Project Overworld

For the next few hours, Keith totally immersed into the construction of his small remote controlled device. It really was not that complicated, especially after having spent so much time inside Project Overworld designing all kinds of devices.

The most complicated part about this test was actually to use the alloted time wisely. Keith immeditalely threw away the plans that has been furnished to him, since he did not have the time to inspect it thoroughly and determine which parts of it were made as traps. In any case, he had built a few remote controlled car for his friends in the past so he already had the plans in mind.

'Is this part of the exam really supposed to be hard?' He meditated. 'Is there something I'm not understanding from the instructions? I guess Horace would have warn us about it, so I don't think there's anything else to be worried about.'

The two most complex components of this build have already been furnished to them so Keith did not even have to sweat about it. In fact, after just three hours he managed to complete his own design of a vehicle. The electronics was something he found really easy to connect and only the structure itself gave him some difficulties, so to make sure everything would be fully optimized at the end.

For the first hour and a half, Keith plugged various systems to the motherboard such as a steering system, the activation of the wheels as well as the radio wave receiver that was supposed to capture all the inputs sent by the remote controller. Afterwards, he coded it so the inputs would be correctly interpreted by the vehicle and spent the rest of his time having fun with the car.

'What should I be adding to it to make it more original..?' He started thinking. Since he had about two hours before him anyways, he wanted to utilize his time efficiently and come up with the best ideas of remote controlled vehicle he could manage to think of within the alloted time.

After searching around the material boxes for a while, Keith finally found what he was looking for.

For the next two hours, he challenged himself to make a home-made horn that would be activated thanks to an extra button on the remote controller. Inside the booth was everything he could dream of, so Keith decided to use an air-compressor and produce high-pitched noises to simulate a horn.

This part only took him three quarters of an hour, but squeezing a button onto the tight controller turned out much more difficult than he had expected. Fortunately, he also made sure every few dozen of minutes that his vehicle would still be working as intended so that he would not end the examination with a car which could not even be activated from a distance.

In the end, Keith was proud of his work. He was quite confident about the end results and could not wait and reunite with his friends to gather their own experience of the situation.

- "The test over!" A voice rang out from behind Keith's door. "Everyone, come out of your booths!" The instructor exclaimed.

Keith immediately left his place along with a few dozen other candidate including Leyla and Michael. Tyler was still nowhere to be seen, but Keith remarked that the man's booth was situated pretty far away from his so he did not worry about it. In fact, regarding the second part of the examination, the leader of the Spacol industry had little to no doubt about the sucess of his subordinates.

Both Michael and Tyler spent a full week designing remote controlled cars inside Project Overworld just to organize a deadly race with their vehicle. As for Leyla, she had to be the most efficient engineer of their group and Keith could blindly give her the lead of Spacol whenever he wanted to take a break from the game.

Thus, after the instructor declared the recruitement session over the four friends left the NASA building altogether.

- "So, how did it go for you guys?" Tyler could not refrain from asking questions. Michael immediately answered with a condescending expression on his face : "No problems on my side. What, did you expect me to find this type of examination complicated?" 

Keith smirked at the enthusiasm of his friends and hit them with the real inquiries : "How many questions did you answer on that written test?"

At this remark, the faces of the two friends turned livid.

- "Where did your confidence go all of the sudden?" Keith's smirk extended over his face.

- "Please, don't ever talk about a written exam anymore!" On this pitiful imploration, the four of them were seized with giggles, more from nervousness after this stressful situation they just went through than anything else.

- "In all seriousness, did you all listen to Horace's advices?" He inquired.

- "Yep." Michael replied with a bright smile while Leyla nodded slightly.

Tyler seemed a bit more hesitant, so Keith tried and brighten his mood : "As long as you did answer to the questions you picked while writing your trails of thoughts, you'll be fine. In any case, it was really impossible to answer one hundred question in under three hours I don't think they'd be really exigent in that regard. So, how about a bevarage to celebrate the occasion? We're in Washington after all, it'd be a shame not to enjoy this opportunity!" Keith offered.

They all agreed and went into an expensive-looking bar, before joining the hotel they resided inside for their final night in the city.

The day after, a long trip awaited for them as they woke up early in the morning. They had to pay a toll from the early hours increasing the effects of alcohol on their brain, but Keith did refrain from consuming too much and had a clear mind upon leaving the district of Columbia.

Two days later, after everyone joined their house back, Spacol members all reunited within Project Overworld. Jim and Xena assailed them with questions until they satisfied their curiosity, and the construction of the 'Spacol Moon Base' or 'SMB' resumed with more motivation than ever.

The two youngest member of their group had been left one week on their own, but it seemed like they did a great job nonetheless. Keith was really happy about the roaster of their team and this made him hesitated even more regarding the future expansion of their company.

They had so much synergy between the six of them that he could not help but think more people joining Spacol would lead to some troubles. However, this really was the only way to accelerate their progression on the long run.

In any case, during the week he had not been able to set foot inside his favorite video game, Keith dicovered that yet another greenhouse had been connected to their base. Four of them already had flourishing biodiversity while the three most recent ones were only at the seed stage.

It seemed like they were finally about to establish into this base for good, as the oxygen level of their base was slowly being filled up.

'I should start organizing the recruitement of the new members now, I guess.' Keith meditated for a while. Either the four American Spacol members really were recruited by the NASA and Keith would have several weeks to examine all of these applications, or they were blatently rejected and there would be no downtime for Keith to wait for new applications.

That was why, in both cases Keith thought it would be a good idea to post something on the forums now and have as many candidates apply to Spacol's engineering team as possible.

_______________

Over a week after the examination, Keith came back from work with a few notifications on his phone. At first, he thought he had received another couple of message on Project Overworld's forums but he realized he had muted them long ago.

'Wait could it be...?' Keith realized that he had a few missed calls from Horace Johnson and immediately tried and call him back. After a few seconds, the call go answered :

- "Oh Horace... Sorry I wasn't home until now. What did you want?" The young man asked.

- "Hello, Keith. Just wanted to notify you about the current progress of you and your friends' applications." Marinating the young man for a couple more seconds, Horace finally exclaimed : "Congratulations, you all were received into the NASA!"