I realized I was in the invested trolley problem, but arel.
The simple trolley problem is an ethical dilemma. There’s a trolley on a track racing toward a group of innocent people. Let’s say twenty of them. Who know why they’re standing on the tracks or how they can’t see or hear the trolley coming. Or why the trolley driver can’t see them. The point is that one has the choice of pushing a single innocent bystander on the tracks to stop the trolley or, by doing nothing, allow the twenty people down the tracks to get killed.
The invested trolley problem is more complicated. In that one, there’s no innocent bystander. There’s someone standing at a track switching lever, ready to move the trolley onto an empty track. Only, you know (somehow) that the trolley is already headed for the empty track and if the well-intentioned someone pulls that lever, the trolley will roll onto the track filled with people instead. Also, you have a pistol. Do you kill the virtuous yet misinformed someone at the track switcher, or allow that someone to inadvertently cause the death of twenty innocent people?
Arel, in my real life situation, Highlighter was holding a trigger. He thought it was the trigger to release the hostages. That was wrong. Very wrong. Highlighter was never very bright.
The Secondaries would not have built a trigger to release their hostages. A voice from one of my distributed nodes modified that twice. They might have built such a trigger, but that would not have been their primary trigger. Their primary trigger would have been designed to execute the hostages.
Such nuance was built into the invested trolley problem.
“Step off, Scuttle,” he said.
A psychological tactic. Me stepping back would change nothing about the physical damage I could do to him. Despite the many weapons lying about, he had none. He was just trying to manage his own anxiety. So, one of my nodes pointed out, anxiety was in play.
I raised my hands, including the one with the gun in it. Highlighter’s body relaxed. That was not rational. As I said, not very bright.
“Your team did a star job.” I glanced around the control chamber. I wasn’t playing him. His team had wiped the Secondaries, if only barely. The radicals were all dead. The Champions were only mostly dead. All but Highlighter.
He glanced around the control chamber, too. The Secondaries and Champions were displayed in blood, sprawled on the floor, reclining in rolling office chairs, slumped over terminal screens. My humorous nodes couldn’t help noting the irony in that. Terminal screens. I resisted a chuckle.
“But,” I said, “maybe the Secondaries didn’t plan to release your family.”
Highlighter shook his head.
“They was getting their payment.” He waved the trigger at me. “They had the release button ready.”
I spread my fingers, another meaningless gesture. I could close my gun hand and send a bullet into his face before he could object. But, maybe not before he could thumb that trigger. This invested trolley problem had an extra layer of ethical dilemma.
Even so, the show of surrender worked its magic on Highlighter. One of my nodes noticed his shoulders relaxing. Another node registered a change in his facial expression.
“What you’re holding,” I decided to be as non-confrontational as I could muster, “might not be the release button.”
According to the utilitarian solution to the invested trolley problem, I knew that Highlighter’s intentions did not matter. He thought the trigger would release the hostages. I highly suspected that it would set off a bomb, or some worse method of annihilation, to kill the hostages. That made his good intentions null and void. I would be justified in wiping him if it meant saving the hostages. In fact, I was required to, both ethically and to honor my professional accreditation.
I could see doubt in his face. Or, rather, one of my nodes reported a change in emotional expression and my executive node processed it in the over-arching strategy.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“What if,” I said in the same non-con tone, “that button triggers their execution?”
He shook his head.
“But, they was getting their payment. Why?”
“Because they didn’t really gaf about the payment.” Several of my nodes protested at the boldness of that statement. It was a gamble.
“No.” His thumb shook over the trigger. “You was bought off by them.”
“Highlighter.”
He took a step back, holding the trigger out as a threat. Against whom, my ironic nodes wondered.
“You stalling for the payment,” he said. “The payment won’t go through if my family is free.”
“I’m nodular,” I said. “You know I’m not in this for the money.”
His eyes darted around the room. A social node reported barely perceptible visual delays on the weapons still strewn about the chamber.
I nodded. “Go ahead. Pick up a weapon. I’ll set mine down. Just so long as we still talking.”
My more pessimistic nodes howled at that.
Highlighter side-stepped toward the corpse of one of his Champion comrades, scooped up the rifle at the man’s side. I knelt slowly, lowering my pistol to the floor.
