This is a repost of my original story. I'd had some trouble updating it lately- I'd been working on it on and off since August 2003- so I decided to just scrap the whole thing from the site and repost it all in a slightly more proofread version. Speaking of which…those who have read this story in the past will have noticed my occasional error. Because of this, I am asking for a beta reader for this story from this site. Please email me if you're interested.

'Philosophy 337: Mid-term Essay Notes

Synopsis of Plato's Cave Plato's Republic:'

'Say you had a group of people, chained up in a cave since early childhood. The chains are such that they cannot move their arms or legs, nor turn there heads all the way around.

'In this cave, behind these prisoners, is a fire. An overseer, a puppetmaster, uses this to cast shadows on the wall in front of the prisoners, sometimes making sounds to accompany them, sometimes silent.

'The prisoners come to believe that these shadows are all there is of the world. After all, they have never seen daylight, never seen their keeper(s); they cannot even stand or turn their heads, so how can they imagine a world beyond the cave?

However.

'What if a prisoner escaped?'

'What if that prisoner could suddenly stand, and (probably not willingly) leave the dark cave that had been their whole world, could ripped away whatever veil prevented them from knowing the truth?'

'How would that prisoner react? (S)He would likely be dazzled, that's not a question. But how would the person deal with this new knowledge?'

'Would he try to disappear into this new world?'

'Would he try to go back to that old life of shadow images, though he has seen trees and grass, and has felt the sun on his face?'

'Or would he try, perhaps unsuccessfully, to convince the other prisoners of the world outside? Plato says that such a person would be killed if they tried to go back for others.

'Maybe by the overseer, trying to save the façade. Perhaps even by the other prisoners, out of fear upon hearing the incredible tale about the world outside.'

'After all, how can you tell the difference between shadows and reality when you've never seen the truth?'

I stopped typing, looked over what I had just wrote. I hadn't wanted to do Plato, but the topics had been assigned, and this was worth a pretty large chunk of the course. But now I was enthralled. This idea of the cave…I don't know what it was, but it was caught in my mind like a thorn.

A month ago, I was downtown, sitting in one of those outdoor cafes. I was trying to catch up on my readings, and cursing the day that I had decided to take on a philosophy minor, especially since I'm a comp. science major. I suppose I wanted to broaden my horizons, but this was extreme. If programming is all about code and rules and so forth, then philosophy is basically arguing away those rules until, theoretically, they don't exist. Yet even though it was driving me crazy then…well, it's given me an open mind to some of the things I've seen, let's just leave it at that.

Anyway, I was trying to catch up on reading, right? And I hear this helicopter way up, around the tops of the skyscrapers. Not surprising, they sometimes do training for pilots. But I still glanced up, and I was on my feet a second later, all hope of getting some reading done long gone.

The helicopter smashed into the side of a glass skyscraper, a tiny figure- the pilot maybe, I don't know- swinging out on a rope, the other end somehow attached to an adjacent building. But the helicopter didn't explode, at least not at first. The glass didn't even shatter immediately. It just…rippled, like it was water, and a stone had been skipped across it. A few seconds later, when the pilot was a good distance away and the explosion occurred, I grabbed my things and ran the other way. I couldn't explain it then, but I was scared-but not of the falling glass. I was terrified that someone had seen me watching that incredible spectacle.

That was the day the veil first began to tear.