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I arrive early with a plan and a pocketful of coins. Not because coins prove anything—coins are liars with pictures—but because they make noise, and noise convinces a room it’s awake. The classroom lights come up in their usual two-stage confession: the back row flicker like lightning behind a curtain, then the front row glare that makes the periodic table look like it’s under arrest. The air has that morning taste I’ve grown to love—dry erase solvent, old paper fiber, wet mop memory from last night, an ozone thread like a secret only the light fixtures know. The UNKNOWN meteorite sits on my desk under its plastic cover with the patience of a god. The labels under it—UNKNOWN, WORK IN PROGRESS, NO LESS THAN NOTHING, HOLD FAST—make a little shrine of sticky notes and gallows humor.
I lift the paper and say, “Morning,” because if something has traveled the black between planets and survived entry and middle-schoolers, it deserves a greeting. The rock, professional as ever, withholds comment.
On the board I write:
CAN YOU PROVE WE AREN’T IN A SIMULATION BEFORE LUNCH?
— Emma’s Paradox Hour
— Show your work (and your doubt)
— Safety: for ideas and fingers
Under that I draw a lopsided rectangle and label it REALITY. Inside I put a stick figure with wild hair and a speech bubble: “hi.” Outside, I draw a bigger rectangle and label it RENDER SETTINGS with a tiny slider and a checkbox that says “flicker” unchecked.
I lay out the props like a magician who shops at a hardware store: a deck of playing cards with bent corners from cafeteria Euchre, a baggie of dice in tasty colors, my tuning fork, a cheap LED strobe that promises 10–1000 Hz and delivers “close enough,” a magnifying loupe, a battery buzzer with two thin wires like whiskers, my ancient laptop with a text editor and nothing else, a cheap Geiger counter I borrowed from the physics closet that clicks like a cricket with anxiety, a clear plastic cup full of water, a laser pointer I keep for cats and inattentive students, a compass, duct tape, a stack of sticky notes because we worship in this church with paper.
Footsteps and voices coalesce in the hallway like weather. The door bangs open with that cheerful violence only seventh graders manage.
“Mr. Grace!” Malik says, entering like he’s been waiting outside since last night with his face pressed to the glass. He reads the board and makes a delighted sound that only a twelve-year-old and certain hyenas can produce. “Oh ho ho. We’re gonna break the universe.”
“We’re going to tap the glass,” I say. “If anything looks back, we run.”
Mia follows with a spray bottle and a roll of blue painter’s tape, sleeves rolled like she’s about to clean a crime scene. She reads the question, then the safety note, then me. “We’re going to write rules before we do anything,” she says, not asking.
“Please put that sentence on my headstone,” I say. She starts tearing off tape in tidy lengths and sticking them in a row on the counter like a mason laying brick. Her hoodie has a bleach spot at the cuff shaped like a small continent.
Emma comes in with her pencil already behind her ear like a scalpel you can also write with. She looks at the board, smiles in that minimal way she saves for when something lands in her neighborhood, and takes the front-center seat, flipping her notebook to a fresh page. She prints at the top in neat capitals: PARADOX HOUR. Under that she writes, smaller: PROVE WE’RE NOT IN A SIMULATION. On the next line she adds, FAIL PRODUCTIVELY.
Luis rolls a cart with the swagger of a kid who knows he’s about to make something misbehave. On the bottom shelf: the ARES-2 aquarium from last week, duckweed jawing on the surface like green confetti that learned discipline. On the top: a shoebox with holes and a label, CHAOS KIT, containing a metronome, a yo-yo, a plastic soldier, two casino dice, a pair of dollar-store magnets, and, for reasons known only to him, a Hot Wheels car with an elastic band around it.
“For entropy,” he says, patting the shoebox like a pet.
Leila slips in behind them, quiet as a mood. The silver moons in her ears catch the fluorescent and give it back kinder. She glances at the board, at the meteorite, at the little stack of sticky-note vows under it, and her mouth does that small movement that’s not a smile or a frown but the place between where better thinking happens. She takes the window seat, writes the date with the care of a person who suspects dates matter.
The bell rings, that bone-felt note the building keeps in its ribs. The room’s noise folds itself into attention, the way a river comes to heel when rocks get interesting.
“Okay,” I say, clapping once because thunder is my brand. “Emma asked for this. Paradox Hour. We’re not doing philosophy to feel superior to our breakfast. We’re going to drag it through the lab sink and see if it leaves a stain. The question: can you prove—not suspect, not feel in your bones, prove—we aren’t in a simulation before lunch?”
