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Exam Bootcamp Turned Me Into a Machine

Exam Bootcamp Turned Me Into a Machine

Short Story · Emotional Realism
By:  T. BodhiCompleted
Language: English
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Synopsis

Family Emotions

Remorse Family

Regret

Bias

Familial Bond

Melodramatic

To give me an edge on my college entrance exam, my parents spend a fortune on a lifelike "study buddy" robot. The day the robot walks through the door, every hobby I have gets the axe. Dad calls my screen time a waste of my life, and Mom decides I can't even eat as efficiently as the robot. My twin brother, Charlie Hartman, piles on, "What do you even do besides drag this family down?" I snap and yank out the robot's charging cable. Mom loses it, grabs me by the hair, and slaps me across the face. "That robot is your role model. If you had half its discipline, I wouldn't be getting called into school by your teachers every other day! "Get yourself to that military boarding academy and learn how to be a real student!" I get forced onto a windowless bus. A year later, the final bell rings at the end of the program, and my parents show up at the gate with my twin to pick me up. They wave and shout my name, but I stand motionless under the blazing sun like a statue. The headmaster pushes his glasses up and says flatly, "Mrs. Hartman, you'll need to scan the barcode on his neck first. Then you enter the passcode, and Candidate 985 will disengage from lock mode."

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Chapter 1

Chapter 1

Mom thought the headmaster was joking. She reached for me with a laugh, but my body didn't move an inch, and even my breathing hadn't changed.

Dad frowned, pulled out his phone, and aimed it at the black barcode on the back of my neck. There was a beep, and a single line of text flashed across the screen.

"Candidate 985 activated. Standing by."

My back snapped straight, both hands pressed flat against the seams of my pants, feet spaced exactly four inches apart.

Mom froze for a couple of seconds, then grabbed my arm. "Danny, come on. Let's go home. What do you want for dinner tonight? I'll make whatever you want."

I stared straight ahead, my lips parting just enough for the words to come out. "Eating is a waste of exam prep time. Requesting nutrient injection."

Mom's hand went stiff on my arm. Dad let out an awkward laugh and said the kid had probably gone a little nuts from being cooped up at that school too long.

My twin brother, Charlie Hartman, leaned against the car door and laughed out loud. "Nutrient injection? What kind of act are you putting on? Pretty committed—I'll give you that."

The sound of his laugh hadn't even faded before I pulled a sheet of scratch paper from my pocket, dropped to my knees on the concrete, and started scribbling from memory. I wrote out the Pythagorean theorem and double-angle formulas, line after line, every character as clean and precise as a typeface.

Mom crouched down and tried to pull me up, only to find that my knees had already been scraped raw into two red patches.

I still didn't look up.

Dad stood beside us, his expression shifting from confusion to surprise, then from surprise to satisfaction. "You know what, this school really knows what it's doing. One year, and Danny's a completely different kid."

Mom hesitated, then smiled too. "It really did work."

Nobody asked if my knees hurt.

After we got in the car, Charlie took the front passenger seat and cranked the stereo all the way up. My hands shot to my ears and my upper body folded forward at exactly 90 degrees.

"Noise interference exceeding 80 decibels. Requesting physical knockout to maintain cerebral focus."

The car went dead silent.

Charlie turned around to stare at me, his mouth hanging open. Dad glanced at me through the rearview mirror. Mom reached over to touch my head, and I flinched away like I'd been electrocuted, my back slamming into the car door.

"Unauthorized physical contact. Please present instructor authorization code."

