Outcasts by Vonda N. McIntyre

safe middle score, so she’d
come out near the top of the group. She had always been athletic. Not enough to
go pro. She’d tried that, and failed.
    She approached the computer terminal warily. She stared at
it, disheartened. Its only interface was a keyboard.
    “I don’t type,” she said. She spoke louder
than she meant to, startling several of the others, startling herself. A
nervous laugh tittered through the room. Jannine turned toward the exec. “I
told them, when I applied, that I don’t type!”
    “That’s all right,” he said. “You
won’t need to. Just tee or eff.”
    She sat down. She began to shiver, distress and dismay
taking over her body with a deep, clenching quiver.
    The chair was hard, unyielding, uncomfortable. Jannine
wished for her reclining couch, for the familiar grip, the helmet and collar
and imaginary reality.
    The screen blinked on. She flinched. She ground her teeth,
fighting tears of rage and frustration. Her throat ached and her eyes stung.
    “Any questions about the instructions?” the exec
asked.
    No one spoke.
    “You may begin.”
    The screen dissolved and reformed.
    I should have been looking for another job a month ago,
Jannine thought angrily, desperately. I knew it, and I didn’t do it. What
a fool.
    She stared at the keyboard. It blurred before her. She
blinked furiously.
    “Just tee or eff.” One of those. She searched
out the T, and the F. She pressed the T. On the screen, the blinking cursor
moved downward, leaving a mark behind.
    She pressed the T twice more, then varied the pattern,
tentatively, with the F. The blinking light reached the bottom of the screen
and stayed there. The patch of writing behind it jumped upward, bringing a new
blank box beneath the blinking square. She pressed the keys, faster and faster,
playing a two-note dirge. Her hands shook.
    She touched the wrong key. Nothing happened. The system didn’t
warn her, didn’t set her down as it would on the substrate, made no
noise, made no mark. Jannine put one forefinger on the T and the other on the F
and played them back and forth. All she wanted to do was finish and go back to
work. If they’d let her.
    The screen froze. Jannine tried to scroll farther down.
Nothing happened.
    She shot a quick glance at the exec, wondering how soon he
would find out she’d crashed his system.
    He was already looking at her. Jannine turned away,
pretending she’d never raised her head, pretending their gazes had never
met.
    But she’d seen him stand up. She’d seen his
baffled expression.
    Paralyzed at the terminal, she waited for him to find her
out.
    “Are you all right?”
    “Yes,” she said.
    “You finished very quickly,” he said.
    She glanced up sharply. Finished?
    The test ought to go on and on till the time ran out, like a
game, like the alert, games you couldn’t win. You were supposed to rack
up higher and higher scores, you were supposed to pretend it was fun, but you
were judged every time against the highest score you’d ever made.
    The screen had stopped because she’d reached the end
of the test.
    The end .
    Amazing.
    The exec looked at the screen over her shoulder, reached
down, pressed a key. The screen blinked and reformed. Jannine recognized the
pattern of the beginning of the test, and she thought, Oh, god, no, not another one.
    “You’re allowed to go through and check your
answers,” the exec said. “Plenty of time before the next section.
Don’t you want to do that?”
    One of the other test-takers, still working through the questions,
made a sharp “Shh!” sound, but never looked up.
    “No,” Jannine said. “I’m done. I don’t
want to go through it again. Can I leave now?”
    “I really think you should work on this some more. It’s
for your own good.”
    “I don’t want to!” Jannine shouted. “Don’t
you understand me?”
    “Hey.” The test-taker who’d shhed her sat
up, glared, saw the exec, shut up, and hunched down over the test.
    The others continued