The Gattaca Testing Center Incident: Friday the 13th

Absurd Geometry Field Notes No. 00.2

It was Friday the 13th, and I had decided, on principle, to prove that it was not an unlucky day by scheduling one of the most important exams of my life. Because it was proctored, I had to drive to Austin. I woke up so early that morning I woke the rooster. I tapped him on the shoulder and removed him from active duty. In hindsight, this was irresponsible. I now believe I interfered with the town’s natural alarm infrastructure, because after that, everyone was late to work. Friday the 13th began badly, and I fear I may have personally initiated the decline.

I had no choice. He was under my care. Ever since he guided me toward the exit at the cornfield maze, he had become my faithful traveling companion. In towns like ours, GPS systems do not work reliably, largely because the town itself does not appear to exist on Google. And if you are not on Google, you do not exist. He was therefore not only the town’s primary alarm system, but also my personal navigation unit. Under those circumstances, taking him with me was less a choice than a guardianship obligation. I do accept responsibility for the consequences.

I finally arrived at the testing facility. I left my car running and the chicken inside, but not before filtering out anything the TV Guide might classify as an escape show, including Houdini, Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, and Prison Break. I did not want to come back to a chicken on the run.

The testing center operated under the assumption that every candidate was a highly motivated criminal. The entire examination process seemed to have been inspired by Gattaca. They took our DNA samples, mugshot-style photos, and confiscated our valuables, including our phones, car keys, and any Pokémon we might have caught in the field. Because they couldn’t pat us down, they had us do what was essentially the Hokey Pokey in case any contraband or cheat notes fell out of our clothes. After we were done shaking it all around, we were moved further into the facility for individual processing.

I had apparently made the proctor extremely nervous because I was the only one in the room wearing long sleeves. He looked at me with the dead seriousness of a man who believed fabric itself was suspicious.

‘You don’t happen to be a certified part-time magician, do you?’ he asked.

After all, only a magician would choose to wear sleeves.

I said no, but not with the authority the situation required.

‘Nothing up this one,’ I added, lifting one arm slightly. ‘Nothing up the other.’

This did not restore confidence.

He did not believe me, so he sent me to the next room to take a lie detector test. After I passed that with distinction and was even issued a certificate of excellence, I was escorted to my assigned room, which appeared to have previously served as an escape room.

Halfway through the exam, approximately three hours in, the internet went down.

This was not a small inconvenience. Our phones had already been confiscated and locked away with the rest of our possessions. We had been explicitly instructed not to speak to one another, not to look around, not to make tapping sounds that could be interpreted as Morse code, and not to behave like members of a human community. So there we were, seated in a loose circle of shared distress, staring at one another in silence while two employees ran around trying to restore order.

They called IT and put the man on speakerphone.

He asked whether they had tried turning the light switch on.

He said this in a foreign accent, which somehow made it feel even more official.

All of us looked at one another with the same expression: we are absolutely finished.

These were high-stakes exams. Hundreds of questions. Hours of concentration. We had all arrived at different times and were frozen at different points in our suffering. No one knew whether our sessions had been saved or whether we would be forced to begin again from the start, now more tired and less innocent than before.

One man whispered, “Oh fuck, I forgot everything.”

That did not improve morale.

Then an older woman entered with a younger male relative, possibly her grandson, possibly her son. It was difficult to tell. She was in an extraordinarily good mood, which, under the circumstances, felt almost suspicious. While the rest of us sat there looking like hostages awaiting procedural updates, she radiated the energy of someone arriving early to a church potluck.

She asked, brightly, whether anyone had tried turning it off and on again.

I informed her that that only works in movies.

She seemed mildly embarrassed, then recovered with admirable speed.

“Well,” she said, “you learn something new every day.”

Because she was not taking an exam, she was free to speak in ways the rest of us could not. She looked around at us and said, with sincere encouragement, “Maybe this is the real test. Maybe it’s a test of patience.”

We all laughed a little.

I told her I would strongly prefer for the test to be about patience and not the opening scene of Squid Game. Or worse, the beginning of Saw, where, in the next few moments, we would hear the small, oiled tricycle of a puppet entering the room to announce that he wanted to play a game.

That improved the atmosphere immediately.

One guy said he wouldn’t mind if Billy the Puppet paid us a visit and signed some autographs.

But I reminded him we didn’t have pens. How, exactly, was he expecting the puppet to sign autographs △ △ △ with blood? Don’t encourage him.

Now everyone was imagining how a group of strangers had ended up seated almost in a circle, stripped of their possessions, under surveillance, waiting for instructions while authority figures failed to restore the system. It was, admittedly, not a reassuring setup.

Negative Nancy, however, remained committed to despair. He kept muttering that this was ridiculous, that of course this would happen to him, that of course he had chosen the earliest slot in the morning, and why he had even come at all.

At that point, I looked around the room and asked, “Do you all realize what day it is?”

They stared at me.

We did not have our phones. We had no clocks. We had been removed from time itself.

“It’s Friday the 13th,” I said. “You all knew what you were getting yourselves into.”

That broke something open in the room. Everyone started laughing at the absurdity of it, at the fact that we had all independently chosen to gamble our luck on one of the most cursed calendar dates available. We had come willingly. We had scheduled this. We had all, in our own administrative way, signed the waiver.

And then, at the exact moment our laughter peaked, the internet came back.

It returned with such precision that it almost seemed as though we had unclogged the system through vibration alone. We all looked around at one another, smiling, stunned by the timing, united briefly by the tragic absurdity of what we had collectively walked into.

Then we were sent back to our respective rooms to continue our exams.

Oddly enough, I felt lighter after that. The interruption had broken the tension, and the laughter seemed to reset something in my brain. I was able to recall information more easily afterward, as though shared despair had briefly reorganized the nervous system into cooperation.

I did pass.