“This isn’t fair!” Xavier shouted as a soldier wrested the sword from his hand. He lashed out, punching and kicking with all his might, but he inevitably found himself pinned against the cold, smooth floor by a powerful pair of hands. Beside him, his fellow subject Carys was thrown to the ground. She twisted backward, clawing and biting and spitting out a ferocious array of expletives, but she was quickly overpowered with a blast of nonlethal electricity.

Dara Kravchenko stood over the test subjects, brandishing her fancy super-staff. “Are you alright, Silina?” she asked curtly, not even bothering to look down at the struggling prisoners on the floor. It was clear that she viewed them as lower than dirt, and that infuriated Xavier.

“Yes, I’m fine. Thank you, ma’am,” said the military man pressing his full weight against Xavier’s shoulders. Xavier had slashed a nice line across his face, to match the stitched-up gashes Blake had left on him. It was difficult for Xavier to feel smug, after being beaten so easily—but somehow, he managed, insolently smiling as the soldier crushed his knees into his arms.

“Why the hell do you think we deserve to die?!” Xavier snarled as he grinned. “Don’t tell me you really think you people have some sort of moral high ground. I guarantee that you alone have killed way more people than Carys and I put together! You don’t get medals like yours from picking flowers and giving money to strangers, Captain!”

Dara did not respond. Instead, she turned toward the young soldier Xavier had run through with his sword before Kazim could disarm him. Garen Deschamps was his name, and his body was already disappearing. The young man had deserved a better end.

Carys watched the fallen soldier cease to exist with wild eyes. “You could’ve put him on the circle and solved everything,” she growled, “but you don’t have any sense!”

“Silina, Genva. Take the murderer to the red circle,” Dara ordered without a single twitch of emotion. “He will be brought to justice.”

“It was self-defense!” Xavier protested as a soldier took each of his arms, lifting him to his feet. They began dragging him toward the center of the room, intending to force him into the glowing red space. Desperate, he pleaded with the eighth member of their ‘team,’ Mira Murata, who stood frozen in confusion and horror. “Please, you have to help me! You saw everything! How can you stand by and let this happen?!”

Mira’s face seized up with emotion, and she took a step back, shaking her head. “I... I don’t know what to do!” she exclaimed. “I’m not a fighter!”

Dara sharply turned, advancing on the young Colonist. “Do you not understand that this is for the best? The Explicator needs a sacrifice, plain and simple. I can’t be the one. A hundred soldiers depend on me. You don’t deserve to be the one, and neither does anyone else in this room, besides those criminals. They willingly threw their lives away, and they have nothing to return to in the real world—unlike the rest of you.”

Mira looked sick. “I... I understand your logic, but... this is just wrong!” she said. “Asking someone to die because you think they’re less valuable... H-he did kill that soldier, but you guys were the ones who attacked first! This... this is so screwed-up, oh god...” Resolve filled her features, and she said, “I’ll do it. I’ll be the sacrifice.”

Dara began to protest, but Mira ran right past her, ignoring her completely.

“Somebody stop her!” the captain shouted as the young Colonist sprinted to the red beacon. Kazim let go of Xavier’s arm to chase after her, giving the test subject an opening to strike the other soldier, Genva, in the jaw.

Kazim dove toward Mira, intending to tackle her.

Private Genva’s head was knocked back by Xavier’s blow. He went stumbling to the edge of the red light, keeping an iron grip on Xavier’s arm, yanking him off-balance. Together they tumbled into the zone of deletion.

Kazim grabbed Mira’s ankle, tripping her. She fell headlong into Xavier and Genva, and her vision was filled with red....

-

The Explicator sat in her Control Room, analyzing streams of data at an inhumanly rapid pace. A tessellation of twenty testing rooms hovered before her eyes. She could see right through the walls she had designed, to observe the progress of the human figures within. She beheld a multitude of unexpected results, altering plans on a massive scale in the wake of the humans’ reactions. The allotted hour was reaching its end, and only three out of the twenty groups had fulfilled the requirements of the test. Chaos reigned supreme in every room, as conflicting brands of irrationality struggled in disharmony. In many rooms, the groups were paralyzed with indecision, arguing or outright refusing to single someone out. In some, they were exchanging threats, or even physically attacking each other. The Explicator took in these assorted intricacies of human irrationality and immediately began to process them, figuring out ways to fit new subconscious insights into the simulated psyches of her AIs. It appeared that the humans had formed three distinct groups based on their origins beyond her maze—groups that conflicted, that saw each other as enemies. This information was valuable.

She waited for the hour to finish playing out, counting down the minutes in perfect synchronization with time in the outside world. The number of successful groups remained at three. Interestingly, all three of these groups had agreed to offer up a maze AI for deletion, rather than a human. Further observation would reveal if this was due to the humans’ preconceived notions about the AIs’ sentience, or if the AIs simply did not behave in a human enough manner.

“That’s enough,” the Explicator said, projecting her voice into each testing room. She promptly returned everyone to their previous locations in the maze, minus the three AIs who had been removed. She dematerialized the testing rooms, already beginning to construct the next set of challenges. “I am very disappointed. Many of you failed this inaugural test, in one way or another. It was really quite simple. I expected more from you.” With that, she went silent, ready to listen, ready to record and dissect every response to her chastising statement.

-

The Colonists were jolted back into their bedroom without warning. Yuli stumbled, disoriented, while Arilus remained steady. Cay let out a pained whimper, grateful to be lying down again.

Mira sobbed aloud when she found herself back in her bed. She tightly grabbed at her mattress in relief and horror. “Oh my god!” she shouted through her tears. “I thought I was gonna die!”

Yuli’s heart pounded in her chest as she stood there, staring at the other Colonists, waiting for her mind to fully process the events of the morning. “That... that’s the sort of test we’ll be doing for the rest of the year...” she murmured. “Will they always be like this?!”

A young man sitting in the corner quavered, “My group... I couldn’t get a word in. The soldiers ganged up on the rest of us and wouldn’t listen to me.”

“Same here,” Mira said, wiping her nose out of habit, only to realize it wasn’t runny. The sticky tears on her cheeks felt real, but the rest of her face was missing its usual crying characteristics. It was incredibly disconcerting. “I was in a group with the captain. The way she handled the test subjects... it was terrifying. I fell into the red spot, but I think a couple others did too? Anyway, I don’t think we did what we were supposed to.” She pressed her hands against her face, talking through her trembling fingers. “I’m still here, so maybe we all survived? Then again, I wasn’t the first to fall in...”

“That sounds horrible,” Yuli gasped. “My group wasn’t quite as bad. A couple of them were pretty nice, actually. But the AIs got into an argument with some of the soldiers over whose lives were a higher priority, and we didn’t end up sending anyone... which I’m really grateful for, actually.”

“Typical,” a nearby woman scoffed. “What else can you expect from soldiers? All they know how to do is kill for A-Corp, destroy the damn world for A-Corp. Anyone who isn’t part of their little army is practically the Enemy itself, right?”

“This is a complete mess,” Cay groaned from his bed.

“Maybe the other tests won’t be as bad as this one,” Yuli said, without much confidence. “The Explicator did say she wanted this one to be ‘memorable.’ Maybe the others are less... intense.”

“There’s no telling. But I can’t help but worry,” the quavering young man shook his head. “If things continue in this direction... our future here’s looking pretty grim, isn’t it?”

A solemn silence filled the room. The Colonists were not in the best shape—one wounded, one dead, the rest virtually powerless against the soldiers and criminals that surrounded them. This was not what they had signed up for. Would any of them survive a full year?