NASA stored the future in a hangar in Iowa. Rosa Hayashi’s future, anyway. The tryouts for a position with the Interworlds Agency would take two days, but they started now. Rosa stepped into the hangar and didn’t wait for her eyes to adjust. She found a seat and bounced a pencil on her leg while she waited for the future to catch up with her.
There were two hundred chairs with swing-up writing surfaces, all but one occupied by people just done with their junior year of high school. Enough legs were jackhammering to remove a stretch of highway. Finally a woman walked to the front of the room. Everything about her was sleek and measured and controlled.
“I’m Friesta Bauer,” she said. She didn’t have a mic on, and didn’t need one. “You are all here because of your stellar qualities, but we’re looking for people with interstellar ability.” A few people chuckled.
Just then a big blond kid slipped into the doorway, his uncertainty outlined against the sky. He managed to be rumpled and clean-cut at the same time—like a hobo in a fifties movie, Rosa thought. He stepped in and stood against the wall, but everyone was looking at him and there were two red laser points on his chest from Friesta Bauer’s eyes. He sighed and began searching for the only empty seat. It was in the middle of a row, of course.
No one shifted over for him.
He began the bump-and-apologize tour down the row, and was halfway to the empty chair when Ms. Bauer called out, “Do you know where you are?” The kid kept his head down but nodded.
“This is a place that requires excellence in a wide range of special skills. Punctuality is not a particularly advanced skill. I have half a mind just to cut you now.”
The kid plowed on toward his seat, his face twisted in misery.
“You have interrupted me,” Ms. Bauer barked. “Do you know who I am?”
“No,” he said. He looked up at her. “Do you know who I am?”
“No,” Ms. Bauer said.
“Good.” He sank into his seat as laughter rose up around him. Ms. Bauer gave him a wry smile and a long look, but then she went on.
“Everyone here has survived a rigorous preliminary exam administered through your high schools, but you’ll find our tests are beyond what a high school can conduct. You’re applying for one of the most elite jobs in the world. We’re looking for specific skills—extreme skills—and we’re not telling you what they are.”
She looked at a guy down the row from Rosa. He had a sweep of dark hair and was fingering his phone. His case had his name spelled in gold block letters that Rosa could see without squinting: BRAD. “A reminder that you have all signed a gag order regarding the testing process and IA facilities. The only place you can take photographs is in the cafeteria.” She pursed her lips slightly. “We’re not afraid of aliens coming across pictures of our meat loaf. It would only make them fear us.”
They laughed, and the guy with the hair—Brad—slipped his phone back in his pocket.
“So—a reminder of who we are and what we do. The Interworlds Agency is under NASA. When they proved that the universe is infinite, IA was created to deal with the implications.” She gave them a sober look. “In an infinite universe, every possible combination of atoms will occur more than once. Which means that many habitable planets are out there—most of them very different from ours, no doubt—but some of them harboring intelligent life.”
She looked at them over a clipboard.
“That means there are aliens.”
Rosa felt a little thrill run up her spine.
“Contact with them will require traditional exploration—travel in spacecraft,” Ms. Bauer went on. “NASA’s working assumption has been that this will be a lengthy process.” She looked around the room. “That’s true unless a more advanced civilization is looking for us.”
Two hundred kids shifted in their seats.
“IA’s mission is to explore, assess, engage, and protect. We are Earth’s sentries. Given the mission,” she said, “and the magnitude of the task, our testing procedures are not excessive. This isn’t a normal job application because it isn’t a normal job.”
She tapped her clipboard against her leg.
“We want to add a third team to IA’s roster. We haven’t taken a new team in several years, but have decided it’s prudent to prepare for alien interaction sooner than we’d expected.”
Rosa exchanged an uneasy glance with the girl next to her.
Friesta Bauer’s gaze swept the room. “When the day comes that we encounter intelligent life from another planet, our IA teams will be Earth’s first line of defense. The military will take its cue from us. There are two people per team. Two people. That means you have to be better than excellent. We make no guarantee that we’ll take a new team on—but if we do, there are two hundred of you, so you have a zero point five percent chance of being selected.” She smiled faintly. “Congratulations. In the multiple worlds’ business, those are good odds. If you are selected, you will receive a free education—your last year of high school and your college will be here. It will be rigorous, and it will make you highly employable in aerospace-related businesses, should you decide that IA is not for you.”
She tucked her clipboard under her arm and rubbed her hands together. “You may consider yourself applicants, but we consider you contestants. This is a competition, and we began evaluating you when you entered the compound.”
There was a rustle at that, and the blond guy slumped down but Rosa sat up straighter. She’d hugged both her parents good-bye, and her dad had cupped her head with his hand and kissed her forehead. “We’re so proud of you,” her mom had said. “No matter how the testing goes.” Then her dad had whispered, so just the two of them could hear it, “But win, anyway.” Had they been watching that?
Two aides stepped forward, holding stacks of tests. “Your first exam today is mathematics,” Ms. Bauer announced. “Followed by physics, and then some more … idiosyncratic tests. There are bottles of water in the back of the room, and we’ll give you lunch.
“You have two hours for this exam.”
