Test Caps: Chapter 1

“Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say.”

It was the skinny one talking to his bigger friend, leaning in close with a hand cupped around his mouth to make the words sound even more dramatic, building tension like a voiceover for a movie trailer while we waited in the auditorium for the suits to begin their program.

OUR program … if we make it through this phase.

The skinny one grabbed his own neck, pantomiming being choked and trying to scream with only the sound of raw air making it out. Flecks of spit escaped his mouth during this performance, and that wasn’t all.

“Oooh … guess we’re not in space yet, huh.”

He used the hand on his neck to swivel his head my direction and stare at me open-mouthed, wide-eyed. “WHAT did you say?”

“I said I can hear you. Like … breathe-screaming,” I used my pen like a pointer, gesturing in a sloppy circle towards him to indicate his act. “So … I guess we’re not in ‘the vacuum of space’ since … I can hear you ‘screaming’ and all.”

Keeping his mouth open and eyes locked on me, skinny boy slid his hand off his neck down under the hem of his untucked t-shirt. He directed his movie trailer voice at me, “lucky … FOR YOU” and punched his fist forward under his shirt in my direction, stretching the fabric so I could see his knuckles. Then he looked down at his belly-fist, gasped, and used his other hand to tackle the under-shirt-alien right when it started writhing and struggling.

While his outside hand and his undershirt creature were locked in mortal combat, I noticed skinny boy’s big friend had been watching me the whole time, kicked back with a little smirk, his arm up on the empty seat next to him like there was just too much of him to be contained by the space allotted to a normal single human.

When my eyes met his I felt caught: spotted, assessed and undefended. I grimaced a tight smile trying to concede my joke had been lost somewhere, and looked down at my notebook, already open and ready to go even though we were there forty minutes early.

I thought I’d avoid guys like this by arriving so early. That the seats would fill in slowly around me by other serious applicants to the program, leaving anybody who clearly wasn’t qualified to straggle in late and wind up in the back rows. Instead it was just me, someone in a silver puffer coat napping across the aisle and off to the side with a hood half-covering their face, and these two who looked like frat boy rejects in community college if community colleges had frat houses. Actually, the big one looked full-on frat boy.

Why are they here?

They couldn’t want what I wanted: a shot to test the new frontier in office space for solopreneurs, contractors and employees of big outfits and government entities who needed to insure complete security during project development with no opportunities for disclosure of classified information. Shoot them into space alone in completely self-contained capsules to work for extended periods of uninterrupted time with customized levels of contact with humans below ranging all the way down to absolutely no contact at all.

That’s what I wanted; more than anything at all I wanted no contact at all.

No interruptions. No hackers. No “co-working”. No trolls. No open offices or bad roommates or paper thin walls vibrating to uninspired beats. No sad people shitting in the streets below screaming in psychotic agony. No sirens no traffic no bus routes getting changed or canceled without warning. No dressing to impress no deciding what’s for dinner. No more making misunderstood jokes that fail to do anything but embarrass me.

Without this chance to be a Test Cap I’d never be able to afford a Cap of my own. Never be able to escape all of the loudness long enough to make something of myself.

No more answering impatient questions about when I would produce work that would prove myself. And maybe a chance to go to work for this outfit. THE Outfit themselves: the big boys that came after Regard Engine and Beeftoast and dominated the landscape, the seascape and owned everything up above.

I didn’t know what I would do for them, but I knew they would see my potential.

After that? There was no limit: not even the sky.