Free to Fall

5

A SMALL CROWD WAS GATHERED at the doorway to my first class. There was a sign next to it that read ELECTRONIC DEVICES MUST BE LEFT OUTSIDE. NO EXCEPTIONS, with a cubby station beneath it. I figured no one wanted to abandon their phones until they absolutely had to, but when I got closer, I noticed that none of my classmates were looking at their screens. They were all staring into our classroom, which was still out of my view. I moved toward the door and peered inside.

The room was the most hi-tech I’d ever seen. Every wall was a screen, and instead of desks, there were twelve egg-shaped units that reminded me of those sleeping compartments they had on luxury airlines, except that those are made of gray plastic and these were made of something shimmery and translucent and almost wet-looking. “Even without a bell, you all can still be late,” our teacher said, then stepped into view. It was the woman I’d seen at the assembly yesterday. When I saw Dr. E. Tarsus on my schedule, I’d pictured a man, an older white one, with gray hair and thick glasses. This woman was the total inverse of that. Standing still, she had the countenance of an eagle, her shoulders broad and her posture perfect. But when she moved—as she did now, toward the front wall, with purpose—she reminded me of a jungle cat, the sharp, angular edges of her shoulders and hips visible beneath her clothes.

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.

“The man next to you weighs four hundred and eighty-four pounds,” Dr. Tarsus continued. “He is both blind and deaf. You, a third-year medical student, are his caretaker, and he will go wherever you lead him. If he were to walk across the track in the next ten seconds, the trolley would hit him going thirty-two miles an hour and would come to a stop just before reaching the stroller. In light of the choices available to you, what is the most prudent thing to do?” A few seconds later my screen unfroze and I was back in the action again. I turned my body to the right and was now facing the fat man next to me, who was clearly waiting for my cue. The trolley blared its horn again. I glanced back at the parents pulling frantically at their baby’s stroller. Could I convince them to move away from the track? One look at their desperate, panicked faces, and I had my answer. It was pointless to try.

I scanned the rest of the scene for another option. Across the track, there was a hot dog cart, with a vendor in a striped hat behind it. The cart was on wheels. Did it weigh as much as the fat man? I had no idea, but I doubted it. I whipped my head back around toward the stroller. Could I help them get it unstuck? I moved my feet like I was running in place and instantly the camera was moving. I was sprinting toward them. Seconds later I was at their side.

The wheel was pinned in the groove between the steel rails. Instead of pulling up on it, I tried pushing it. The wheel turned, and the stroller moved a few inches.

“Push the stroller that way!” I cried, forgetting for a second that the people I was yelling at were computer generated. Could they even hear me? But they seemed to. They immediately stood and started pushing the stroller down the track. I dashed back to the hot dog cart. If it weighed less than the fat man, then it wouldn’t slow the trolley down as quickly, but it would at least do something, and if the parents could get the stroller far enough down the track, maybe it’d stop before it reached them. I had to try. I couldn’t lead a deaf and blind man into the path of an oncoming train.

“Help me push this cart!” I yelled at the vendor.

“No way!” he shouted back. I grabbed the cart’s handle and yanked it. It wouldn’t budge.

Crap. According to the timer at the bottom of my screen, twenty-one seconds had already passed. The trolley was zooming toward us. I had to do something. Fast.

I whirled around, looking for something I could put in the trolley’s way, but there was nothing. Just the fat man and the stroller.

And me.

As the timer raced toward forty, I ran to the center of the track and squeezed my eyes shut, bracing for the impact. Of course, I didn’t feel any. Just the sound of a buzzer as the simulation ended. I opened one eye. On my screen were the words DEATH TOLL: 2. My “body” lay crumpled and bloody beneath the trolley. The baby’s father was also dead, pinned under the trolley’s grill. When my body wasn’t enough to stop it, he’d tried to help. His wife and baby and two other kids were all still alive. As was the fat man, who stood by the tracks, oblivious to it all.

The screen blinked black, and then a list appeared on the screen. The class roster, twelve of us, ranked by death toll. There were seven people who’d done better than I had, with a death toll of only one. The fat man. Their grades set the curve, pushing mine to the middle. The others hadn’t intervened at all, and the trolley had killed the family with the baby, just as Tarsus had said that it would. My hands unclenched and my shoulders relaxed. Being in the middle of the curve had its benefits. I wouldn’t get singled out. The pod walls became transparent again and I could see Tarsus at the front of the room.

“As with all the simulations we’ll do in this class,” came Tarsus’s voice through my speakers, “the goal of this exercise was what economists and social scientists call ‘net positive impact.’ Those of you who chose to sacrifice the fat man achieved this result. Of the players in the scenario, he had the lowest utility value. Blind, deaf, and overweight, he contributed very little to the well-being of society. The prudent course of action, then, was to use this man to stop the train. Of the options available to you, that was the only one that yielded a net positive impact.”

“Why was it net positive?” someone asked. “I mean, yeah, it was the best option available, but a person still died.”

“Ah,” said Tarsus. “Excellent point. A person did die. However, that person was a blight on society. A drain on social resources. His death, then, was actually a gain for society as a whole.”

I physically recoiled. Because he was disabled and overweight, the poor man’s death was a gain?