“Meaning what,” Malik says immediately, hands already in the air like he’s catching a ball, “like Minecraft but with taxes? Or like the Matrix but without cool coats?”
“Meaning,” Emma says, calm as a metronome, “there’s a substrate different from the world we perceive. We might be processes on it. The physics we measure could be rendered outcomes of deeper rules. If so, could we tell? If not, what do we do with that?”
She says it like she’s humming, like these words have their own key. I love these kids so much I could explode and repaint the ceiling with my heart (gross but with the feeling).
“Three paths,” I say, holding up fingers like I’m trying to make a deal with them and also myself. “Empirical: look for glitches or limits. Statistical: look for fingerprints of a lazy coder in randomness or compression. Moral: decide how to act when you can’t know. Emma, you get to drive, but Mia is the brakes. Malik, you’re the emergency horn. Luis, you’re the duct tape. Leila”—I nod toward the meteorite—“you’re the conscience.”
Leila flicks her eyes to UNKNOWN and back. She doesn’t nod, exactly. She permits the role to happen to her.
Emma stands, small ceremony, and steps to the front. “Hypotheses,” she says, chalk in hand. “H₀: we’re in base reality. H₁: simulated. Predictions?” She writes FALSIFIABLE? on the board, underlines it.
“Flicker,” Luis says, holding up the LED strobe. “If the sim has a frame rate, we can catch it with the camera, like when the overheads look like they’re pulsing on video even though they look steady.”
“Good,” Emma says. “That tests for discrete time steps at this scale. Known cause: mains frequency and rolling shutter.” She writes 60 Hz lights because San Francisco hums at that number like a low song.
We kill one bank of lights. The room immediately changes species; it goes from sunny bureaucracy to submarine and back. I set the strobe to somewhere around 60 Hz and sweep it along the ceiling. The fixtures answer with a lattice of slow beats, dark bars crawling like lazy zebras. The kids make the oooo noise. Malik films, of course.
“Could be evidence,” he says, because he’s generous with meaning.
“Is evidence,” Mia corrects, “of the grid and my headache.”
“Known phenomenon,” Emma says. “Explainable by the way the camera exposes strips of the image at different times. Not proof.”
She ticks a box next to Flicker and writes → AC, shutter. Her handwriting hums with the quiet zeal of a person content to be wrong with documentation.
“Statistical,” I say, pulling the dice bag open and letting them clatter like hail on the counter. I pour out a fistful of six-siders, jewel-colored. “If somebody cut corners coding the RNG of reality, maybe small samples show bias. It won’t prove anything, it’ll give us an excuse to calculate so we feel alive.”
We roll, because rolling is a way to be a mammal. Emma calls out, “Collect by pairs—ten rolls each, record outcomes.” Dice hop and clatter and bounce off notebooks. Luis’s Hot Wheels car watches with painted eagerness. Mia tapes an impromptu “stay behind this line” stripe on the counter and people actually honor it. Leila, without a fuss, starts drawing tally marks in crisp quintets.
When we finish, the room smells faintly of warm plastic from the strobe and hot coffee from my cup and kid energy from everything else. Emma builds a frequency table so pretty it could be art. The sixes are not special. Neither are the ones. We got a lot of fours because somebody always does. The histogram looks like a shrug.
“Conclusion,” Emma says. “No obvious weirdness in thirty people times ten rolls.” She writes N too small; expectation holds and circles it with a line that curves like a smile pretending it isn’t.
“Coins,” Malik says, grabbing my pocketful. He flips one, misses, drops another, catches a third like he meant to juggle. “Heads means real. Tails means sim.”
“Stop dignifying nonsense,” Mia says, and he bows at her.
“Geiger,” I say, lifting the counter because I love props that click. The little device wakes with a flicker and starts chattering to itself in polite intervals, ambient radiation politely knocking on the detector. The kids go quiet like small animals listening for rain.
“Cosmic rays,” I say. “Radioactive decay. Processes that, as far as we know, aren’t predictable even in principle. If this were a sim with shortcuts, maybe we’d see patterns or avoided values. We won’t. But click is a good sound to remind your brain it’s not in charge.” I hold the sensor over the meteorite. The click rate does not change in a way my arm can tell.
“Is it…radioactive?” Luis asks, eyes big.
“It’s a rock,” I say. “And it’s fine.” I hold the counter near the fluorescent light; it clicks the same, clockwork random. Leila watches the LED blink, then glances from the meteorite to Emma to me like the lights are spelling something only adults see.
