*** Patrick ***
Patrick slowly woke, trying to piece together where he was and what was going on. He was someplace strange, and his memories seemed like a cross between a dream and a movie. The room and everything in it was an ash grey color. The sense of deja-vu was strong and puzzling. He wanted to fall back asleep, but his bladder motivated him to get out of bed.
After using the facilities, he returned to the table and sat down. Still trying to remember what was real and what may have been a dream, he spun slowly in the chair for a few minutes. Taking in the studio apartment, and remembering his ‘tutorial’ mission to explore it.
‘I really do want a clock.’ He stopped spinning and checked the shop tab on the table. In addition to snacks there were some “shop upgrades” that could be purchased. The ones listed were:
apartment accessories – level 1
apparel – level 1
education – level 1
entertainment – level 1
food – level 1
snacks – level 2
Indecision gripped Patrick, he had enough coins for one of the upgrades, but he didn’t know which would be the best. After a minute of considering, he used the power of procrastination to put the decision off until later. ‘I’ll mull it over a bit and then decide.’
The table had another new feature today, “Performance Review”. Tapping it brought up a list of yesterday’s tasks, and how well he had done on them. The review grouped the tasks into five categories:
Strength
Endurance
Dexterity
Intelligence
Concentration
The only category that was marked good was Endurance. Strength and Intelligence were marked as acceptable, and Dexterity and Concentration were highlighted yellow with a “needs work” notation. Patrick had only done about half of the tasks in those categories. 75 percent was the threshold for an area to be marked as acceptable. Looking at the Endurance category Patrick was a bit puzzled why that one stood out. The screen showed that he had racked up 19.3 miles on the treadmill.
‘That can’t be right, I’ve never gone that far in my life.’ Remembering back to the previous day, and the long walk he went on after the meeting. ‘I remember running some of the time last night, but if this is right I averaged over 5 miles per hour, which is unreal.’ Standing and stretching, ‘I don’t even feel sore or achey.’
Puzzling over it for a bit more, ‘Just another weird thing I don’t know how to react to.’
Patrick’s attention returned to the table, it was 3:10. The agenda only had another neighbor meeting scheduled from 6 until 9, then sleep at 11. Patrick calculated that he got about 7 and a half hours of sleep and overall felt well rested. He was still overwhelmed with what this “assessment” was, but physically he felt great.
Looking at the tasks for the day, they were similar to the day before, with performance expectations about 10 percent higher.
Flipping back to the shopping menu, he bought the apartment accessories upgrade for the shop, and then had just enough coins to buy a clock. Patrick didn’t give the posters and other decorations a second thought, he wasn’t planning on making this his new home. The new clock was 6 inches tall and 18 inches wide. It was already on, and was using the decimal format instead of the hex format that the table originally had. Patrick was curious, and went into the table settings to switch the time format back to hexadecimal. The clock switched formats with the change. ‘Neat, must be bluetooth or WiFi.’ He switched the format back to decimal and put the clock next to the ‘Deliveries’ cabinet so he could see it from most of the apartment. The clock seemed to be battery powered. Looking around Patrick realized that there were no power outlets in the whole apartment. ‘I should start making a list of all of the weirdness….’
Patrick still felt uncomfortable about the situation, but there seemed to be no good option but to play along with whatever game he was stuck in. Trying to put it out of his mind he went back over to the treadmill to figure out how he traveled so far yesterday.
Starting out at a light jog the treadmill display showed 4.5 mph. Patrick easily maintained the pace for 5 minutes, ‘I wonder if this is accurate, it feels like it is on easy mode.’ Every 5 minutes Patrick went a little bit faster. After a half hour he was running 7.5 mph and just starting to get winded.
‘Wow, only 53 minutes to get to today’s goal of 5.5 miles’. After 2 minutes to catch his breath, ‘Another piece of weirdness for the list, that treadmill was way easier than it should have been.’
The clock read 3:67, although the display was now decimal, that didn’t change that this place’s hours were a bit over 68 minutes long. Patrick went back to the table and ordered his breakfast shake. Sitting down and slowly twirling while he drank his shake, ‘These are good, maybe I should buy the food upgrade to see what else there is.’
Patrick was looking forward to the neighborhood meeting in 2 hours, it was good to have people to share in this insanity. So far they seemed like decent people.
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After finishing the shake he was feeling accomplished and decided to work on the intelligence, concentration, and dexterity tasks. Patrick completed half of the intelligence and concentration categories, he only got to 30 percent in dexterity though. The dexterity tasks required him to wear control gloves and perform augmented reality tasks shown on the table. The table display made it look very realistic, but Patrick struggled with the accuracy needed.
At 5:35 he went to the shopping menu. He had earned enough coins to get the apparel upgrade, and bought some cargo shorts and a navy blue t-shirt. The default clothes that came with the apartment were all ash grey, and he was getting sick of it. ‘And the clothes I had on disappeared when I put them in the clothes bin yesterday. I wonder if I’ll ever get them back.’
After showering and shaving he had a few minutes, and zoned out while watching the door. It was back to its solid form.
—-
At six sharp the door disappeared again. Patrick tried watching more closely to see where it had moved to. There wasn’t any apparent pocket that it had moved into. It was just gone. Stepping closer to the translucent pane of the doorway he couldn’t figure out how that worked either. Stepping through there was no feel of a substance or air movement, the room just appeared to light up as soon as walking into it.
