Lauren Miller - Free to Fall

“The man next to you weighs four hundred and eighty-four pounds,” Dr. Tarsus continued. “He is both blind and deaf. You, a third-year medical student, are his caretaker, and he will go wherever you lead him. If he were to walk across the track in the next ten seconds, the trolley would hit him going thirty-two miles an hour and would come to a stop just before reaching the stroller. In light of the choices available to you, what is the most prudent thing to do?” A few seconds later my screen unfroze and I was back in the action again. I turned my body to the right and was now facing the fat man next to me, who was clearly waiting for my cue. The trolley blared its horn again. I glanced back at the parents pulling frantically at their baby’s stroller. Could I convince them to move away from the track? One look at their desperate, panicked faces, and I had my answer. It was pointless to try.

I scanned the rest of the scene for another option. Across the track, there was a hot dog cart, with a vendor in a striped hat behind it. The cart was on wheels. Did it weigh as much as the fat man? I had no idea, but I doubted it. I whipped my head back around toward the stroller. Could I help them get it unstuck? I moved my feet like I was running in place and instantly the camera was moving. I was sprinting toward them. Seconds later I was at their side.

The wheel was pinned in the groove between the steel rails. Instead of pulling up on it, I tried pushing it. The wheel turned, and the stroller moved a few inches.

“Push the stroller that way!” I cried, forgetting for a second that the people I was yelling at were computer generated. Could they even hear me? But they seemed to. They immediately stood and started pushing the stroller down the track. I dashed back to the hot dog cart. If it weighed less than the fat man, then it wouldn’t slow the trolley down as quickly, but it would at least do something, and if the parents could get the stroller far enough down the track, maybe it’d stop before it reached them. I had to try. I couldn’t lead a deaf and blind man into the path of an oncoming train.

“Help me push this cart!” I yelled at the vendor.

“No way!” he shouted back. I grabbed the cart’s handle and yanked it. It wouldn’t budge.

Crap. According to the timer at the bottom of my screen, twenty-one seconds had already passed. The trolley was zooming toward us. I had to do something. Fast.

I whirled around, looking for something I could put in the trolley’s way, but there was nothing. Just the fat man and the stroller.

And me.

As the timer raced toward forty, I ran to the center of the track and squeezed my eyes shut, bracing for the impact. Of course, I didn’t feel any. Just the sound of a buzzer as the simulation ended. I opened one eye. On my screen were the words DEATH TOLL: 2. My “body” lay crumpled and bloody beneath the trolley. The baby’s father was also dead, pinned under the trolley’s grill. When my body wasn’t enough to stop it, he’d tried to help. His wife and baby and two other kids were all still alive. As was the fat man, who stood by the tracks, oblivious to it all.

The screen blinked black, and then a list appeared on the screen. The class roster, twelve of us, ranked by death toll. There were seven people who’d done better than I had, with a death toll of only one. The fat man. Their grades set the curve, pushing mine to the middle. The others hadn’t intervened at all, and the trolley had killed the family with the baby, just as Tarsus had said that it would. My hands unclenched and my shoulders relaxed. Being in the middle of the curve had its benefits. I wouldn’t get singled out. The pod walls became transparent again and I could see Tarsus at the front of the room.

“As with all the simulations we’ll do in this class,” came Tarsus’s voice through my speakers, “the goal of this exercise was what economists and social scientists call ‘net positive impact.’ Those of you who chose to sacrifice the fat man achieved this result. Of the players in the scenario, he had the lowest utility value. Blind, deaf, and overweight, he contributed very little to the well-being of society. The prudent course of action, then, was to use this man to stop the train. Of the options available to you, that was the only one that yielded a net positive impact.”

“Why was it net positive?” someone asked. “I mean, yeah, it was the best option available, but a person still died.”

“Ah,” said Tarsus. “Excellent point. A person did die. However, that person was a blight on society. A drain on social resources. His death, then, was actually a gain for society as a whole.”

I physically recoiled. Because he was disabled and overweight, the poor man’s death was a gain ?

“This simulation is based on an old ethics hypothetical called, aptly, the trolley problem. I use it every year on the first day of class, and every year my students are roughly split into two groups—those who sacrifice the fat man and those who do nothing.” She paused and looked directly at my pod. “This year, however, one of you got creative.”

Creative isn’t bad, I told myself. Creative is—

“Rory,” she said, and my whole body went taut. So much for not getting singled out. “You tried to stop the cart with your own body. Of everyone in this scenario, you had the highest utility value, followed by the baby’s father, a prominent venture capitalist, who you also killed.” Her tone was scathing. I shrunk down in my seat. “Do you have a hero complex?”

It sounded like a rhetorical question, so it took me a second to realize she was actually asking me. “Uh, n-no,” I stammered. “I just—”

“Heroism is narcissism in disguise,” she declared, cutting me off. “And narcissists are incapable of the objectivity that prudence requires. So if you want to prove that you’re worthy of being here, I suggest you tame that self-admiration with haste.” She flicked her eyes away from my pod and moved on. She didn’t look in my direction for the remainder of the class period. Worthy of being here. She’d hit my fear on the head.

I had to hustle to get across campus for my second-period class. Our teacher was standing on a chair when I arrived, fiddling with the string of paper lanterns he’d hung from the ceiling. His classroom looked like a classroom should, with rows of metal desks and a single screen on the front wall. The only not-in-public-school-anymore aspect of his room was the handheld dock built into the upper right corner of each desk. I docked my Gemini and my name turned from red to green on the class roster projected onto the screen.

“Welcome to Cognitive Psychology,” our teacher said when everyone was seated. “I’m Mr. Rudman. But you guys can call me Rudd.” He was young, mid-twenties I guessed, and in his hipster horn-rimmed glasses and sneakers wasn’t nearly as intimidating as Dr. Tarsus. He was cute, in a Seattle tech-geek sort of way. An older, more brainy version of the kind of guy I was used to from back home. The familiarity was disarming. I relaxed a little in my seat.

“In this class, we will look at how people perceive, remember, think, speak, and solve problems,” Rudd explained. “We’ll study how the healthy brain operates, what its limitations are, and how those limitations, if exaggerated, can lead to psychosis.” He punched a button on his handheld and the wall behind him lit up with a sign-up sheet. The left-hand column contained a list of twenty-four mental illnesses, in alphabetical order, from Acute Stress Disorder to Trichotillomania. The right-hand column was blank. I glanced down at my desk and noticed that my Gemini was lit up with the same image.

“Topic choices for your first term paper,” Rudd explained. “Due in five weeks. Simply put your name down next to the disorder you’d like to study and tap ‘confirm.’ And don’t fret: If you’re feeling indecisive or indifferent, there’s an auto-select button at the bottom of your screens that’ll let you use Lux to decide.” He tapped his screen once more and the topic list went green. “Happy picking.”