fandomhigh | Practical Philosophy, Monday

For once, Ender had sent out an invite to his students to show up to the Danger Shop, not the lawn. Entering through the doors would get them into what looked like a large airlock, with rounded walls in stark whites and greys. There was a bigger door up ahead; Ender was standing right in front of it.

"It's a little warm outside," he said, "And it's been a quiet week. So I thought I'd try something different."

He reached out and rapped his knuckles on one of the walls. "Different for you, but not different for me," he said. "My old school used this technique to prompt us to think out of the box. I'm going to give you some time to adjust before we talk this time. Call it a lesson in perspective."

Then he opened up the door and hurled himself into the room ahead, folding his legs under him. Zero gravity meant that his momentum carried him. He caught his movement on the opposing wall with extreme grace, bouncing off at a different angle, and then another one, and then another.

Eventually he hooked his feet under a set of handholds. The way he was standing, the opening from the door was right above him. He had to look up to look at his students.

"There are a lot of issues involved in what Fandom does to us," he said. "Issues of consent. Issues of privacy. Issues of bodily autonomy. It can be easy to disregard that sometimes it's useful to experience something from a different point of view - not that that makes any of those other issues irrelevant. Orient yourself. Then we can share some experiences."

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Gert was more than a little disoriented by the setting, so it took her a while to talk and her voice was wavering somewhat when she finally did. "I'm really into accountability and taking responsibility for your actions," she offered at last. "So living somewhere where it really is okay to say 'It wasn't me, I was gremlin-bit' or whatever is kind of unsettling sometimes. In the real world, you shouldn't be able to do that."

"So it's having an easy excuse that bugs you," Ender said. "Not having choices taken from you?"

"It's similar," Gert said, after a brief pause to consider it. "But not having choices is -- I know it isn't me when it happens. It's in my body and I remember it afterwards, but it's not conscious, so I can... I don't know, detach from it. What bothers me more is that there's no one to hold responsible for whatever we do when we're like that."

She paused, almost like she was done speaking, but then amended, "Well, ourselves, for staying here, I guess. But it's different."

"How is it different?"

Ender's shoulders shrugged. The movement always felt - and looked - different in nullo. "Isn't leaving the island - and I'm not referring to your particular case here - an action you can personally take to avoid it? Doesn't staying here make for an unacceptably high risk?"

"I don't know who can choose to leave and who can't," Gert said. "At least most of the minors here are probably under some adult's thumb, whether it's their parents or Captain America or whoever. I agree with you that we're still responsible for what we allow to happen by knowingly sticking around, but it's not the same as someone making a conscious choice to, I don't know--" she eyed Cade, knuckles going white around the handhold she was gripping as she turned the better part of her body to look at him-- "spend a day thinking they're a socialite and getting a lower back tattoo. It's a choice, but not always a really wide-open one."

"Some people would say it's the island that's completely to blame," Ender noted.

Gert wrinkled her nose. "That's bull crap," she said at once. "Do you buy that?"

"I'd go so far as to say it's not a safe place to live," Ender said. "But no, I don't blame the island personally."

"Unless the gates are boarded up at the end of the causeway, it doesn't have any power over us," Gert said, sounding certain. "We're all here because we're choosing it over some less desirable alternative. Whatever happens is -- maybe indirectly -- on us."

"That's the trouble with choices, isn't it?" Ender said. "There are usually too few of them, and the one we pick still has far too many undesirable side-effects."

Not that his original stint had been voluntary - though even that wasn't entirely true. If he had pushed hard enough, they would have taken him back to Eros permanently. But that would have restricted his freedom even more.

Not that he had thought about it even that much, at the time.

"Well, yeah, but that's life," Gert said. "Even a choice made at gunpoint is a choice. We can whine about not having good choices, but that's not the same as being forced to do things. Like me being here at school."

Practical Philosophy, Monday

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