“Now,” I said, taking in his more relaxed posture. “Let me search the Secondaries for another trigger.”
He sniffed. His face was a play of conflicted emotions. He nodded and lowered the rifle at me. That made a couple of my nodes nervous.
Which Secondary would have the other trigger? Not Polygon, an undisciplined braggart. They’d never trust him with it. My nodes were madly in congress, debating the best path forward. My eyes were darting in that way that made typpies uncomfortable. Not Zaton. He was radical even for the Secondaries. He’d kill the hostages even if the payment was delivered. And certainly not The National, who was so dumb he was only trusted with a single revolver, allowed six fuck-ups.
It had to be McMahon, the stoic one, the patient one, the one who could be trusted to wait until the proper moment. My nodes reached a unanimous consensus.
I crawled over to McMahon’s body. His head was a chaos of brain and bone and blood. And hair. One eye was on the floor, staring blindly at the door the Champions had kicked in.
I shuffled through his pockets. His vest was full of spare ammo. His pants pockets produced a wallet, some key cards, a couple of anon debit cards, and a minipad. No trigger.
I was wrong. Could I have been wrong, asked one node. The analysis was compelling, said another. Those aren’t all the pockets, suggested a third.
I scanned him up and down. McMahon liked to play with the back of his neck. I thrust a hand past the gore of his head, under his collar. A clump of plastic, tucked into a goatsilk sleeve. I tugged it free, careful not to touch the button at its end, and held it out triumphantly.
I did not need a social node to read the change in Highlighter’s expression. The existence of two triggers said all he needed to know.
“Oh my god.” He lay the rifle on a nearby desk, his eyes locked on the trigger in his hand. “Which one?”
I shrugged. “Don’t know, but you might want to—”
He nodded and lifted his thumb stiffly from the trigger.
“What now?”
I considered that, nodes jabbering to each other. Consensus.
“What now is we go to debriefing. The Georgia Accord reads me out and works out your release with Tidewater.”
He was breathing hard, visibly shaking. That meant he was coming down from the confrontation. He set the trigger on the desk next to the rifle.
“I’m not Tidewater.”
That was new info. The Champions were a Tidewater-sanctioned action group. I had always assumed Highlighter was a Tidewater resident.
“Well,” I said, glancing around the room at the terminals that were still working. Somewhere there would be clues to where Highlighter’s family was being held. “The GA team will be here shortly. They’ll sort it out.”
∈•∋
“Shortly” ended up meaning five minutes, during which Highlighter just sat breathing in a chair while I stifled my nodes’ attempts to reason out where the hostages might be. Their location hadn’t been part of my accreditation. I was just there to neutralize the Secondaries and keep the hostages from being killed remotely.
Highlighter’s team had taken care of the first part of my job, but he’d nearly fucked the second part. Or maybe not. I still hadn’t hundered which trigger was which.
But, I had bypassed the invested trolley problem. The Practice had served me well. The basic trolley problem, whether you should push one person in front of a trolley to keep it from killing multiple people down the track, wasn’t easy to bypass. The standard lame gimmick was to declare (in class) that you’d dive onto the track yourself.
Good luck convincing yourself to do that arel.
The invested version, with a track-switcher, gets super-fun at that point. It forces you to recognize that a person’s intentions and knowledge form a matrix of ethical consequences. A well-intentioned incompetent is ethically equivalent to an ill-intentioned competent.
The Practice was intended to help you work through that sort of ethical problem. And to develop the nodular thinking of Type II Autistics.
Speaking of which, a surveillance node told me someone was moving in the corridor outside. That would be the GA team following me. To gather intel to locate the hostages (and free them without blowing them up), to assess my job, and clean up anything I fucked up.
A scope peered around the doorway. It was tiny but the only thing moving in my vision. I waved at it. Highlighter caught that and looked up with blank eyes.
Sidewinder stepped through the door with his rifle at rest.
“He’s Champion,” I gestured toward Highlighter.
“Fuck,” Sidewinder said. His face twisted.
“It’s his family.” I nodded toward Catter, who was lying on her face on the floor. “And hers.”
“Okay,” Sidewinder said, but his face said, “Still not okay.” GA action groups didn’t like indies, even govvie-sanctioned like the Champions. Especially those sanctioned by foreign govvies. But, Tidewater wasn’t hostile to the Georgia Accord, and having family in play brought international law into play. Highlighter would probably be on his way home inside the week.
