He opens his eyes. The room is damp with an eerie silence broken only by the occasional drip of a leaky faucet. Through the fluorescent glow of the ceiling lights, Adam looks around, hoping for some explanation to his situation. Struggling to remember, all that comes to mind is him leaving work, and then waking up here. There are no answers, until a screeching announcement comes over the intercom. “Wanna play a game?” The voice’s raspy tone reverberates through the small bathroom, it seems to be commanding more than asking. 

“My whole life”, it continues, “dedicated to one purpose, serving my students, yet lung cancer doesn’t really care about dedication, now does it?”Adam shakes in horrifying anticipation. “That handcuff around your ankle has a key hidden somewhere in the room, I’ll help you out, but you can start by grabbing that pen and paper in front of you”. Leaning forward he grabs the objects, only to listen in horror to what he hears next.

 “Riddle me this”, the voice says in glee, “If there is a right triangle with an interior angle of 53 and a corresponding side measuring 13 ½ in., using the Law of Sines, what is the length of the hypotenuse?”. Adam pauses as he’s filled with unbridled terror. Oh my God. Clutching the pen, he draws out the problem, but he’s still lost. “Can’t I just saw off my foot or something?” he asks. “No, find the length of the hypotenuse”, the voice answers. Silence…

 “I’d really rather cut off my foot though”. The voice shouts back in a fit of exasperation, “No, we already did that and, even if we didn’t, it doesn’t even matter because you’re missing the point. The point is that the youth of Advanced Western nations take their education for granted and don’t realize that what they learn carries over well into adulthood and that failure to study correctly puts you in the situation you’re in right now”. 

It’s alright, you only graduated a few years ago, you can do this, now pull it together. He puts his mind to the paper and makes use of the nearby calculator, when suddenly his memory comes back to him. Within a few minutes, he bolts up, confident in his answer. He takes a deep breathe and tells the voice, “If I learned one thing in Mr. Paxton Trig class, it’s that you can’t find the hypotenuse without another codependent side length to the triangle. Making your whole question incomplete and unsolvable”. 

The voice lets out a sigh, and soon a man walks through the door. He’s covered in black, with a mask shrouding his face. “Not at all, but you see I… I was Mr. Paxton”, he reveals. “All I wanted was to shine the light of human intellect into a dark and ignorant world. Yet I failed even my very own students”. Adam feels hope bubble up inside, “So you’ll let me live right?”. 

“No you f*cking moron”, and just like that Adam was never heard from again.