I love my band. I really do. Ain’t none of them can run for shit. Priya used to jog regularly, but there’s no treadmill I’ve seen in this world, so she’s a bit rusty. Neither Steve nor Miguel is the jogging type. That means we can’t do a lot better than walking for speed. At least, it seems that way until Priya says that she’s not impressed with our speed.

“Can we take ten?” asks Miguel.

“Sure. We need to be moving in ten though,” answers the boss.

Seven minutes later, Miguel has a go-cart built from metal parts he had in his pocket. “This thing isn’t going to handle much in the way of dodging or uneven terrain.”

Steve adds, “Make the wheels wider. If you want to be able to go cross country in a cart, you gotta have fat wheels.”

Still within the ten minute window, Miguel and Steve happily flop into the cart, and Priya reluctantly hops in also. Miguel uses his metal magic to accelerate the cart to about ten miles an hour. It’s a lot faster than the four mph of Steve’s fast walk, or Priya’s jogging seven. In the next hour we cover as much ground as we did in the first three. And then again in the hour after that. Five hours of travel, and we’re thirty-odd miles away from Rocco and his slaving operation. We’re nervous though, so we add 2 more hours of driving as dusk falls to be safe.

Fifty miles from the danger zone, we set up camp for the night.

Priyanka starts in immediately, “What are we going to do about this?”

Steve cuts in. “Why don’t we all take an hour, Priya. We just got here, Miguel’s gotta set up camp, plus he’s been running his magic for five hours already. Snake’s been jogging with us for this whole escape, and there’s no way he’s not ready to rest.”

I’m fine. I wasn’t even running, but Doc needs to calm down a bit. “Lemme drum a bit to get us all a bit more full of thaums before we try to talk.” I start getting out my kit.

“Fine. We have to talk about this. But we can wait an hour. That’s reasonable,” she says, sounding as if it’s clearly not.

Instead of playing a song, I just screw around with rhythms for the hour. If you play 15/4 every beat on the kicks, and then do something simple, hitting right handed every third beat, and left every fifth, then it gets a rhythm like this:

da da tda da kda tda da da tda kda da tda da da ktda

When it’s a beat every second, it seems like it would only take most folks a few tries to get it right, even if they don’t have much in the way of coordination. One of the tricks for noobs is hitting on the beat, rather than a bit in front or behind. This rhythm is harder than that though. It was always kinda fun watching folks try to do that rhythm on their desk, or in a chair, and how long it would take them. Even making other musicians who are used to only one or two lines in a song are kinda funny trying it.

Then I speed it up. A beat every quarter second, instead of every second. Then back to every second. But add my high hat pedal in on a "one, two-and" kinda rhythm, and stuff starts to get interesting. Then with the tail tapping crashes every four, we have a rhythm that’s not beautiful, but it takes work. Well, it takes work as it speeds up.

I’m messing with 128th note speed when Steve comes to get me. “We gotta talk rescue.”

“Dude. Thanks for reminding me. I coulda been stuck in the rhythm all night.”

“Don’t remind me. Remember that time when we packed up camp and left while you were drumming? We waited 3 hours over the other hill before we came back to get you. You hadn’t even noticed we were gone.”

“That wasn’t fair dude. I was workin’ three-handed drum rolls. No one ever did that before. It took concentration.”

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“Five hours of concentration?”

“I wasn’t paying attention to time, man. I was in the music.”

“My point. Come on. Priya’s ready.”

We have a campfire going because it’s pleasant, and because Miguel can chop trees with an axe pretty well. He doesn't seem to do chainsaw or rotary though.

“Miguel, man, you’re cart was bitchin’,” I say, when we get to the fire. “Why’ve we never seen it before?”

“I’ve been working out kinks, yaknow. You liked it?”

Steve answers, “Man, that thing needs shocks. If we were going sixty, my teeth would've fallen out. Actually, Priya, can you check if they’re all still here?” He opens his mouth real wide, pulls on his top jaw, and starts trying to show her.

Miguel and I laugh.

Priyanka does not. “I want to go save them.”

“How?” Steve is always pragmatic.

“I don’t know. But that’s slavery. He’s probably farming them for coins, keeping them weak all the time.”

Miguel thinks for a minute. “You ever read any philosophy, P.?”

She answers, “What I had to in school. Plato. Hume. Neitzche.”

“Ever look at Kant?”

“No. Why?”

“He’s one of the more impressive guys to ever write about stuff like what’s good behavior. He wrote in German, though, so I haven’t ever read his original stuff. Just some translations, and man, is he hard to read.

Miguel continues, “Everyone knows his categorical imperative stuff, right?”

Facing blank stares, he elaborates, “If you can’t make doing it a rule, then don’t do that thing. It’s about duty and shit, but it makes a lot of sense about how to decide the kinds of things to do, or the kinds of rules to follow for ethics.

“Why I brought him up today though is that the categorical imperative wasn’t his only big idea. Another ethical thought of his was that “ought implies can.” That means that Steve doesn’t have an obligation to run fifty miles an hour to save a kid from a monster. Why not? Because he can’t run fifty miles an hour. You don't have a moral obligation to do things you can’t do.

“I guess what I’m trying to say is, I don’t see any way for this group to save those folks. Under normal circumstances, I ain’t much of a fan of slavery. Half of my family did a bit too much of that to the other half of my family back in the fifteen hundreds. But let’s not agree that we’re obligated to fly or nothin', okay?”

I'm surprised. “Miguel. Dude. Did you study Kant in college?”

Miguel answers me, “No, man, I didn’t go. Just found it recommended online, so I read some. So do you have some sort of plan, P.?”

“There’s gotta be something we can do. We can’t just leave them as slaves.”

“So are you going full utilitarian here? There’s maybe more of them than us, so their welfare is more important than ours?”

We look at Miguel suspiciously.

“What? I read during lunch breaks on the site. You know Mill and Singer and them, right?”

We all continue to stare at him.

“Okay. So it’s like this. We want to do the greatest good for the greatest number. We can try to save them. But if we do, there’s better than even odds that some of us die. Probably most of us. If they don’t kill Snake, he can get away because he’s faster than the wind. The rest of us, we’re fucked if anything goes wrong. We’ll be trapped, enslaved or killed. Is it worth it?”

Priya objects, “We know they’re there. They don’t know us. We’ve got really good detection ability. There were only eight of them. We can surprise them.”

Steve pipes up, “No one sleeps any more. We don’t get much of a sneak attack. We’d have to spend a lot of time watching, and there’s a really good chance someone would find us. Also, I don’t think there’s only eight of them. That was eight in a hunting group. They left at least someone back to watch the slaves. Probably there’s twenty or more.”

More questions come from Priyu, “What if we sprung the slaves?”

Steve answers, “They’re almost certainly out of energy, and need a long recovery before they fight again.”

“Dammit. What can we do?” Priya has tears in her eyes.

“We can vote,” says Miguel. “It’s not gonna give us a right answer, but it’s a good way to figure out what the group is up for. I’ll agree to go with the group decision.”

“That’s fair,” say the rest of us, all at about the same time.

Miguel leads off, “The question is do we go try to save the slaves. I vote no. Too dangerous to us.”

Priyanka follows with, “I think we should do it, even though it’s dangerous. Yes.”

Steve hesitates, then replies, “I don’t see any way we can win. I vote no.”

I look at my shoes some more, and mumble, “I agree with Miguel. We can’t do it now. Maybe we can find others and come back sometime, but for now, I vote no.”