I'd never been nervous about the yearly test before, which was ironic, because this was the only time I didn't cheat. The morning dragged on with every action of my unsteady hands: brushing my teeth, combing my hair, pulling on my favorite tee, and grabbing my backpack. Sauntering through the kitchen, I tore open a granola bar and called a muffled goodbye to my parents.

Dad gave me a halfhearted wave with his cigarette, and Mom mumbled "good luck", I think. Neither of them looked up, which wasn't surprising. At least when I leave for the stations, I thought, it won't hurt them.

I jogged the six blocks to school, drinking in the city morning, figuring it'd be the last one I'd get to enjoy. I felt at home right in the middle of the blinking signage, the flashing headlights, the looming skyscrapers. A stiff, acrid breeze raced through the streets beside me, carrying the angry cacophony of beeps mixed with that constant, pounding beat. As usual, teenagers poured out of buses in front of the school entrance while teachers scurried everywhere, trying not to collide with the gangly redhead weaving through the commotion.

"Watch it, runt!" shouted a taxi driver, shaking his fist at me.

"Sorry!" I yelled back, grinning at the familiarity of the exchange, while glancing into the interior of the taxi for any reflections that could hint at a weapon. I tried not to be a nuisance to oncoming traffic, but that was nearly impossible in a school zone.

I pushed past the doors and made it to homeroom as quickly as I could, avoiding those girls that always hung out by my locker, and waited for my classmates to file in.

Three giggly girls? Giggling. Check. Three punks trying to flirt with them? Burping contest. Check. Jenna? Staring out the window in the corner. Check. She flashed me a small smile, which I returned. I suddenly regretted not talking to her more this year. I'd known her longer than anyone else in class, and now my opportunity to get to know her better had ended. Though we were friends, I only knew a few things about her:

One, she didn't smile much. Two, when she did, it was usually for me. Three, she seemed to be in a good mood that day. And that made me happy.

Two homeworkaholics. Scribbling furiously. Check.

And me. I know the nicknames I assigned groups of classmates were sort of cliché, and rude, and I promise I wasn't a total jerk to everyone. I talked and tried to be friendly with these kids, but in the end, I was focused on my schoolwork and they...

I heard a loud burp followed by low-pitched laughter behind me. Point made. And, side note, how the heck was that supposed to attract the gigglers? Do any girls, no matter how giggly, actually enjoy hearing us burp? That morning began one of the few days where I actually felt okay about standing out from the rest of my...peers? Entire generation?

I waited and contemplated, bouncing my knee up and down in my seat, before quickly glancing into the mirror above the classroom sink. Frowning, I pulled my trusty comb out of my backpack and repaired the damage inflicted on my hair from the morning's jog. Good hair is supposed to be attractive, not burping, right?

The rest of the class filed in eventually, as did our near-elderly teacher, Miss McKinney. The punks and the gigglers aptly referred to her as Miss McSkinny, but even they had all been frozen countless times by her signature glare. It didn't matter that she was half their height: that glare held the promise of death. (Thinking back, though, she was always nice to me. I tried not to cause any problems, and more than once she'd told me I was "a fine young man with a fine head of hair".)

Miss McKinney shut the door, signaling that class was starting. "Alright, everyone, we all know the program for today, so I won't go through explaining it. Line up for morning announcements, then we'll get straight to testing." The morning announcements commenced, detailing which teachers had won which yearly awards, offering congratulations to class presidents, and stating that today was annual high school testing day...although I'd be concerned for anyone who didn't already know that. They also ran through the pledge of allegiance, which, as usual, I didn't participate in. Why not? Simple. I wasn't gonna pledge allegiance to a supposedly "united" country when two percent of the population had segregated themselves. In outer space. Orbiting above the planet, for goodness' sakes, like they just couldn't get far enough away!

Looking around the grimy classroom, though, I realized that the two percent may have been on to something.

Anyway, when the announcements ended, Miss McKinney informed us that the test would be held in alphabetical order by last name. That put me right in the middle of the line. We all watched as Mara Adams was called, and she sat down to start the testing process. Her hands ran through her curly black hair over and over as she stared at the paper in front of her.

Okay, so, I'm assuming you're wondering what all this testing business was about. The yearly test came at the end of every school year, as a way to figure out who would be enrolled where for the next school year. In eleventh grade, where I was at the time, it was pretty much pointless. If we'd been in the advanced schools since elementary, we weren't suddenly going to be sent to a basic school or flown off to a station.

Generally.

The yearly test had three parts: factual, logical, and the brain scan. The factual test was a remnant of standardized tests that were popular a century or two ago. Sheet after sheet of questions covered all the subjects we'd learned about over the year: math, language, history, science, geography, and so on. Since it was all multiple choice, we really just colored in bubbles. The factual test counted the least on our final grade anyway. Slightly more important was the logic exam, with its brain teasers, number problems, and critical thinking exercises specifically crafted to test the ranges of our logical thinking. It required some thought and was usually a fun challenge. The last and most important portion of the test, however, was the brain scan. We supposedly had no control over our results for this part. A tall, silvery machine scanned your head and instantly counted up the number of neural connections in your brain. That, and only that, was what really mattered to the school system.

So, another question you might have. If we had no control over the results of the brain scan, how did I cheat on it in the past? Easy. The machines can't scan through metal. Since the front of my hair was always a little on the longer side, I managed to tape a small, thin piece of lead to my forehead and keep it hidden there. It had arms, these long, skinny juts extending all over the rest of my head, that I'd hammered out myself. With that contraption, I managed to hide about a sixth of my connections from the machine. No one even bothered to check for cheating mechanisms like that, because who wanted to look like they had less brain than they did?

