================================ Episode #102: Standardized Tests Reel 1 ================================ "Okay, students, you may now open the seals and begin." It was Exam day. Jen took her pencil and used it to break the red string wrapping the Test. "'And lo, the seventh seal was opened,'" she muttered to herself. Then she decided that references to the Apocalypse wouldn't exactly help her optimism for taking the Exam. Turning the page, she looked at the first question. Section I: (recommended time: 45 minutes) 1. The current senshi in command of Her Majesty's Armed Forces is? (A) Venus (B) Mars (C) Mercury (D) Jupiter (E) Saturn Well, she thought, this'll be easy. She bubbled in the correct answer and moved on. The next question said: 2. Crystal Tokyo was founded in? (A) 2001 (B) 2432 (C) 3031 (D) 1023 (E) 1066 'Oh no!' she thought. 'None of them are even close to being right!' Jen fought down her rising panic. The actual date was 2197; she knew it better than her own birthday. But none of the dates given was even close. 3031 was in three years, for crying out loud! 1023 was close to the Silver Millennium era, but not close enough to make it a trick answer. The same went for 1066. 2001 was too early, so that left 2432, which was a good two hundred years after Serenity began building the Crystal Palace which dominated the city. Despairing, she moved on to the next question, which wasn't even multiple choice. She'd have to guess on the previous one. 3. Find the indefinite integral of the function f of x equals sine cubed of x dx. She was still puzzled, but she at least had an idea on this one. She did some scratch work and computed the answer. 4. In the event that Neo-Queen Serenity dies or is otherwise incapacitated, who is to take immediate charge, and what is that person's first action to be? Fairly easy; as Princess Usagi was not yet of age, King Endymion was currently next in line. What was he to do? She had no idea. His connection to Serenity's crystal was nonexistent; it was unlikely that he could do anything with it. Protect the Princess? That was the senshi's job. Declare a state of emergency? No, that would cause almost total panic, if it wasn't already extant. Contact Sailor Pluto? She would almost certainly know what to do. Probably send Chibi-Usa back to the past, like- -Like during the Black Moon crisis! And why had she gone back? To summon the assistance of the senshi of that time! The answer was to make immediate preparations to bring the twentieth century senshi to the thirty-first so that they could somehow revive Serenity! She hurriedly scribbled down the answer. 5. Analyze and discuss the reasons for Chibi-Usa's second recorded voyage to the past. She had, just for fun, read a book on that very topic. A good thing, too; historical records of that time period were extremely sketchy, even more so than for any others of the Senshi's 20th century exploits. History classes generally gave very cursory information on the period, and it was left out of many Exam review books. It had been dry reading, and she disagreed with the author's conclusions, but at least she had a base. After a half hour, she had completed the question in classic five-paragraph essay form. A good seven minutes for the last question in Section I, and then on to II. 6. "Sailor Moon's barbaric policy of youma xenocide in the late twentieth century left a black mark on human history and delayed the race's social progress by hundreds of years." Justify the preceding statement. "Wow," she whispered. She'd read about these kinds of questions before, the genre of "List some of Hitler's major accomplishments," but never seriously answered them. Basically, it analyzed the writer's ability to contradict and overcome her built-in bias and inclination to canon thought. She hadn't expected to see one until graduate school, however. And she certainly hadn't expected it to be on the Exam. Bad-mouthing the very ones whose boots you were, in theory, supposed to be licking at this point? But the question was painfully unambiguous. She sighed and began composing a thesis statement to start her off. This would be a fun seven minutes. *** "Time." Jen sighed with relief, and very nearly collapsed with the effort. She closed the cover on section XXXVII. "Please put your pencils down, do not do any more work on the test . . . " As the proctor droned on, Jen stretched her limbs, finding her body as exhausted as her mind. The exam had been even worse than she'd expected. No-one had been allowed to leave the room, either for the bathroom, or to stretch, or due to cardiac arrest. She wished that she could have gotten out of the exam by being sent to fight a youma or something. Scholarships by gladiatorial combat was