Reia took a pencil and wrote one single word: "Yes." She got up, took the sheet in her hand, and moved to the very beginning of the hall to hand over the sheet to the teacher when she suddenly realized that there was no place in the hall to put her answer paper, as well as there was no teacher who would accept it.
"Where can I submit the answer?" she asked herself.
Something flickered over her head. It was the testing's timer.
"Maybe I need to submit the answer at the end?" she thought. "Okay, I'll go back to my place."
Meanwhile, out of the corner of his eye, David tried to spy on what was on Aram's sheet.
"Hey, what are you doing?" Aram shouted and, grabbing his sheet, turned in the opposite direction. "Have you decided to write off from me?" Aram grinned.
"What? Me? Why on earth?" David shouted as if nothing had happened. "I wanted to call Ksyu."
At that moment, Ksyu turned to David with a smile.
"Hello, ahahaha," David said awkwardly.
Ksyu waved at him.
"Yeah, yeah, of course..." Aram said. "Do you really think that I will believe you?"
"That's your problem," David said. "And please don't bother me, there's actually a test going on. They can kick us out of here because of this."
"Speaking of expelling, where is the teacher? Was there no one here all this time?"
"Yes," Zen reacted. "And that's strange. There are really none of the teachers."
The students, noticing that there was no one watching the exam, began to talk louder and even sit near each other.
"Why don't we solve this riddle together?" Aram suggested.
The guys looked at each other and nodded their heads at the same time.
"Reia seems to already know the answer," Ksyu noted. "She wanted to turn in her paper at once."
"What's so hard about this?" Reia asked "They asked us to be ourselves. I believe that terrorists should never be justified. And, considering how many innocent people they are ready to kill in cold blood, I have not the slightest desire to treat them humanely. If beating one person will save hundreds of lives of innocent people, then I'm ready to do it myself."
"It's hard to disagree with you," said one of the students.
"I would probably agree with Reia, too," David added. "But I don't think the numbers are that important. It doesn't matter how many people die, one or many. You cannot put the interests of several people against the interests of one person."
"What do you mean?" Reia interrupted him. "Why can't you? Why can't you sacrifice one to save thousands of people?"
"What if the person they decide to sacrifice is your loved one? Your significant other, or a child? What would you say then?" Aram entered the dispute.
"Yes. That's exactly what I meant. Each person is a separate life, a separate destiny, which is connected with a huge number of other destinies. The victim's relatives will not be happy with his death, even if he will save a huge number of people," David added. He hesitated a little, as he did not expect Aram to support his idea. "Of course, there are different cases and different people. Some people will understand that the person who perished was a real hero. But no one has the right to take a person's life, even for the salvation of all mankind. A person must make this choice himself."
"I agree," Reia said after some pause. "I was wrong."
"I remembered!" Ksyu suddenly said. "There was also such a thought experiment in one of my books. It was called The Trolley Problem."
"The Trolley Problem?" Reia asked. "What is it?"
"As I said, this is a thought experiment. Imagine a heavy, unguided trolley running along the rails in the direction of an arrow that you can switch. On one of the paths along which the trolley can move, there are five people, tied by a mad philosopher. On the other path, only one person is tied. What will you do? Will you switch the arrow so that one person dies and 5 are saved?"
"After everything you said. I don't know how to answer anymore," Reia whispered. She looked up and saw the timer. "But we have a problem here. Time is running out. And it seems to me that we have deviated a little from our task".
"Yes, you're right," Ksyu agreed.
"And so," Reia continued. "Our main question is that we are facing a criminal, a terrorist. This means that everything that we discussed here is unimportant in this situation. So my answer will remain the same for now. A terrorist can be tortured."
"But what if," Zen said, "what if he gives us wrong information in the end?"
"I didn't think about that," Reia replied.
"But somehow the secret services are getting the truth." Ksyu started walking around the tables. "And I'm sure that such, let's call them, events do not always take place over a cup of green strawberry tea with cookies."
"Yes, but if you beat him for too long, tormented by pain, he would be ready to tell you anything. And it will obviously not be the truth," Zen said. "And since we clearly understand that he is a bad person and decided to organize such a crime, he will be ready for anything, if only his plan is fulfilled. He will lie to the police so that they leave him alone even for a short period of time, and then hundreds of people will die."
"What then is to be done? What is the correct answer to this question?" David wondered.
All the time Aram was sitting aside rereading the text of the assignment with a gloomy look.
"Wait," an insight suddenly struck Aram, "but who said that this man is a terrorist?"
"What?" Reia was surprised. "What do you mean? It says here "In front of you is a man tied to a chair who has been caught by the intelligence service. It is assumed that he placed..."
Reia suddenly stopped reading further.
"It is assumed," all of the students said together.
"This means that there is a possibility that the person caught by intelligence is absolutely innocent," Aram continued. "And we will harm an ordinary man who has nothing to do with terrorists.
And besides the fact that we will beat him for nothing, he, exhausted by pain, will decide to simply invent a nonexistent place where the bomb is planted, and send the police on the wrong track. Thus, specialists will lose their already expensive time in search of a nonexistent bomb, and will have no chance to save people from death," David added.
"The time!" Reia suddenly shouted.
There was a minute left on the clock. Everyone quickly began to fill out their assignment papers.
When there were only 10 seconds left, the holographic image of the timer suddenly turned into a bomb.
3.. 2.. 1.. 0
Everyone expected the bomb to explode, but instead, its fuse simply went out and it fell to the floor.
"Dear Students!" said William, who unexpectedly appeared in the gym. "Congratulations, you have completed another test. Now there are exactly half of the tasks left to do, and you are free to hang out."
"Hang out? After we've been kept here for 10 or more hours?" Aram said with displeasure.
"Stop grumbling," Reia said. "Until you suffer, you will not achieve anything in life. I am sure that everything that happens here is not for nothing. This is rather a gift for the future from the director than a test or torture."
"Maybe. Maybe you are right" Aram replied. "I wonder what the next test is?"