Read the companion story: The Ring and The Shadow
There was once a student who arrived at community college burned out and cracked.
In high school he had done everything: all the rigor, all the expectations, all the masking. His nervous system conditioning (autistic-and-ADHD) survived on fumes, constantly whiplashed between hyperfocus and overwhelm, shutdown and sprint. He graduated with trophies and fractures no one saw.
Community college became a kind of convalescence. Part-time terms. Online classes. Long rides through suburbs. Majors changed when the system didn’t fit. His transcript looked strange: high GPA, low credits. He wasn’t lazy; he was pacing his life so he didn’t shatter again.
Then someone pointed up the road.
On a small hill at the edge of town sat a liberal arts college. Tiny classes, professors who knew your name, programs for first-gen students, funded research and “epic” projects. The brochures spoke of peace, justice, global citizenship. To him, it looked like a place where all the half-formed thoughts he’d had about empire and prisons and power might finally be named out loud.
On that first approach, he didn’t see contradictions. He saw a story:
“From community college to the College on the Hill to meaningful work. The messy years were just the prologue.”
Admissions liked him—until they opened the transcript.
“Seven credits a term,” they said. “To qualify for our big tuition grant, you need state aid. To get that, you must be full-time. Fifteen credits a semester.”
To them, it was policy. To his body, it was déjà vu: the exact load that had nearly broken him.
He walked the campus and did the math. Fifteen credits, plus commuting, plus the invisible work of having autistic and ADHD conditioning in a new environment. He had already watched that movie once. He knew how it ended.
He could force it and likely shatter. Or walk away and let the dream go.
He withdrew. Publicly, it was “too expensive.” Privately, it was, “I cannot afford to break myself in half just to sit in a nicer classroom.”
At the time, he still thought the failure was his. The Hill stayed pure in his mind. He was the one who wasn’t “full-time material.”
The door closed, and life went on.
Later, a different offer arrived from the Tower: a powerful Scholarship, a Ring that promised, “Wear this for a handful of years, and you will never fear unemployment again.”
The first thing his mind did was not dream of distant capitals or secret rooms. It went back to the Hill.
“If I win the Ring,” he thought, “I can finally afford to go full-time. Fifteen-credit semesters paid for. State aid triggered. The big grant unlocked. The College on the Hill won’t have to look twice at my transcript.”
The Ring was, at first, a key for that one door.
Only afterward did the ladder extend in his imagination: from liberal arts college to Ivy League college, from there to clearances, high-clearance jobs, even fortified postings overseas. Learn to critique empire in seminar rooms, then carry that fluency into more powerful rooms and “make a difference from within.”
To win the Scholarship, the Tower demanded a five-year plan.
Being who he was, he didn’t stop at five. He followed the line further: from scholarship to service, from service to a life spent keeping the Tower’s machines running in a world coming apart. Safe jobs, safe compounds, safe clearances—built on the same machinery he’d always been uneasy about.
By the time he was done, the Ring still gleamed—but it felt heavier in his hand than it had when he was just thinking about tuition and fifteen-credit terms.
He set it down.
Only then did he look back up at the Hill with clearer eyes.
On his second approach, he noticed more than the brochures. He heard about a crushed faculty union and an endowment guarded carefully while the school spoke of justice. He saw how dependent it was on federal grants and loans. He looked more closely at where graduates went: agencies, NGOs, corporate programs—many of them administering the very systems students dissected in class.
The message in the classroom was “question power.” The structure of the pipeline was “learn to question it well, then go work for it.”
And he saw the shape of his own plan for what it was:
- Use the Tower’s Ring to grind through a course load his autistic-and-ADHD body had already rejected,
- to force open a college that criticized empire,
- so he could more efficiently climb toward serving that empire somewhere else.
The hypocrisy wasn’t just institutional. It was his: seeking a place that taught critique of the Labyrinth, while plotting to use that critique as a polished passport deeper into it.
The first time the Hill’s door closed, his body had said no while his mind still idolized the place. Now, with the Ring’s weight and his own Shadow still lingering, his conscience joined in.
He let the ladder go. He let the Hill remain on the horizon—a place he could respect, but no longer chase as his salvation.
He still felt a soft spot for the College on the Hill. Its students were sincere. Its Plus Ki was real. But he no longer mistook its banners for an exit from the Labyrinth. It was a humane room inside it—one that sometimes helped people see the machinery more clearly, and sometimes trained them to serve that machinery more fluently.
So he stayed on the slower, stranger path: finishing his degree elsewhere, learning Linux and networks, studying grids and mutualism, building his own forms and stories for people who would never be invited to the Tower in the first place.
The Hill remained where it was. He kept walking toward places that might, one day, grow into Orchards instead.
Insight
Sometimes you come to the same door twice.
The first time, your body tells you it can’t afford the price of admission. The second time, with the Ring’s weight and your own Shadow still lingering, your conscience realizes it doesn’t want what’s on the other side.
⛩️🖥️
