Do you free yourself from a death trap if escaping means killing the person you love most?

Eddies in the space-time continuum have ripped you out of your comfy chair and into an alternate universe in which the 7.5 billion inhabitants of earth include 143 people with actual superpowers. Your arrival increases that number to a round 144, for the transition between worlds gives you the abilities of Lightning Lad. You can generate electricity, hurl thunderbolts at will, absorb electricity directed at you (if you’re ready for it) and… that’s it. No flight, no force shields, no magnetism, and a bullet or club will kill you as dead as anybody else. The person you love best in the real world (spouse, parent, child, best friend, whatever) comes with you to this new world, but that person does not gain any super-powers.

Limited though your abilities may seem, they make you one of the most powerful supers on this world. Even so, you are hugely eclipsed by the mightiest of the supers, for that is BOB X— the black, bisexual superhero with superman’s powers, no known weaknesses, and a kid in middle school. You contact Bob, hoping he can help you get home, but sadly neither he nor any of the big brains who work for him have any notion how to do so. For lack of a better idea, you take a job as one of Bob’s support staff; your MacGuyverish savvy and native intelligence have you swiftly moving up the ranks in that little organization. You are not doing super-hero stuff yourself; frankly, Bob doesn’t need sidekicks, and anyway you figure that while it is to your benefit to have his cell phone number, it is best to stay away from the center of any stories about him.

But sadly, this story is about YOU. See, there is a certain psychotic super-genius on this world who decides he wants to use your power for his own sick purposes. Specifically he wants to use you as a living battery to power a suit of technomagic armor that will let him go on a killing spree. No real reason; he is just an evil bastard. To that end, he kidnapped you and your beloved non-super-powered companion and imprisoned you both in the usual death trap. The machinery and said trap is set up to drain your power at a safe rate for the villain while making it impossible for you to exert enough force to blast your way out without also killing your beloved

You are fully conscious and able to move about; after an exhaustive examination, you conclude that the villain did his work well. There is no way you are getting out of here without sacrificing the one you love. Moreover, the power-draining process will kill you within four hours unless you get out. Bob could defeat the villain even in the powered armor and/or bust you out easily, but you happen to know that he is on a space mission that by this time has taken him half a light-day from Earth. If you were free, you could maybe send out an SOS, but best case scenario would have him coming to save the day in three day’s time— and of course you’d have to get out of the death trap first. And in the meantime, the super-villain will massacre Athena only knows how many innocents.

Now let’s be clear about something. This is a super hero world, but not a comic book one. Bob sometimes kills his enemies if they need killing, and those villains never come back from the dead because NOBODY comes back from the dead here. And Bob generally wins his fights because he is the baddest mama-jamma around, not because the editor is on his side. He has at least one dead girlfriend who could testify that he does not always arrive in the nick of time if she weren’t, well, dead. In short, you cannot count on him being a deus ex machina.

And of course, even as all this goes through your head, the super-genius-psycho is in his ersatz IRON MAN armor, and not only will he massacre hundreds of people using it, but his use of it will kill you shoortly.

So here are your choices:

A: Bust out of the death trap while you still have enough juice to do so, both saving your own life and cutting off the villain’s power source (thus saving the day yourself) but also killing the one you love.

2- Hope against hope that Bob somehow arrives in time to handle the menace, even though you yourself helped plan the mission that took him off Earth and you were manning the high-tech monitor that charted him flying too far away to be of any help;

III) Save your beloved’s life by doing nothing, thus both allowing the villain’s rampage and letting the death trap kill you

What is your choice, NY? If you choose to sacrifice the life of the one you love, will he/she be OK with that? If you choose to let the innocents and yourself die, will your beloved agree to THAT?

I die and let my beloved live. And no, I don’t think my beloved would like or agree to it, any more than I would want my beloved dying for me.

This is easy because I know what my loved ones would say. They will die and I should get out there and kick some ass.

loved.

