An unexpected situation indeed. The black duckling suddenly turned into a swan before their very eyes. The games varied; some tested abduction, deduction, or induction. More exams were all about IQ, while other obscure ones challenged concepts he did not even understand, like his EQ or his instincts. Hasta performed disastrously in most assessments yet displayed prodigiously in others.
More often than not, he would fall short in his tests. Maybe due to the fact he failed to immerse himself in the simulations. He performed awfully in many scenarios. Researchers focused on him sighed at the most atrocious attempts. But their mood swung as soon as he started demonstrating unexpected skills. He occasionally proved to be shockingly fast, witty, and decisive, but only in selective situations. Yet every time he did, he broke a record.
After exercising his brain for two hours, Hasta finally decided to rest, and the group of specialists took advantage of his respite to consult one another. It seemed the young man segregated against purely "arithmetic" and "mechanical" problems but excelled at resolving enigmas when they revolved or involved human interactions and solid reality-grounded observations.
Whenever the questions became more theoretical, he boycotted them, purely and simply. However, if they involved a photograph, scene reenaction, behavior analysis, or testimony dissection, he immediately demonstrated an interest in them and chain-cracked them industrially like a veteran! His tendencies became even more flagrant when he reached the concerned section.
One of the booths was dedicated to crime scene replication. The setting was holographic and very realistic. Many participants avoided this evaluation because of its stressful and traumatizingly repulsive nature. In contrast, despite the crudeness and gore, Hasta enjoyed it the most. Once he started investigating, he refused to leave the test field until he cleared the entire catalog.
But only one hour and a half passed as he solved the last case, leaving him genuinely frustrated. He turned unmotivated and decided on another break but then got attracted by the next-door booth. It was only the start of his observators' astonishment because Hasta finally reached… the memory game.
The concept was simple. The virtual board was made of face-up cards. They would all flip face down after a few seconds. He then needed to find the pairs as fast and as accurately as possible.
From the very start, Hasta blew it up. Not only did he find the card, but he did it way too fast. He never had a hesitation. And even though the face-up phase became shorter and shorter, it seemed that he only needed one glance to memorize it anyhow. Rapidly, the revealed time became so little it reached the one-second gap!
Perfect memory? Hyperthymesia? Yes, they thought. The game proved it. There was something about this young man's brain, something exceptional. The scariest about him was that it never stopped. Cards automatically multiplied in colors, numbers, and forms. But he kept getting everything right even when the differences became more subtle. His pairing speed slowed down a little at some point, but only because his hands could not keep up with his brain the more he got physically tired.
No matter how low the face-up phase was cut down, no matter how many types and numbers of cards, he still performed a Perfect. The grid grew so wide the cards were finally too small to tell apart because of the screen resolution. The programmers never imagined this kind of situation after all. They never caped the progression, and the game continued to generate more difficult levels. Hasta started misclicking and got frustrated when the pictures were too small to be readable. He had to concede in the end.
Outside this last booth, the scientists glared at him and wondered if they started hallucinating. Was it a delusion, or was the man glowing and sparkling? As for his fellow test subjects, most of them turned shocked when they finally noticed the changes appearing on the leading board.
Even the other group soon acknowledged there was someone else to be aware of during the selections. Someone was breaking their morning records, and they could do nothing about it anymore. They had already established their intellectual scores in the morning. Now, the only way to keep their lead or regain their rank was to push themselves on the physical tests. Since they already finished half of the exercises, they had little to nothing to improve. The ranking was almost decided.
Fortunately for them, Hasta's physical skills were mediocre compared to anyone in the experiment. Still, people knew from word-of-mouth, that "monotypes" (subjects who only focus on their strong fort, be it intellectual or physical) were not disadvantaged compared to more well-rounded participants. Regarding personal evaluation, the ranking was only a part of the Center's criteria. Of course, they would not discriminate against overspecialized people, as they tried to study the extent of human ability.
This knowledge pressured his opponents even more. If his poor grades on the physical part were not a handicap anymore, what prevented him from securing one of the final spots? They were already feeling a chill, but the room cooled down even more as Hasta nibbled bit by bit onto the gap between him and the top ten.
The leading board started to shift a lot. People became more antagonistic and relentless. Hasta was affecting his surroundings significantly. Wind shifted. He was like a butterfly creating an unexpected tsunami.
Intellectuals were the most affected as they took pride in being the best in their trade. The more astute immediately isolated themselves from the board, trying to avoid this new mental threat. But most of them still got shaken by the news. It was a fatal blow, and many got discouraged and demoralized.
Many slowly crumbled under pressure; some fell straight at the bottom as they gave in to eagerness; others coped with the stress pretty well, even though the atmosphere was heavy in the hall. Anyone could quit at any moment now. On the other side, some other participants were blooming. They revealed themselves better thanks to stimulation and rivalry. In contrast, rarer specimens showed to stay unphased and wholly focused on their own thing, ignoring hell going loose around them.
The suddenly psychedelic cadence was not for everyone. It filtered the best from the worst. But it also sunk promising contestants who could have evolved into better themselves if given more time.
Another problem was group disparity. As people by his side were constrained to adapt to the sudden pressure, the gap between both groups widened. The neutrality of the experiment was compromised as the stress both halves were subjected to was now too different.
Hasta completely disrupted the established order, shaking up the experiment hall. The rule of the next batch would have to be modified to prevent the same thing from happening again.