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The cadet removed his hands and returned his attention to his padd, shaking his head. The moment his hands were gone, the planet returned to its natural-or, in this case, decidedly unnatural-form.

Creak… creak…

Turning from the cadet on her right, Kathryn studied the planets that were being manipulated by the rest of the cadets taking the test. Some of them glowed as the one on her right had done. Others were covered with sheets of ice. Some were several times smaller or larger than they should have been, and a few had left their static position on their respective workstations and were zinging around the room, crashing into one another and exploding in bursts, dissolving into liquefied masses, or being duplicated by factors of ten or more.

This was ridiculous. Apart from the fact that there was no obvious point to this exam that she could see, it didn’t appear that any of the others were having better luck than she was.

Kathryn moved as gingerly as she could behind the seats of the others and made her way to the center aisle. From this vantage point she could see a wooden chair behind the podium. The chair had gently curved slats at its base which allowed the person seated to rock gently back and forth. Here at least was the source of the annoying creaking sound. But she could not see who was seated in the chair.

Striding briskly down the steps that separated her from the podium, she saw hands, hundreds of hands at the ends of hundreds of arms all attached to the same torso, moving almost quicker than her eye could perceive. Their motion was hurried without being frantic. As the hands moved, huge folds of fabric unfurled at the base of the chair.

Kathryn moved slowly around the edges of the fabric, which lapped toward her like waves carried in by a surging tide. She had to see the face of the one who was sewing this tapestry, which in no time at all, it seemed, would cover every square inch of the examination room.

Placing a gentle hand on the back of the chair, Kathryn stopped its movement. A head sat atop the torso. The hands continued their rapid work, but the head lifted slightly at Kathryn’s touch. As it turned to face her, Kathryn saw that the oval area where she had expected to see some semblance of eyes, nose, and mouth was a void of blackness.

As she tried to take this in, a gruff voice spoke from the void.

“You can help me, or you can help them,” it said. “You can’t do both.”

“What are they trying to do?” Kathryn asked.

“Solve the problem,” the faceless face replied.

“But I don’t see the problem,” Kathryn said, her frustration mounting.

“Then you had best stay out of our way,” the sewer replied, returning its attention to its work and resuming its rocking.

One of the planets came zooming toward her. Kathryn caught it instinctively, as if it were a perfectly aimed hover-ball. The moment she touched it, an unexpected sense of power flowed through her. Suddenly, all of the equations on the padd were part of the fabric of her mind. She could see them in their infinite possibility and realized at once that this planet was not a planet at all.

This planet was her mind’s representation of the entire universe, in dozens of different dimensions. She suddenly remembered Seven of Nine, standing before her in her ready room, exactly when she could not recall, describing a computer that could hold every quantifiable fact of all living and nonliving things in the galaxy. It had sounded like an impossibility at the time, but in this moment, her mind contained the processing power of that computer.

This universe was hers… to do with as she would.

She could not deny that she was tempted to play. The rest of the cadets seemed to be enjoying their work, and given the vast possibilities at her fingertips, she could hardly blame them. What would this universe look like if one removed all but ten dimensions? The fact that she could conceive of ten dimensions was dizzying, but as she thought it, she watched the planet begin to erupt violently, losing its spherical