sounding like a good idea. After all the materials had been collected, she made her way outside, where Kanomi was waiting with a mock look of exuberance. "Hi, Jen!" "Hi." "I bombed. And you?" "Ditto." Mere words could not express her depression at that point. Then again, it was at that moment being shared by all the others who had decided that they, too, had failed utterly and miserably. "Great. Oh, there's my dad. See ya!" "Bye." And Jen was thus left alone with her thoughts in the dark of the plaza of Mizuno District High School. *** Ryoko Osaka was a direct descendant of Naru Osaka. She didn't know that, however. What she did know was that she was the only human in the building she worked in: 3-R. 3-R was where all the test booklets from the Examination went, and it was her job to file them. The AIs did the hard work, and was it ever hard. They did what it used to take graders nearly a year to do: grade hundreds of thousands of tests. It sounds easy, and would be if one were speaking of the old-fashioned standardized tests that students in the 20th were familiar with. But these went beyond that. There were qualitative as well as quantitative answers. Essays, short-answers, picking up that unknown something from scrawls on a paper--from the books alone, the graders had to sort out and filter the wheat from the chaff, and come up with those worthy to be in the School. The task was difficult enough to give a grader ulcers. If he were human. The graders weren't. Three independent artificial intelligences worked around the clock, using the most powerful processing power on Earth to decide who would become the most powerful women on Earth. Even then, it wasn't easy, and mistakes were made; no-one had forgotten the name of Sailor Pollux. The computers checked and cross-checked every evaluation, making sure that the Second Sailor Wars were not repeated. Ryoko picked up another Exam booklet, labeled Sakachi J 5-161-46716 ACCEPT PRIOR 3. Looking at the label, she turned from the bin she was about to toss it in and put it in another stack. She shook her head. "The poor girl." *** Several weeks later, Jen walked into her house, the girl dripping wet from a rare Crystal Tokyo rainstorm. "Mom?" "Yes?" "Could you get a new SI? This one doesn't know squat about weather forecasting." "Yeah, sure," her mother said jokingly. "I'll just run down to the corner store and grab one." She walked over to turn off the vid, which was showing the Queen at some function or another. "Oh, the mail's on the dining room table. Haven't had a chance to read it." "Thanks!" Jennifer walked into the room in question and rifled through the mail, simultaneously thinking of a thesis for a paper on why people still insisted on paper mail in the thirty-first century. Thinking up theses was her standard way of solving problems, and it usually worked. Except, she thought, on that damned exam. "Um, junk, bill, junk, junk, bill, Exam results, junk, junk, bill. Great." She dumped the whole pile on the table and started up the stairs to her room. Her mother put some tea on the stove. Fifteen seconds later, Jen raced down the stairs again. "EXAM RESULTS!" Frantically, she tore them open and read the results. After reading them, she didn't know what to think. In one way, what she had expected had happened, and at the same time it was totally unexpected. In one sense, she was overjoyed, and in another she was depressed. In one way, however, it was rather obvious that her life was going to change. "Uh, Mom?" "Yes," came the distant voice. "Cancel the vacation. I passed the exam." "Dear God." *** The next twenty-four hours were a blur at the Sakachi household. There were calls to be made, calls to be received, a constant stream of visitors, a constant stream of congratulations. In a country where one nearly had a better chance of winning the lottery than of passing the Exam, she, and the other seventy-five girls who had beaten the odds and passed, were instant media celebrities. The School's officials knew this, and arrangements were made. All who passed had two days to get their affairs in order, and get to the school. Any student giving an interview or such during that two day period got their invitation revoked. Very few interviews were given. One of the first calls came from Kanomi. "Jen-chan?" "Yes?" "Jen-chan! You are . . . you're just amazing! You actually passed?" "So I hear." "Jen-chan, I'm so proud and happy and-" "Pray restrain yourself. It's just a test." "Just a test? JUST A TEST?!? In the name of Serenity, you're going to be a Sailor Senshi because you passed 'just a test.' Goodness, do you realize-" "I realize that I'm still soaking wet, the phone's ringing off the hook, and that I've got some decisions to