Tales from the Universe
Moral Dilemma: If saving many people requires deliberately sacrificing one innocent person, does refusing to make that sacrifice preserve your humanity—or merely force someone else to pay for it?
Talen knew how heroes behaved.
He had studied them carefully.
Heroes entered burning buildings.
Heroes fought when everyone else ran.
Heroes stood between monsters and children.
Heroes did not abandon friends.
Heroes never surrendered innocent people.
And, most importantly, heroes always found another way.
That last rule was Talen’s favorite.
It was also the one that caused the most trouble.
Talen owned thirty-seven volumes of The Adventures of Sir Veyr.
He had read all of them.
Several twice.
Volume Twelve eleven times.
That was the one where Veyr was trapped beneath Mount Calon with the demon king, his wounded companion, and three hundred prisoners.
The demon demanded one prisoner.
Veyr refused.
The demon threatened everyone.
Veyr refused.
The mountain began collapsing.
Veyr still refused.
Then, through a combination of courage, cleverness, and a previously established weakness involving silver bells, Veyr saved everyone.
Talen loved that story.
“That’s what makes him a hero,” he once told his sister.
“What?”
“He refuses the choice.”
His sister, Mara, looked up from her sewing.
“What choice?”
“The bad one.”
“That seems convenient.”
Talen frowned.
“You haven’t read it.”
“No.”
“Then you wouldn’t understand.”
“Probably not.”
She returned to sewing.
Talen was not a hero.
He repaired municipal water pumps.
This was respectable work.
It simply contained fewer demon kings.
Then the eastern reservoir broke.
The first explosion shook windows across the city.
Talen was underground when it happened.
He and six workers were inspecting a pressure gate.
Dust fell.
The lamps swung.
Someone shouted:
“Surface!”
They climbed.
Above them, a black column of smoke rose from the reservoir.
Then the warning bells began.
The eastern reservoir did more than hold water.
It fed the city’s pressure system.
Water from the mountains entered through three channels.
Gates controlled the flow.
If the damaged reservoir failed completely, millions of gallons would descend through the eastern district.
Twenty thousand people lived there.
Talen knew this because he had helped maintain the gates.
He also knew something worse.
There was an emergency spillway.
Opening it would redirect the water.
Away from the city.
Into Hollow Vale.
Population:
Forty-three.
The engineers gathered.
Maps covered a table.
“The reservoir won’t hold.”
“How long?”
“Maybe four hours.”
“Evacuate the eastern district.”
“Impossible.”
“Why?”
“Festival.”
Talen’s stomach dropped.
The Founding Festival.
Thousands of visitors.
Streets packed.
Four hours wasn’t enough.
The chief engineer pointed at Hollow Vale.
“We open the spillway.”
Silence.
Talen stared at the map.
“There are people there.”
“Yes.”
“Forty-three.”
“Yes.”
“Evacuate them.”
“We can send riders.”
“How long?”
“Three hours there.”
“And back?”
The engineer didn’t answer.
They all understood.
They could warn Hollow Vale.
They could not know whether everyone escaped before the water arrived.
“Then we don’t open it until we know.”
The chief engineer looked at Talen.
“We may not have that time.”
“Then find another way.”
“We are.”
“Good.”
Talen stood.
“So find one.”
For two hours, they tried.
Reduce mountain inflow.
Impossible.
Repair the reservoir wall.
Too damaged.
Open the northern channel.
Insufficient capacity.
Use the old quarry as overflow.
Wrong elevation.
Talen proposed pumping.
Not enough pumps.
Then siphons.
Not enough pipe.
Then controlled release through the city canals.
The canals would overflow.
Every plan failed.
Not dramatically.
Mathematically.
Talen hated mathematics for this.
Three hours remained.
A rider left for Hollow Vale.
The chief engineer ordered the spillway prepared.
Talen blocked the control room.
“No.”
“Talen.”
“We don’t know they’re clear.”
“We know what happens if we do nothing.”
“Find another way.”
“We have looked.”
“Look again.”
The chief engineer stepped closer.
“You think I want this?”
Talen said nothing.
“You think because I’m willing to open that gate I don’t care about those people?”
“No.”
“Then move.”
“No.”
Two guards removed him.
Talen fought.
Actually fought.
He broke one guard’s nose.
They locked him in an office.
Talen kicked the door until his foot hurt.
Then he saw the maintenance hatch.
He escaped.
Of course he did.
Sir Veyr would have.
Talen reached the spillway mechanism and jammed the main gear with a steel bar.
The machinery stopped.
Someone shouted.
Talen stood beside the mechanism.
“Find another way!”
The chief engineer stared at him.
“You have disabled the only emergency outlet.”
“Temporarily.”
“How long to remove that?”
Talen looked at the bar.
“Long enough.”
“For what?”
“To think.”
The chief engineer’s face changed.
“We have been thinking.”
Then the second explosion came.
The reservoir wall shifted.
A messenger arrived.
“Two hours.”
