Forcing a "user click" with triggers and/or variables

Hi! I have a hotspot freeform quiz built in to my course, but I need each slide to be timed. Unfortunately, I do not want to include a results slide after each quiz question (which would allow me to time the question), and even then, the time restriction starts at 1 minute, and I need my learners to answer the question faster than that-- about 5 seconds. I could achieve the desired result if I could "trick" the freeform quiz into thinking the user clicked somewhere other than the correct answer using triggers, but there's no option to make a trigger take that action. Does anyone know how we could achieve this? I keep running into this problem in different situations (needing to get the program to "user click" via triggers), and changing the state of objects does not trigger the quiz to recognize the changed variable as an answer since the user did not click anywhere. (P.s. Using triggers to "submit interaction" also doesn't work since it doesn't recognize that as an answer. Using that option with triggers just gives an error message that the user selected an "invalid response.")