make. Sorry, but I've got to go." She hung up. The phone rang. "Hello?" "Yes, Jennifer Sakachi, this is . . ." "No." Click. The phone rang. "Hello?" "Yes, Jennifer Sakachi, this is . . ." "No." Click. The phone rang. "WHAT DO YOU WANT?" "Well, I suppose that if you're going to be that way, then I'll call someone else." The voice caught at something within her. "Oh, sorry, but there have been so many calls today . . . who is this?" "Sailor Venus." The clock ticked on. "Oh, um, err, that is-" "It's okay, believe me." She sounded every bit like on television. Actually, she sounded a bit more fun, and had a bit more of that quality that used to be called ditziness. Most biographical texts said that she had never been such, but the voice that Jen was hearing didn't jibe with that. "I've called a lot of Exam finalists, and they were a lot more harried than you are." "Der . . . " "Well anyway, I just wanted to give you my congratulations on behalf of the Senshi here at the Palace." "Uh . . . " "You know, the whole gang. Mercury through Pluto. Well, Pluto left a note saying to give you her regards, she's off at some thing or another, you know how it is." "No . . . " "Come on, girl, speak to me!" "You're Sailor Venus?" "The one and only." "Right. Um-" "Look, Jen, I'd love to chat, but I've got forty-three others to call right now. Look me up during orientations, okay? Thanks." Click. *** "Okay, Jen, now's the time to talk." Jen and her family were sitting in the living room, with all the phones set to be picked up by the overwhelmed SI. If they were lucky, it would keep a log of all calls so they could call back. Luck and the house SI, however, rarely saw eye to eye. "Right," answered Jen. She knew what this conversation was going to be about, and was already marshaling her arguments. "Now Jen, you've passed the exam, and believe me, your father and I couldn't be happier for you. You did an absolutely stellar job." "Thanks." "But-" 'Great,' she thought, 'here comes the but. We're sorry, but we don't think you're ready to go out on your own. We don't think you can handle it. We don't think that you should be involved with fighting. We think you should stay home.' "-but, we'd much rather you didn't go to the School in a couple of days." Jen opened her mouth to give the first counterstrike of the evening, but never got a word out. "We'd much rather you go tomorrow." Jen's mouth stayed open, although it was made more noticeable by the fact that no audible sound was emitted. In fact, it stayed open for quite awhile, during which her parents simply beamed at her. At length, she recovered just enough of her faculties to reply. "You *want* me to go?" Her father chuckled. "If it's okay with you, then yes, we'd love to have a sailor senshi for a daughter." "But-" "Jen, look around you. Look closely." She obeyed her mother. She looked at the second-hand furniture, outdated vid screen, main console for the obstinate cheap house SI, the very crampedness of the room itself. "Jen, you've always known that we weren't very well off. I do my best, heaven knows that your father does, but somehow or another it simply isn't enough. We're in this social rank, and we've gotten used to never rising above it. "But you, Jen, you have the potential and the opportunity to surpass all this. You can be up there with Mercury and Mars, Jupiter and Venus. You can make us, the Queen, and all of Crystal Tokyo proud." Jen just continued to sit there, stunned. There had been a tacit agreement never to say out loud that the Sakachi family was definitely on the low end of the Crystal Tokyo totem pole. Her father had the job with project Pleiades, but it was really just a glorified blue collar position that could have easily been filled by an AI. Her mother was another hanger-on as a secretary. She had been on vacation for weeks, and it was starting to look like she was out of a job. As for Jen, well, her grades just weren't going to get her to a top college. At least, not until before the exam. Now, she was going to go away for at least a year, quite possibly go into space for a decade, and they were encouraging her! Her, their only child! "Yes." said her father, "we know it's strange, but we want the world to remember the name Sakachi for something more than grunt work. Be somebody. Have a life." They all sat for a moment. "Now," said her father briskly, trying to cover his emotion, "get packed. I want you there tomorrow to get used to the place, okay Orion?" "Okay." She rose to go upstairs. Halfway to the steps, she turned. "What did you call me?" "Oh, just a dream I've had. You see, plans are for Sailor Orion to take out H.M.S. Pleiades first." She frowned. "But there is no Sailor Orion." "I hope to God that you're the first."