Drawstone

He sneered and felt tempted to roll the poster up and throw it in the trash. But there was something beneath the disgust. A strange feeling — familiar, yet he couldn't place it.
He continued reading the poster.
Preliminaries:
Wednesday, May 13th
Sign up for your local preliminaries today!
It was the most curious sensation which arose inside of him. It was something he hadn't felt in a long, long time. At first, he thought the sensation was anxiety, but as he considered winning the competition, he realized he wasn't scared.
He was excited.
He shook his head. There was no way he was considering this. What was he going to tell them?
"Sorry, but do you have a small mountain of ether batteries I can borrow? Trust me, I'm an expert."
The thing is, he was certain that if they allowed him to enter with the condition that he could use ether batteries, he could win that damn competition and get the hell out of this city. Despite the risk, he felt like a potential avenue to freedom had opened up and he'd be a fool not to take it.
100 000 credits would go pretty far with him. Then it occurred to him that job security would also be pretty nice in the future, after the life he'd been living.
He almost gagged at the thought.
That wasn't like him. Those were not the type of thoughts he was prone to thinking.
Was it stress? Maybe he was cracking under the weight of uncertainty for his future.
He entered the rec centre and talked to the person at the front desk. They gave him a pamphlet explaining more about the competition.
Like it said on the poster, it was a team competition, but the preliminaries were a knowledge test. He only needed to show up, pass the test, and he would enter the competition the coming weekend. But he'd need to travel all the way to the Oberon Capital City to compete.
And he'd be going without a team, and he'd be taking the risk of losing and having nowhere to go.
Yet, the possibility of winning remained.
The excitement that came with that thought was almost overwhelming. It was a feeling he hadn't felt in ages. He applied for the preliminary test, scheduled for noon the next day at the rec center.
After passing the test, the only thing he would need to figure out was how the hell he was going to get to the primary competition. He considered the 50 credits in his pocket that Mrs. Margaret had given him.
That should be enough for a taxi, he thought.
He made it home with little hassle from the street rats. They seemed disinterested in his arrival, save for a few threatening glances and one of them pointing to their watch.
Time was ticking.
He didn't sleep well that night. He could hear the Comics out front, a constant source of noise and annoyance until they got bored and headed home. After catching a few hours of sleep, Hunter had a small breakfast and reviewed some notes from his latest research until he had to leave.
Hunter contemplated Seckina City as he walked through it on the way to the rec centre. The name 'Seckina' was a legacy from an ancient language. Not as old as the Asutnahem, which was about as dead as languages got.
Seckina. The word was supposed to mean "Dauntless."
What Hunter thought of when he heard the word was stubbornness.
Tunnel Vision.
Ignorant obedience to a vast machine marching along at the cost of your own life.
All sentiments he attributed to the Council and their grand, unifying legacy. The stubborn chase for power, the inability to see beyond their egos, and utter indifference to the damage they cause to whoever gets caught up in the wake of their games.
He'd seen bureaucrats show up at Mrs. Margaret's store, voiding contracts with years until expiration, contracts upon which she and her family depended, because a competitor offered a better deal. They didn't care about the impact of their choices, unless it was about how it would impact their reputation and back account.
Most people wouldn't be able to get away with such a blatant disregard for written agreements. But the Council, and those connected to the Council, weren't under the same limitation as most people.
They weren't beyond taking everything from someone who couldn't afford the loss in order to further their agendas.
They would have found nothing on his family's old estate. Hunter had looked after his father had died, and before they 'found' the bodies. Nothing remained of his father's work. At least, not that he hadn't already given to the world.
As he walked, he could spy the tall E-towers that received and transmitted wireless etherium signals — one legacy that his father had left behind. E-towers peppered the city. Most businesses preferred the secure communications the ether-comms could provide compared to the alternatives. The downside of communicating along an etheric network was that although it was wireless, it required a lot of static infrastructure, and line of sight for the signal to travel across.
Whereas most personal mobile phones could be used anywhere with service available, the brick-sized devices were a bit of an eyesore and a hassle to carry around. That being said, their convenience made up for the inferior security. Besides, Hunter doubted if most people would ever need to worry about their conversations being overheard.
It was the people with things to hide, and things to lose, who invested in gaining access to the E-Tower network. His father once had sole ownership of those towers. Now he could see a bunch of different logos painting across their long cylindrical surfaces.
LockeMark Industries, the Lumina Company, and the Pacific Shield. Three out of the five megacorporations who owned the world, and the realms beyond it. And he presumed they were the three corporations who were most likely to have conspired against his family. He would bet all 50 credits in his pocket that they were behind the explosion which had ended his father's life.
