But as I lifted my hand to the screen, it stopped me, with just a single word.
Wait.
I reacted. “Wait?” I clasped my hand over my mouth. I hadn’t meant to say it out loud. Our pods were wired with cameras and speakers, and I had no doubt that Tarsus had them going now. Wait? I demanded again, silently this time. The voice spoke again.
Wait.
The advice, so clearly and unmistakably irrational, snapped me into action. I needed to do exactly the opposite of what the Doubt had instructed. I needed to hurry the hell up.
Scanning the crowd, I double-tapped a youngish man with a Rolex on his wrist.
Male. 29 yrs. American, Norwegian descent. IQ 156. Hedge fund manager.
I knew how to do the analysis, still I resisted the valuing that had to be done. Just get him off the platform, I told myself. I held my finger to his head until he began to blink, and then I slid him toward the footbridge. No, the water was faster. With a flick of my wrist, I tossed him into the ocean. As soon as I did, he began to swim toward shore.
Buoyed by the progress, I held my finger to a girl nearby. I didn’t have time to check their stats. I’d have to assess their value just by looking at them. It was gross, but we’d learned enough in class to know what to look for. How to size them up. This girl was wearing Chanel sunglasses and a tailored linen sundress, and there was a giant diamond on her finger. From the way she was smiling at the native kids, I pegged her for a philanthropic socialite, someone with the means to do a lot of good. Quickly, I slid her toward the water and she began to swim toward shore.
I started moving faster now, without second-guessing myself, hurling people into the water as fast as I could. Seven minutes in, I’d saved two hundred and ninety-eight people. Number two hundred and ninety-nine set me back. It was a thirty-something man in seersucker shorts with tiny anchors on them. Since it looked like he belonged on a boat, I was shocked when he flailed his arms as soon as he hit the water and quickly sunk beneath the surface. My death toll ticked from 0 to 1.
Crap. I hadn’t thought about people who couldn’t swim. I felt myself start to panic, but I pushed the panic away. The odds that someone who couldn’t swim would go on vacation to a tropical island had to be slim. I couldn’t reassess my strategy now. I kept moving, evacuating people into the water as fast as I could. With only sixty seconds left, I’d gotten six hundred people off the dock and lost only that one.
With ten seconds left, the pit in my stomach returned. I hadn’t been able to save a single native kid nor their young female teachers. Maybe it won’t explode, I found myself thinking with only ten seconds left. Maybe the Doubt was right. Maybe the sim was a trick of some sort, and we were supposed to know that somehow and ignore the instructions we’d been given. I found myself hoping for this as the clock ticked toward zero.
But with two seconds remaining, the crates burst into flames. It took a full second for sound to kick in. A crackling sound then a pop pop pop. All at once there was smoke everywhere, black and then gray, with spurts of light as the fireworks went off. The platform disappeared in the cloud of smoke, but the bodies didn’t. They were tossed in the air like rag dolls, the air thick with their screams. I squeezed my eyes shut, unable to watch it, and I kept them closed until the sound stopped. I should’ve kept them shut even longer. The image of the aftermath was far worse than the explosion had been. Limbs and trunks floating among charred wood. Bodies on fire in the sea.
I swallowed hard and tasted bile. It’s not real, I reminded myself. Still, I cast my eyes down, not wanting to see anymore.
“Congratulations, Rory,” I heard Dr. Tarsus say through my speakers. “With the lowest net social impact and a death toll of only one hundred and eighty-eight, you got the highest grade in the class.” I raised my eyes to my screen and saw our class roster there. My name was at the top. The name beneath me had a death toll that was nearly double mine. “The rest of you checked the stats on every person you saved. Rory relied on her rational instincts and had a far better result.”
It was the nicest thing Tarsus had ever said to me.
Pride yanked at the corners of my mouth. I’d done it. I’d gotten the highest grade in the class and defeated the Doubt in the process. Okay, so maybe defeated was a little strong, but I’d finally answered the question that had been poking at the back of my mind since the first time I heard it. Could I trust it? The rational answer had always been no, but still I’d wondered. Now I knew. If I’d listened to the Doubt during the simulation, I would’ve failed my exam. And if it’d been real life, eight hundred people would be dead, instead of only one hundred and eighty-eight.
One hundred and eighty-eight people were dead. And just like that, my good mood evaporated, and I was back on that dock with those smiling, doomed kids.
It wasn’t real, I told myself again as I pushed through Hamilton Hall’s double doors into the bright October sun. It had to seem real in order to trigger all the reactive neural activity we were supposed to know how to suppress. Still, I couldn’t stop thinking about the children I’d left behind. Their giggles as they crowded around their teachers, oohing and aahing at the sky’s display. It was their little bodies that flew through the air when the crate exploded. Their screams that surged then went silent when their burned flesh sunk below the surface of the sea.
Casualties were inevitable in a situation like that. I knew that. There was no way to identify the flawed firework or move the heavy crates, no time to even try. It was a given that the dock would explode. The only variable was how many people would be standing on it when it did. Of course, it wasn’t just a numbers game—Dr. Tarsus had made that clear. Our bystanders were valued by the software, ranked in order of importance. I’d gotten the best score not because I’d left the fewest number of people on the dock but because the ones I’d left weren’t considered as valuable as the ones I’d gotten off.
“It’s an effed-up concept,” I said to Liam at lunch. He’d planted himself at our table without an invitation, taking Izzy’s seat. She was dyslexic, so she got extra time for her exams. “People are assigned values? As if some lives matter more than others?”
“They do. And you don’t disagree.”
I looked him in the eye. “Yes, I do. I completely do.”
“Okay,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “A trainful of convicted murderers is speeding toward a bus full of Nobel Prize winners. You can either derail the train or knock the bus into a ravine. If you do nothing, everyone will die.” He popped a piece of cauliflower in his mouth and looked at me. “Choose.”
Hershey looked up from her tablet. She’d been cramming for calculus since the lunch period started, barely touching her tomato soup. “I’d save the murderers.”
I gaped at her. I knew she was just saying it to get a reaction out of us, but still. “You guys are both sick.”
But Hershey looked thoughtful. “In Liam’s world, you kill the murderers because you’ve assigned them a negative utility value. But maybe there’s another way to look at it. Maybe you save the murderers because of their redemption value.”