*Mavis pov*
My mind raced, playing against 3 chess geniuses, answering questions on mental game theory equations as Dr Stein explained a mission that is the sole definition of my existence begins in 2 hours.
Few hours later, I was in the United Kingdom, at the front of 'blackridge University for the gifted'. After enrollment and my orientation I was to meet my teammates. Apparently we needed to be in a 3-man team and I was led to room 254 by the Dean.
As we moved through the hallway I saw a lot of cameras but no AC unit as the whole hallway was quite cold.
When I questioned her about the cold, she said the school uses metal pipes that pumps coolant(liquid nitrogen) through it which provides the desired temperature. Finally, we were standing at room 254 and as I was about to knock an Asian-american girl opened the door.
-Let's talk about the university a bit-
Blackridge university, In the modern United Kingdom, is the crown jewel of higher education — a sanctuary for the brilliant and the privileged.
Politicians , defense ministers, and offsprings of the corporate elites filled its halls.
To the outside world, Blackridge shapes "the minds that shape the nation."
But the truth beneath its glass towers is something few will ever live to tell.
Blackridge is not a university — it's a sorting machine.
An experimental system created under the classified world government directive known as Project Ascendancy.
Its mission: To create a generation of perfect leaders — men and women engineered to think, act, and evolve beyond human limitation.
Its method: The Sphere, an autonomous digital world powered by alien biotechnology — a legacy of Dr. Stein's forgotten research from the 1945s.
When a new season begins, every admitted student undergoes what the university calls "Cognitive Translation."
We're told it's an IQ testing process that compares their minds to know how the required 3- man team is formed.
The truth is far more sinister.
The process doesn't just test us, it embeds a surgical chip into their wrists that links them to the sphere.
This allows us to access the school's digital leaderboard, gives us access to our private and group points, let's us purchase necessary equipments using our private points to be used in the digital world.
And it gives the sphere access to kill/deatomize any 'failures'
To us, the digital world feels real — air, light, sound, emotion — all reconstructed from their own neurological patterns. But inside that world, the system controls everything. It decides when we fight, and when we die.
Where we are digitalized and who comes out alive is determined by the strongest, smartest , most resourceful and more importantly the cunning.
These are the 2nd generation to be in Blackridge, the first being their parents. Every year blackridge has a body count of over 70 students and has never been questioned by the media or organisation showing the power of government influence. Students deemed as failures are cloned before deatomization and sent back home, after a while the die in a 'normal' human way.
81 years ago, a 20 years old hotshot unlocked the secrets to either save or destroy the world.