Oscar pushed at the wheels on his chair in disgust. “So, if you don’t cooperate, you’ll die and then they’ll prosecute you. That makes a lot of sense.”
“Yeah, well,” said Emily. “They were trying to lean on me where it hurts…”
“But what did they want?” asked Doug.
“I don’t know,” said Emily, looking up at Doug. “I told them to suck on their own sanctimonious flatulence. I told them they’d better get used to singing soprano because as soon as I get out of here, I’m going to see their balls get used as wheel bearing grease on a honey wagon - while they’re still attached.” She paused and looked back at her coffee cup. Raising her eyebrows, she said, “It kind of put an end to the interview.”
“Emily! You sweet, beautiful hunk of woman,” laughed Oscar. “I love you. Will you marry me?”
“As good as that might have felt, you need to be a little careful how you react to these guys,” said Richard.
“It might have been better if you’d found out a little more about what they were trying to do…” said Doug.
“I know, I know. But they really pissed me off. Besides, isn’t it obvious what they’re doing? They haven’t found a way to get to Richard, the only one who knows anything about the vial, so they’re trying to get to us. They hope we can find a way to get him to open up.” She turned her head and looked at Richard. “And don’t you do it, Richard. Don‘t you do it.”
Richard nodded. “Are you sure the people you talked to were who you thought they were? Could it have been faked, or maybe they were coerced?”
“Oh, it was Lovejoy, for sure,” said Emily. “And nobody could coerce him to do what he didn’t believe in, trust me.” She paused. “I’m pretty sure of the DA, too. It was real, alright.”
They each sat quietly, trying to digest what was going on and, Richard supposed and hoped, trying to come up with some effective way of regaining the upper hand. Richard came to a decision. The first thing they would have to do is figure out some way around their surveillance. “Oscar,” he said. “We need you.”
“I’m workin’ on it. I’m workin’ on it,” said Oscar.
“Maybe we should try to appear to cooperate,” said Doug. “Maybe we can get more information, from the inside. Something we can use.”
A pair of suits returned with Alex. Pushing Alex through the door, they looked at Doug. “Doug Brown, please come with us,” one of them said.
Doug paused, exhaled, stood and followed them out the door. “See you guys in a few minutes,” he called back to them.
Alex walked over and sat down next to Emily. Emily looked up at him with a question in her eyes.
“It seems they’re trying to apply the screws,” said Alex. He looked at Emily. “Did they get someone whose opinion you respected to try to convince you to cooperate with Todd?”
“Yeah, you too?”
“Yeah.” Alex took a deep breath. “I don’t know how they found out who to get, but they sure hit the jackpot.” Alex stopped and thought for a minute. “They found the head of the residency program in the ER where I trained. I got pretty close to him when I was there. I’m telling you, he could diagnose pancreatic cancer in a patient by shaking his hand and patting him on the shoulder. I once saw him save a fifteen-year old kid with a stab wound to the chest. The kid walked into the ER and collapsed just inside the door, pulseless. It was obvious something pretty catastrophic happened, but it was in the early hours of the morning and it would take too long to rouse the trauma team. So we put the kid on a gurney, the chief cracked open his chest, found a hole in his ventricle and quickly put in a couple of stitches. We massaged his heart, it started beating again, and the kid lived. The guy was amazing.”
“What did he say to you?” asked Emily.
“Oh, about what you’d guess. He said I had taken the Hippocratic Oath to help mankind and what I was doing was just the opposite. That the actions I’ve been taking will ensure a lot of human disease instead of preventing it. That it’s my duty as a physician to minimize human suffering and the best way to do that is to help Todd achieve his ends.”
“What about all the people Todd is trying to kill?” asked Richard.
“Yeah, well, I pointed out I took no oath to help kill billions of people, and he countered, they would die anyway. He said we have to save the ones we can and accept the fact that we can’t save everyone. I said I thought there was a big difference between doing triage and passively letting some people die, who couldn’t be saved, so you could use the time to help those that could, and playing God by actively murdering masses of people so an elite could survive. He then said it was about time I grow up and face the facts of life; sometimes we have to make sacrifices for the betterment of all. I said he’d better increase his dose of Aricept as he was going senile - if we were among the survivors, we would not be the ones making the sacrifice.”
Alex slumped in his chair. “It kind of went downhill from there. I finally couldn’t take anymore and turned off the damn computer.” He leaned back in his chair and hugged himself. “I used to really respect that guy.”
Emily put her hand on Alex’s knee. “Something pretty similar happened to me,” she said. Richard felt mutual bonds of respect entwining the two. “So who’s next?” She looked at Oscar and Richard.
“Not me,” said Oscar. “Who’re they going to find to influence me? Another computer-hacking anarchist? My mother’s dead, so she can’t help them any.”
“Maybe they could get the CEO of Microsoft to threaten to block you from the internet,” said Alex.
“Ah, that’s not a problem,” said Oscar. “They can’t even provide a screen door to keep me out.”
“Richard?” asked Emily.
“Isn’t it obvious they’re leaning on you guys because they can’t find any other leverage on me?” said Richard. “Who could they get? The head Lama of my monastery? Never gonna happen.”
