You work inside of the death ray. You're a computer programmer, making sure the death ray functions properly. There are thousands of people who commute to the death ray for work every day. Engineers working in its core making sure it doesn't overheat or fail to fire. People in the upper offices making sure the entire operation functions properly. Everyone working together like a massive clockwork machine that they're only a small part of. Even if you don't agree with how the death ray is used, you have to be impressed by how powerful, how wholesome it is, that you're all working together.
You personally are against most uses of the death ray. It's one of the most powerful weapons of war in the galaxy, it's capable of destroying entire planets and star systems in a few days, or fleets of ships and continents in mere hours. It's only ever used on planets far from yours, in the savage areas of the galaxy where the rights you have in your comfortable inner world don't exist. It's always people you never meet, never see, you're against it but it feels distant, it's hard to even feel like it's real. You understand what it's like, alien civilizations and human offshoots crushed under a grand imperial boot, planets slowly engulfed by that distant fire, taking days to be destroyed as their cities burn and seas boil until no life is possible on their surface. But you don't know the name of anyone whose been hit by the death ray, they're all millions of miles away.
You don't personally agree with the death ray being used the way it is but you're not responsible for it. You just work on the code, you have to make money somehow, the economy is rough, and someone is going to be hired as a programmer in such a competitive position. Also, you're not 'the guy who fires the death ray' (despite your uncle proudly introducing you as that at one point), you just make sure their code is running properly. You're not a killer, not even part of the military, just someone who programs computers, it would be silly to claim you're responsible for what those computers happen to be used for.
And sometimes people around your age will morally grandstand and naively act like you're more responsible than you are. They'll tell you that you're complicit in something that's too big for you to stop. And you try to tell them that you need a job, that you need to make money, and it's like they think you have freedom that you don't. We're all trying to survive right? Do they just expect you to quit your job because of someone you've never seen before, because of a roll so small, that can so easily be replaced? You can disagree with your bosses, right? Everyone doesn't like their boss.
It almost seems like nobody is the person who chooses to fire off the death ray. When it was being built, when there was a pro-war movement as opposed to people who just didn't like the anti-war movement, there were people who chose to build it, and everything around its first firing was in so many people's hands. But now the death ray is so part of normal life, so mundane, that there's very few people who make choices to support it. There aren't politicians who enthusiastically choose for the death ray to destroy a certain place, just politicians who have to continue supporting the death ray to get reelected, and who can't get anti-death ray laws passed because their opposition will call them soft. There aren't generals who choose to destroy anywhere, just military analysts who figure out what places would serve the empire best to be destroyed using logical and scientific calculations. Nobody's more powerful than the system, and it's nobody's job to decide what the system is, it's just so many people's jobs to figure out how to best make the system work. And the people upstairs in the office need to make sure the press isn't against the death ray because then it might not kill people. And it's the engineers' downstairs job to make sure the death ray doesn't overheat because then it won't kill people. And you fix code because if the code is broken, if you weren't maximally competent, the death ray might fail to kill, it might be off, and fire into empty space, and lives would be saved. It's a massive gun with no trigger. People working at hospitals are told they're saving lives. People working in libraries are told they're helping people learn. Even people working for porn companies get to know that they're getting people off. But everyone you work somehow believes that their job does nothing, that they have no consequence, that they mere watch what's happening happen but have made no choices, because the choice they want to make would go against their interest, their actions are thus not theirs'.
You met a girl once from the outer worlds, and she was mad when she found out where you worked. And you thought that she was just another privileged kid who didn't understand your job. But then she told you that she was from a world that was destroyed. She told you she barely got out in time. She said that it first came like a heatwave, but it kept getting hotter. She saw the streets she once walked as a child consumed by fire, knowing she would never walk them again. The river she has seen every day outside her window, a holy river in her culture, dry up, as dead fish were cooked in its bed. It worked so efficiently thanks to code you'd written. She saw her childhood friend take their own life rather than die from the heat. She had to choose between taking her younger brother or younger sister on the escape pod, chose the one she thought would be more likely to make it. You told her you work there because you need to money to survive. She told you she had to kill people to get a spot on that shuttle, wielding a ceremonial blade she never expected to use. You told her that you don't enjoy doing this, you have to for your job. She told you that she doesn't care if the people who killed her family enjoyed it or not, she just cares that they killed them.
You could stop properly doing your job. Write code that's purposefully wrong. You wouldn't stop the death ray forever, but you might cause it to stall for a day, or take longer to destroy planets, or to miss and give people a warning before it lands a lethal blow. You could give people, not all the people, but thousands to millions of people, more time to escape, more time to build escape vassals, even just more time to say goodbye. You'd save at least one life. You almost certainly wouldn't be arrested for writing bad code. You'd be fired, and if you played your cards right you could be written up, or reprimanded, or passed up for promotion the first few times before eventually being fired. But if writing code badly means saving lives, then all of the times you did you job properly it would mean things you can't bear to think about. And anyway, you have a promotion coming up very soon, maybe you can think about this later.
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