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10 Chapters
Chapter 1
Mom thought the headmaster was joking. She reached for me with a laugh, but my body didn't move an inch, and even my breathing hadn't changed.Dad frowned, pulled out his phone, and aimed it at the black barcode on the back of my neck. There was a beep, and a single line of text flashed across the screen."Candidate 985 activated. Standing by."My back snapped straight, both hands pressed flat against the seams of my pants, feet spaced exactly four inches apart.Mom froze for a couple of seconds, then grabbed my arm. "Danny, come on. Let's go home. What do you want for dinner tonight? I'll make whatever you want."I stared straight ahead, my lips parting just enough for the words to come out. "Eating is a waste of exam prep time. Requesting nutrient injection."Mom's hand went stiff on my arm. Dad let out an awkward laugh and said the kid had probably gone a little nuts from being cooped up at that school too long.My twin brother, Charlie Hartman, leaned against the car door an
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Chapter 2
Mom's hand hovered in midair, caught between reaching for me and pulling back. Nobody in the car said another word.The sun beat harshly and relentlessly through the windows. I fixed my eyes on a loose thread on the front seat headrest and kept staring at it all the way home.The car pulled up in front of our building, but I didn't get out on my own. I sat in the back seat and waited for instructions. Dad opened the door and said, "We're here," and only then did I step out, right foot first, left foot following, each stride exactly 12 inches.Mom walked beside me, sneaking glances at me every few steps. I knew what she was looking at. She was looking at the barcode on the back of my neck, the one they'd burned into my skin with a laser. It would never come off.The moment the front door swung open, the robot, Alpha, greeted us with a precise 30-degree bow. "Welcome home, Danny. According to the exam prep calendar, there are 67 days until the college entrance exam."I didn't look a
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Chapter 3
By the time the sun came up, Mom hadn't slept at all. She'd spent the entire night sitting outside my bedroom door with dark circles under her eyes, keeping watch. Inside, I'd finished six practice exams.At breakfast, Mom dug out an old tin box from somewhere. She sat down across from me and opened it carefully.Inside was my sketchbook, the thing I used to treasure more than anything. On the cover was a big blue whale I'd drawn when I was 12, with a crooked line of handwriting next to it that read "Danny Hartman's Secret Ocean".Mom slid the sketchbook across the table toward me. "Danny, look. You were so good at this when you were little."Her voice was shaking. "I kept it for you this whole time."I glanced down at the sketchbook. Nothing in my expression changed.Charlie got up from the couch and crossed the room in two quick strides. He snatched the sketchbook out of my hands, flipped through a couple of pages, and ripped one out. "What is this garbage? What good is drawi
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Chapter 4
But stacked next to a 1590, a 1280 turned into a punchline. Charlie sat on the couch, his face getting darker by the minute.The celebration cake had already been bought and brought home, a two-tier one with "Danny's #1" written across the top. Then Alpha's light suddenly turned red."Warning. Candidate 985's problem-solving pathway shows anomalies. Predictive analysis indicates a 93.7 percent probability of cheating."The living room went silent. Dad looked at Alpha, and Mom looked at me.Charlie jumped to his feet and bolted into my room. 30 seconds later, he came running back out holding a stack of papers. "Look at this! He had it hidden under his mattress!"It was a printed answer key for the mock college entrance exam, perfectly organized, every answer marked in red pen, and identical to my test sheet.Mom's fork slipped from her hand and clattered to the floor. She grabbed me by the collar, hauled me out of my chair, and dragged me to the middle of the living room.My knee
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Chapter 5
When the cleaver came down, I heard the sound of bone cracking.Mom was the first one to reach the kitchen. The moment she saw the pool of blood on the floor, she dropped straight to the ground unconscious.Charlie's screaming carried all the way from the living room out into the hallway. Dad came running in and tripped, then crawled over to me on his hands and knees and cupped my right hand in both of his.It hadn't been severed all the way through.I stood where I was and looked down at my own right hand. "Command execution complete. Please verify results."By the time the ambulance arrived, Mom still hadn't come to. Dad had my right wrist wrapped tight in a towel, pressing down with everything he had. The first thing the paramedics said was "preserve the severed end," and the second was "notify the hand surgery unit."I was wheeled into the emergency room while Dad knelt in the corridor outside.The surgery took 12 hours. Four surgeons worked in shifts, reconnecting blood ves
