Wednesday arrived without agenda.
No briefings in my lenses when I woke up. No messages from TRAD. No updates on Thursday sitting in my notifications like a bill I hadn't opened yet. Just the quiet hum of connection and the particular quality of morning light that suggested the city had decided, temporarily, to be uncomplicated.
I made coffee. I ate breakfast. I looked at my schedule.
Ethics. History. Free period. Lunch. Two afternoon electives.
Normal. Entirely, unremarkably normal.
Sky appeared at the bottom of the stairs with his usual offering and his usual energy, but with an added quality today — a kind of barely contained anticipation that suggested he had a plan and was waiting for the right moment to introduce it.
"Debate Club," he announced, before I'd finished my first sip.
"Good morning."
"It meets today. Wednesday. You said you'd think about it."
"I said Camilla mentioned it."
"Which is thinking about it adjacent." He fell into step beside me. "Come on. It'll be good."
"I have things to do this afternoon."
"What things?"
I thought about it honestly. The mission brief was for Thursday. The gear check could happen in the evening. The things I had to do this afternoon were, in terms of genuine obligation, essentially nothing.
"Things," I said.
Sky looked at me with the patience of a man who had heard this answer before. "Two hours," he said. "That's all. You sit in a room, you listen to people argue, maybe you say something. Worst case, it's boring and you leave."
"Best case?"
"Best case, Camilla acknowledges your existence in a room full of witnesses and the social implications are enormous."
"That's not a selling point."
"It absolutely is." He paused. "Also I've already told two people you're coming and it would be embarrassing to cancel."
I looked at him.
"Morally," he added, "you're already committed."
I finished my coffee and kept walking.
The mock trial was Dr. Mirela's doing and it was, objectively, the best thing that had happened in Ethics class since Dr. Mirela herself.
The case was simple on the surface: a fictional company, a known flaw in their software, six weeks between discovery and disclosure, no deaths, no prison sentences, a subset of users with real financial harm and nowhere particular to direct their anger. The question was not whether harm had occurred. The question was whether the company was responsible, culpable, and what those words actually meant when you took them apart.
The room had been rearranged into something approximating a courtroom. Two tables facing each other. A witness stand that was technically just a chair placed slightly apart from everything else. A jury of six students who had drawn the short straw and now sat in a row looking like people who had signed up for Ethics class and not whatever this had become.
Dr. Mirela sat at the back with her notebook and her gavel and the expression of a woman who was going to enjoy every minute of this.
Role assignments had been random.
Sky had been given prosecuting counsel.
The universe, if it had a sense of timing, had outdone itself.
Within forty seconds of receiving his brief, Sky had produced a notepad, colour-coded tabs, and the focused energy of someone who had been waiting for exactly this moment without knowing it. He reviewed his materials with the intensity of a man preparing for something real. He made notes in the margins. He underlined things twice.
"I'm going to be excellent," he informed me quietly, before the session began.
"You're going to be a lot," I said.
"That's what excellence looks like."
Camilla was lead defence counsel, which surprised nobody. She had read her brief in the time it took most people to find theirs, made two small notations in the margin of her notebook, and then set it aside with the serenity of someone who had already won and was simply waiting for the formality to conclude.
I had been assigned as a witness for the defence. The brief was minimal — former user, experienced the flaw, minor financial harm, humanise the abstract.
Bella was prosecution witness. She read her brief for ninety seconds, set it face-down, and appeared to have absorbed everything she needed.
The trial opened with chaos, which Dr. Mirela allowed with the patience of someone who understood that disorder was part of the point. Wrong roles, a juror who had misread his brief, someone's chair scraping at exactly the wrong moment.
Then Sky stood up.
And something happened to the room.
He wasn't polished. His opening statement ran slightly long and contained the phrase a company that chose silence four times in different formations. But he was completely, genuinely committed to it — to the idea that this fictional wrong was a real wrong, that it mattered, that someone in this room should care about it — and that commitment moved through the room the way real belief always does, finding the parts of people that respond to it before their critical thinking can catch up.
Several jury members were leaning forward by the time he finished.
Camilla waited.
When her turn came she stood without apparent hurry and spoke in the measured cadence of someone who had decided exactly how much force each sentence required. Where Sky had come in hot she came in precise. Where he'd appealed to feeling she built a framework. Where he'd asked the jury to be angry she asked them to be careful.
"Knowledge of a problem and legal obligation to disclose it are not the same thing," she said. "We will demonstrate that the company's conduct, while imperfect, remained within the limits of what the law actually requires — and that ethics, where it diverges from law, is not the courtroom's domain."
It was very good. Even Sky had to pause and recalibrate.
I was called to the witness stand second.
Sky approached with his notes. "Can you describe the moment you realised something was wrong with the platform?"
"There was a discrepancy," I said. "Small at first. The kind you might write off. But it kept appearing. Same shape, slightly different numbers. Like a pattern that wasn't supposed to be there."
"And did you report it?"
"Yes."
"What happened?"
"A form email. Automated. We take your concerns seriously."
"How long after your report did the company publicly disclose the flaw?"
"Six weeks."
Sky didn't add anything. He just let the number sit in the room.
Camilla stood for cross. She moved differently than Sky — less forward momentum, more considered placement, like someone who had already decided where she wanted to end up and was walking toward it without appearing to.
"You said the discrepancy was small at first," she said.
"Yes."
"Small enough to write off."
"Yes."
"But you didn't."
"No."
"Why?"
The character's answer and my answer were the same. "Because something felt wrong."
"A feeling," she said.
"A conclusion that hadn't fully formed yet."
She tilted her head slightly. "There's a difference, you'd say, between a feeling and a conclusion?"
"A feeling can be wrong without reasons. A conclusion has reasons even when it's incomplete."
Something moved through her expression — not approval, not surprise, something in between that had no precise name. She asked two more questions and returned to her seat.
Dr. Mirela wrote something in her notebook.
The verdict came back guilty on two of three counts.
Sky celebrated with the restrained dignity of a man who understood that gloating was inappropriate, and the completely unrestrained energy of a man who had forgotten that understanding entirely. These two impulses collided into a kind of vibrating stillness where he sat very correctly in his chair and made very small fist gestures under the table.
Bella had been on the stand for four minutes. She had answered every question with the minimum number of words required to make the answer true. The effect was somehow more devastating than Sky's entire opening statement.
"Nine sentences," Sky told me in the hallway afterward, with the wonder of a man describing a natural phenomenon. "Nine sentences and somehow that was the most convincing part of the trial."
"She only uses what she needs."
"That should be less effective."
"It's more effective because it is."
Sky looked unsatisfied with this, which was fine, because it was true.
"Good day though," he said, after a moment.
I thought about it. The trial. The argument. The strange normalcy of two hours where the only thing at stake was a fictional software flaw and whether twelve students could agree on what responsibility meant.
"Yeah," I said. "Good day."
He bumped my shoulder. "Debate Club's in an hour," he said. "Don't forget."