This story is somewhat of a tribute to the short stories of Andy Weir. Even though he’s probably much better known for The Martian and Project Hail Mary, there’s something in his shorter works, a way of coming to an unexpected ending, or at least very gradually revealing the truth, that I really appreciate and tried to emulate somewhat in this story.
I can’t say I would have done anything different, but I still can’t stand what I did.
I’m a free man. Free two weeks now, I think, but all the days blend together, what with the brutal heat in this dead-end town. It’s the kind of place they show on TV when they talk about the population decline. You know, it used to be some sort of boomtown, back in the fifties or sixties or whenever it was that the America you see in movies was the America you really got. I’ve seen these pictures – I spent half my time in prison just flipping through the same photo albums, memorizing every detail of the history of every speck of dust around me – I’ve seen pictures of these beautiful identical white houses, smiling ladies in colorful dresses chatting on the front porch while a couple of kids play tag on the front lawn. The moment is frozen in time, right as the redheaded lady seems to be in the middle of her sentence. It’s too bad we’ll never know what she said. But those kids? I did some research online, any time I got time on the computers, checking out what happened to these fragments of the American dream. And it seems like they really shattered.
The girl who’s “it” in the photo, her blonde pigtails trailing her as she runs past, was Eleanor Dawson, and she dropped out of Kent State in 1969 — a year before the massacre —when her mother died. Ended up trying to launch a career as an actress, died of a cocaine overdose in the eighties. Then there’s Daniel Dawson, her older brother, who ended up becoming a prison warden after moving to Tennessee and trying every other job he could get his hands on, always getting fired for his temper. Eventually he lost that job, too, failed suicide, and finally started working as a convenience-store clerk, which I think he’s still doing today. And there’s Buddy and Layla Redding, who both wound up dead in a car accident at seventeen, and Norton Gorman, who lived in a mental hospital for thirty years due to severe schizophrenia until he just disappeared one day, and nobody knows where he went. So there. The Kodachrome, Technicolor beauty of the American dream didn’t quite pan out.
I was born twenty years after that photo was taken. There was still a bit of hope in the city, I think (I’m not sure, I can’t remember). The words “urban decay” hadn’t yet really hit the newspaper headlines. You could still lead the life you wanted to lead. I wanted to become a railroad conductor, and by God I became a railroad conductor.
Well, I suppose you know the story of what happens next. But I don’t. I mean, not any more than you do. I don’t remember a single frame of the incident, the “problem,” as the local news always put it. It couldn’t have taken more than five seconds. I know, in some deep corner of my mind, that I was there, I was awake, I was making the decisions, I pulled that godforsaken lever, but I think I’ve wished so much that I had blacked out during that instant that I really have destroyed the entire memory.
But that hasn’t stopped me. I’ve seen videos. They were only taking two when it happened but I’ve seen both of them so many times I can predict every frame of video, remember every pixel with perfect clarity. There’s the tracks, the two tracks, and there go six teenagers, all running together across the tracks. They heard the siren, they climbed the fence, they were by all means trespassing. They thought they could make it across in time. They definitely couldn’t. Especially not Lincoln Perch, the younger of the two Perch brothers, an asthmatic nine-year-old with strawberry blonde hair and a pair of sunglasses he constantly wore because he thought it made him look like the guys from Men in Black. The boy collapses on the first track while the rest of the kids are on the second. Lincoln’s brother Andy notices, tells everyone to wait up, and tries to cross over to where Lincoln is, but seeing that Lincoln’s getting up, decides to rejoin the rest of the group on the second track, figuring Lincoln can follow them.
The next frame of the image is a shot of Lincoln, scrambling to get off the tracks, and a train which is suddenly barreling towards him rather than the five friends he thought it was about to hit. All because a man pulled a lever in some state of semi-consciousness.
The next frame of the image is up to your imagination. I have dreams, nightmares really, about that frame. About seeing the very last possible picture that could have been taken of Lincoln Perch’s face. About staring him down and telling him that I was about to kill him, and I would feel no remorse for doing so, I would justify his death in front of an audience of millions, I would be given a single year of prison time and then be set free, a citizen more than he ever was, paying taxes and voting for President, a man who has been given thousands of dollars from taxpayer’s coffers for murder while he has been given no compensation for being murdered.
I can’t say it’s not my fault. Everybody else in my life insists it’s not my fault, that they would have done the same thing, but these are impersonal hypotheticals that have no real value. You know, a lot of men think they could take a bear down in a fight, unarmed. But I think we both know only a handful of them could actually stand a chance at even running away without getting mauled. It’s the same with this. I bet you think you could pull the lever. You’re wrong. I couldn’t even pull the lever. That boy was murdered by me, but I did not murder that boy.
I’m talking nonsense. It’s a habit, I guess.
What could that boy have become? is the question that reverberates in my head as I stare at that toy train, that stupid train that I worship like some sort of idol because maybe I’m not worthy of God’s love anymore, all I deserve is the budget version that runs on triple-A batteries. The train that Andy gave me after his brother died, something he found digging through his old toys. He never told me he forgave me, but it seemed like that was what he meant. I bet he thought he would be betraying Lincoln if he ever forgave me. I can’t blame him, I think the same thing.
What could that boy have become?
He was fascinated by space, he was always checking in on where some probe or other was, he could name all of the astronauts on the ISS off the top of his head, he knew the name of every single constellation. Maybe he would have been an astronaut, or an engineer, or a programmer, or an astrophysicist.
Maybe he would have been a mechanic working on some space shuttle, twenty years from now, and he would notice something a loose bolt that could have made the whole thing go up in flames. Maybe I didn’t save any lives at all.
But we can’t foresee the consequences, can we? We can’t imagine the future, or so I’m told. We have to make a decision in the precise instant a decision is needed, and there’s nothing we can do about that. Five lives are greater than one. It’s such a cold, rational way of describing human beings, it scares me. How can we equate the values of human lives, if every life is sacred and infinite in its value? What is the equation for morality?
And that’s precisely the core of it. You have to understand that the problem cannot be approached logically. You are a human experiencing human emotions and you always will be, and you cannot put numbers on that. You cannot compare your thoughts and feelings and memories to someone else’s, let alone the psyches of two total strangers, or one stranger with five, and say what is the most valuable, what ought to be protected while the other is destroyed. If you believe that there is some number of lives – or worse, dollars – equivalent to the value of a human life, you will be sorry for that mistake as I am now.
But, yeah, that’s the real trolley problem, isn’t it?