“Compression,” Emma says, back at the board. “Kolmogorov complexity*. If reality output can be described by a short program, then reality is compressible. But then so is physics, and we like that.” She smiles and I swear I see a wolf behind her teeth, a polite one that writes grant proposals and wins.
I drag my laptop closer and open a blank file. “Write a string,” I say. “Ones and zeros. Anything. Then compress it with the simplest method I can handle before coffee: count runs and write down counts.”
She starts, chalk on board, and as she writes the class starts chanting in low voices because pattern loves company: “110011001100…” It grows like a square wave took singing lessons. Leila doesn’t chant; she listens to the rhythm like it’s telling her how old it is.
I run the silly compression—counting twos until my fingers hate me. Surprise: we compress the chant like a dream. Then Emma writes a new line, eyes on us the whole time: “101001000100001…” A devil’s staircase of gaps. When I “compress” that, the file grows because I have to write each count as a one. The class laughs because failure here feels like winning.
“So,” Emma says. “World with simple rules that make complex output? Compressible description, incompressible experience. We cannot prove we aren’t inside an algorithm because we live inside one either way—the universe’s differential equations or someone’s code. The question becomes…subtle.”
She looks at UNKNOWN then. She doesn’t go to it—Emma doesn’t do theater—but she lets her gaze travel there and back like she’s stealing courage.
“Empirical, statistical,” I say, ticking my fingers. “Moral.”
“Before moral,” Malik says, unable to leave a good stage alone, “glitch hunt. Lasers. Pixel edges. If reality has resolution, we find the pixels.”
Luis hands me the laser pointer like a sidearm. I point it through the loupe onto the opposite wall. The dot becomes an ellipse, a little blood-orange comet with bright core and fuzzy edge. If reality had pixels at a human scale, the edge would staircase. It doesn’t. It’s smooth like a fruit you want to touch.
“Long way to Planck*,” Emma says. “Our loupe is a toddler trying to interrogate a mountain.”
“Phones glitch,” Malik says. He flips his camera to slow-mo and waves it in front of the strobe again. The world shutters and shutters. He narrates: “We can catch the sim switching scenes. We can—”
“Catch your eyes being fools,” Mia cuts in, kind as a blade you trust. “And your teacher reliving his rave days.”
“Never happened,” I say. “There’s no video.”
“Exactly,” Emma says, and in that exactness is mercy. She writes NO EVIDENCE ≠ EVIDENCE NO. She doesn’t say it out loud. She wants the board to keep a secret with her.
“So we cannot prove before lunch,” Leila says quietly, not asking, not accusing. “Not with dice or lasers or noise.”
Her voice is low and so I echo it in the same register. “No,” I say. And that no tastes honest. It tastes like dry air and dust and the back of my tongue and coffee gone cool. “We can look for anomalies that break our model. We can fail to find any for the rest of our lives. That proves… that our model works where we checked. It proves we’re good at living in a system that lets us live.”
“Then moral,” Emma says, turning to the class like a conductor who knows the next movement will hurt in the good way. She draws a new rectangle on the board, writes IF SIM inside. Under it she writes, WHAT CHANGES?
“Nothing,” Mia says immediately. “We hold to the plan. Down-hook-cover. Count. Help. The rules that keep people alive don’t care about metaphysics.”
“Everything,” Malik says at the same time. “We can—hear me out—hack out. Or at least entertain the architect. Do something so improbable they drop the controller. Make art with fireworks.”
“Pro tip,” I say. “Don’t blow up anything to get God’s attention.”
Luis lifts the Hot Wheels. “If we’re being observed, I want to be the kind of output they don’t delete. But also if we’re not, I want to be the kind of output I don’t regret.”
We all look at him because sometimes the clown in a classroom slips and a philosopher steps out wearing his shoes.
Leila raises her hand in the smallest way—two fingers, a question that already knows its answer. “If we cannot know,” she says, eyes on UNKNOWN, “then the shrine stays. And we choose a rule for choosing rules.”
Emma writes MAXIM: ACT AS IF CHOICES MATTER. Then, beneath it, MAXIM: BE KIND TO OBSERVERS, SEEN OR UNSEEN. She looks at that for a beat and then adds, smaller, INCLUDING YOURSELF.
A flicker runs down the length of the ceiling. Not the strobe this time; the building does that particular blink that old fluorescents do when ballast thinks about its mistakes. Three kids flinch, two laugh, one says “glitch” like a joke he wants to be true and is not sure he can survive if it is. My heart does a small, traitorous jump because I’ve been a person too long not to want the sky to answer back.
