Joseph Voelbel

The Examination was administered without regard to the participant. Those who knew they’d been examined had not passed. Those that had passed did not know. To ensure a continuation of results circumstances of every examination were irreproducible. Inimitability was intrinsic in examinations, due to the fact that no examination could be dictated by the constraints of space or time. This was most likely because examiners existed in neither while examinees persisted in both.

Thousands of exams were held daily. To ensure a passing score examinees vowed acceptance in the face of the inexplicable. The degree of unlikeliness present in any given circumstance, as well as how uncertain one was what was being observed is real, gave reasonable indication as to the likelihood of an examination being administered. One success transpired in a handshake. Another examinee, simply as a preparatory exercise, wrote a facsimile of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, without lifting his pen. An infamous failure involved composing weather patterns into song. Potential examinees found themselves in foreign countries, forging new patterns of speech, manners of living, and diet. Others assumed new bodies, of animals even. Still more endured severe losses of prestige, faith, or family, became divested of fortunes or were bequeathed maps with no X.

The regimens proscribed for each examinee were unascertainable by anyone other than oneself. Furthermore, said understanding could not be explained to anyone, or by anyone, particularly to oneself if they understood it.

Curious attributes of examinees abound. With an eye for these things such aspects can be spotted. Symptoms include the ability to perceive thought without speech, the unintended arrival of companions, and dreaming in groups. Some have been said to even have the capacity to not die, or to pretend to, appearing upon riversides, in mountain caves, or outside Spanish mercados, as necessary...

Long safeguarded are the answers to The Examination. It has been alleged there is a singular key, and that that key may in fact be a single word with a potency not dissimilar to that of the Tetragrammaton, (a four letter name for God that cannot be spoken) and if known, although each examination is inherently unknown, and when spoken, (what exactly may constitute speech remains debated), behaved like a skeleton key to every other examination.

Pursuit for this key was long been underway. Information as to its exact nature trades at a price similar to a bundle of small countries. Anyone who thinks they can purchase this key would not understand what The Examination is for, or how to take it.

It has also been whispered in dark rooms that The Examination is a hoax, or that it is autobiographic, and its proctors are simply future versions of ourselves.