The person I love the most is my son. I would gladly sacrifice myself for him under any circumstance.

Well, get Eddie out of there already! Everytime Eddie gets into the $#@! space-time continuum, he fucks something up, doggonit!

I pick III.

So all these “I die and lever my loved one live” people are also condemning hundreds or thousands of other to die? I think I’d want to talk it over with the beloved first - maybe they’d prefer to sacrifice themselves to save all those others.

ETA: Welcome back, Skald. I missed you.

StG

Yeah, I rather suspected that the choices people made would depend on the identity & age of the most-beloved person. Excepting the sacrifice of wind’s 87-year-old father (Who has just said “bust out of here and go save those nuns! That is my last order to you!”) is quite a different thing than deliberately killing one’s four-year-old-niece (who has no idea what is going on ).

nicely played sir!

My actions are not actively contributing to their deaths. I’m being held against my will, forced to comply. My moral standing is sound.

In theory, I should bust out, thus saving my own life and that of lots of other people. In practice, those other people are DOA. Sorry, but there it is.

It isn’t a question of what I should do - it’s what I can, or can’t, do. I can’t allow my beloved to die. I can’t.

Regards,
Shodan

Skald! You’re back! I’m so glad, you’re my favorite.

So. Yeah, sorry babe, but I can’t let maybe millions of innocent people die if I can stop it. I love my husband, but the right thing to do here is to suck it up and save the world.

You didn’t specify how the death trap works. I would presume it’s hooked up to my power, a sort of dead man’s switch. If I escape, the power is cut off and my loved one dies, but the killing is aborted. If I stay, the killing goes on for four hours, then I die, the power is cut off, and my loved one dies.

I would like to think I would do the above but I think my gut reaction if time was limited (seconds count) would be “screw the universe - my loved one lives”.

Same here!!!

I thought I had specified, but whatever.

That is pretty much it. The death trap is set up so that it will drain your power to fuel the ersatz IRON iron MAN armor from afar and so that any attempt to break free of the prison will also kill the beloved. But also bear in mind that the power-draining process will kill you in a few hours. You will die if you remain in the cell during the rampage. Presumably the villain has promised to spare your loved one if you allow yourself to be slain, but I’m not sure whether I would trust him to keep his word as he is, obviously, a villain. Dr. Doom might keep his word in such a situation; the Joker probably would not.

Now you’re saying that my loved one might be spared. That muddies the water - the calculation now involves weighing the lives of myself and others against the possible survival of my loved one. I’m still leaning toward option 3 but it would make it less of a guarantee.

Also - what if I kill myself early without escaping? Does my loved one still die? Does it stop the rampage?

How are you planning to kill yourself? Do you think the villain would have left you with any weapons?

Anyway, I don’t know that I would give any credence to the villain’s promise to free your beloved after you have died and he has finished his rampage. Do I need to explain to you again how villainy works?

Killing oneself with the powers given is easy. Just generate a hundred trillion volts inside your body but absorb it when it reaches your skin. You’ll fry instantly.

Problem with that is that, while that might stop the villian’s plot by cutting off his suit’s power source, he’d almost certainly kill my loved one in retribution for doing so. Unless it seemed that cutting off his power would trap him in the cockpit or something there’s no point in electrical suicide.

Anyway, regarding the actual scenario, I strike the entire mech with a gigantic lightning bolt, melting it and fusing it and killing all three of us instantly. I accept the trolley problem as it is but do not intend to have to live with murdering my loved one.

My problem with your solution is that, since the villain is out of your site, you can’t know whether you are succeeding in killing him. If you are going to sacrifice your beloved, it seems to me that you yourself need to survive to make doing so worthwhile. That is, there seems no point in sacrificing your beloved’ S life unless you also know for certain that you have defeated the bad guy. Otherwise, you might as will pray that Bob ex gets back from his mission early and saves both your asses. You are being equally passive in both cases.