the fat man kept chuckling to himself, apparently about his encounter with the desk person khan, as he led edward to an elevator, where he pressed the button for the twentieth floor. they reached the twentieth floor in seconds, and the door opened and the fat man led edward down a long corridor lined with unmarked doors. all the doors had twelve digit keypad locks.
no words were spoken the whole time, and the man finally stopped his chuckling and assumed a somewhat stern expression. he stopped at the door on the left at the end of the long corridor.
the fat man rapidly punched the keypad, and they entered the room.
a very ordinary looking room, like a classroom. but empty of people. there was a plain wooden table with a chair at the front of the room. and about thirty smaller tables with folding chairs lined up in four rows facing the front. each of the thirty tables had a pencil attached to it with a chain, otherwise the tables were empty.
there was no blackboard, or any kind of screen, or any visible apparatus for projecting anything on the blank walls.
the fat man sat down at the table in the front, took out his phone and began scrolling through it.
edward hesitated, but as the man showed no signs of giving him any instructions he sat down directly in front of him, but three chairs back from the front.
“we will start in five minutes,” the man suddenly announced. edward assumed this meant, whether anybody else showed up or not.
edward waited. he did not look at his own phone, but after what he took to be about five minutes, the man got up and walked over to the left wall, to a door edward had not noticed before. it looked like the door to a closet.
it was indeed a closet, with a stack of cardboard boxes in it. the fat man opened the top box and took out a big stack of papers.
the examination papers? as he took out so many, maybe he was expecting other applicants after all, edward thought.
but the mystery was solved when the man plopped the whole pile down in front of edward. you have two hours, he told edward. but don’t worry, that is plenty of time, the questions are not that hard. a lot of them are just opinion, there are no right answers.
the man went back to his table.
the pages of the test were numbered. edward glanced at the number of the bottom page. 303!
his heart sank. but he took a deep breath, and held back his tears.
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