Leo

Leo was the last student to take his place at his assigned desk. As was always the case in tests, every sound was amplified. The students weren’t talking, the chirping of birds couldn’t breach through the walls, and, judging by the lack of faculty, the school may as well have been deserted. That eerie silence meant that each cough, shuffling of feet, and grinding of chair legs carried without hindrance. If Leo listened closely, he could hear the students’ anticipation.

To his surprise, nothing seemed out of the ordinary save for the lack of examiners. The testing room was a moderately sized theatre, with a high roof, elevated stage in front of the examinees, and level floor. An array of desks had been bolted to the synthetic wooden floorboards. On each desk was a screen set into a plastic shell, an indent beside it where a meus could be docked, a stylus for writing equations by hand, and a thin keyboard moulded into the desk.

It wasn’t until Leo turned around that he saw it: at least five meters above, a one-way glass pane stretched across the wall, completely translucent on the side of the students. There was a light on behind it. Whoever was in there was watching them, peering constantly over their shoulders.

Really? You can’t even show your face to the students whose dreams you want to destroy? Pathetic.

Scowling, he faced forward and received a prompt from the screen.

The test cannot begin until every student has docked their personal terminal.

Every student? Leo thought. Why? What if someone doesn’t want to take the test and decides to just sit there. The corners of his mouth turned up. Oh, that’ll never happen.

Someone near him cleared their throat. Leo perked up and realised a class full of eyes watched him expectantly. A pair of those belonged to Morgan, who was staring lasers into him. Every student’s monitor displayed the same message, and everyone but him had already done as they were bid. He grinned an apology, took a deep breath, and slipped his meus into the dock.

As soon as he withdrew his hand, a steel latch snapped shut separating Leo from his meus. Gasps radiated through the theatre as every desk imprisoned each students’ meus—though it was just a device, every student was so attached to their meus that they may as well have been chained to the desk. A second later, the terminal in front of Leo gave its next set of instructions.

The following are the rules under which this test will be conducted. Pay careful attention to this page as it will not be accessible once the test has begun.

0. Students cannot communicate verbally.

1. Administrators cannot fail any student.

Leo blinked at the screen. He read rule one again, just to be sure his eyes hadn’t deceived him. There were many implications to that rule, the first of which was that there were administrators. They weren’t in the theatre, so the only place they could be was—

He spun and glared at the one-way glass. If you can’t fail us, then why are you here? Leo seethed. To mock us?

The more important point, however, was that cheating was more-or-less allowed, since an administrator couldn’t fail them. Leo kept reading.

2. Once a student has correctly answered all their questions, their personal terminal will be released from the dock.

3. If a student submits an incorrect answer for a question, their terminal will be locked out for five minutes.

4. If a student’s personal terminal is in a dock at the moment the test has concluded, they fail.

5. If 50% or more of students fail, then all students will fail.

6. The test will commence at 12:00 and conclude at 14:00.

7. This is the students’ last rule.

Leo’s brows furrowed at rule seven. That seemed like an odd thing to add to a list of rules, and if Leo hadn’t known better he would have thought it to be an error. But Leo absolutely knew better. It was subtle yet so blatant: if rule seven was the last rule, then these were all the rules. In other words, if Leo were to do something not listed in the rules, such as walk out the room, there would be no consequences.

A smile crept onto Leo’s face. This was not a test about answering questions, he realised, but a test on a student’s ability to draw conclusions from limited information. The rules were so threadbare, which gave students an enormous amount of room to manoeuvre. All they had to do was throw away the norms that had been drilled into their heads since they entered the school system—a task that was both so simple yet near impossible. This test was practically begging them to cheat! Rule five, the rule about failing all students if half failed, meant that if any student wanted to pass, they’d probably have to help others. There was just one problem with that…

He had a bad feeling about rule zero, Students cannot communicate verbally. A Platonian would have told Leo that gut feelings were irrational, but given how absurd this test was shaping up to be, a little irrationality could go a long way. If he spoke, an administrator couldn’t fail him on account of rule one. However, they didn’t have to.

Leo’s eyes settled on rule four, If a student’s personal terminal is in a dock at the moment the test has concluded, they fail. If the administrators wanted a student to fail, all they had to do was lock out their terminal. Except, could an administrator actually do that? There was a giant logical gap surrounding this concept of administrators. Their existence was never explained, mentioned only in passing. And if the rules didn’t prevent him from cheating then, conversely, did they prevent an administrator from locking him out on a whim?

Don’t take too many risks, he decided. And especially don’t talk.

A few more minutes until the test started. Leo scanned the room to see how others were reacting. Trepidation, anxiety; biting lips and bouncing legs. Few people seemed confident, though that could have just as easily been arrogance. Morgan’s face was completely blank but her shoulders were hunched. Alan was trying to bore a hole into his screen with his sneer. Raphael, sitting far in front of Leo, scratched his shaved scalp. Tock leaned back in her chair, stared up at the ceiling, and mouthed some kind of chant. Lumia, who had been seated in the very front row, turned around and made eye contact with Leo. Within her gaze was a fierce determination. Leo wondered if it was intended for him, or for herself.

The clocks switched to twelve; the test began.

The rule list disappeared and the first test question was presented:

Increases in pollution over the last five hundred years have resulted in persistent cloud cover over most of Earth’s surface. Briefly describe three consequences this phenomenon has on plant life.

Huh, that’s not too difficult.

