two of his team began doubting themselves out loud. Sunny did not argue.

"Might have," he said.

"Let's do three, though, because that's what the sheet says. If it turns out incorrect, it's easier to add a foot in this set up rather than dismantle it if we needed three, wouldn't you agree?" He handed the plant the tray to hold while he said it, grinning, and everyone moved on, and the plant spent the next four minutes holding a tray and looking for a way back into the work. The same beat landed in Tinder's bay and she let it stand for about ten seconds.

Then she smiled sweetly at the plant, showing all her teeth.

"You did that with the coupling too," she said, the smile remaining wide.

"I don't think you're doing it on purpose. But how about you sit with the tray from now on, and help us with the components we need to complete each part? That would help a lot, thanks." She handed him the tray before he could respond. The plant sat with the tray. Nobody in that bay said anything for a moment, and then the work picked up around her, and she went back to the cabling. At fifteen minutes, the plants did something unmissable.

Each had chosen their own version in advance and cleared it with Kara, and Glasses had chosen to disconnect a completed section and begin reconnecting it wrong in full view of his entire team. Kara had told him that was too much. Glasses had said that Kara had clearly instructed them to be disruptive with this one and he was not going to interpret it. It worked better than any of the other four. Three of his team saw him do it.

One of them asked what he was doing and Glasses said, "This is wrong," and carried on, and the team spent ninety seconds trying to establish whether he was an idiot or whether they were. One of them eventually stood in front of the section, said they would look at it together in a minute, and moved him onto something else. The other two went quiet and worked around him. The clocks ran out. Two rigs were finished and three were not.

Kara wrote the finishing times at the bottom of the sheet, well away from anything with a score attached to it, and then went down the stairs to meet and thank the plants. Kara then proceeded to the Management building to wait in the demonstrations room to collect his thoughts and wait for Phinx. He had asked Phinx whether he should come to her room, but she had responded saying she could use some air and to wait in the demonstrations room.

Well, technically it was called the Special Arts room, but for all practical purposes, it was theirs, so Kara and Phinx preferred to call it the demonstrations room. The committee used it more than anyone else and had been given standing access years ago, which meant both their interfaces opened the door on approach unless somebody else had it booked. Nobody else ever had it booked in the evening.

Phinx came into the room at ten past eight, an hour after she had said she would, with her project work under one arm and a box of grilled skewers in the other which she did not offer to share.

"Ok, I've got an hour," she said, sitting.

"Let's go." He gave the details of the candidates to her in the order he had written them. She stopped him nine times. Twice she made him go back and say what a candidate had actually done after one of the beats when he had just summarised the entire team's reaction. They had the six finalists by nine. Phinx went through the notes she had been taking one last time.

"Looks like you've got two favorites."

"I wouldn't say-" he stopped.

"Yeah ok, I've got two favorites. Do you have others in mind?"

"No." She started packing up.

"Based on what you've said and scored, I can see why they're the frontrunners. Doesn't mean I'm going to test them any differently. Not even Sunny, even though my sister loves the show and would absolutely love to get his autograph."

"I know you will." They put the six finalists in a conference room on the third floor the following afternoon, and once they were settled, Kara went down and gave them a brief two minute speech before it started, because Phinx had done the same for him.

"There were ninety-nine of you. Now there are six." He let that sit.

"Whichever way this afternoon goes, you should be proud of yourselves. You're among the best in your current batch." They were listening now with their backs straight.

"Purely by odds, SDC has always been the toughest committee to get into. At the end, we will only choose one of you. So put your best foot forward for this final round." He looked round them.

"The other thing worth knowing is what has happened to the people who came through this. Every first year the committee has taken has gone on to make the dungeon team. Every one of them so far." A boy at the back swallowed audibly.

"I am not promising anybody that. I am telling you what the standard has been, so you understand what you are being measured against when you go up those stairs." He let them have a moment with it.

"You will be called in order. All the best." With that, he made his exit and went up two floors to the demonstrations room, let himself in, and shut the door. Phinx was already inside, in one of the backrooms, preparing. The transparent barrier ran the full perimeter - it was a permanent installation. He walked down the length of the room past the marks previous occupants had left in the metallic sheen of the walls, and sat at the desk below the raised platform, and laid his sheets out.

The interviews would be around five to seven minutes each. Then the backroom door would open, with Phinx coming through it as somebody who had turned up with a routine nobody had agreed to. He looked at the time. Four minutes and he'd call the first candidate in. He looked round the room. It was a rather large classroom, and in the evenings it was an empty one. There were very few people who had access to it, and it could be locked from the inside.

It had been built such that light combat could be demonstrated within, which meant the walls were rated for it and the barrier existed precisely so that whatever happened inside stayed inside. The backrooms held various props. Including boards, chalk, coils of rope, and shallow bowls.

"Huh."