CHAPTER 22

Melody hung up her phone, and she looked over at Doran.

“You really want to go through with this, don’t you,” he said.

She pressed her lips into a thin line. It was too easy just to say, “Yes.” If she was going to say yes, she was going to demand of herself that she face all of the ramifications. No childish assumption of her own immortality; no childish disregard for the people around her.

“And you’re asking for my help.”

“I’m asking you to consider helping. I’m telling you so that if you decide you can’t help, you can get away. But I would like your help.”

“You’re asking me to put myself in danger. If what Mr. Constantine said is true, then you’re putting yourself and everyone you love in danger by doing this.”

“I know. I am aware of that.”

“Why? Is it worth it? If they’ve killed anyone, it’s only people who tried to do what you’re trying to do. Expose them.”

Melody folded her hands and pressed them against her mouth for a moment, thinking. Finally, she looked down at the table. “You know… Did you ever hear the train thought-experiment?”

“No? I don’t think so.”

“I heard it once in, like, some kind of intro-to-ethics class or something. Like, my freshman year. You’re on a train coming up to a fork in the tracks, and the two tracks ahead—The one on the right has a single person tied up on the tracks. The one on the left has a bunch of people tied up on the tracks. You have the lever. You have to pick which way the train goes.”

“Yeah, I have heard this. Obviously, it would suck, but you have to choose the lesser evil, right?”

She shook her head. “That’s just it. The whole thing is stupid.”

“Well, sure,” said Doran. “It’s just a… what you said. Thought experiment? It’s just an example. But these situations happen in real life. Sometimes you have to sacrifice the few for the many.”

“And then what? Take the train analogy. What happens after that? Five on the left, one on the right. You sacrifice the one for the five, and the train keeps rolling. And a little way down the tracks, there’s another fork, and now there’s four on the left and one on the right. Like you said, it’s just a metaphor for life, and life isn’t done after one choice. Once you start down that road, it doesn’t end. You have to keep sacrificing people, and sacrificing people.”

“What’s the alternative, though?”

“I don’t know. Yet. I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure it starts with blowing up the train. You have to find some path that doesn’t involve making that choice. You can’t accept the bad guys’ rules.”

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“So you sacrifice yourself.”

“If you have to.”

“And your family?”

She looked up at him, and he saw in her eyes, in her expression, a kind of fierceness which made him wonder if he had not been terribly mistaken, in all of this time, about exactly whom he had been dating.

“You know,” he said after a moment. “I once heard about another experiment—an actual study. I think it was, like, a prison study or something. But basically it came out that, put in a position of having the ability to do evil—or maybe it was having to choose between doing evil or suffering—not even dying. Just, like, you had to either be the cruel prison guard, or become the prisoner. Something like that. And, like, ninety percent of ordinary people chose to be a cruel prison guard. Maybe I’m not remembering it exactly right, but it was something like that. Most people are not going to do the right thing, if it means really sacrificing.”

“What about you?” she asked. “Would you do the right thing? The thing you knew was right? Even if it meant you might get hurt? Or die? Or someone you love gets hurt?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. I mean, sacrificing myself? That’s easy. But family? What else is there besides family?”

She looked down at the table again. After a moment, she said, “Just Truth.”

Doran huffed a little through his nose. “Truth. Yeah.” He sighed. “I’ll tell you what I do know—what I’m starting to realize.” Melody met his eye.

“You’re a scary lady,” he said. She frowned. That was not true, to her mind. She was just trying to figure out the right path, without being weak about it. “I also have a feeling,” he continued, “that what I choose is also going to decide whether or not we stay together.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that if you go through with this, and I don’t follow you, you won’t have any use for me after that, no matter what happens.”

“That’s not true!”

“Yeah?” He pushed himself up from the table. “I think it is. Let me think about it, Mel. And you need to think about it, real hard. We’ll talk later, okay?”

She did not respond but only stared at him. He took up his bag and left without another word.

For the rest of that evening, and indeed late into the night, she sat in silence in her apartment, just thinking. It was a struggle of instinct versus reason, but it was perfectly topsy-turvy from the one she would have expected. She would have expected that reason would tell her she had to fight, and that she would have to battle against her fear, her survival instinct. That was how it should have been. But she found it was just the opposite: She found herself with every reasonable, logical cause to back down, to look the other way, to pretend none of it had ever happened, and to go on with her life in that fashion, while a feeling—a thin, feeble ray of light, of faith, shining in her heart—called her to defend Truth even at great cost. She found herself struggling to rationalize such ideological extremism against the obvious potential cost of it.

That reality, that truth about herself, made the whole world seem sick to her. It appalled her that the entire world, within and without mankind, from his worldly environment to his innermost heart, should be so biased toward lies, weakness, and cowardice. Ultimately it was not reason which drove her to action, but rage. Rage at that sorry state of the world.

And, perhaps foolishly, she felt still a little bit of faith that she could succeed. She did not share Constantine’s pessimism. One person, she believed, acting smartly, could make a difference, especially in this Internet age.

It was thus that Melody turned to her computer and began to type. As she was finishing her messages, her phone chimed with a new text. It was from Doran, and it read, “If we’re going to do this, we need to be smart about it.” That was the last piece of encouragement she needed. She sent her emails. Oh, she would have sent them, regardless, but there was no denying the value of knowing that her boyfriend, her man—her future husband, she decided in that moment—was on her side.