Tanner opened his eyes couldn’t make out much. It was dark, his eyes needed time to adjust. Out of instinct he reached up to rub his eyes but his hands didn’t raise higher than his shoulders. They were stopped abruptly by hard metal around each wrist. Out of fear he stood but his wrist pulled him down this time. He was trapped. He sat back down and tried to get a better picture of his situation. Not only were his hand chained but his feet too. He was sitting on cold hard concrete. His eyes could now make out the steel bars in front of him. He was in a jail cell but how had he ended up there?

He tried to remember what had happened before he woke up there but he was drawing blanks. Or more accurately he couldn’t believe what he could remember. It had been a normal day. So how could he go from normal day to day life to a jail cell? That was a serious amount of grey area. He called out for help and only heard his cry echo back at him.

He slept for who knows how long but he had a very odd dream. In the dream he had a party for his 21st birthday. All his friends and family were there. It seemed less like a birthday party and more like a sending off party. Everybody was telling him good luck and that the next 2 years would fly by. Next 2 years of what though? He couldn’t make it that far in the dream because of the pain in his shoulder. He was beginning to realize he was going to need to get use to sleeping uncomfotably.

He spent days, maybe weeks chained up. Waking to nothing, thinking of nothing, surprisingly eating nothing, never needing anything. He only slept and dreamt.

One day he woke and it all came back to him. His 21st birthday hadn’t been just any normal day, he had been collected that morning. They took him to a facility where he would spend the next 2 years being taught by an AI in a virtual reality. The government had mandated that everyone go through this facility at 21. They were trying to correct the collective morality of the nation. His birthday/ sending off party had taken place one day before he turned 21. This had become tradition for everyone to have this party the day before they turned 21.

Maybe he hadn’t been moral or his morals just weren’t matching up with the governments. Guess it was time to start learning from this AI. He began to think that maybe his morality wasn’t in question at all, maybe this was all about building upon your baseline morality. At that moment the chains disappeared and the cell door swung open.