64 Written Exam

"-40 points."

After getting a rather disdainful stare from the teacher, Daniel almost ran out from the shooting range from shame. Though, he still managed to contain himself, staying frozen in place from his own spot with a pale complexion until someone finally came over and took him towards the final part of the tests -- the written test and the psychological test.

***

Daniel was led by the admissions officer while the former was still in a daze. Therefore, by the time he managed to realize what was happening, he had already found himself inside what looked to be one of those interrogation rooms one would find within a police station back in the early 21st century. However, in this day and age, the simple white walls and one-way window is actually the standard models for all personal classroom spaces within schools, used when a student wanted to study on his own without any distractions.

Once Daniel sat down subconsciously on the chair placed at the very center of the room that looked more like a cubic pod, an admissions officer handed placed a holographic tablet on the table before him and asked Daniel to comlpete all the questions of the digital exam within 2 hours. Before Daniel could even try and ask any questions, the officer had already shut the door before him, so in the end he still had no idea what the exam was about until actually he actually lowered his head to take a look.

Like a good student, Daniel simply skimmed through all the questions within the exam in order to make a mental note as to which questions he would do first and which he would do last depending on difficulty of said question.

"There are 25 multiple choice questions, 5 short answer questions and 1 long answer question. It seems that most of these questions are concerned with asking about my subjective view on the geopolitical state of the Solar System. Is this exam a test to make sure that I'm not a Martian spy?" Daniel thought to himself. However, before he could think deeper upon the topic, he realized that the clock is ticking and he doesn't have time for this, so he decided to think about it later after he's fully finished with the exam.

After breezing through all the multiple choice questions easily, Daniel started typing down the answers for the short answer questions.

<Give a general explanation of the political structure within the Terran Federation> denoted the first question.

Giving it a pause, Daniel thought for a while before finally started typing.

"The Terran Federation is a fully integrated military and economic union of more than 100+ countries on Earth created as part of the treaty that ended World War III. The legislature of the Federation consists of the Representative Council, the lower house, which are directly elected by Terran citizens every four years, with its seats being allocated by general population. The upper house, the States Council, is indirectly elected, with each member of the Council being either a head of state or head of government of a constituent state within the Federation..."

Wracking his brain for the next hour or so, Daniel finally manage to finish the exam right before the end of the time limit. Heaving a sigh of relief, he was about to relax on his chair when the admissions officer abruptly opened the door again and told the former that he will now go to the adjacent room in order to get a psychological evaluation.

Feeling slightly irritated, Daniel simply remained silent as he followed the admissions officer to the following room.

Unlike the psychological evaluations of the early 21st century, the current evaluations are made when patients are submerged inside a special VR pod, where they would enter into a dream-like state, unaware of what's happening to them as they are transported into their own dream world created from one's own psyche.

The psychologist, looking into the patient's world from the outside through monitors, would guide the patient until the former got the intended effect out of the latter, inducing an emotional change within the patient.

***

The psychological test is completely different from the rest as Daniel came out from it not knowing what actually happened since all his interactions he had within the VR pod seemed to have been wiped out by the psychologist before leaving. Therefore, one could not help but feel slightly weirded out by it even though such a situation is normal for psychological evaluations. This is also one of the reasons why people dislilked going to the psychologists because it seemed as though their brain were being picked without their permission before let off like a lab rat.

Still recovering from this experience, Daniel decided to head back to his own room within Dormitory D, which should be empty by now since his roommate still haven't gotten off from school yet. The second he returned to his own room, he simply jumped on top of his own comfy bed and decided to take a long, comfortable afternoon nap in order to forget everything that happened.

After waking up a few hours later, Daniel looked out the window and found that the sky is already getting dark. After receiving the notifications that were unseen during his sleep, he found that he still have not gotten the results from his tests back yet even after all this time. One had to know that except for a rare case like 666, normal assessments would have their results out almost instantly after their completion since the scores are all tabulated and analyzed by the Minerva system.

Only cases like 666, where there is a difference in algorithm between calculating his prowess earned from the military and the scores he would earn within the academy, causing a slight error needing the input of biological individuals, the results should almost always be automatic.

Since Daniel did not know about this, he thought that as his roommate has also gotten into such a situation, not getting the results on time should be somewhat common within the academy. Little did he know that the reason for his own delay is caused by an intervention from a higher authority, which hijacked the results for 'further approval' before Minerva could even finish with its tabulations.

***

"... Seeing such results, I've gotta say I'm somewhat disappointed." A young man spoke with a rather sarcastic tone as he gazed upon the incredibly large holographic screen in front of him from within a dark room. "I thought the son of the Hero Couple would have better skills up its sleeves."

"Give him some slack, it's not like he's been trained in martial arts since he was born. I heard that his foster father never wanted him to enter the military so he didn't go through the process any military family would in this day and age until he suddenly decided to join this academy." Another person spoke from next to David, his voice somehwat nonchalant.

"If everyone has such slack requirements when it comes to military skills, our planet would have been destroyed by the Martians a million times over already." The young man replied, continuing on with his sarcastic tone.

"As if they would do that." The other man sneered. "Earth is also the ancestral homes of the Martians, with how uneducated and unscientific they are to the point of worshipping their long dead ancestors just to get some non-existent luck out of them, I bet they would think twice before using their disintegrating beam on us."

"But they did hurl a few artificial satellites down on Earth a little more than 10 years ago, wouldn't that be called destroying the planet where their ancestors laid rest?" The young man gave a rather sound retort with a smile, as if trying to goad the other person to get angry at him.

The other man, however, simply remained unfazed and replied, "The fact that the both of us are still standing here safe and sound right now disproves your argument. Though, I have to say, those Martian really have the guts to bet on our planetary shield to last in front of that gigantic impact. In the end, it actually failed for a few seconds, turning half of our planetary surface into dust almost instantly. It was lucky that we had a back-up generator back then, or else the Martians would have directly won the last war."

"But the war ended up getting dragged for almost a decade." David spoke in a rather displeased tone. "How inefficient that was. Even though the last Secretary-General was dismissed because of it, the sh*t-storm he caused costed the lives of millions of people."

"I didn't know you were actually this patriotic, David." The man spoke with a slight tone of surprise. "I thought you are still a rebel teenager going against your family who would snort in the face of blind nationalism!"

"...I think you've read too much early 21st century literature lately, Mr. T, you're starting to get a little delusional again." David muttered.