Patrick was able to recall Scott, Fred, and Erin’s names. Putting names to faces had always been tough for him. He recognized two of the other faces, but kept blanking on their names. Then there was one other guy who didn’t look familiar. Everyone had gravitated over to the center of the room again. Although today instead of one large table, there were two medium sized tables, each with a Settler’s of Catan game setup on it.
Scott took the lead and said, “Hi, nice to meet you, my name is Scott” as he reached his hand out to the stranger.
The newcomer appeared middle-aged, a bit shorter than Patrick, and about 50 percent heavier. He had disheveled brown hair, and a scraggly beard. In a soft voice he said, “My name is ….”
Scott smiled and said, “Sorry I didn’t catch that, my hearing has been going, too many concerts I guess” and gracefully pulled back his hand.
Just a bit louder the new guy said, “I’m Marcel.”
Fred waved and said, “Welcome, I’m Fred.” A round of introductions followed, and Patrick paid close attention when Caleb and Harvey introduced themselves. All the while Marcel stood there somewhat bewildered.
The neighbors engaged in small talk about the food, what knick-knacks, or clothes they picked up. Only Caleb, and Marcel were still in the grey sweats that everyone wore yesterday. Fred, Erin, and Sydney were in t-shirts and shorts. Scott and Harvey had splurged and got polo shirts, which were about twice as expensive as the t-shirts.
When everything had been said about the new shopping options Scott said, “Alright, what do you all say we play some Catan. I was worried about how we would play with 7 people, but it looks like we can just split into two groups of 4.”
Everyone rolled all four of the dice and the groups were split up based on each person’s roll. Patrick was with Erin, Caleb, and Harvey; Scott, Fred, Sydney, and Marcel were in the other group.
Patrick was lucky to nab a couple of good lumber and brick locations and decided to go for a strategy of getting to new locations first and having the longest road. It wasn’t clear if Erin and Caleb had an overall strategy, but Harvey seemed to be focused on development cards. As the game progressed they shared their thoughts about their captivity.
Erin started, “So, allegedly all of this is some sort of job interview process. For the life of me I can not ascertain what we have been doing could be relevant to any sort of position.”
Harvey smirked and said, “It's clear this is a hidden camera reality tv show. A weird new game show.”
“There’s no way the government would be involved with something like that, especially after the attacks.” responded Caleb.
“They were still strong-armed into it, we are not dancing to the government’s tune, it is whoever is controlling the ‘dragon’”.
Patrick asked, “So you don’t think the dragon is a creature? The sightings were just starting when I was taken.”
Harvey: “It comes down to an issue of size, biological systems can not scale up to something the size of Florida. It’s also inconceivable to imagine an evolutionary path that would end with dragons in space. I made all of my money in genetics and DNA, and it is just impossible. The only way it could be an actual creature would be to genetically design it, and then what would be the point.”
Erin laughed and said, “The ultimate flex of superiority?”
Erin waited a beat and continued, “More seriously, my job is with one of the research groups with access to Hubble, and they had some great shots of it. There was a lot of debate about what the dragon was, and I saw a bunch of the arguments against it being biological. From the pictures and videos though, it looked more like a dinosaur than a space station.”
Erin: “Again, I am not disagreeing, just sharing what I saw. The other thing I will say is that just by showing up, whatever it is, the dragon broke all of the rules about how we thought physics works.”
Patrick asked, “for example?”
Erin: “All of them, for example, conservation of momentum. When an object is in motion it stays in motion unless acted upon by a force. When I throw the dice they keep going until they hit the table and the table pushes back on them. The dragon flew into the solar system at about 5 percent the speed of light. We saw it at Jupiter one day and the next day it was here. That speed is already insane, but the kicker is that it just stopped in orbit, easy as pie. None of the satellites picked up anywhere near enough thermal radiation to detect a braking force of any type. All of that energy just disappeared. *poof* There were a lot of arguments about how much energy you would need to stop it that fast, but the lowest estimate was more than enough to turn the moon into confetti. I was taken on the 18th, and the list of impossible was already quite long.”
There was a short lull while that was digested before the table continued to throw out ideas and observations as the game continued.
The post game mood was sour. By the time Patrick’s group had finished Marcel had won the other game, ordered a round of raspberry energy drinks, and retreated to his room. Scott, Fred, and Sydney were unhappy and casually blaspheming the random number gods. Patrick had started to lose interest in his game once his push into the center of the island was blocked by Erin. Harvey won the game through aggressive deployment of the robber and development cards. He was bitter though that Caleb used the monopoly card to hoard all of the bricks and refused to trade. Ultimately it was futile, just extending the game for an extra two rounds.
Given the mood, Patrick said a few polite words and excused himself to get back to make some more progress on his tasks.
— 7:57 —
Patrick changed back into his grey sweats and started using the home gym. The strength tasks covered a range of different exercises. The first day focused on the upper body, and today was focused on the lower body. The task was to hit a certain volume, so Patrick chose weights that he was comfortable with and kept doing reps until he hit the goal. A third of the way through he noticed that, just like with the treadmill, the weights seemed to be on ‘easy mode’. He upped the weights a bit to finish faster, but was cautious not to go too high and injure himself.
— 9:12 —
Patrick was drinking his supper, a french vanilla shake, and was feeling good about the work out. He did a bit more than the minimum for the strength tasks and felt focused and ready.
Patrick spent the next couple of hours working on the Intelligence and Concentration tasks. He hadn’t been able to make progress on the Dexterity tasks and wanted to make best use of his time. He was able to complete the Intelligence tasks, but by 11:30 his progress on the Concentration tasks had stalled out.