His father never gave into their demands and always rejected their offers. He built the network himself, found high-level, independent investors who wanted an income stream aside from their parent companies. With their seed money and a grand vision, Gideon Koar had started his own venture. A burning jealousy gnawed at the Council, frustrated by their powerlessness over the pig. So, Hunter guessed, they took action to ensure that their dominance was absolute. The Council seized his father's company and all the land held by the Koar name. Every credit his father had saved now belonged to companies who already had more money than they could ever spend.
As far as he could tell, Oberon wasn't in on the council's plot. However, as a council seat, there was no way that Trey Oberon could avoid accountability. As far as Hunter was concerned, Oberon Enterprises and Smith Transports were just as complicit, whether or not they were involved. Knowing and not doing anything about it made them guilty, and there's no way they wouldn't have known.
Of course they'd known, Hunter figured. They're Council Seats. A company can't rise to the top of the pile of money-hungry pigs by being a saint, or ignorant. You devour the smaller pigs and make deals with the larger pigs to secure your dominance. That being said, if it came down to a choice between which companies he'd throw in his hat with, Oberon and Smith would be the prime contenders, if only because they didn't smother their branding all over whatever remained of his father's work.
That was the deciding factor. He'd almost convinced himself not to come this morning, telling himself that he should either run away or join the gang. Too much could go wrong. He could have underestimated the competition. What if the test touched on something he'd only be familiar with had he attended a school? What if they decided his AR was too low for him to be taken seriously as a candidate?
Suppose he grew too tired, too fast? His physical weakness made it a real possibility. He may not even be capable of competing at all.
Then he reminded himself that he has some advantages that the other contestants didn't. Unlike them, he's been able to devote most of his young life to etherium and constructs. He could match most experts in the field in terms of knowledge.
He also had very little to lose, all things considered.
He was surprised to see a line stretching out the rec center's door as he approached. Eavesdropping on the surrounding conversations revealed they were all here for the same reason he was. They all appeared to be around his age and were most of them were graduating this year. It made sense, now would be the perfect time to gain a corporation's attention. Even if they didn't win, there is no way Oberon would let young talent go so easily, right?
He found the thought comforting. And for a moment, self-disgust washed over him.
Is this how easy it was for his sense of integrity to be challenged?
He shifted from corporate hatred to desperate ambition, agonizing over whether he measured up.
But what was the alternative?
He decided overthinking it would only stress him out. What would serve him now was reviewing what he knew, and what he could do. Basic schema, formula lists, the ever-growing combinations of synergies that he treasured as the greatest work of his young life. They all flashed through his mind as he took an inventory.
And he realized he was coming up against another potential problem. Just how much did he know about synergies compared to these hopeful students around him? Compared to his peers? How stunted was his education? What if some of his synergies he'd so prided himself on discovering were common knowledge? The library wasn't an artisan's wonderland. Compared to most industries, most people still considered ether artisanry niche and emergent.
The best approach was to be careful. Revealing too much might prompt questions about Jonathan Esper, leading to Hunter Koar's discovery.
He thought that the only way to ensure he passed the test was to underperform. Yet that circled back around to the original problem. His information was lacking. He was certain he had read all the relevant information at some point. Somewhere in his mind were all the relevant names, dates, and events he would need to memorize for the test.
But where would he even begin? He didn't have time to go to the library and refresh his knowledge. There was too much to go through.
Yet he still felt this was all worth the risk.
It was his turn to approach the front desk. They directed him to a gymnasium where the test was being held. He walked down a long, silent corridor. His steps echoed. A soft murmur intruded in the silence. Signs appeared, pointing the way down a few branching hallways towards his destination. The murmuring grew into a wall of voices. Hunter hadn't heard so many people together in the same place for years.
The gymnasium was more packed than he'd expected. More than a hundred tables, all facing the same direction, filled the gymnasium. Were there so many young artisans in Seckina? Maybe they were also from some of the surrounding towns. An annual contest like this might be a big enough deal to attract a lot of attention. An attendant at the gymnasium door directed him towards a seat. The remaining seats filled within minutes.
A woman appeared at the front of the gymnasium. She was older, had blonde hair and kind eyes, but with that unmistakable pride of a corporate cut-out.
