After going to the appointed location for mr. Jepen's next mission, we were herded into a hall. It looked like a cross between a large classroom and a detention center. There were small, well separated desks. The desks were suitable for one person each, and were spread out over the entire floor of the hall, there must have been many hundreds.
The desks had simple datapads on them and the overseers yelled at us to a seat at any desk without delay. The overseers, who looked as if they were bored of patrolling the hall, also told us not to talk to each other. Everybody complied.
I was the only capsuleer, all the others were baseliners, scared and startled by my presence. Looking around me, I realized that most of them, or probably all of them, were recently freed slaves. They were suspicious of me, probably thinking my presence was part of some sort of strange final test following their manumission.
In reality, I was to be subjected to the same procedure as they were.
A booming voice, reverberating in the large hall announced our fate via hidden loudspeakers:
"Using advanced machine learning, psychometrics, and career satisfaction data, we’ve reimagined what a Career Orientation Test can be! Welcome to the first day of your orientation! Please fill in the questionnaire on the datapad in front of you."
