Baseline

After the light changed, nothing happened for two hours.

The notification had come a moment before it. It had said that the aptitude survey would begin shortly.

That was the first any of them had heard of a survey. The notice had not mentioned one. Nothing had mentioned one since. They had been taken off a planet without being told one thing about what for. The first sentence any of them got was that there would be a test.

The notification had also said that the survey could not be prepared for. And then, in the same flat voice and with no gap at all, that candidates would prepare for it.

Then the light changed, and nothing else did. No walls moved and no doors appeared. There was simply the new light, slightly colder than the old one, and a very large number of people standing in it with two hours to fill.

So they got ready.

Ellis watched a room full of the most examined human beings alive prepare for an examination. It was, in its way, magnificent. They knew exactly how to do this. Every one of them had spent a life being measured. Every one of them had a ritual for it. The rituals came out now, all at once, everywhere.

A woman went through a sequence of stretches with her eyes shut and her lips moving. Two men from different continents recognized the same warm-up in each other and did the rest of it together without speaking. The boy who had been doing arithmetic on his fingers was doing it faster.

A man near Ellis took off his shoes, set them side by side, and stood entirely still with his eyes closed. He stayed there for forty minutes.

Kai warmed up as if this were a track meet.

He did it with no self-consciousness at all, in the shirt he had been taken in, on a floor that was not a track, in front of nine thousand strangers. Skips, then a long slow hamstring thing, then some short accelerations that took him twenty yards away and back.

"You should move around," he said, coming back.

"I don't think I'm going to be running."

"You don't know that."

"I have a fairly strong sense of it."

Kai laughed, and then went and did it again, because it was something to do and because standing still was worse.

"What do you do before an exam?" he asked, going past.

"I check the parking."

"That is not a warm-up."

"It has never once let me down."

Ellis did not warm up. He stood where he was with his hands in his pockets and looked at the ceiling, which was pale and flat and had no seams in it anywhere.

He was thinking about the second sentence.

It occurred to Ellis, standing there, that the survey had already happened.

He did not arrive at it cleverly. He arrived at it as he had arrived at the missing holes on the dresser. He looked at a thing long enough that the wrong part came loose from the rest of it.

The notification had told them the truth. It had told them plainly, in the flattest available words, that nothing they did would matter. And the room had heard that and started stretching.

Why say it at all, he thought. Why put a sentence like that in front of anybody unless it was simply true.

And underneath that: they have had me for thirteen days. Thirteen days in which nobody asked him to do anything, or tested him, or interviewed him, or spoke to him at all. Thirteen days of ordinary life, with a sheet of paper on the counter that would not go in a bin.

He took the notice out of his inside jacket pocket and looked at it.

It was warm. He had assumed for thirteen days that this was his own body heat, because it had been against his chest.

It was not.

The hall took it badly.

Not loudly. The cohort learned that the most important examination of their lives had concluded without their participation, and the room got quieter rather than louder.

The man who had been standing still for forty minutes opened his eyes and did not move otherwise.

Somebody a few groups over said, "When does it start," in the voice of a person who has not heard properly.

The woman beside her had understood. "It doesn't," she said.

"When does it start."

"It's finished. It finished when we got here."

The first woman looked at her. She was perhaps fifty, in a suit she had been taken in, and she had the flat competence of somebody who has been examined successfully for forty years.

"But I didn't do anything," she said.

Nobody answered her, because there was no answer that was not cruel.

Ellis watched it go through the hall over the next few minutes, group by group, the same shape every time. First the not-hearing. Then the working out. Then, almost always, some version of the same sentence.

I would have done better. I wasn't ready. If I had known.

They were not wrong, either. Every one of them would have performed. It was the single thing they were all certain they could do, and it had been taken off them without anybody meaning anything by it.

The notice had been reading him the whole time.

That was what it was for. It had never been a summons. A summons was what it looked like. Looking like a summons was the only part of the job it did badly, because it had no sender, no reference format, and would not go in a bin.

He thought about where it had been.

Under the coffee grounds, in a tied bag, in the dumpster in the alley. Flat on the counter under the good light while he photographed it four times and got a clean empty counter every time. In his inside pocket on the thruway while he said out loud, twice, I need you to not react until I finish.

In his jacket at his sister's table. In his jacket while he dried a colander.

It had needed to be close, and it had needed to be there a long time. There is a way of looking at something without changing it, and the price of it is always the same.

Thirteen days. It had taken his measurements the way you take a photograph in a dark room, which is slowly, and by holding still.

Then everybody was shown their numbers.

There was no screen. Ellis could not afterwards describe the mechanism and stopped trying. The numbers were simply available, the way a word you have been hunting for is suddenly available, and they were his, and there were six of them.

SOMA 13. EDGE 9. COG 14. STRAT 15. WILL 13. RES 0.

He looked at them for as long as they were there, which was not long.

Around him the hall found out what it was. A man two groups over said a number aloud, once, in a voice with nothing in it. Somebody sat down on the floor. The boy who did arithmetic put both hands over his face. Ellis never learned whether that was because the numbers were bad, or because they were exactly what he had always been told they would be.

Kai read his and said, "Huh," and did not offer them.

Ellis read his as a starting position, because he had seen numbers in that shape before.

Not those numbers. That shape. The row of low values you write down on the first day precisely because they are embarrassing, so that they are there to be compared against later.

He had a notebook at home with a page like it. Bench, squat, the date. Nine loaves, each one better than the last. A bouldering grade in a phone note he had never deleted.

He had never once looked at a first entry and felt judged by it. That is not what a first entry is for.

Every other person in that hall was reading a verdict. Ellis was reading a baseline. It was the only thing he had ever known how to read. The numbers were not, in any sense, a disappointment to him.

RES 0 meant nothing to him at all. He assumed it was something he had not done yet.

The numbers went away.

He reached for them a few minutes later, the way you check a pocket, and there was nothing there. Not a blank. Nothing at all, the way there is nothing where a sense you do not have would be.

He would not see them again for a long time.

"Did yours stay?" he asked.

"No. Gone."

Kai was quiet for a second, up on the balls of his feet, looking out over nine thousand people sitting down on a gray floor.

"Sixty-one," he said. "I've been sixty-first at things before. It's not the worst place to start from."

Ellis said nothing, because he had been thinking almost exactly that, and because he already knew enough to understand that one of them was wrong about it.