I remember during the height of the COVID pandemic, my intrepid state developed a humble little app. Queenslanders were asked to “check in” when visiting cafes, shops and other venues. The idea was simple: if an infected person had been at the same place and time, contact tracers could notify you quickly and recommend testing.
The trouble was that authorities tried to make its use mandatory. Almost immediately, conspiracy theories flourished. This wasn’t a harmless public health tool, some argued. It was tracking our movements, harvesting our data, controlling our behaviour. There seemed to be a new theory every week.
At the time, I was a public servant working on an app project. I found these theories hilariously outlandish. Not because governments would never do such things, but because, from my experience, we were lucky enough to get a functioning app built at all, let alone one packed with nefarious backdoor features.
These experiences as a hardworking, well-intentioned, but let’s be honest, sometimes ineffective public servant came rushing back to me as I read The Test.
The Test is about exactly that: a test to become a British citizen. It follows Amir as he completes the exam, answering questions about the history of Britain, important dates and significant events. All the sorts of things a fine, upstanding British citizen should know.
However, all is not quite as it seems, a fact revealed deftly and cleverly as this novella tightly unfurls.
I won’t spoil any further plot details, because that would rob you of the experience should you choose to read this little story. But the scenes within it really resonated with me as a public servant. The innovations we develop without fully considering the unintended consequences. The ways we push the envelope because we believe we are doing the right thing, even when those actions may be perceived very differently by others.
I think The Test gets to the heart of something many people who have never worked in government may struggle to appreciate. Government can seem like a faceless, lumbering behemoth determined to make life difficult. In reality, it is usually just a collection of ordinary people, the same people you see at the grocery store, trying to do their jobs and occasionally getting things wrong. Very rarely is the problem genuine malice or malevolence. More often, it is the cumulative effect of innocent mistakes.
That is what makes The Test so effective. It presents a terrifying “what if” scenario, not because it imagines evil people doing evil things, but because it imagines ordinary people creating systems that slowly drift beyond what anyone intended.
I found this a deeply affecting story and a genuinely unsettling one to ponder. It is also one I hope remains firmly in the realm of science fiction.
Four AI-generated algorithms out of five.
