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The time has come for your first technopath exam. You’ve tried to prepare yourself, but there was no way to know what to prepare for. You arrive at the Administration building as instructed and get to the exam room on the second floor a few minutes early. The door is open, so you enter and find Professor Haze. Instead of their usual all black and white, their clothes today are dark grey, a hooded cloak mostly wrapping their body up. Now even their stims could give nothing away about this exam.

“Good morning, Aydan,” they say.

“Professor. So it’s ObTech after all?”

“I’m overseeing the first year mid-term exams this year, but the test will involve a variety of technopathy, and your results will be scored by all of the department heads. Take a seat.”

You sit down in one of the two chairs facing Professor Haze. With a knock on the open door, another person enters, a nurse. Not the one you’re familiar with, surely there is more than one nurse on this colony. They’re carrying a hypospray.

“I suspected it would involve dissociation,” you say.

“Of course,” Haze says.

“Alright, I’m ready when you are,” you say.

“Just a moment, Aydan, we are still waiting for one person,” they say. “Ah, here she is.”

You didn’t hear her come in, but another student sits down next to you--your classmate in Haze’s class, 7☆.

“Professor,” she says. She glances over toward you for a second before diverting her eyes away.

Haze looks up at the door and it slides shut. “Let’s begin.”

“Both of us?” you say.

“For this year’s mid-term, we’ve decided on a cooperative exam,” Haze says. “Both of you are promising candidates. I have no doubt that each of you would overcome any challenge I threw at you alone. Of course you would, we Autistics excel at working alone. But sometimes as a technopath you will need to work together with others. Others you don’t know well, or even like, people you don’t understand at all. It is part of the job. So it will be the subject of your exam today.

“Out of all my students, I have seen few with such a rivalry in my class as you two. Your methods are very different, your thinking, your personalities. Aydan, the social butterfly befriending everything in sight, and 7, the quiet one, content to befriend your own constructs. I can think of no better test for the two of you than to work together.”

“I see,” you say.

7 glances at you. “Understood.”

“Now, your objective,” Haze says. “An imprisoning prism my familiar has crossed. Split into two, one green and one blue. Find the fragments, and false shall be true. But let them not touch, or all shall be lost.”

Haze signs to the nurse and they approach you with the hypospray.