“Two remote triggers,” I nodded at them. I didn’t have to explain what that meant to Sidewinder.
The rest of the GA team swarmed into the room. Sidewinder gathered up the triggers and nodded his team to the live terminals. Bodies were shoved aside.
“Look don’t touch,” Sidewinder reminded them. The keyboards could have triggers to thwart tampering.
“Map,” said one of groupers staring at a terminal. I think he was called Tran. At least that was what one of my shelf nodes served up when I looked at the man’s face. “Probable hostage loc.”
Sidewinder nodded at him. “Send the loc to the demo team. Any others?”
“This one looks like a garage. But, maybe not. Maybe the hostage location.”
“Send both.”
I glanced at the map on the terminal. “It’s the green one.”
Highlighter glared at me suspiciously.
I sighed. “That’s how you beat me here. I went there first.” His eyes narrowed.
I turned to Sidewinder. “Three Secondaries there, all wiped.” He nodded at me. He nodded at Maybe-Tran. Maybe-Tran nodded at him. There was a lot of nodding going on.
I looked back at Highlighter. “If those guards lost comms when you cleared this room, what do you think would have happened to your family?”
That sank into his face like rain melting a sandcastle. Like I said, Highlighter was never very bright. He’d nearly gotten them all killed. Maybe twice.
“Thanks,” he said.
“You see demo there?” Sidewinder asked.
“If I hadn’t seen demo—” I shrugged sarcastically at the triggers. Sidewinder didn’t appreciate that. I wouldn’t have gaffed about the triggers if I didn’t think the hostages were rigged with demolitions. Sidewinder scanned his team at the terminals.
“Anybody see a countdown?”
A chorus of voices said, “Neg.”
“Tran, call in a cancel on the payment.”
One of my shelf nodes pinged and reinforced the name. Tran it was.
Another node raised the invested trolley problem again. Sidewinder had guessed that the payment might trigger the demo. On the other hand, payment might cancel a countdown. He was gambling that the countdown (if any) gave them more time. Good play. Sidewinder was a typpie, but he’d probably been exposed to the Practice as part of his action group training.
“How far out is the demos?” asked Highlighter. He was regaining some composure.
“They on-loc,” Sidewinder said, still annoyed at the foreign presence. I felt like I was watching a vid, not involved. My nodes were busy working out the probabilities of the demo teams finding the hostages and defusing any explosives before the countdown (if any) reached zero. I wasn’t busy, so I indulged the analysis.
“Should I tag my people?” Highlighter asked.
Sidewinder huffed. “You can do that after they all processed. Right now, just stand up slow and follow Sergeant Tran into the corridor.”
Highlighter wasn’t happy to leave his dead team behind, but he knew the sitch. His nod was non-con and he stood with hands out and fingers spread. Tran thrust his chin toward the doorway.
“So, Scuttle, you get what,” Sidewinder said, “half cred?” He had guessed from the wiped Champions that I hadn’t wiped the Secondaries in the control chamber. But I had wiped the guards at the hostage loc.
“More like sixty-two point five.”
He squinted.
I nodded at the bodies. “Nine Secondaries here vs. my three.”
“I thought you was Type II.”
I shrugged. “I can still do basic math.”
∈•∋
So, that was the Browns Island Raid. Highlighter was out-processed. His family was freed and allowed to return home to Cedar Island. I was read out, told by Sidewinder’s political officer to forget it all. Good luck with that, bucko. I’m Type II. We don’t forget.
But we don’t talk, either.
I loaded myself into my hover on the nearby shore, trying to resist the nodes that wanted to sigh and roll my eyes in futile recollection of the past four days’ confused events. The dark side of not forgetting. But, that was over. Back to reg life. At least, until I got another govvie accreditation. I checked my minipad to see if Sidewinder had processed my cred payment like he promised. I had no signal. That was typical. Signal was for cities, like Laurinburg, Augusta, and St. Augustine.
My annoyingly humorous linguistic node said that the diphthong “au” must be a requirement for cities. My historical node retorted that not being a toxic wasteland was a requirement for cities after the war. Big cities became cleaner-bot nests; small towns became cities. Those two nodes were always at odds.