The aides passed Scantron sheets, scrap paper, exam booklets, and sharpened pencils down the aisles. When they were done, Friesta Bauer said, “These preliminary exams are to weed out anyone who’s here because of an irregularity with the test at their high school.” She stared hard at the blond kid, then gave the rest of the room a frosty smile. “We will be making the first cuts at the end of the day. You may open your booklets.”
The first problem was 3 + 5. Rosa stared at it for a moment, wondering if there was a trick. She chose (B) 8, and moved on to a calculus question. Twice more there were first grade questions and she read them both three times, just to be sure. She checked her watch, but she was okay on time. She felt good about the math section until she realized that everybody in the place probably felt good about it, too.
Rosa had checked all her work when Ms. Bauer called, “Pencils down,” and they got a break. She didn’t need to go to the bathroom but she did, anyway. No point taking any chances. There were eight guys standing outside their bathroom, and about thirty girls ahead of Rosa. They had proven that the universe is infinite and contains an infinite number of planets—an infinite number of Earths—but they still couldn’t put enough women’s bathrooms in public buildings.
When the break was over, Ms. Bauer led them to an adjacent building, to a room with banks of computers separated by partitions. “Take a seat,” she called, moving to the front of the room. “By the way, some of you have terrific pedigrees.”
Rosa straightened, in case Ms. Bauer was going to mention her. In case people were going to look.
“Among you are the offspring of a Fields Medal winner, two astronauts, a chemistry Nobel laureate, a Gauss Prize winner, a Maxwell Medal winner, and the heads of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Los Alamos National Lab.” That last one was Rosa. And then Ms. Bauer read their names and made them wave to everybody. The guy who came in late was a row ahead of Rosa. He turned and looked at her, and not in a particularly friendly way. The way Rosa saw it, the only reason Ms. Bauer would single out the science legacy kids was to up the pressure on them. And she did not actually need that.
“The physics exam is fifteen questions long. You have two hours. In order to take the exam, you first have to find it. Go.” She hit a stopwatch.
Rosa stared at her, and then at the people around her, half of whom were still standing. All of them had wide eyes as they scrambled for seats. Most people were frantically booting up their computers, ready to scan files for the exam. The big guy ahead of her stood on his chair, glancing over the room’s perimeter. Smart—what if this exam was also in paper booklets, stacked somewhere in the back? They’d all be messing with their computers, wasting precious test time. She watched his eyes while she booted up, and when his blond head sank below the partition she gave the computer her full attention.
It wasn’t difficult to find the exam, as it turned out—it was on the hard drive. The file name was the date and the formula for pressure. Fifteen questions, two hours—eight minutes per question, including checking her work. There was no scrap paper, but there was a notepad feature on the computer, and a calculator, too. She allowed herself six minutes for each question.
Which was fine until she finished the fifteenth problem and saw that the scroll bar wasn’t all the way to the bottom of the screen, so she scrolled down and discovered five more problems. Hard problems. Was the exam really twenty problems long? Was it a test to see if they noticed the scroll bar’s position? Or was it to see if they could obey orders—were they only supposed to do fifteen problems because that’s how long Ms. Bauer had said the test was?
Rosa worked the last five problems as fast as she could, trusting that her earlier work was correct as it stood. When Ms. Bauer called, “Time!” Rosa was done, but barely. She wasn’t used to close scrapes—nobody here was—and she didn’t like them. “The cafeteria is on the ground floor,” Ms. Bauer said. She was very calm. It was incredibly irritating. “You have half an hour.”
The lunch room was blue and silver and decorated with giant posters of photos taken by the Hubble telescope. Rosa got a vegetarian pilaf and a cup of fruit, and hesitated for a moment at the end of the line. Because of course everybody had spread out, and there was no empty table. She started walking, slowly, so she didn’t look awkward. She was passing a group of guys when one of them caught her eye and motioned her over, and she was grateful to slink in opposite him. “I’m Ellis,” he said, and actually stuck his hand out to shake. Seriously? At lunch? She gave him the quickest handshake she thought she could get away with.
“Rosa.”
The other guys introduced themselves. One of them put his phone on hover and grinned as it snapped a group photo of them. “Upload to my social media sites,” he said as it returned to his hand. He smiled sheepishly. “Gotta make some people jealous.”
As soon as Rosa took a bite, Ellis spoke again.
“So, where are you from?”
She looked up. Of course he was talking to her. She chewed slowly, but he kept his eyes on her. “New Mexico.”
“But where are you from?”
“A pleasant ranch house on Bayo Canyon?”
“Like, what are you?” he asked.
“Dude,” one of the others said. “She’s from New Mexico.”
“What am I?” She wanted to say, Smarter than you, or Not a jerk. Instead she sighed loudly and said, “I’m an American of French and Japanese descent.”
“Wow,” Ellis said. “Good combo.” She flushed. “Which half is which?”
Rosa stared at him. “My left side is French.”
One of the guys snorted appreciatively. Ellis scowled.
“What do you think will be on the ‘idiosyncratic’ exams?” the other guy said. “That can mean anything.”
They started talking about the exams, and she only half listened. Across the cafeteria the late guy was snarfing down a cheeseburger. He was listening to the kids he was sitting with, but wasn’t talking. And—seriously? He was eating the fries some girl didn’t finish.
Rosa glanced up and for the first time noticed discreet camera domes on the ceiling. She straightened involuntarily, although it probably wasn’t going to be her posture that got her kicked out.
Were they watching, even now?