“Well, somehow, we need to decide what we should do,” said Alex. He looked over at Oscar who seemed to be lost in a reverie. “Oscar?”
Oscar looked back at Alex, and Richard thought he saw an ever-so-slight flicker in one of Oscar’s eyes. The suggestion of a wink.
Chapter Thirty-One
When Doug returned, he was quiet. Alex thought it a bit odd, but maybe Doug was lost in his own thoughts.
“Who talked to you?” asked Emily as he sat down at the table next to her.
“Hmm?” he said. He turned and looked at Emily. “What did you say?”
“I said, who talked to you? Are you okay, Doug?”
“Yeah, sure,” he replied. “I’m fine. Uh, let’s see. Webb, the Director of the FBI, talked to me and the Attorney General, too.”
“Whoa,” said Alex. “They really pulled out the big guns. What did they have to say?”
“It was pretty much the same as what happened to you, Emily. They appealed to my sense of duty and tried to play on my willingness to follow authority; just about what you’d expect.” He paused for a moment, then took a breath. “Unlike you,” Doug gave Emily a sidelong glance, “I pretended to play along to see what they might reveal. I guess this goes pretty high up. Probably all the way to the top, all around the world. I think they’ve been inoculating the chosen ‘survivors’ for a year or so. They said they’d inoculate us too, if we cooperate.”
“Jesus,” said Alex. “How’d they get that many people to agree to anything with such tight secrecy?”
“It seems,” said Doug, “they selected the people to survive that would maintain the status quo on the big issues. They agreed to work together to survive first and then settle their differences later. They seem really spooked.”
“Me, too,” said Emily. “So how did you leave it with them?”
“I tried to make them feel I was on their side and would cooperate. I’m still hoping that’ll give me some leverage later.”
“They tell you anything helpful?” asked Alex.
“Not yet,” said Doug. “
But we’ll see.”
Alex looked over at Oscar. What is he doing? he wondered. Oscar was messing with the power cord to the refrigerator. Alex didn’t want to draw attention to it so he kept quiet and ignored it.
“I have an idea,” said Richard.
All eyes turned to him.
“But I can’t really say anything.” Richard stared back at them without expression.
This is getting pretty annoying, thought Alex. Even if Richard had a good idea, how could they act on it if they couldn’t even talk about it without being overheard? Alex glanced back over at Oscar. He was up to something, alright. Something he wouldn’t want watching eyes to notice. They needed a minor distraction. He turned to the others and said, “I don’t suppose there’s any way we can talk Todd out of this? Anyone have any arguments we haven’t tried?”
No one answered.
“Well,” said Alex, “I can’t think of any. If I read Todd right, his mind is made up. I also think he can’t afford to question his decision at this point. He’s gone beyond the point of no return. I’ve been thinking about Todd. He’s too cerebral to see the morality of what he’s doing.”
“What do you mean?” asked Richard.
“There were some interesting fMRI studies done a couple of years ago,” said Alex. He moved over and sat on a chair at the table, well away from Oscar.
“What’s an fMRI?” asked Doug.
“Functional MRI, said Alex. “You put someone’s head in an MRI and you look for areas that light up on the images. These correspond to areas of increased blood flow. The active brain uses a lot of oxygen and glucose and the supposition is, where there’s a lot of blood, there’s a lot of brain activity. Proponents claim, if you give the brain an activity to perform, where it lights up on the fMRI is where the thinking activity actually occurs.”
“Interesting, I suppose,” said Emily. “But what does this have to do with Todd?”
“Bear with me and I'll explain.” Alex leaned back in his chair. “One experiment involved giving a group of subjects moral dilemmas to resolve and the researchers looked to see where in the brain this was done. The quandaries given were old ones, proposed and pored over by ethical philosophers, in one form or another, to this day.”
“I’ve heard about these studies,” said Richard.
“For example,” said Alex. “You’re standing on the curve of a railroad track next to a switch. To your right, two branching tracks lead off around a curve. On one track, five men are working. On the other, there’s only one man. To your left is a train coming fast. You can see the train and the six men on the track. Because of the curve, the men on the track can’t see the train and the train can’t see the men. Because of the speed of the train, you know it will never be able to stop in time to avoid hitting the men and the men can’t get out of the way. You can set the switch to send the train down either track - the one with five men, or the one with one lone man. What do you do?”
Doug shrugged. “I’d send the train down the track with the one man.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Alex saw Oscar was again bent over, this time around the microwave. “Some ninety percent of the people in the study agreed with you. Now we change it a little. There’s only one track, a curve and five men on the track that can’t see the approaching train. Only this time, you’re with another man on a bridge over the tracks. You can see the train coming and the five men on the tracks. Again, the train won’t have enough time to stop. But, you realize, if you throw your companion off the bridge, the train will begin to stop, not in time to save your companion, but it will stop before it hits the five men on the tacks. Would you do it?”
“Hell no,” said Doug.
“Why not? The mathematics are the same. One man dead versus five men dead.”
“Because it’s murder and it would be wrong,” said Richard.
