Lauren Miller - Free to Fall

She taught Plato Practicum, the official name for the practical reasoning intensive Dean Atwater mentioned at the assembly and the only class on my schedule that met every single day. She was also my advisor, so I wanted to make a good impression.

As we filed into her classroom, milling around and looking generally uncertain ( do we stand next to the pods? inside them? ), Dr. Tarsus stepped up to the front wall and wrote with her index finger, her words appearing like chalk on the wall’s surface. Instantly the wall transformed into an old-fashioned chalkboard, and she was writing in chalk. I knew it wasn’t actually a chalkboard, just a rectangle of interactive wallpaper resembling one, but the texture was so reminiscent of the real thing that for a split second I wondered if somehow it was. The beginning is the most important part of the work, she wrote in impeccable script. Plato, The Republic, book two .

“Pick one,” she said, turning to face us now. She gestured to the egg-shaped compartments. I went for one in the middle.

“You should see a small square in the center of your screen,” Dr. Tarsus said as I sat down in my pod’s metal chair. I felt it adjust beneath and behind me, sliding forward a few inches and conforming to the curve of my spine. “Press your thumb firmly into the box,” Dr. Tarsus instructed. “Your terminal will activate.” The screen she was referring to was oblong and rounded outward like the nose of an airplane. When I touched my thumb to the little box, the door to the compartment slid shut, sealing me inside. Within seconds, the surface I’d touched and the walls around me had become completely transparent, like glass. I could see my classmates in the row in front of me, the walls of their enclosures as invisible as mine. Dr. Tarsus was perched atop a stool at the front of the room.

She stood and began to make her way around the room as she spoke. “As Dean Atwater explained yesterday, this program is unique in its focus. You’re here to gain knowledge, yes. To learn the who and the what and the where and the why of literature, history, mathematics, psychology, and science. But you’re also here to pursue something that is far more valuable than knowledge, and much harder to attain.” She paused for effect. “ Phronesis ,” she said then. “Prudence. Wisdom in action. The ability to live well.”

Something in me grabbed ahold of this idea. Wisdom in action. I want that . The conviction that I’d made the very best choice, without having to ask an app on my handheld to be sure. When left on my own, I waffled and wavered, second-guessing my decisions before I even made them. It was the reason I’d always sucked at sports. And gardening. And art. It was the reason I used Lux for nearly every choice I made, from the mundane to the major. I craved the assurance that I was on the right track, headed somewhere that mattered.

I knew what Beck would say. That prudent genius was an oxymoron. That the greatest athletes and the most talented artists and the most brilliant thinkers went with their gut. But wasn’t that exactly what Dr. Tarsus was offering? A gut I could trust.

Don’t exchange the truth for a lie.

My whole body stiffened, bracing against the voice. Hearing it once was one thing. A fluke. But here it was again, less than twenty-four hours later, cryptic and eerie and even louder than it had been the day before. Dread pooled in the pit of my stomach as I swallowed. Hard.

Chill, I told myself firmly. The Doubt wasn’t anything to panic over unless you couldn’t turn it off, like that French girl in the Middle Ages who let herself be burned at the stake. So I’d heard it a couple of times. It didn’t have to be a big deal. If I ignored it, the way I’d been taught, it’d eventually go away, the way it had when I was a kid.

Dr. Tarsus was still talking. I started repeating her words in my head to drown out the Doubt’s, which were replaying like an echo in my mind. “The ancient Greek philosophers, and Aristotle in particular, understood that phronesis could not be attained in a vacuum,” she was saying. “Or a classroom for that matter. They believed that phronesis had to be hard-won through personal experience.” She pulled a tiny remote from her skirt pocket and typed on its screen. The walls of our pods instantly turned opaque. I realized now that the pods were soundproof and that her voice had been coming through tiny speakers above me. “The simulations we do in this practicum will provide that experience,” she said, and my screen lit up. Grateful for the distraction, I focused intently on the image on my screen. It was a ground-level shot of Nob Hill in San Francisco. I’d never been there, but I recognized the steep hill and cable-car track from movies and TV. The image shifted, and I realized that it wasn’t a photograph but video footage shot from the point of view of a pedestrian waiting with several others at a trolley stop. The camera must’ve been on a pair of glasses, or mounted between the guy’s eyes, because I was seeing whatever he saw as he looked around, glanced at his handheld, even bent to tie his shoe—a men’s Converse One Star.

“Our simulations will differ in format, but the way in which we interact as a class will generally remain the same,” Dr. Tarsus went on. “The booths you’re in are equipped with audio technology designed to facilitate our discussions. You can hear me, obviously. But I can only hear one of you at a time. The booths are wired to record your audible responses and broadcast them over the speakers in the order they were received, and I’ll respond—or not—as I see fit. There is no need to wait until you’ve been called on, and no risk that you’ll interrupt one another. Speak when you have something to say. If the discussion stalls, I will begin addressing my questions to specific students, in which case the responses of other students will be recorded and delayed until the person I’ve called on has responded.” She paused, and I imagined her glancing around the room. Were the walls opaque on her side, or could she see us? I kept a pleasant smile on my face just in case. “Any questions?” she asked. I shook my head, eyes riveted to my screen. A family with three kids and a baby in a stroller had gotten a wheel caught on the trolley track. “Excellent,” Dr. Tarsus said. “Let’s begin.”

Immediately the audio from the video switched on. I could now hear the chatter of the people on the street, car noises, a jackhammer pounding on asphalt nearby. And a baby crying. The baby in the stroller caught on the track. The parents still hadn’t gotten the wheel unstuck, and they seemed to be having trouble getting the baby out. Next to me, an obese man in sweat shorts and a T-shirt fiddled with his waistband. Somewhere in the distance, a cable car rang its bell. Dr. Tarsus had called this a simulation, so I assumed these details were important and paid attention to all of them. But what were we being tested on?

The cable car sounded its bell, much louder this time. Much closer. Instinctively, my head turned in the direction of the sound, and when it did, my view shifted. I blinked. Was I controlling the camera? I turned my head the opposite way, and the camera moved with me. I felt the headrest against the back of my skull and realized that it must have motion sensors. I’d just started to move my feet—wondering if I could get the guy with the camera to walk—when I heard the bell a third time, so loud this time my head whipped to the right. The cable car had crested the hill and was now barreling down it. Toward the baby in the stroller.

Just then the screen froze and Dr. Tarsus’s voice came through the speakers. “Here are the facts. The wheel of the stroller you see is caught in the track in such a way that it cannot be removed without dismantling the entire stroller, which, with the proper tools, would take four and a half minutes. The cable car careening toward it has just experienced brake failure. Unless stopped, the cable car will hit the stroller in forty-two seconds, traveling at sixty miles per hour. The baby inside the stroller is buckled into a seat belt that has jammed.” Her voice was dispassionate, almost bored, as if she were describing the weather. “If the trolley hits the stroller,” she continued, “the angle of impact will cause the trolley to jump its track, killing at least five passengers on board, including two children, and two pedestrians. The baby and its parents, who will refuse to leave the stroller’s side, will also be killed, along with their three other children, who will be crushed when the trolley flips over. The only way to prevent this outcome is to force a crash before the trolley reaches forty miles an hour. The trolley is currently traveling at thirty miles an hour.” I felt my eyes go wide with horror. I knew that what we were seeing wasn’t actually real , but still. The scenario reminded me of the morality quizzes Beck was always taking online. Except in those, I couldn’t hear the baby whose life was at stake or see its parents’ desperate faces.