I fired up the hover and stared at the gray plastic of the wheel. I didn’t feel like driving. I was exhausted. Not from the day of the raid, which was actually fun. Puzzles to solve. Moves to predict. Nope, exhausted from the three subsequent days of answering action group questions and filling out the Georgia Accord’s after-action forms. It was a symptom of Type II that answering questions and filling out forms were severe emotional drains.
The waters of Coré Sound were smooth and green in the light of early morning. There was a mist over the waters, but not enough to obscure the line of pines on the far shore. The mainland. Time to go home. Burgaw. No “au” but “aw” was close enough. Which also justified Warsaw and Yamacraw. The largest cities in the northern Accord. The largest living cities, anyway.
The hover spat sound spray into my wake as I crossed the strait toward Marshallberg. I drove ashore, found the road, and punched the descon. The hover knew the way back. The roads were pitted and overgrown, but enough was left to keep the descon on track. The government of the Georgia Accord had better things to spend money on than maintaining roads when all the govvie vehicles were hovers. The wagons that regs used mainly followed secondary roads connecting farms to city markets. And trains, of course, had their own tracks.
My nodes were working hard to predict what cred Sidewinder assessed me. Even without distractions, they could not hunder it. I slipped my hand into my car library and pulled out a book at random. Intelligence by Stuart Ritchie. Non-fiction, and a bit old. For a moment, I entertained the impulse to draw again, but my integrity node (nearly as powerful as my executive node) vetoed that. As the hover passed the ruins of Smyrna, I opened the book.
The descon pinged. I prepared myself for the suggestion. One node predicted that one of the bridges were out and we were rerouting. The descon’s voice crooned: “Breakfast in Beaufort?”
I surveyed my nodes. I was hungry and not in the mood to read. Particularly not non-fiction. Breakfast would be a nice break.
“Yes,” I said. I slipped the book back into the car library. It felt like surrender, but it did make my nodes relax.
One of my more quiet nodes spoke up. It pushed past the relaxing nodes and announced: “Something isn’t right.”
“What,” I said, accidentally out loud.
“Breakfast in Beaufort,” said the descon. “I have three restaurants that will be open by your predicted arrival.”
I glanced at my minipad and tapped it. I had signal. I was not as happy about that as I should have been.
“What’s not right?” I asked in my head. Silence. The node was being shy again. I repeated it out loud, which sometimes worked.
“None of the restaurants are marked as right,” said the descon.
“Pick one with bacon on the menu,” I said.
“Pirates’ Ordinary at eight,” said the descon.
“What’s not right?” I asked again in my head.
The quiet node buzzed with a troubling tremor. I shushed the other nodes, which were growing agitated. Finally, the quiet node spoke up again.
“Why were Highlighter’s family all living in the Georgia Accord?”
I sighed. Highlighter told me he wasn’t Tidewater. Why would he not reveal his actual residence if he were actually GA? That would have been a wedge he could have used in his processing. And, why would the Secondaries abduct GA residents to threaten a Tidewater-sanctioned group?
None of this was part of my accreditation which, moreover, was complete. I was uncred. I had no mission. I had no reason to care about Highlighter any more. I hated dealing with him and his bumbling Champions. Hated even thinking about them.
That’s too strong. I didn’t really hate anyone. It’s an alien sentiment to Type II’s. But, the Champions were frustrating. Dumb and always fucking things up. Frustration with people always fucking things up actually is a common Type II sentiment.
The hover slid onto the North River bridge. I loved looking at water, so I was distracted for a moment. There were sailboats on the broad waters of the river, heading out to sea. Fishermen probably. Ancient technology, which is what most regs were reduced to after the war. Watching the boats sailing down toward the ocean, as boats had been doing for thousands of years, gave me a contented sense of continuity.
Since I was going to stop in the port of Beaufort (which has “au” in it!) anyway, maybe I should’ve just gone over-water. But, that would’ve disrupted the flotilla of fishing boats, a scene I had a sentimental attachment to. So, maybe not.
Another hover swooshed by in the other lane, exploding my moment. Just as well. The bridge vanished behind me, replaced by walls of green trees. The water and its sailboats were gone.
What to do now? I had some time before the restaurant. One of my curiosity nodes had my fingers tapping the minipad on a Beaufort signal, suggesting I do research on Highlighter. I hadn’t known to research him before the raid. I hadn’t expected him to be there. A lot of nodes groaned at that memory.