Alex shook his head. “Again, ninety-some percent of the people in the study agreed with you.” Alex noticed Oscar was over by the toaster. “I’m just trying to understand Todd and his choices. You see,” said Alex, “when the first scenario was given, the fMRI lit up in two main areas, the neocortex, the calculating part of the brain - one man, five men - and the amygdala.”
“The what?” asked Doug.
“It’s believed to be more the primitive, feeling part of the brain. Anyway, in the first case, where most people would set the switch to kill the one man, the neocortex lit up more than the amygdala. In the second case, the amygdala by far outshone the neocortex. It was as if the primitive parts of their brains were shouting, ‘NO! It’s WRONG!’”
“Interesting, but…” said Emily.
Oscar was over by the coffee pot.
“I think Todd is so cerebral, his neocortex dominates his more primitive instincts and there’s no way we can appeal to his amygdala. His mind can only be changed by an argument that appeals to the calculating part of his brain, his neocortex. Our amygdalae are shouting, ‘It’s murder!’ and his neocortex is shouting, “Come on, do the math!’”
“There are other solutions you didn’t mention,” said Richard.
“Like what?” asked Alex.
“You could jump off the bridge,” said Richard. “But I agree with your assessment of Todd. I think he’s so confident of his intellectual abilities, he’s lost sight of more basic, moral human values. His hubris has caused a disconnect between what he thinks ought to be done and what should be done.”
“The story goes on,” said Alex. “The researchers took these same subjects, put them in the MRI and gave them another moral predicament to consider. This time, imagine you’re in the basement of a house in a village in the middle of a battle of a great war. The entire village is in the basement and enemy soldiers are outside, trying to find everybody. You know, beyond a doubt, if the soldiers find you, they will kill you all - men, women and children. But you're also holding your baby. The baby has a cold and can’t help but cough and give your presence away. The only way to stop it is to smother the baby. If you don’t smother the baby, the enemy soldiers will find you and kill everybody, including the baby. What do you do? Do you kill the baby?” Oscar was looking at the power outlets.
“That sounds like the last episode of MASH,” said Doug.
“Where do you think the writers got the idea?” said Alex. “The interesting thing is, in the fMRI, it was like a war of a different kind was going on. The brains of the subjects lit up everywhere. Kill the baby, don’t kill the baby. The baby will die anyway, but if the baby is killed by you, then the rest of the village will survive. But, it’s a baby. Your baby. You could almost see the battle being waged in the brains of the subjects. Finally, two spots lit up, one behind each eyebrow, and things calmed down. It’s was if those two spots were referees forcing a decision.”
“What did the subjects decide?” asked Richard.
“Fifty percent said they’d kill the baby, fifty percent said they wouldn’t.”
For a moment, there was silence.
Alex leaned forward, placing his forearms on the table. “I’ve spent my life caring for, easing the pain of, and saving the lives of the very same people Todd is trying to kill. I could never kill the baby. It goes against everything I am.”
Emily grabbed his hand. “And I have spent my career serving, shielding, and protecting those same people. I could never kill the baby.”
“I hear what you’re saying, Alex,” said Richard, “and I agree with you about Todd. But what I find more interesting, is those people, the subjects of the studies, were so willing to accept the plausibility of situations where there were only two solutions. Real situations are never like that.”
“You don’t think there are situations where you’re ‘damned if you do and damned if you don’t’?” asked Emily.
“Ah, but not damned if you do something else. Life is much more complicated. How many situations in your own life can you look back on and think, ‘if only I’d known’? Or, ‘if only I knew then what I know now?’
For every situation, there are an infinite number of ways we can respond. It‘s just a matter of being creative enough to find one that’s acceptable.”
“You make it sound so simple,” said Alex. Oscar was absorbed in something, but Alex couldn’t tell what. Just gotta keep this going.
“I certainly didn't mean to imply that.” Richard shifted in his chair and took a moment to collect his thoughts. “Human beings don’t like a lot of choices. It overwhelms us. So, we try to reduce the number of options to something manageable. If there are only two, we like it. Either ‘A or B’, ‘true or false’. But in trying to reduce our options to just two, or even a few, we often throw the baby out with the bath water.”
“Okay,” said Alex. “Would you kill the baby or not?”
“I’d spend what time and energy I had trying to find another acceptable alternative. Just off the top of my head, you could try to smother the sound of the cough by putting your mouth over his and breathing with him. Or you could give the baby to someone else so they would have to decide. In my mind, not a good choice, but still another possibility. There are always options. Always.”
“But, what if you don’t have time, or you’re overwhelmed with fear, or totally confused by what’s going on?” asked Emily.
Oscar was back at the microwave. “So,” said Alex. “You’re in the basement with your baby and the rest of the village. Maybe you should have done something different to avoid getting into that situation, but you didn’t. The soldiers are right outside the building. The baby is about to cough, any second. You don’t have time to come up with a good solution. What do you do?”
“You do the most compassionate, kind, loving thing you can think of. That applies to the soldiers outside as well as your baby and the villagers, by the way. At every moment in your life, you have decisions to make. Choices. Strive to make every one of them as kind, loving and compassionate as possible.”
The Devil's Vial Page 32