"Hello, welcome to the annual Youth Ether Artisan competition's preliminary test. My name is Joyce, and I'll be one of the 4 Oberon representatives marking your preliminary tests. The test is 80 questions long, and time to completion will factor into your score. This year's test will be a bit more challenging than previous years, and will require a score of 95 percent in order to pass," Joyce said, pausing at the chorus of gasps arising in response to her announcement.
"The offered sponsorship to the Barnum Academy of Excellence has only occurred a few times in the history of the Youth Etherium Arts Competition, and the requirements for those years have always risen to match the prize. This year, only the best of the best may compete for the chance of a lifetime. Does that answer your questions?" Joyce asked the murmuring youths spread out before her.
"Now, you will have 1 hour to complete the test. I and a few others will watch to ensure that there is no cheating. Questions?"
There were a few questions. Such as, 'will there be half marks?' which made no sense to Hunter. Who would grade a question as half right? What kind of insane calculus did they use to determine that a question was over 50 percent correct?
Absurd.
What if it was over 50 percent right?
The last test he'd taken must have been over 6 years ago. Soon after, he'd stopped going to school entirely.
It had been a mathematics quiz. Multiplication. He remembered that he'd performed well. He spent his spare time at the library supplementing his lacking education, while his class struggled with basic algebra, he was in his room on the Koar estate memorizing construct schematics.
It was the school environment itself that he found himself ill suited towards, but not learning. He loved to learn.
This test evoked nostalgia in Hunter, but he felt its intensity. He could see jaws clenched and brows furrowed as the pressure to perform rose in the surrounding people. The test seemed a lot more daunting than it had a few minutes ago.
Someone handed out the tests, a small stack of paper stapled in the upper left-hand corner. There was a space for Hunter to write his name and the table he was sitting at, as well as the date the test was being taken.
There were a few questions where he felt he couldn't get around sharing his synergies, and he justified it by telling himself that they were too obvious not to use. In those cases, they were probably the expected answer.
And if they weren't, he'd just say that he'd done a few experiments in his own time and had found a few new glyph combinations that worked out pretty well.
Apart from that, the test was a breeze. He only struggled with some of the more academic questions. There were a lot of names he didn't recognize, but he did his best to deduce what the question was asking him based on the information given.
The multiple choice answers themselves gave enough information about the question's subject for him to make an educated guess.
Sometimes he'd be stumped and would just circle 'C'.
The written portion was more about describing the logic behind choosing one design element over another. Sometimes, it described arbitrary glyph choices, which Hunter could dissect and understand immediately.
The multiple choice portion was the most difficult and comprised most of the test. He completed the test in 40 minutes. He deposited his test at the front of the room. Although he wasn't the first to complete it, Hunter reckoned he was among the first 10. The test's difficulty surprised him, but it wasn't as bad as it could have been. Although there were some specific gaps in his knowledge that he'd identified, they were far less than he'd feared.
As Hunter turned to walk back to his desk, he caught the test he'd submitted out of the corner of his eye and froze. He felt weak, and the room seemed hotter than it had just been a moment ago.
On the top left-hand corner was his real name — there for all the world to see.
Calm down, he told himself. Breathing deep and slow, he considered his options.
There were only two that appealed to him.
The first one was to leave and forget this ever happened. Leave the city and survive, somewhere, somehow. Maybe a farming community would take him in without asking too many questions. He could maintain their constructs for a place to live and three meals a day.
The second was absolute insanity, but it stirred something within him that surprised Hunter.
The urge was dangerous. A reflexive itch. A crazy, reckless compulsion that Hunter already knew he was going to follow, because that's what he did when this feeling came up.
So, he said 'fuck it.' He left the test where it was.
Hunter Koar.
Table 47
Based on his experience, he had no way of identifying how well he did. He'd had to make too many guesses. Now, all he had to do was wait for the announcement of the results. Worst-case scenario, they would recognize his name, notify the corps, and drag him away, never to see the light of day again.
Best case, he would pass and they wouldn't recognize his name.
There were a few other degrees of positive and negative between those two, as well.
The latter case felt unlikely to him. He had registered as Jonathan Esper, but had taken the test as Hunter Koar. He figured that discovery wouldn't sit well with them.
But he stuck around anyway. He had nowhere else to go — unless he wanted to go home and deal with the street rats.
Whether he passed or failed, only time would tell, and Hunter felt surprised at himself for not caring anymore. Once the urge to throw caution to the wind had left him, he'd expected some sort of anxiety to creep up.
When he analyzed what he was feeling, all he felt was a deep sense of being tired. He was tired of hiding. He was tired of being tired.
He'd let the fates decide his destiny, and accept their decision.