Chapter 25: The Ethics Problem
He finished unpacking, sat on the bed for about ten minutes, worked through one of the snacks, and then acknowledged that there were still several unresolved items on the agenda.
He moved from the bed to the chair, cleared his throat, and adopted the posture of someone chairing a meeting.
"Mom. A few more things."
Galatina turned from the wardrobe where she'd been sorting his clothes. Attentive.
"In the room, it's just us — door closed, back to normal, no issues there," he said, working through the list. "Laundry. You're handling that. Confirmed."
He paused on that one for a moment, feeling something in his chest release that had apparently been coiled without his knowledge.
"Now. The bathrooms."
"Bathrooms?"
"The dorm bathrooms are communal. You're registered as a boy, so you'll have to use the men's room. Which means other boys will be in there too."
He stopped there. The full elaboration of where that sentence was going was somewhere beyond his current willingness to narrate. "You understand what I mean."
Galatina considered this with genuine focus — the specific quality of attention she reserved for problems that required actual thinking.
"I could construct a spatial circuit using aetheric resonance," she said calmly. Her fingers traced a small path in the air. "A loop from any given stall, or from a corridor junction, connecting back to our bathroom here. Entry and exit in under a second. No one nearby would detect it."
Uriel's brain, in that moment, became very smooth.
"Right, yes," he said automatically, and started mentally laying out logistics — timing, cover, safe distance thresholds.
Then he stopped.
Wait.
He rewound the conversation and ran it again from the beginning.
...Wait.
He put his hand down. Looked at the ceiling. Sat with it for a few seconds.
A stall had walls. A door. A latch.
If she went into a stall and closed the door, nothing was visible. The problem solved itself. The spatial circuit was a solution to a problem that did not exist.
I agreed with it. I started optimising it. I nearly called it a good idea.
He turned to her very slowly.
"Mom. Stalls have walls. Correct?"
"Yes."
"You go in, you close the door, nothing can be seen. Correct?"
"Yes."
"So you use the bathroom exactly as anyone would. Correct?"
"...Yes."
"The spatial circuit was solving what problem, exactly?"
A pause. Galatina's eyes drifted upward slightly. She thought about it with visible sincerity.
"...It seems," she said, scratching the side of her head, "like it wasn't necessary."
"It was not necessary."
"No."
"So what," Uriel said, "were we just discussing."
She didn't answer. A rare expression crossed her face — the specific, faintly puzzled look of someone who has just traced their own reasoning back to its source and found nothing there.
Uriel put his hand over his face and conducted a brief, silent self-review.
She introduced a completely unnecessary solution. I evaluated it seriously. I was close to endorsing it. My thoughts were hijacked by a spatial engineering proposal for a problem that a door handles.
He gave himself a moment. Sat up straight. Returned to the actual point.
"What I mean," he said, clearly, "is that there will be other boys in the men's bathroom. Other male students. Who are also using it. And you will be able to see them."
He left the specifics unspoken, on the assumption that she would fill them in.
She did.
Galatina's eyes went wide.
A genuine blink. A full stop. The expression of someone who had just encountered a variable they had not included in their model.
In approximately fifteen years of knowing her, Uriel had never seen that particular look on her face. He filed it immediately.
Galatina: caught off guard. First recorded instance. Cause: men's bathrooms.
Then she tapped her palm once, lightly — the small habitual gesture she made when something clicked into place.
"Right," she said, looking back at him with an expression that had rearranged itself into something warm and purposeful, "little Uri is almost fifteen. That's practically an adult."
On this continent, fifteen was the legal threshold.
"...Yes," Uriel said. His right eyelid developed a faint, involuntary rhythm. He sensed where this was going but couldn't yet confirm if it was the direction he feared. "So—"
"It's time to have the talk."
Room 402 went completely silent.
Uriel tilted his head. Confirmed he had heard correctly. Then, in a very measured voice: "Mom. I was talking about the bathrooms."
"The talk," Galatina repeated, with the composure of someone who has been mentally scheduling this for a while and is glad the moment has finally arrived. "A boy your age should know about his body. About how things work. The details that matter."
"..."
"This is part of it, yes," she continued, and simply began. "The male body is structured differently from ours — you know this generally, but specifically—"
This direction.
I did not map this direction.
I asked about the bathrooms. Somehow that became—
Uriel closed his eyes, pulled in a breath through his teeth, and pressed two fingers to his forehead. A profound, bone-deep tiredness settled over him.
"Mom."
"Yeah."
"I know."
She paused. "Know what?"
"What you're about to cover. I already know it."
Galatina studied him with the careful look of someone calibrating the scope of a claim.
"...How much do you know?"
"Theoretically. Comprehensively."
She considered this. Then, apparently deciding to verify: "Walk me through it."
Uriel did. Approximately five minutes. Calm, complete, and delivered in the flat tone of someone reciting established facts from memory.
Galatina listened through the whole thing. Her expression cycled through: attentive, slightly furrowed, nodding, then quiet.
When he finished, she said, with complete equanimity: "That's impressive. Little Uri actually knows more theory than Mom does."
She said it the way she would say the soup is ready. No hesitation whatsoever.
Being complimented on this is a deeply strange experience and I don't know what to do with it.
Uriel opened his mouth, found his prepared exit line had dissolved, and looked somewhere to the left for a moment.
