The Room Challenge is by @katoregama

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They said it was a sociology experiment. They said that if you could survive living in total isolation for long enough without wigging out, you'd end up richer than your wildest dreams. I can dream pretty wild, let me tell you.

You have to apply, and they don't pick just anyone. They don't tell you the criteria, either, so there's no way to prepare. Anybody can apply ... and anybody can hope. That's how they sucker you in. As soon as you graduate from Secondary Ed you're eligible.

It's about all a guy like me will ever be eligible for. I was born into the Third Tier, see. It's alright for those First Tier elites in their mansions behind the radiation shields, with their good teeth and their shiny hair and their soft skin, and their servants, and all the food and clothes and medicine they could ever need. Plus all the luxuries they could ever want. All the stuff even ordinary people took for granted in the old days, before the nuclear "accident" and the collapse of the old infrastructure.

Even Second Tiers can work their way up to a pretty comfortable life, if they live long enough to scrape up the dough. The lucky ones go to work for the Richie Riches, cleaning their mansions, cooking their gourmet meals, serving at their fancy parties, breathing their clean air. Second Tiers get to go on to Tertiary Ed where they can learn a trade skill, although of course there's a cap on how much you're allowed to earn.



For a guy like me, though, where you're born is where you stay. The best I can look forward to is working for pennies a day on one of the government's reclamation projects, and a crummy pension when I've soaked up enough radiation poisoning that I can't work any more. Then old age in a cracker box with about ten other guys and a few million rats while I wait to die.

There is one thing. If you can get money, and I mean a lot of it, you can buy your way out of the squalor.

Is it any wonder that just about everybody applies for one of the sadistic government experiments?

I got picked for one of the Isolation experiment slots. I got the letter yesterday. "Dear Mr. Theo Golden ..." with a government seal on it and everything.

The Ministry of Science, the guys who monitor these experiments, sent my contract. I am not to leave the area. As if I could. They wall up the door as soon as you're inside. Personal, face to face contact with any human is forbidden. Yadda, yadda, yadda. But you know what the kicker is? All this money I'm supposed to be rewarded? I have to earn it myself. That's right. I don't just have to stay in this box going stir crazy and waiting for it to be over. I have to figure out how to earn my fortune on my own. Then and only then will I be allowed to leave.

I have no idea how I'm going to do this.