He punched out the answer within a minute then hit the submit button. He immediately received a passing mark. The next question was displayed: a math question. It was even easier than the first, though a little more tedious. There was a moment of panic as Leo realised he had forgotten the method for solving it, but fortunately a formula was provided for him. In short order he answered the second question correctly. The third question arrived, was answered, followed by the fourth, then the fifth.

He got lost in it—as frustrating as this whole ordeal had been so far, there was a strange simplicity in answering questions. Leo could forget about the whole world and focus entirely on the problem in front of him. This was the problem, this was the enemy, and all the world’s troubles could be reduced to this conflict. Leo versus the question.

It wasn’t until he was at question nineteen that Leo paused, realising that he had just chewed through the test like it was clean air. The back of his head itched, and he peered over his shoulder at the glass that loomed high above.

Surely it can’t be that easy, right? Are you saying I was worried for nothing?

From beside him a boy sniffled. Leo’s attention snapped onto the boy and his heart sank. Tears were streaking down the boy’s cheeks which he wiped away as soon as they fell, and though he did his best to cover his sobs there was little he could do to stop his shoulders from heaving. When he caught sight of Leo, he covered his face with a hand and turned away.

Holding his breath, Leo inched closer to the boy’s desk to get a clearer view of his screen. In stark black on white, buried in the corner of the screen, was written, Question 1 / 20. When Leo read the question, it was like taking a punch to the gut.

Prove that the integral of sine of x over x is equal to half pi.

That was not a simple question. Sure, Leo knew how to solve it. He’d actually been given this question in his last exam. However, that was in a calculus course, where this kind of question was not only expected but even solved in his textbooks as a way of demonstrating a formula. This was not the sort of thing you threw on a pop quiz and threatened to fail a student for not answering—that was, unless you wanted them to fail.

But even more worrying was that the formula that was provided was the chain rule. It was completely baffling: using the chain rule to calculate an integral was like giving someone a drill and asking them to plug a hole with it.

Finish your own test first, Leo told himself. They can’t do anything to you once you’ve already passed.

Then the room went as still as space when one of the latches snapped open and a student was released. Leo edged over to see Lumia pull her meus from the dock and place it awkwardly on her desk, as though unsure what to do with it. A few seconds later, another latch snapped open. This time it was Morgan, and she directed a stormy glare at Lumia. After she was done with her death stares, Morgan leaned back in her chair, folded her arms, and settled on scowling at her terminal.

They haven’t figured it out, Leo realised. They need to help other students.

He wracked his brains for a way to tell them but kept running into the what if problem. What if the administrators didn’t like that? What if he got locked out? What if the students next to him were locked out in his place?

That was when the answer came to him, in the form of that secretive message he’d seen on the notice board: Let your actions be heard where your voice cannot reach.

His answer found, Leo couldn’t hold back a grin. Fine. I’ll show them.

He knuckled down on the last two questions, finishing them in record time. A couple minutes later he submitted the final answer, and his meus was released. He snatched it up without hesitation and slid over to the desk next to him.

The plain looking boy gaped up at him, eyes bulging, and Leo responded with a smile. He commandeered the boy’s keyboard and typed a message: I can’t fail so I might as well help you.

The plain boy’s eyes darted between Leo and the screen. Once he understood he nodded and shuffled to the side. Leo snatched his stylus off him and went to work.

It had been a few weeks since he’d last looked at this problem, so it took a fair bit longer than Leo had anticipated. As he fussed over another wrong step in his method, he checked on Morgan and Lumia to see if they had caught on. Morgan, unsurprisingly, was staring at him in abject horror. Finding her reaction so unusual for a robot, Leo replied with a smirk. Her back stiffened and her head swivelled this way and that, as though looking for something. What did she expect to find, an administrator? Was she expecting punishment? So far there had been none and everything was going smoothly.

Come on. Catch on already.

What was more surprising, however, was that most of the room was staring at him. Upon realising this, Leo paused his work and stood straight. Unless they were finished the class should have been focused on their tests. So Leo tapped on the plain boy’s screen and arched his eyebrows, as if to say, Back to work. Most students put their heads down. Five didn’t.

His acquaintances from the hall considered him, and in each of their gazes Leo recognised something, like when you were on the verge of puzzling out a difficult problem after an hour of staring at your screen in exasperation.

Leo, now confident that his hypotheses were paying off, decided to take another risk. He spoke—not verbally, but with his hands.

‘They never said we couldn’t help,’ he signed.

And finally, in each of them, it all clicked.

Lumia was the first to stand. She shuffled over to the desk next to her, a smile on a face and her hands clasped before her. Raphael, Alan, and Tock all put their heads down and worked with renewed determination. Morgan, still uncertain, looked at her screen nervously.

Is this really going to work? Leo wondered, scanning over the bowed heads of the hundred-something students.

Either way, he had to keep trying. He went back to the question in front of him and got lost in it for a few more minutes, until he felt a tug at his sleeve. The boy he was helping pointed towards the front of the room.

Lumia was waving at him, smiling but with her brows knitted.

That can’t be good.

Dropping the stylus, Leo rushed over to her. Lumia pointed at a freckled girl’s screen and, fearing the worst, Leo slowly leaned in.

Of all philosophical theories relating to scientific reason and practice, the two that are most commonly employed by Plato are the Recursive Adjustment Method and Expansive Hypothesis Theory. Name nine key differences between them.

It took everything Leo had not to swear up a string of curses. He twisted his head around and drilled a murderous gaze over his shoulder and into that translucent glass pane.

Is this the first sacrifice?