Red or Blue?
ethics
The buttons rise from Elena’s kitchen counter like they grew there overnight, which they did. Red on the left. Blue on the right. The voice that explained the rules has gone silent, and now there is only the hum of the refrigerator and the three of them staring.
“It’s a coordination problem,” Marcus says. He has already taken off his jacket and draped it over the back of a chair, the way he does when he’s about to win an argument. “Think about it cleanly. If everyone reasons correctly, everyone picks red. Red is dominant. Red guarantees you live.”
“Red guarantees you live,” Elena says. “Not everyone.”
“If everyone picks red, everyone lives.”
“If everyone picks red, everyone who picks red lives. Which is everyone, in your scenario. But your scenario assumes eight billion people all read game theory papers for fun.”
Marcus shrugs. “The ones who don’t have nobody to blame but themselves.”
Sarah is sitting on the floor with her back against the cabinet, knees pulled up. Maisie has wandered in from the hallway and is doing her slow, careful circuit of the room, nose working, the clouded eye catching the overhead light. Sarah scratches her absently behind one ear as she passes.
“Marcus,” Elena says, “listen to what you just said. There are people right now who don’t speak English. There are children. There are people having strokes. There are people who will press blue because they trust other people to press blue, and you’re calling that a mistake.”
“I’m calling it a miscalculation.”
“It’s the same thing in a nicer suit.”
Sarah finally speaks. “How long do we have?”
“Forty minutes,” Marcus says, without checking. “I checked when it started.”
Elena watches Sarah’s hand on the cat. Sarah’s hand is shaking, very slightly, and Maisie has stopped walking and is leaning into the tremor as if she can feel the seismic register of it.
“I keep trying to imagine other people,” Elena says. “Eight billion buttons. For many of them, they don’t have anyone to talk it through with. Someone whose first instinct is, I should pick the one that helps the most people. And if I press red, I am betting against that person. I am saying, your kindness is a loss for me.”
“Your kindness is a loss for you,” Marcus says. “That’s the whole structure of the problem.”
“Then the problem is wrong.”
“The problem isn’t wrong, Elena. The problem is the problem.”
Sarah looks up. “What if half the world is having this exact conversation. What if there are three people in every kitchen, and one of them is you, and one of them is him, and the third one is me, and I’m the one who decides.”
“You’re not the one who decides,” Marcus says. “You’re one vote out of eight billion.”
“I’m the one who decides what I do.”
Elena kneels down next to her. Up close she can see that Sarah has been crying, quietly, the way Sarah cries, which is mostly with her shoulders. The cat is pressed against Sarah’s hip now, and Sarah is staring at the buttons on the counter with a dazed, open-mouthed look.
“I keep thinking about my mom,” Sarah says. “She’d press blue. She’d press blue without even sitting down. And I keep thinking, am I a worse person than my mom, or am I just better at math?”
“You’re not a worse person,” Elena says.
Marcus opens his mouth to recalculate something and Elena holds up a hand and, for a wonder, he closes it.
In the corner of Elena’s vision, something moves on the counter.
She doesn’t register it at first. The kitchen has been so still that any motion reads as wrong, and her brain takes a beat to assemble what she’s seeing. Maisie is up on the counter. Maisie, who hasn’t jumped onto a counter in two years because her depth perception is a memory. Maisie, blind but picking her way across the tile with a patience borne of many hours of memorization.
There is a third pair of buttons on the counter. Smaller. Cat-sized. Elena had not noticed them. None of them had.
Maisie sniffs the red one. She sniffs the blue one. She puts her front paw, deliberately, on the blue.
The button gives a small, satisfied click.
Sarah makes a sound that is mostly breath.
“Oh,” she says. “Oh, okay.” She stands up. Her knees crack. She walks to the counter, past Marcus, who is staring at the cat with the expression of a man whose model has just acquired a new variable. She puts her hand flat on the blue button and pushes down until it clicks.
“That’s an easy one now,” she says.