"You know it too," he said. "You've been alive long enough—"
"Theory, yes," she said, with the same placid calm, the same tone she used for discussing mathematics. "But zero practical experience. So the finer details—"
"Theory is sufficient," Uriel cut in, preemptively. "Plenty of theory. Theory covers it."
"It doesn't, actually. The gap between theory and practice is quite significant. I've read about it, but the texts and the reality—" She shook her head in the manner of someone who has done their research and found it incomplete.
"Mom."
"Yeah?"
"What texts."
"An illustrated encyclopedia. And a wedding customs compendium — found it at a bookshop in town. Very detailed diagrams—"
"All right," Uriel said, raising one hand. "That's enough. Stop there."
"Some of the content is genuinely—"
"Stop."
In the gap that followed, Galatina tapped her palm again, lightly, in the manner of someone reaching a logical next step.
"So. Theory is established."
"...Sure," he said, sensing an approach vector and unable to identify it in time to intercept.
"Then practical application."
The expression on Uriel's face in that moment was Edvard Munch's The Scream. It lasted approximately two seconds before his face found its way back to something that could be called an expression.
"Practical — what."
"After theory comes practice," she said, with the gentle certainty of someone explaining that multiplication follows addition. "You're the right age. There shouldn't be any gaps in this area—"
"Mom—"
"And then practice," she continued, completely unaware that Uriel's voice had acquired a very fine tremor, "the question of a partner—"
"Mom."
"Mom—"
He was out of the chair at a speed that, evaluated against every time he had stood up in his current life, was an absolute personal record.
"No."
"Why not," she said, looking up at him. Her eyes were clear. Entirely clear. No subtext, no hidden layer, nothing he had been braced to find. Which somehow made it worse.
"I'm hungry," Uriel said.
"What?"
"Very hungry. I haven't eaten since this morning. It's serious. Food needs to happen immediately."
"You just had a snack ten minutes—"
"Hungry."
Galatina looked at him.
Uriel held eye contact. Steady. Unblinking. Absolute commitment to the premise.
She stood up, with the air of someone who has decided that some conversations can wait.
"...All right. Food first."
"Thank you, Mom."
She headed toward the storage room — she'd already located the small kitchen, which meant she'd quietly mapped the entire unit before he arrived — and went inside.
Uriel noticed the kitchen with faint surprise. Then he remembered something and called after her.
"...Wait."
The words came out before he'd decided to say them. Galatina stopped and looked back.
"The encyclopedia. The illustrated one. What was it called?"
She thought about it.
"Something like... Let Mommy Teach You All the Good-Feeling Things~ ♡. Little heart on the cover."
The birds outside kept going.
The noise from the next room over kept going.
Everything else kept going.
Uriel sat on the bed and stared at a fixed point in space.
"..."
"The vendor said it was a bestseller," she added helpfully. "Very popular at the market—"
"That is an adult publication."
He was standing again. The volume had gone up by two full registers without his authorisation.
"That title. From the very first word. It is obviously, immediately, transparently that kind of book. You cannot buy that kind of book. You cannot read that kind of book. The fact that it was available at a market stall does not mean—"
"What kind of book—"
"That kind! The kind that's obvious from the very first word of the title!"
He wanted to say it plainly and discovered he couldn't, which was its own specific humiliation. He let go of her shoulders — he'd grabbed them at some point — covered his face with both hands, and issued the rest through the gaps between his fingers.
"Mom. I need you to locate that book in your memory."
"Located."
"Delete it. Every page. Every word. Every diagram. Permanently. Thoroughly. Gone."
"But some of it had—"
"Gone."
"—genuinely useful—"
"Gone."
Each word arrived with a full stop after it. Very calm. The calm of a man holding something together with both hands and all available willpower.
Galatina's mouth opened slightly. She appeared to be sincerely evaluating the feasibility of the instruction.
"If I delete it, the practical component won't have a theoretical foundation—"
"There is no practical component!" The last word broke at the top of his register. "Delete that phrase too! Delete the entire category! It doesn't exist!"
"But you said theory—"
"I don't know any theory! I've never known any theory! Complete blank! Nothing!"
He was approximately four seconds from the floor, and he knew it, and he remained upright through pure stubbornness.
"Mom. Promise me."
"Promise what?"
"The book. Its contents. The phrase 'practical component.' All of it. Never to be raised again. None of it was appropriate. Promise."
"..."
"Promise."
"Okay. Promise."
She went into the kitchen. Mildly puzzled. Uriel was left alone in the room.
He lay face-down on the bed.
I am a normal person.
Confirmed. I am a completely normal person.
A normal person, in this situation, chooses hunger. This is the correct and rational choice.
He stared at the mattress for a while.
...She was going to say herself. For the partner. The name she was about to say was her own.
I know this because in her framework, Mom teaches child, Mom provides for child, Mom handles everything — and there is not a single part of her that registers anything wrong with that logic. Not one cell. The framework is complete and internally consistent and has no gaps.
Outside, the leaves moved. The birds kept at it. Somewhere down the hall, someone laughed at something.
Uriel lay still and waited for dinner.
Official Statement from the Author:
The following events did NOT occur after this chapter:
- No "practical component" was conducted
- No partner was designated
- No illustrated encyclopedias were consulted