Why was I hung up about the mission? I had a nice apartment in Old Town Burgaw, above a butcher, just down the street from the Carolina Regional Governance building. I could walk there to give any follow-up interviews. I had a comfortable library, a star hind-tech kitchen, and a high-access link to the GA intranet. If the Hardware Interface Act passed the Accord Congress, I’d have access to the Tidewater, Cubano, Highlands, and New Venice intranets. Unlimited reading, unlimited study.
Type II heaven.
If you’re a reg reading this (because you somehow managed to learn Global English), you might be confused by the politics. Most regs are too busy working, and buying food and clothing, to worry about what was going on in Augusta or other capitals. I grew up reg, I know all the stories. The Georgia Accord is always on the verge of war with the Cubano Accord over Florida. China is reunifying. Europe is a toxic wasteland.
None of these are true. Nobody wants the no man’s land in Florida, except cracker militias. The Cubanos are happy with Miami and the Keys. China is splintering into smaller and smaller states. Europe has the best cleaner-bots in the world. They’re actually reclaiming some old cities.
To get more relevant, action groups and cred ops (like me) are not the brutal assassins and torturers of reg myth.
I can see you shaking your head and saying, “Yanaa-ye-se-in-da’.” A cred op is going to sweet up the truth, you think. But, I’m Type II, and we don’t like lying. We’re integrity foundationalists. Not as extreme as Type I’s, but still.
So, take this as you will.
Here’s how it works. As you know, autistics are one of the several neurospecialties targeted by the assessments we all take in kindergarten and fifth grade. I passed as typpie in kindergarten, but wiped the second test. That’s fairly normal for Type II’s, since we don’t suffer as overt social disabilities as Types I and III.
From there, we’re introduced to the Practice. We’re not all augmented with intranet implants like regs think. Augies can be hacked and located too easily. It’s primarily academics with no govvie creds who go augie. The jobs many of us are valued for make augmentation a bad idea. If you accept Practice training, you have to forgo augmentation.
The Practice isn’t an authoritarian cult. It just helps you develop your neurospecialty. For Type II’s, that means nodularizing your cognition to improve your ability to process multiple tracks of information simultaneously. And, to improve your abstract, strategic thinking. It’s nothing ideological. It’s just mental exercises, like meditation. Seriously, that’s all it is. Mental exercises, systematically designed for your particular neurospecialty.
The Practice for Types II and III is a bit restrained. There’s a danger of going from nodular to full-on modular, which is similar to dissociative identity disorder. Multiple personalities. The node links attenuate to the point that they separate into distinct personae. Modulars were once thought useful, an entire team in one body, but their propensity to spawn murderous personae, isolated from all moral concerns, led to their deprecation.
I’m in no danger of going modular. My nodes actually enjoy talking to each other too much, even if some of them argue a lot, and I have a low propensity for the traumatic stress that lead many to attenuate their links.
My coherence node just warned me that I’m going off-track. And, I was already inside the city of Beaufort, hovering past pedestrians and carts and market squares. A couple of police hovers were parked in an empty lot, officers leaning out of their windows to talk to some gathered regs.
Politics, action groups, cred ops. Everyone is technically in the militia, all regs know this. The militia model took over worldwide soon after the war, when people were just trying to protect their local resources. Action groups followed soon after, professional soldiers in permanent govvie employ. They used to called these people special forces, but it’s not a perfect analogy since there were professional armies before the war who were mostly not special forces.
More to the point, action groups do not exist for assassinations and torture and suppression. They exist to be permanently credded for special missions that crop up and can’t be handled by local reg militia.
Well, there are also the sanctioned groups, like the Champions, who are provisionally accredited by governments to act independently. Assuming they’re going to do the right thing. Which I think is fucking naïve as hell. Mostly, the sanctioned groups just spread chaos.
For example, the Secondaries once had sanction in half a dozen capitals throughout North America before they were caught conspiring to create a covert hegemony by bribing and blackmailing local politicians. Now, they’re recognized internationally as a disruption group.
The node is warning me I’m off-track again. And descon is telling me we’re one minute from the Pirates’ Ordinary. Bacon.