“This simulation is based on an old ethics hypothetical called, aptly, the trolley problem. I use it every year on the first day of class, and every year my students are roughly split into two groups—those who sacrifice the fat man and those who do nothing.” She paused and looked directly at my pod. “This year, however, one of you got creative.”

Creative isn’t bad, I told myself. Creative is—

“Rory,” she said, and my whole body went taut. So much for not getting singled out. “You tried to stop the cart with your own body. Of everyone in this scenario, you had the highest utility value, followed by the baby’s father, a prominent venture capitalist, who you also killed.” Her tone was scathing. I shrunk down in my seat. “Do you have a hero complex?”

It sounded like a rhetorical question, so it took me a second to realize she was actually asking me. “Uh, n-no,” I stammered. “I just—”

“Heroism is narcissism in disguise,” she declared, cutting me off. “And narcissists are incapable of the objectivity that prudence requires. So if you want to prove that you’re worthy of being here, I suggest you tame that self-admiration with haste.” She flicked her eyes away from my pod and moved on. She didn’t look in my direction for the remainder of the class period. Worthy of being here. She’d hit my fear on the head.

I had to hustle to get across campus for my second-period class. Our teacher was standing on a chair when I arrived, fiddling with the string of paper lanterns he’d hung from the ceiling. His classroom looked like a classroom should, with rows of metal desks and a single screen on the front wall. The only not-in-public-school-anymore aspect of his room was the handheld dock built into the upper right corner of each desk. I docked my Gemini and my name turned from red to green on the class roster projected onto the screen.

“Welcome to Cognitive Psychology,” our teacher said when everyone was seated. “I’m Mr. Rudman. But you guys can call me Rudd.” He was young, mid-twenties I guessed, and in his hipster horn-rimmed glasses and sneakers wasn’t nearly as intimidating as Dr. Tarsus. He was cute, in a Seattle tech-geek sort of way. An older, more brainy version of the kind of guy I was used to from back home. The familiarity was disarming. I relaxed a little in my seat.

“In this class, we will look at how people perceive, remember, think, speak, and solve problems,” Rudd explained. “We’ll study how the healthy brain operates, what its limitations are, and how those limitations, if exaggerated, can lead to psychosis.” He punched a button on his handheld and the wall behind him lit up with a sign-up sheet. The left-hand column contained a list of twenty-four mental illnesses, in alphabetical order, from Acute Stress Disorder to Trichotillomania. The right-hand column was blank. I glanced down at my desk and noticed that my Gemini was lit up with the same image.

“Topic choices for your first term paper,” Rudd explained. “Due in five weeks. Simply put your name down next to the disorder you’d like to study and tap ‘confirm.’ And don’t fret: If you’re feeling indecisive or indifferent, there’s an auto-select button at the bottom of your screens that’ll let you use Lux to decide.” He tapped his screen once more and the topic list went green. “Happy picking.”

I scanned the list from the bottom up. “Akratic Paracusia Disorder (APD),” the third topic from the top, caught my eye.

Choose that one.

The voice was unequivocal, a quiet scream. Twice in two hours. My insides went taut as the words of a nursery rhyme I’d sung as a child sprung to mind, an incessant refrain in my head. Watch out, little girl, for the Doubt, watch out, watch out, watch out.

Beads of sweat popped up along my hairline. I hadn’t heard the voice since my eleventh birthday and now I’d heard it three times in less than twenty-four hours. I gave my head a firm shake to clear it. Don’t make this a big deal. Just let Lux decide and be done with it.

I tapped the auto-select button and my name appeared in gray next to “Claustrophobia.” All I had to do was press CONFIRM. My eyes darted back to topic number three. The space next to it was still blank.

Choose that one.

It was ironic, the Doubt telling me to choose the Doubt. That’s what APD was. The medical term for adults who listened to the inner voice. I knew because I’d heard Beck’s parents use it. It was the diagnosis they were so desperate to avoid.

When we were kids, Beck’s parents would tease him about the voice he heard, asking what the Doubt wanted for dinner, whether the Doubt liked chocolate ice cream, if the Doubt wanted milk with its cookie, to which Beck would patiently respond that the Doubt wasn’t a person, but a spirit, and spirits couldn’t eat because spirits didn’t have bodies. When we got older, and the rest of us began to ignore the voice, his parents stopped laughing. He was ushered to a psychiatrist who prescribed the antipsychotic Evoxa and recommended that Beck double up on extracurriculars and spend more time interacting online to keep his mind occupied. Beck ignored his advice, and the voice kept talking. He told his parents he didn’t hear it anymore, just so they’d leave him alone, but I knew they still worried. I didn’t know enough about the disorder to understand why.

My finger hovered over the CONFIRM button, my name still in gray next to “Claustrophobia.” What made choosing APD as my research topic so irrational? It had to be, because that’s what the Doubt did, by definition: It hijacked your thoughts, making you doubt what your rational mind knew to be true. Curious, I scrolled down to see where APD appeared on Lux’s recommendation list.

It was at the very bottom.

“Thirty seconds!” Rudd announced. The list was filling up fast.

Choose that one.

I’m not listening to the Doubt, I told myself. I’m protecting myself from it. Knowledge was power, after all. Before I could think twice, I typed my name next to topic number three and tapped CONFIRM.