Wesley plummeted. Scream swallowed by void. Other candidates tumbled past him.
Then he wasn’t falling. Floating. Zero gravity.
His stomach hadn’t received the memo. It was still very much falling.
Weapons materialized around him. Guns. Shields. Batons. One riot helmet that had clearly been in somebody’s locker recently. All drifting within reach. A pistol spun two arm-lengths away. Maybe 1.5 meters. A dark-haired boy spotted the same weapon. He was closer. Maybe half a meter.
“Begin,” the woman’s voice commanded.
Begin what? Fighting? In zero gravity? With weapons? Wesley’s combat training consisted of one Stack 5 air-duct fistfight at age nine, which he had also lost.
But sure. Begin.
The other boy lunged. Wesley reacted on instinct, grabbing the pistol just before the boy’s fingers closed on empty air. They floated there, staring at each other. Wesley’s hand trembled around the grip.
Laser fire erupted around them. Other candidates had seized weapons and begun firing, their shots leaving trails of light through the open air. When hit, candidates went limp and drifted toward the floor at a speed someone had clearly calibrated for dignity.
Somewhere to Wesley’s left, three candidates had opened fire on a skinny kid whose gravity had apparently lost its mind. The kid shot upward. Then slammed down. Then rocketed sideways. The candidates tracked him with their weapons, but every time they pulled the trigger, he’d lurch in a new direction. Up. Down. Up-up-down. Diagonal. The gravitational field around him was overcompensating so violently that hitting him was like trying to shoot a ping-pong ball in a hurricane. One kid threw his weapon down in frustration. The skinny kid pinballed off the ceiling, off a wall, off another candidate’s face, and kept going.
Below, a heavier kid had discovered something wonderful: in reduced gravity, he could skip.
And skip he did. The kid was beaming. Probably the first time in his life movement felt effortless. He bounded across the open space like a man reborn, arms spread wide, face split with pure joy.
But gravity was not happy about this arrangement.
Every third skip, the field would hiccup. The kid would plummet two meters, hit nothing, then get yanked back up like a yo-yo. He’d tumble. Flail. The gravity would catch him at the last second, suspending him mid-fall. Then he’d right himself, shrug, and go right back to skipping.
Down. Catch. Skip-skip-skip. Down. Catch. Skip.
He looked like a whale trying to learn ballet, and gravity was his reluctant instructor.
The dark-haired boy made another move toward Wesley.
Without thinking, Wesley raised the pistol and fired.
A thin beam struck the boy’s chest. He collapsed, drifting past Wesley with eyes full of betrayal.
[ENCRYPTED:His hand was still shaking.]
Great. Now he was shooting people. First day of the Beta Test and he’d already become a person who shot people.
Wesley’s stomach turned. Below him, the “defeated” candidates floated in a mass, watching the battle above with hollow expressions. He could fire at the others. The ones not looking. The ones focused on different targets. Easy shots.
He couldn’t pull the trigger again.
Apparently he had limits. Good to know.
Instead, he drifted toward the edges of the battlespace, avoiding conflict, waiting for the phase to end. When the laser finally subsided and gravity returned, Wesley landed on solid ground alongside the survivors.
One shot. One “kill.” Minimum viable participation. Somewhere a clipboard approved of him.
He was unreasonably proud of this.
Across the room, the ping-pong kid landed in a heap, completely unscathed. Zero hits. He looked around, confused, like he’d just woken up from a nap at a party he didn’t remember attending.
The skipping kid touched down nearby, still grinning. Not a single shot had come close. Apparently nobody wanted to shoot the happiest person in the room. Some instincts ran deeper than competition.
A guard consulted a tablet. Frowned. Consulted it again. The ping-pong kid had somehow scored in the top five. The system had interpreted his erratic movement as “advanced evasive tactics.”
Wesley watched the guard’s face cycle through confusion, disbelief, and finally a resignation so profound it aged him five years in three seconds.
Fair enough. The test measured what it measured.