Will couldn’t afford to be nervous, that was the whole point. All that time spent practising a state of  calm awareness, he wasn’t about to blow it by anything so analog as the jitters. Not too calm, though, either. Will had perfected an ability to fake his feelings by making tiny muscle movements in his face, altering ever-so-slightly his on-screen focus and playing with split-second keystroke timings. He knew he could never hide completely, but he could do just enough to trick the sensors and skew the software designed to read him. He’d even found a way to raise his body temperature by remembering that awful embarrassing thing. He wasn’t going to think about that now though, he needed it in reserve and fresh enough to make him sweat a bit.

Will tried to recall when it had dawned on him that even the set of his shoulders was being clocked and computed, never mind anything else he did on lEARN like replaying a course video a couple more times than usual. It was a creepy feeling that had started gradually and sort of been confirmed by the acronyms beginning to feature in his assessments and on CorpShare – SEL, mCog, grIT, sYk. He knew it all amounted to the regular sequence of numbers on the minus-twenty to plus-twenty scales that recorded his skills, determination, emotions and anything else it tried to deduce from his involuntary reactions and, well, his private self. Will had felt helpless at first, then overwhelmingly angry, and finally a sort of sad deviousness consumed him. If he was trying to fool the system, Will knew, other kids must be too. But he wasn’t going to think about that now either. He had to concentrate and practice a few more times before tomorrow.

Tomorrow was Class Day. It sounded innocuous enough, but it was the most important day in the academic year and to Will’s reckoning it really meant classification day. It wasn’t just that you had to produce the right answers, though that was hard enough, it was that you had to try and convince the system that you were the right sort of candidate in every other way. The temperature thing for example – avoid sweaty panic at unexpected questions, but if you thought you could nail a difficult answer it was good to notch it up a degree. He’d experimented a couple of times and seen his SEL scores soar, but he knew it didn’t work by downing hot coffee, the system was a step ahead there. Over the months Will had developed ways of tweaking his numbers, an animated face here, an excited burst of keystrokes there. Thinking about nice or awful stuff were winners too, probably affected his heartbeat or something Will guessed, but their effects faded with use and he had to store them up for the right times.

Will composed himself for a few seconds, settled his expression and his posture and entered a nonchalant but alert mood zone. Then he sat down at his machine for another subtle practice so that tomorrow, on Class Day, he could score the right numbers and get placed in one of the coveted P categories. He banished his anger, regret and exhaustion – he knew they would be waiting for him on the other side.