You get powers today. The powers are super strength (10,000 tons), speed (Mach 100), reflexes (microsecond reaction time), healing (perfect physical and mental health until you die at the age of 150), durability (no weapon or tool in the world can hurt or kill you but another superhuman) and flight (Mach 100). You’ll have perfect control of the powers and the required secondary powers to use them properly.
The catch is that you have to choose five other real life living people to get the same powers before you can use yours. No one will know this choice was made but you. You have an hour to choose.
I can’t imagine giving the powers to someone I don’t know personally, no matter how impeccable their public image is. Too many apparently wonderful people have turned out to be monsters.
So I’d give it to my wife, my son, my sister, my brother (which would have the added bonus of healing his quadriplegia) and the more emotionally stable of my two best friends. I trust them all with my life, and by implication, the world.
Seriously, I’m not going to dump all this on someone without asking them first if they want it. So even if that criterion is removed, having to choose in an hour is right out, because I might not even be able to get hold of all the would-be recipients in an hour, let alone have the sort of conversation that would go with such an offer. Let alone giving them enough time to think of whether they wanted this gift or not.
As Terry Pratchett said, sin is treating people as things. So I find these terms unacceptable, and will cheerfully refuse this gift.
I hope this isn’t a threadshit, but no way do I do that to someone without their consent. You can’t ethically force that kind of responsibility (“with great power…”) on somebody.
I missed that. Yeah, i can’t do that to anyone without their consent, either. I was assuming i was allowed to check with them. (And glossing over the logistical problems with that.)
@Cmyers1980 , you might want to add something about that to your conditions.
I’m not sure I understand this thread… It looks like it’s supposed to be a gotcha, but as presented, I’m not just ending up as a superhero; I have a whole superteam, too. Is it supposed to be hard to find five people we’d trust with superpowers, or something?
I had the people picked out. But this is a LOT to lay on someone if you could not talk to them about it. At least let them know.
But it would be my wife, my two best friends, one is married so I would also pick her. Then I would give my wife a choice of course. I think I know who she would pick.
It would be great, I guess you could avoid airports, can I bring luggage? Guess I don’t need it, at that speed you could fly home and change.
No. It’s just a fantastical scenario to provoke discussion. There’s no catch or right answer. It could have easily been any number of opinion based scenarios or prompts and I’ve made similar threads.
I’d pick five people known to be both evil and stupid, thus creating five supervillains, whom I’d immediately defeat very publicly, before they know the full extent of their powers, cementing my reputation as a superhero.
