#moral calculus

Over the years we walked the treadmill, he asked me a lot of questions like that. We debated the cosmos into dust and back again, a hundred times over. Meanwhile, our steps moved the big wheel and the big wheel kept spitting out fresh godbits below us.

When I came of age, my best pal bought me out of my contract. In theory, we can save up to buy our own fresh start. But the workhouse foremen keep track of the maths; it’s rare that anyone’s wage of surplus deity-dust ever outweighs the sin of doing the grinding.

So when my friend blew his whole year’s student loan to pay off my debt, it took me off-guard.

“I suppose you want my soul in return?” I said.

“Don’t be silly,” he replied, “I just purchased your life. I paid for it by the second, and over the going rate. I basically already bought your soul. Now I want to see what you’ll do with it.”

I think about him now, as I stand over the bound body of the deity in the gloom of the city granary. The dim light of my hellfire lantern glitters off the salt that coats the inside of the walls.

In my hand is a knife, with an ugly iron blade and a sickly white bone handle. I made it out of iron distilled from my own blood and used one of my ribs for the handle.

I raise the knife over the comatose corpus of the god. I pause. I think. I close my eyes and pretend I’m talking to my demon buddy.

When you get down to it, the question isn’t whether you’d kill one innocent people to save five.

It’s whether you’d be willing to kill to save a guilty person. Would you kill to save the most deplorable wretch alive? Would you strike someone down to spare your greatest enemy?

And then the real question: what would you do to save a world that has only hurt you? What would you sacrifice to save an earth soaked in ill intent? What would you turn yourself into, hoping to bring salvation to a malign reality?

Would you kill to salve hateful, sharp-toothed creation?

And, again, the question beneath the question: who would you kill for that salvation?

Because I don’t know if I’d kill one innocent person to save another (or another five, ten, thousand).

But I might kill an innocent to save a monster.

I open my eyes. I see the deity, bound in platonic ropes. They are woven from thought-strands, with all the strength of ideas and ideals.

My wicked knife slices through them, not like butter, but like a cleaver through a knot of bone and gristle. I have to saw.

The god opens its eyes, a matched pair of wounds in the firmament.

“I have a question for you,” I say, voice perfectly even, “On your right are five deities. On your left is just one. I’m there too and I have this knife and you can’t save all of them. So… right or left?”