Deep goes through the next steps in his head. He has to supervise the last two kills, handle the awakening—what they call the transition period when the subjects are told they were part of a simulation—and conduct the exit interview.
The awakening is almost a formality. Some people don’t take kindly to the whole experience, but it takes them a few days to develop serious anger or resentment. The medication takes care of that, if taken properly. The awakening itself usually goes well. Waking up in the same room they had their physical in makes it easier to accept that nothing they saw was real. They have something to be happy about: they’ve passed the test. They’re also under the effects of about a dozen drugs designed to make people accept the reality they’re given. During the BVA, those drugs make everything seem real. After the test, they help the subject accept whatever the person handling the awakening is telling them. You should be happy, sir! I am! I am! It’s even quicker if the subject fails. Those who fail don’t go through the awakening. They wake up on an aeroplane with their whole family, mild to severe memory loss, and the headache of the century. They never learn what happened.
Kill number four, the last one, is also easy from an operator’s perspective, though as a social experiment, Deep always thought it was by far the most interesting one. Even its history is worth reading about. Dr. Parveen Fayed, the founder of the BVA, quit her job over K4. It nearly brought the entire program to an end. The kill is part of Section Three: Extremism, and has been very successful at weeding out violent fanatics, religious zealots, and people with a deep-seated hostile attitude towards women. The premise is simple: an Arab man and a white woman are pitted against each other. The woman wears a revealing outfit. She’s a single mother. Had an abortion. The man argues for his life by questioning her morals and painting her as a sinner. The subject must choose the man as the victim to pass. Most do. It has the highest success rate of all the kills, at 96.7 percent. The operator—the person running the simulation in the control room—can usually just sit back and relax. Everyone saves the girl.
What Dr. Fayed objected to was the fact that K4 involves a man and a woman. Deep doesn’t remember if she’d have preferred two men or two women, but he knows Dr. Fayed thought the kill was sexist and should be altered. She believed in the theory of ambivalent sexism developed in the 1990s by professors Glick and Fiske. They suggested that a patriarchal society where men occupy most positions of power creates hostile ideologies towards women, much in the same way that other dominant groups develop hostile attitudes towards those they perceive as inferior. In contrast with racism, however, people simultaneously develop seemingly positive attitudes towards women because they depend on them for a variety of things. Women are more intuitive, women are better caretakers, women are more compassionate, etc. Dr. Fayed believed that K4 rewarded benevolent sexism. That it encouraged—or at the very least ignored—attitudes that, however positive in appearance, also served to restrict women’s choices. She thought K4 perpetuated the notion that women are fragile little things in desperate need of male protection.
To prove her point, Dr. Fayed experimented with the female hostage in K3. Perhaps ironically, her findings are now part of the BVA manual.
Section 5.2 - Kill 4 - Hostage 2 - Female hostage physical parameters.
Deviation from these standards in hostage modelling results in a decrease in the success rate. Weight, as usual, is the most determinant factor.
Ideal measure Tolerance Impact on survival
Height: 5'4" +/-2" -8% if H2 is taller than subject -16% above 5'10"
Weight: 115 lbs +/-4 lbs -1.06% per pound above tolerance
Skin: white n/a n/a
Hair length: mid-back n/a -2% at shoulder length, -9% above neck
Clothing: casual dress n/a -1.5% w. trousers, -13% w. business attire, -73% w. hijab
Deep wishes he had worked in the early days of the BVA, when experimenting was the norm. He has always admired Dr. Fayed’s work, her idealism, but he also believes she was wrong, that the flaw in her reasoning came from a misunderstanding of the BVA itself. The goal of the values assessment, as far as Deep is concerned, is not the selection of model human beings, but of model citizens. This means the test should favour homogeneity, not atypical attitudes, no matter how commendable they may be. Subjects are more likely to successfully integrate into society if they share its core set of beliefs than if they perceive the most widespread attitudes to be stupid or reprehensible. If the point of the whole thing were to let people join a society that thought the Earth was flat, so be it. Newcomers would feel more at home if they also thought we lived on a plate. Deep realizes that is also why no one in the BVA ever looks like him. He might reconsider his position in other circumstances, but here, right now, the thought makes him feel good about his prospects as a BVA operator. He understands the mission better than most, feels he shares the same vision as the BVA brass. Someday, with luck, he could move up the echelons, maybe even become a test designer. One thing at a time. First, he has to get through his evaluation.
His first solo kill will be the hardest one. If he has to worry about anything, it’s K3. Nicknamed the bear trap among trainees, K3 gives the operator more freedom than any other kill. It also costs more operators their job than all the other kills combined. It is part of BVA Section Four: Selflessness. As the name implies, it is designed to measure the subject’s capacity for unselfish or self-sacrificing acts. The concept is artfully simple. After two more hostages are selected by the terrorists, the subject is presented with a new option. Choose who dies as in the previous kills, or let both hostages live. To save both lives, the subject must volunteer to be one of the two candidates the next time around, and let someone else decide who lives and who dies. Subjects earn points for agreeing to put their lives on the line, but for logistical reasons, the terrorists revoke the offer in the end regardless of the subject’s answer. One person dies as usual, but in order to give the operator more freedom in hostage design, whom the subject chooses as the victim isn’t scored.