Maybe less.
The chief engineer sat on the floor.
Talen had never seen him do that.
He looked suddenly old.
“Do you know why stories always find another way?”
Talen said nothing.
“Because someone wrote them that way.”
Talen felt anger rise.
“Don’t.”
“Reality isn’t required to provide a hidden door because you deserve one.”
“Don’t.”
“You are not refusing the sacrifice.”
“Yes, I am.”
“No.”
The engineer pointed west.
“You are choosing a different one.”
Talen looked toward the city.
Twenty thousand.
Then toward Hollow Vale.
Forty-three.
The arithmetic was obscene.
That did not make it false.
“There are children there.”
“Yes.”
“Families.”
“Yes.”
“They did nothing.”
“Yes.”
Talen shouted:
“Then how can you do it?”
The engineer shouted back:
“HOW CAN I NOT?”
Silence.
Talen thought of Sir Veyr.
The demon king.
The prisoners.
The collapsing mountain.
There had been silver bells.
There had always been silver bells.
Some forgotten passage.
Some clever mechanism.
Some answer waiting for the hero clever enough to discover it.
Talen looked around the control room.
Gears.
Valves.
Stone.
Water.
No silver bells.
He removed the steel bar.
The spillway opened.
Water thundered toward Hollow Vale.
The sound lasted nearly an hour.
Talen sat against the wall.
Nobody spoke to him.
The eastern reservoir survived.
Barely.
The city did not flood.
The riders reached Hollow Vale forty minutes before the water.
Thirty-nine people escaped.
Four did not.
An old couple refused to leave their home.
One man returned for his horses.
A girl went back for her dog.
They found the dog three days later.
Alive.
The girl was not.
The city called Talen a hero.
He hated them for it.
His photograph appeared in the newspaper.
WATER ENGINEER SAVES THOUSANDS
He tore it down.
People bought him drinks.
He refused them.
The mayor awarded him a medal.
Talen left it on the mayor’s desk.
He visited Hollow Vale.
Nothing remained.
Mud.
Broken trees.
Foundations.
A man named Orrel confronted him.
His daughter had been the girl.
“You opened the gate.”
Talen could have said:
The chief engineer gave the order.
He could have said:
Twenty thousand people.
He could have said:
We sent warning.
He could have said many true things.
“Yes.”
Orrel hit him.
Talen fell.
Orrel hit him again.
Talen did not resist.
Eventually Orrel stopped.
They sat in the mud.
“My daughter was fourteen.”
Talen nodded.
“Her name was Pella.”
Talen nodded again.
“She loved that stupid dog.”
The dog was sitting nearby.
Talen looked at it.
Orrel began crying.
So did Talen.
Neither apologized.
Years passed.
Talen stopped reading Sir Veyr.
Then one winter he found Volume Twelve while cleaning.
He nearly threw it away.
Instead he read it.
The story was still good.
That surprised him.
Veyr refused the demon.
Found another way.
Saved everyone.
Talen cried.
Not because the story was childish.
Because he understood why people needed stories where sometimes everyone could be saved.
He returned to engineering.
For years he studied reservoir failures.
He redesigned spillways.
Built warning stations near flood channels.
Required evacuation roads in every community downstream of an emergency outlet.
Some officials complained about the cost.
Talen became extremely unpleasant.
“Nothing has happened in fifty years.”
“Good.”
“Then why spend this money?”
“So the next person gets another way.”
Thirty years after the flood, Talen lectured young engineers.
A student asked about Hollow Vale.
Everyone knew the story.
“Did you make the right choice?”
Talen became quiet.
“I opened the gate.”
“Yes, but was it right?”
“I know what you’re asking.”
The student waited.
Talen looked around the room.
“When people ask whether it was right, they often want me to make what happened clean.”
Nobody moved.
“It wasn’t.”
He wrote four names on the board.
Then beneath them:
19,864
“These people do not cancel those people.”
He pointed to the four names.
“And those four do not make twenty thousand irrelevant.”
Another student raised her hand.
“What should you have done?”
Talen smiled sadly.
“What I did.”
The room became still.
“And I wish with everything in me that I had not needed to do it.”
The students wrote that down.
Talen stopped them.
“No.”
They looked up.
“That isn’t a formula.”
He erased the numbers.
“Your job is not to become comfortable choosing who gets hurt.”
He picked up his notes.
“Your job is to build systems where fewer people ever have to make that choice.”
After class, Talen walked home.
His old books were on the shelf.
Thirty-seven volumes.
He had started reading them again.
Not as manuals.
That had been the mistake.
Stories could show what courage looked like.
What hope felt like.
What kind of person you wanted to become.
They simply could not promise reality would cooperate.
Talen opened Volume Twelve.
Sir Veyr stood before the demon king.
One innocent life against hundreds.
Veyr refused.
Of course he did.
Talen smiled.
“Find another way.”
He turned the page.
And in the story, wonderfully, impossibly, there was one.
Leave a Reply