When I first decided to take a CAP test during the run of “Joe Average” it was an effort to find something objective about myself to feel good about. Getting a score of 7.0 did work well as something of an antidepressant being a good objective measure of my worth.

That does not mean that my wife found me any more valuable to her, of course, but, then, I suspect many other married men feel under-valued anyway.

I eventually volunteered for the Confederacy Navy once the CAP testing had been exposed as a measure to sort out humans needed to defend the Confederacy’s races from the Sa’arm. It also worked to sort out many of the jackals, wolves and hyenas from the human gene pool, too, and was part of the selection criteria for the evacuation and colonization effort. The good news that a volunteer scoring over 6.5 had an opportunity to sponsor others, whose CAP scores were lower than 6.5, to leave the Earth, ensuring that it wasn’t just another eugenics program.

However, in imagining my own extraction, I never actually foresaw any of the little complications I was facing when it finally happened around me.

Extractions of Confederacy volunteers are done “out of the blue” in public spaces that get locked down. The volunteers are limited in choosing those around them to take off to the Colonies...

So, getting to leave, even if you’ve volunteered and have all of your paper-work in order, is still something of a crapshoot. There are no guarantees that you will be in the right place at the right time to be picked up. By this time I had already adjusted my habits and found any excuse to go out to a sit-down restaurant, even if only for a cup of tea. There’s that hope that you’ll be picked up.

I do consider myself fortunate to have only a 7 as my raw CAP score since I’ve heard stories about high 8s and 9s being followed everywhere by hopefuls, almost like groupies. Women with high CAP scores, I’ve heard, go far to hide that fact than men do. Men with CAP scores below the magic number of 6.5 tend to be in a lot less demand than any woman with the same score. It was interesting, really, how these extractions quickly changed quite a few demographics as women tended to get scarcer.

In the women’s cases it is more like being stalked than any kind of groupies, too, though there are women who seem to bask in it. In such cases, of course, these “stalkers” do tend to be very careful not to piss off the stalkee ... and often shower gifts on the woman.

And, yeah, enough of those men are zeroes because they have no real empathy and feel that the only way off is to try manipulation and flattery, expecting the women to fall under their spell. Even though they’d be, functionally, no better than property, I suspect many of these men do not consider it a fate worse than death.

And, really, it comes down to hope. Even for a volunteer like me, there was always some hope, even if it was entirely dependant upon chance, to be picked up. All I needed to do was be in the right place at the right time.

Well, I was finally in the right place at the right time. The interdiction field locked down this restaurant with both volunteers and those we could sponsor.

The good news was that my wife was with me.

The bad news? My wife was with me.

Once I got home with my CAP score my wife chose to stay as close to me as she could, especially for lunches and dinners out. The ironic thing is that she neglected to take care of the one detail she would need as a pre-requisite to travel with me.

You guessed it-- she believed that mandatory CAP testing did not apply to the spouses of high scorers and would not listen when I encouraged her get tested. Sometimes you are married to people who will not listen to anything other than what they want to believe and nothing will shake them loose until it’s too late.

It was now too late for my wife to get tested in order to leave with me. Except for her tendency to not listen to viewpoints that didn’t agree with her own, I felt that she would likely score pretty well on her own. For all I knew her score could even be higher than my own.

So there I stood, my wife lying unconscious on the floor after being stunned, then rolled into a corner so that her body would not be in the way, all because she could not present an ID card with a CAP score.

All right, so that alone isn’t why she got stunned. She got truculent about having to be left behind, feeling that the the pick-up team should cut her some slack.

She was no longer my problem ... and, I was told, if I made it my problem, I would likely be going nowhere myself.

I still wanted off this rock. If I couldn’t take her with me-- and, truly, the idea that she would be under my authority for a change had appealed to me-- I was still leaving.

So now I had to choose four people present here in this restaurant to be my companions in the colonial effort.

What a dilemma!

Whoever I did not choose would likely die when the Sa’arm finally arrived, assuming that subsequent pick-ups didn’t have someone willing to take them.

How does one make a choice like this?

What are the smartest ... and “right” ... selection criteria?

Everyone in the room seemed to be waving their hands for the attention of the three Confederacy volunteers this whole extraction had been staged for. All of this despite the pair standing next to something that had to have been done to bust our chops: a blue police box. I suspected that the extraction crew had twisted sense of humor and was likely getting a laugh out of how many people weren’t getting the joke. Of the three volunteers, I suspect that I was the only one to catch it.