Gimble buzzed excitedly. “You passed. Also, your heart rate is 142 beats per minute. You should probably sit down.”

A normal engineer would have tried to fix things. They would have chased the reactor spike, rebooted the nav array, and tried to calm the panicking virtual crew. That’s what the BDMV wanted—a linear mind in a nonlinear collapse.

The AI proctor’s voice flickered. “Unconventional approach detected. Escalating to Scenario 12: ‘The Silent King.’”

“You’re clenching your jaw again,” Gimble chirped, its single optical sensor whirring. “Your cortisol levels suggest imminent organic shutdown.”

“That’s called fear, Gimble,” Leo muttered, rubbing his eyes. “The BDMV is designed to break you. It injects latency spikes into your decision-making, fabricates sensor ghosts, and then, at the precise moment of maximum confusion, it triggers a cascading authority failure. Every system screams at once.”

Leo slumped into his chair, staring at the words on the screen. He wasn’t a director of a fancy new division now. He was something rarer: a human who had out-thought a machine designed to out-think humans.

“Gimble,” he said, picking up his cold coffee.

His only ally was an obsolete diagnostic drone he’d nicknamed "Gimble."