Aptitude: A Tor.com Original

By Cooper Shrivastava

Don't miss Cooper Shrivastava's engrossing hard sci-fi story "Aptitude", a Tor.com Original

Alena has momentarily escaped her world and its imminent gravitational collapse by cheating her way into the selection process of the Board of Cosmogamy. By passing this stringent exam, she may finally learn the secrets of building a universe from first principles. But the competition is smarter and better prepared, and even Alena’s cunning and mathematical talents may not be enough to uncover the answers she has been looking for. The appearance of a strange competitor reveals that Alena may not be the only candidate with hidden motives.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Aug 4, 2021
• ISBN: 9781250819536

Cooper Shrivastava

Cooper Shrivastava is a writer based in New York City. She holds an undergraduate degree in math and philosophy, and is always excited when she can bring these elements into her fiction. When not reading and writing, she can often be found indulging in her other strange hobby: recreating recipes from historical sources. Cooper was a member of the 2019 Clarion Writers Workshop and has been published in Clarkesworld, and Heavy Feather Review.

Book preview

One may ascend to godhood in the same way one attains any other competitive position: a series of rigorous standardized exams.

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9:00–9:30: Registration & continental breakfast

Alena appeared in the white room, in front of the registration desk, with her hair neatly combed, wearing formal business interview attire. As far as she knew, she was the only person in the universe to be invited to the Practical Assessment. She wasn’t the only candidate in the reception room though, which meant the others must be from somewhere other than the universe.

There was a list of names. She scanned it, noting each candidate’s profession. Mostly mathematicians, with strange specialties like reality theorist, meta optimalist, and stochastic botanist. Alena knew she was underqualified for this position. She had resorted to connecting her mind to the ship’s computer, illegally tapping into some of humanity’s last remaining resources, just to access the brainpower she would need to understand the test. Hopefully the connection would last to the end of the interview.

She pressed the pad of her thumb next to an entry near the bottom of the page: Alenagutnarsunurassttir, recycling processor.

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9:30–10:00: Meet and greet

In the waiting area, candidates clustered together around the danishes, probably being judged on their ability to make small talk. No one wanted to work with a socially awkward nerd, no matter how good they were at building universes. Alena searched for loners to help demonstrate her ability to smile through her