Commander Smegg in "Invasion of the Vertices"*

Location: Prison - er, testing room 47
Time: They confiscated my watch, it had numbers on it
Why hadn't anyone told Smegg about the annual engineers' certification
testing?
Sure, it would probably be a breeze (as all standardized tests tended to
be), but it sure was a pain in the neck. He'd hoped he'd been out of the
system for good once he'd joined the Space Corps but no...
He looked around the room. It wasn't very big. Must be doing the tests in
shifts, with the senior officers going first. Around him Smegg could see
Lt. Cmdr. Steev MacKenzyyyyy, Lt. Marlene Box, Ensign Jenni Madison, as
well as a couple dozen others from around Engineering.
Wait a second, Ensign Jenni Madison? The test hadn't started yet (where
was that damn proctor?), so Smegg leaned over to her and asked her why
she was there.
"Psst, Ensign! You're not assigned to Engineering, you're assigned to
Communications! What are you doing in this test room?"
Instantly Smegg slapped himself as Madison "replied": "Holly, why am I in
this test room?"
Holly appeared on a screen at the front of the room, wearing horn-rimmed
glasses and a navy tie and "holding" (well actually floating next to him,
he didn't have any hands) a stopwatch. (So that's where the proctor
went!)
"No talking amongst yourselves before the exam period," Holly stated.
"Three minutes to commencement." He disappeared.
-------------------------------------
Location: Same place (no spacetime vortices today, just vertices)
Time: Ten minutes later, give or take a quarter hour (but maybe there is
a spacetime vortex... how would I know, my watch is still missing!)
Smegg had nearly finished the test while most of the other engineers
seemed to be struggling on the "trig review" section. A few of the least
competent ones were still trying to fill out their names in the little
bubbles on the cover of the test booklet. With their erasers. (Got to
talk to the captain about them.)
But there was one little problem. Problem twenty-six.
"Given a regular lentiform crystalline lattice of phase polarity 7.25 and
the following set of vertices:
A (1.7725, 6.9904, 3.5276)
B (2.6401, 0.1063, 5.2250)
C (5.4715, 5.7984, 7.5872)
D (2.7627, 6.5494, 3.2476)
E (1.7725, 5.0900, 3.6226)
F (5.8761, 5.2220, 6.5536),
which, if any, is the irregularity in the matrix?"
He knew it couldn't be E; that was the cosine-integrated rotational point
and that had to be one of the stable points. But which of the others
could it be? This was the ONE thing Smegg didn't get in all of his math
courses. (There was a substitute professor that day; Dr. Wiebermann had
been sick, he recalled.) With his luck this question would probably count
for half the test and he'd flunk.
Well, he thought, there was nothing to do but guess, so he picked F (all
those 2's looked suspicious, not to mention the power of 2 hidden in the
Z-coordinate).
Now... there was nothing to do but wait.
-----------------------------
Location: Still same place
Time: Ten years - uh, maybe an hour later
Finally Holly appeared on the screen and said, "Time is up. Please hand
in your tests." The test-takers groaned as a scutter made the rounds
collecting the test papers. One engineer kicked the scutter underneath
his desk; he received a nasty electrical shock. Holly spoke again: "If
you want to hear your scores right away, please stand at the console to
your left. For the return of your personal articles, stand at the vendor
on the right. Thank you for taking an ETS-9000 test; please come again."
As the test-takers filed out of the room, Holly's accoutrements
disappeared. "God how I hate doing that," he said. Then he disappeared as
well.
Smegg walked over to the console on the left. He was the only one who did
so. "So, Holly, how did I do?" he said to a smaller version of Holly.
"Commander Jason T. Smegg... you scored one hundred percent." Holly
replied. "Congratulations."
Smegg almost fainted, something a guy his size and age didn't usually do.
"What about that question I guessed on? Number twenty-six?"
"Oh, that?" Holly said. "That was one of the fake questions."
"Fake questions?" Smegg asked.
"Yes, fake questions." Holly said. "We put those in there to psych you
out. Haven't you ever heard of them before?"
"No!" exclaimed Smegg. "They never did that to me in school!"
"You must have guessed them all right then and never noticed." Holly
grinned.
"fake questions my foot" Smegg said, stomping out...
*All right Kayn/Lonewolf, you got "OMF2097", let's see if you can figure
out this one!
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Dumb quote: "It's 'unite', not 'ignite'! 'To UNITE all peoples within our
nation'!" - James
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