Me, actually. Having that thing on my head put me in the eighty-ninth percentile, which let me stay home to take care of Amber. It also put me in an average class where the work was easy enough that I could devote most of my time to tutoring her.

"Rowan Miles!" I hadn't realized how quickly the test was moving along, but there was Miss McKinney's voice.

"Here," I said quietly, and sat down to take the factual exam. In years past, I stalled this part to keep up appearances, but in that moment I didn't bother. Page after page of equations, dates, and diagrammed sentences were tucked neatly in a pile on the corner of my desk, and it wasn't more than a few minutes before I moved onto the logic problems.

Miss McKinney handed me a single sheet of paper, and my eye immediately fell on the first question. Which word is always spelled wrong? I scribbled "wrong" and continued down the quiz, and before I'd even thought about it, I was at the bottom of the page.

Then, I switched chairs for the brain scan. Sitting on my hand to keep it from shaking, I took a deep breath.

A few preparatory beeps emanated from the scanner, and I braced myself, preparing for a commotion. Like I said before, it was virtually unheard of for an eleventh grader to switch schools, unless they were moving or something. So, I wasn't exactly excited about becoming the center of attention, but it would be totally worth it to get to the stations.

The machine buzzed next to my head, then spit out the results to the computer on Miss McKinney's desk. I heard her gasp, and, sure enough, every kid's head turned to look at her.

My teacher looked at me, eyes shifting back and forth from her screen to my face a few times. She cleared her throat.

"Excuse me for a minute, class," Miss McKinney spluttered, "I need to find one of the advisors." She walked out of the room with no further sound except the taps of her shoes on the sticky linoleum floor.

All eyes turned to me, with mixed expressions of open-mouthed wonder and concern (well, all except for the eyes of one homeworkaholic who was fiddling angrily with his glasses). "What did you do?" asked Karlie, the short blonde giggler. To my own surprise, I found myself repressing a grin as I shrugged nonchalantly. Being the center of attention wasn't so bad after all, I guess.

Meeting Jenna's perceptive eyes, I couldn't hold back a smile as she gave me a thumbs-up.

A few more minutes passed as everyone looked around awkwardly before Miss McKinney returned with one of the advisors, a young guy with dark hair whose badge read "Kevin". The advisors were hired to fix computer issues and smooth out any bumps in the exams, so they essentially oversaw the testing process.

Kevin sat by Miss McKinney's computer as she circled him anxiously. I craned my neck, trying to hear their muted conversation.

"No computer malfunctions... Just ran a self-diagnostic..." Kevin pressed a few more keys. "Doesn't look like the data was planted... Patterns look somewhat consistent with past scans."

"I don't think this student would falsify the scans," Miss McKinney piped in, and my heart warmed, knowing that she trusted my honesty.

"Well, then I can officially rule that the scans are accurate. This student..." Kevin mumbled the rest, and I couldn't catch it. After a moment, he rose, shook my teacher's hand, and left the room.

"My apologies for the interruption, class. Please resume your testing." Miss McKinney glanced at me a lot during the rest of the tests, eyes wide. Sometimes I'd even get an astonished head shake.

I waited quietly as the final tests wore on. A punk with pink hair chewed on his pencil, then a homeworkaholic sighed loudly at the logic puzzles. Kaylie fretted over whether the scan would mess up her braid. Jenna was quiet and focused, as always, which I admired. I couldn't wait to see which of the stations I was assigned to, but I had to hold on until Sarah Waters was done with her brain scan.

At this point, I'm assuming you've gathered that the stations were a pretty good place to be. Let me fill in some details.

About a hundred years before I was in eleventh grade, in the year 2048, the earth descended into chaos. Educational systems had declined so much that any scientific, technological, or otherwise practical advances had all but died out. So, the genius innovator Asia Breaker founded the space stations and developed the neural connection scan. The results of the scan, as you know, were calculated on a percentile basis: for example, if you were in the seventy-first percentile, it meant that, on average, seventy people out of a hundred scored lower than you. After organizing a planet-wide administration of the brain scan, Asia Breaker's two percent of the population, the ones in the ninety-eighth percentile or higher, designed, built, launched, and populated the series of space stations. By the end of it, there were twenty-four stations in all, one for each letter of the Greek alphabet. The people with the highest test results within the two percent populated station Alpha, then those with results just below them, Beta, and so on until all the way down to Omega. As Earth's population grew, the stations were expanded. So, by the time I was born, the stations had become a symbol of prestige and wealth, as well as the sole center for innovation or progress of any kind.

As you can see, they were kind of a big deal.

Sarah Water finally completed the brain scan, and the last of the class results compiled on Miss McKinney's computer. Sarah joined the rests of us at our seats to listen.

Our teacher hesitated before reading the results, something I hadn't seen at all during the year. For a minute or so, she just sat, her usually authoritative figure bent over the screen.

"Mara Adams: Manhattan Advanced High School. Thomas Alston: Manhattan Advanced High School. Lorraine Aubrey: Manhattan Advanced High School..." Like I mentioned before, we really didn't transfer much. Most young lives on Earth kinda just stayed the same. The refrain of "Manhattan Advanced High School" continued until she reached my name.

"Rowan Miles: Station Alpha."

After feeling returned to my limbs, I felt pride blossoming in my chest. I made it to Alpha! Honestly, I'd barely expected to make it to a mid-level station like Omicron, so this was far beyond my wildest imaginings.

There was a moment of calm in the classroom before the gasps and murmurings began.