Here’s the point. A cred op like me is essentially an individual action group who works on contract, getting accreditation for specific missions. This is far more lucrative than being in an action group but with far less stability. Months can go by between creds. Action group members are paid a wage. Not cred ops. We have to budget.
And, we’re not assassins and torturers. Torture, you should know, is utterly discredited as a method of gathering intelligence. Even cred ops psychopaths understand this. We just go do things typpies and untrained regs aren’t qualified to do. Like stopping well-trained and well-equipped assholes who kidnap people and hold them for ransom.
Like how the Secondaries kidnapped members of Highlighter’s family.
The Highlighter research was on my minipad screen. His sanctioning by Tidewater and the Megalopolis as part of the Champions group. His unflattering mission history. His immigration from PNW.
The Pacific Northwest? Why was he in Tidewater? And why were so many members of his family in the Georgia Accord?
The hover pulled into the parking lot, mostly empty, and picked a space. Local regs were walking around the nearby streets, to work, to eat, to shop. My fingers were tapping like mad on my minipad. The hover settled and pinged its shutdown as I read.
Highlighter and his family had moved to the East Coast in the 90s. One of my more suspicious nodes noted it was a year after the Secondaries were outed as disruptors. Highlighter himself had been the last to move. Which indicated his hesitation in some common motivation, one of my nodes noted.
I glanced through the hover window at the back of the restaurant. Fresh bacon awaited. And fresh vegetables, eggs, and fish.
I packaged up my research and forwarded it to my handler in Augusta, Ben Gallus. She could make of it what she wanted. She was also a nodular Type II. She’d get it.
I slipped the minipad into the car library and took a deep breath. I was done with the Browns Island Raid. I would have to interact with extraverted typpies in the restaurant, but star food would be the result of that. I was okay with that exchange. I opened the hover’s door.
One boot crunched the packed gravel of the parking lot. My nodes were debating. I pinged them. They came back with a provisional consensus: take the minipad. My executive node, meaning me, considered it. What could it hurt? Benjamina might have follow-up questions, and she always asked interesting questions.
I pinched the minipad between two fingers and carried it with me into the Pirates’ Ordinary.
∈•∋
My waiter was, I was grateful, a quiet guy with a business focus. No small talk, no questions about my hover or my minipad, which were not normal reg stuff. Just my breakfast order. He must have been an introvert. Maybe a special who slipped by the assessments like I did once. Not my problem. I had bacon and a fish-and-onion omelet to enjoy.
As I finished up the omelet, the minipad pinged. Ben had a question.
I tapped to retrieve the message. It was not a question. It was a new cred. I would not be seeing my Burgaw apartment any time soon.
“Good analysis,” I read. She had learned that social trick in the Practice. Autistics tend to be abrupt, but it helps to be polite first. Like when I told that idiot Highlighter that his team did a star job, even though that was debatable.
Her message continued: “The Security Office has approved a new cred, immediate. Hostages are en route to the Harlowe black site for out-processing. Intercept and interview.”
I dropped the fork into the plate. It clattered noisily, attracting unwanted attention from various regs also eating in the Ordinary. I lay my forearm on the table to obscure the minipad.
With my other hand, I typed: “Not qualified as an interrogator. Perhaps Sidewinder?”
I scooped up the fork and stabbed the last triangle of omelet. I still had a tip of bacon and half a glass of milk to finish up with. Planning was everything.
As I downed the last of the milk, the minipad pinged again. More unwanted attention from the regs. I glanced at the hover, alone in the parking lot except for two horse-drawn wagons. Several regs were standing around the hover, talking about it.
I tapped the message: “Sidewinder does not have the requisite analysis skills. Accept cred or no?”
She was back to the abrupt. I appreciated that. She wanted me to sift through the bullshit. My nodes were already in consensus. I was the best bet.
One of my nodes noted that Harlowe, where the black site lay, was near the broad, tidal inlet of the Neuse River, which separated the Georgia Accord from Tidewater. In my free time, I could take a boat out, maybe fish. Maybe read a book while my pole just sat there.
The pragmatic node: After this cred, you can take a longer break. More uninterrupted free time. Good old delayed gratification.
I didn’t need to ask for consensus. I should visit the local police station and charge up the hover, just to be careful. And, I would take the water route up Harlowe Creek. Decision made.