There were others, too, I was sure.  A part of me was horrified that I couldn’t even keep track of it all.

Hmm…

Park Jihoo might count, but he could be considered to fall under the Bakuda umbrella from the previous paragraph even though he and people like him went unmentioned.

At the very same time, another part of me was just as horrified at the idea that I might not have the ability to pull the trigger, to deliver the venomous payload or drive the knife home.

So much could hinge on that.

Pull the trigger, Piglet.

Yeah, this would be the part that… well, the same part that keeps me from swatting flies, except applied to a human in this case.

I don’t swat humans either.

The inch deep water splashed as I ran, my feet already sore from the impacts against the pavement.  The soft soles of my costumed feet made me quieter when I walked, but it wasn’t fit for running. 

Huh. I suppose she didn’t anticipate how much she would be skittering around while out in costume, due to her power letting her fight from a hidden location, like she started her career by doing against Lung.

How much of my decision just now had been because I didn’t want to kill a man?

Before she went into detail, I figured that would be her primary reason, so this is a question I’m interested in.

To what extent was she justifying not killing to herself?

I was indirectly responsible for the deaths of others.  I’d looked at the information on the capes who’d died during Leviathan’s attack and found Chubster, the fat man I’d failed to save.  Innumerable others had died because we hadn’t been able to stop Bakuda, giving her the chance to attack the city, killing forty-three people and inflicting horrific injuries on dozens more in the process.

Hell, if you allow more layers of indirectness, it can be argued that Taylor may have been a cause of Leviathan’s attack in the first place, unless there’s something to Coil’s hypothesis that he was attracted to Noelle for some reason.

But I don’t think these are cases for Taylor to beat herself up over. She did what she could. She failed, but she tried.

When Thomas, the man from the Merchants, had been bleeding to death, I’d given the order to leave him there to die.

This one, on the other hand…

I don’t think it quite counts as her killing him, but it’s the closest we’ve seen by far, and she was actively responsible for it.

The decision to attack and kill Jack and potentially sacrifice our lives in the process wasn’t binary, I told myself.  It wasn’t limited to two options.  I would try to save the people I could tonight.

Hm, what sort of third option do you have in mind here?

Then our teams could collectively prepare to do something about Jack and the other Nine, after we were all ready to defend ourselves.

Ah! Makes sense. She’ll untie the people on the short track and enlist their help to stop the trolley while it’s going down the long track.

As much as a small part of me wanted to make the heroic sacrifice, I couldn’t throw away my life for the mere chance to kill him, and I definitely couldn’t throw away the lives of others.

Fair enough. That is a somewhat different story than if it were a certainty.

Anyway, let’s get back to Taylor’s musings. 🙂

I remembered what Brian had said back when we’d found out about Dinah: the choices we made in terms of who we tried to save: those we cared about versus complete strangers.  I’d rebelled at the idea of people abandoning people to their fates simply because they didn’t know them and weren’t connected to them in any meaningful way.

Yet that is precisely what I think Taylor is going to do.

Could I be wrong?

But now that I faced having to make the call and decide if my life and the lives of just about everyone I cared about were worth less than everyone else’s, it didn’t seem so black and white.

Yeah.

I talk about the moral dilemma being a lot easier when it’s unbalanced like this, and on a global scale, but there’s a big difference between me and Taylor beyond just philosophies: She’s living it.

Logically, there are a lot of good reasons to send the trolley down the short path. But Taylor isn’t making this decision with just logic in mind. She’s the one who values the people tied to the short track, who has an emotional connection to them.

Now watch as I turn out to be wrong about Taylor’s decision and half the stuff I said in that last post becomes irrelevant…

If it was just my life at stake, a part of me hoped I might do it anyways. But it wasn’t.  Others would pay the price if I got away from Siberian, and maybe even if I didn’t.

Yes, but not nearly as many as will pay the price if she doesn’t do this.

Which I don’t think she will. That would surprise me, and not just because of Jack’s plot armor (which may have been taken off in Interlude 11b).

Even if I escaped and Siberian didn’t get her hands on any of us, the added distraction and detours that came with evading her would probably mean I couldn’t make it to my dad in time.  And if I did die, Dinah might never go free.

It’s sad that Dinah almost seems to be Taylor’s primary reason to care about her own life.

Which only led to the greater question: would I be willing to trade ten lives for the hundreds or thousands those members of the Slaughterhouse Nine might potentially kill if they walked away here?  The billions, if Dinah’s prediction about Jack came true?

And here I thought we finished the trolley problem last chapter. But I suppose Taylor got off easy then, not having to choose herself.