“Maintenance will replace those tubes never,” I say, and the room breathes out, no one acknowledging the breath.
Emma taps the meteorite’s case. Not a knock, just a touch like you put a hand on a shoulder of someone who’s been through worse. “This,” she says, and the whole room dips a little closer like gravity remembered us. “If the universe is a simulation, it includes this. A rock that fell through code and still feels like rock. Our moral center can be a thing that doesn’t change when we change our minds.”
“Blessed be the rock,” Malik says, mock-serious, and laughs, and the laugh isn’t disrespect; it’s a relief valve that keeps the boiler from becoming literature on the news.
“Okay,” I say, because we have to make a thing even when we can’t make a proof. “Deliverables. Emma, write the Paradox Hour Rule. Everyone else: a one-sentence law you’d live by if this is simulated and if it’s not, same sentence, still true.”
They write. The room fills with the soft sound of pencils and the tiny whine of the strobe’s transformer cooling and the tick of the cheap wall clock that I would replace if I believed clocks wanted better lives. The aquarium fogs at the corners because its top is plastic wrap and the water remembers the air and the air remembers the water. The Geiger counter clicks once in a way that makes you notice it, and then goes back to doing its little cricket-labor like always.
I walk among the desks. Mia has written, FIRST HELP, THEN UNDERSTAND. She underlines FIRST. Malik has written, MAKE BEAUTY THAT WOULDN’T EXIST WITHOUT YOU and drawn a dumb little exploding star next to it, which I pretend not to see because I want him to think I trust him. Luis wrote, BUILD SMALL WORLDS KINDLY and drew a tiny dome with a smiley, because even his metaphors have habitats. Leila has written nothing yet; she’s looking at the board and then at her blank line, and I think of the way people pause before telling the truth that puts them in it.
Emma writes on the board: PARADOX HOUR RULE: ‘WE DON’T KNOW’ IS PERMISSION TO BE BETTER, NOT WORSE. She underlines PERMISSION and BETTER and then stands back like she handed a baton off to a future she wants to hear.
“Coin flips,” Malik says suddenly, because he can’t leave joy sleeping. He flips one, catches, slaps. “Heads: real. Tails: sim.”
“Stop assigning ontology to metal,” Emma says, and then, because she isn’t as immune to theater as she thinks, she adds: “If heads: we clean the lab sinks. If tails: we also clean the lab sinks.”
He flips. It’s tails. We all groan with the deep satisfaction of a punchline that cleans.
“Before lunch,” I say, as the clock’s minute hand does that shy cough, “no proof. But a protocol. Two, even. Science without despair. That’s all I’ve ever wanted for you.”
“Can’t have both,” Malik says, smiling, because he had to.
“Watch me,” I say, and it’s a little more feral than I meant because sometimes hope has teeth.
We do one last demonstration because rooms remember the last thing. I put the tuning fork under the bell jar and pull the air away. The fork keeps shivering in my fingers; the sound dies in the jar’s pretty nothing. Then I touch one tine to the plastic cover of the meteorite case. The hum comes back to us through the plastic, through the air, through our ears and bones. It is a small song and it is enough.
“Translation,” Leila says, so quietly I almost miss it. “For whatever is trapped.”
“For whatever is trapped,” I say, and leave the fork singing while I let air back in. The hiss as the jar breathes fills every small space in us that wanted an answer; when the hiss stops, the silence is bigger and kinder.
The bell rings. It’s the sound of something persistent and ridiculous and ours. The room erupts—that verb is overused, but rooms really do erupt at bells—and I stand and watch them turn back into a river. They are the best evidence I have that meaning isn’t a bug. They are why I can’t be a nihilist even when the fluorescent ballast winks. They are my proof.
On my way to the door I take a sticky note—yellow, because yellow is the courage of office supplies—and write in my crooked moving-car letters: ACT AS IF REALITY IS WATCHING. I stick it on the meteorite case under the other vows. The rock takes the weight without comment. It looks about the same as it did when I met it.
The next class stacks up outside, faces pressed to glass, and for a wild moment I imagine a hand sliding a slider in some other room, render settings twitched, shadows deepened, a parameter changed from HIGH to ADAPTIVE. I wave at the window anyway like a man on a ship that believes in water. The door opens. I flip the marker cap off with my thumb and draw the rectangle again. It’s never quite straight. That’s how you know I’m here.
“Paradox Hour,” I tell the new room. “Prove it. Or don’t. But make it matter.”