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Chapter 6
"Welcome home. Recommend initiating Secondary Training Target protocol immediately."Charlie Hartman's comprehensive evaluation score is a B+, indicating potential for admission to a top-tier university."Dad stopped in his tracks. He stared at Alpha's mechanical face, and something felt wrong. Danny was already ruined, and Alpha's first response wasn't concern. It was recommending the next target.Dad kept quiet about it. The next day, he brought in a systems security engineer from his company, and when that wasn't enough, he hired a hacker on top of it. The two of them spent three days cracking Alpha's back-end permissions.The log files totaled 4,700 entries. Printed out one by one, the stack was half a foot tall.The first critical entry was dated one year and two months earlier."Operator: Charlie Hartman. Command: Release high-frequency noise. Target: Danny Hartman."That was the day I'd pulled Alpha's charging cable. I thought the piercing sound that gave me headaches was
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Chapter 7
The front gate was sheet metal with two padlocks on it, and the top of the perimeter wall was strung with barbed wire. The guard wouldn't let them in, so Dad called the police.Once the officers arrived and helped force the gate open, the first thing Dad saw made him vomit.There was no yard, no field, just row after row of tin sheds, numbered 001 through 200. Each one was barely 40 square feet, containing a desk, a chair, and a lamp.There were no windows and no bed. The desk was stacked with a foot-tall pile of practice tests, and the chair's armrests had metal clamps welded onto them to lock a student's wrists in place and keep their hands from shaking or their heads from nodding off.The lawyers photographed every room. In shed 87, they found a boy still hunched over his desk, working through problems. His lips were cracked and bleeding, his finger joints were deformed, and the creases under his nails were packed with pencil dust.When they asked him his name, he lifted his he
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Chapter 8
There was no sound, but her shoulders were shaking.Dad bought me the newest phone and set it in front of me. Then he bought a 120-color set of professional colored pencils and a brand-new sketchbook. I looked at all of it, but I didn't pick any of it up.I only did one thing every day. I sat in the chair by the window, faced the glass, and didn't move. I was there when the sun came up, and I was still there when it went down.I didn't eat, didn't drink, didn't speak. Without a command, I didn't initiate any action.Every now and then, Mom would come in and stand behind me, calling my name. "Danny."Danny?"I'm talking to you, sweetheart."I didn't turn around. She could call my name a hundred times, and I still wouldn't turn around.One day, Mom finally couldn't take it anymore. She dropped to her knees beside me and grabbed onto my leg, begging. "Danny, just call me Mom. Please. Just once. If you say it once, I can die happy."I glanced down in her direction. My line of si
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Chapter 9
That was the first time in three years that my body had responded to anything from the outside world.Mom was standing behind the door in the hallway. She saw the orange tabby, and she clamped her hand over her mouth, pressing down hard, too afraid to make a sound. She was terrified that even the smallest noise would shatter the moment.The tabby rubbed against me again. This time, it lifted its head and let out a short, soft meow, as if it were asking, "Can you pet me?"My right hand had been resting on the armrest of that chair for three years. It was covered in scars, the knuckles were deformed, and the nails had gone gray. Then it moved, impossibly slowly. My wrist rose an inch, then another inch, and then my twisted fingers touched the top of the tabby's head.Its fur was wet, but underneath, it was warm."Soft," I whispered. My lips had moved, but my throat had gone so long without speaking that the word barely came out at all.But it was enough. Behind the door, there was
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Chapter 10
I was 23 by then. I'd never taken the college entrance exam, and I never went to college.I spent two years teaching myself psychology, then another year passing the licensing exam to become a counselor. During the exam, I wrote with my left hand. The handwriting was ugly, but every letter was mine.Mom and Dad put up everything they had. They sold two properties, cashed out every investment, and liquidated all their stocks. They rented a 3,000-square-foot space downtown and renovated it into a practice.The sign out front read "Danny Hartman Youth Psychological Intervention Center".On opening day, nobody came. The second day, nobody came either. On the third day, a black sedan pulled up outside.A middle-aged couple half-carried a boy through the door. He was 16, with a buzzcut and a crooked school uniform collar, both hands clenched tight around the insides of his pockets. His mother's eyes were swollen red from crying."Please, Mr. Hartman, please help him. He spent a year at
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