The evaluations began at dawn.
Not the loud kind.
No whistles. No shouting. No sand.
Just doors closing softly and names being called.
Li Chen was first.
That alone meant something.
A petty officer led him down a corridor he hadn't seen before. The walls were bare. No unit insignia. No windows. The air felt thicker, recycled too many times.
They stopped at a reinforced door.
"Inside," the officer said. No eye contact.
Li Chen entered.
The room was larger than it needed to be.
White walls. Cameras in every corner. A single metal table bolted to the floor.
Three people waited for him.
None wore uniforms.
That mattered more than rank ever could.
"Sit," one of them said.
Li Chen sat.
"Li Chen Walker," the woman in the center began. "Eighteen. Dual heritage. Perfect testing scores across physical, linguistic, and cognitive evaluations."
She looked up.
"We're going to ask you some questions. They're not trick questions."
Li Chen nodded.
"They never are," he said.
The man to her left frowned.
They started simple.
Ethics.
Decision-making.
Hypotheticals layered with moral contradictions.
Li Chen answered calmly.
Precisely.
He never rushed.
He never hesitated.
The woman stopped him midway through an answer.
"You already know what we're testing for," she said.
"Yes," Li Chen replied.
"And?"
"You want to know where I draw lines."
Silence followed.
"Where do you?" the man asked.
Li Chen met his eyes.
"At necessity," he said. "And never beyond it."
Physical testing followed.
Not the standard kind.
Force plates. Motion capture. High-speed cameras.
"Apply maximum effort," a technician instructed.
Li Chen paused.
"Define maximum," he said.
The technician hesitated.
"Within safe parameters."
Li Chen nodded.
He pushed.
The machine screamed.
Red lights flashed.
Technicians swore.
"Stop!" someone shouted.
Li Chen stopped.
He hadn't broken a sweat.
Behind one-way glass, Grant stood with the others.
"That's not maximum," Grant said quietly.
"No," the woman replied. "That's him being polite."
Cognitive testing came last.
Pattern recognition.
Predictive modeling.
Multi-layered simulations designed to overload human processing.
Li Chen finished them before instructions completed.
The system froze.
Rebooted.
Froze again.
The room went quiet.
"That shouldn't be possible," a technician whispered.
Li Chen tilted his head slightly.
"It's inefficient," he said. "Your model assumes linear thought."
They dismissed him without ceremony.
No praise.
No warning.
Just a nod.
Outside, the hallway felt longer.
He passed other candidates waiting their turn.
None met his eyes.
That evening, a ranking list was posted.
Li Chen's name sat at the top.
Alone.
No scores.
Just placement.
The silence around the board was complete.
Later that night, the System spoke.
Not as an alert.
As a statement.
[SYSTEM NOTICE]
[External assessment confirms internal anomaly]
[Evolution Phase I — Authorization achieved]
Li Chen lay back on his bunk.
Above him, the base hummed with quiet calculations.
They were measuring him.
But Li Chen already understood the truth.
You could measure strength.
You could measure speed.
You could even measure intelligence.
But restraint?
Restraint could only be tested after everything else failed.
And soon—
—it would