My eyes were open, but all I could see was darkness. I blinked and felt my eyelids scrape against the darkness itself. Confused, I tried to touch my face. The moment I moved a muscle, a thousand pinpricks danced across my body. Had all my muscles fallen asleep? No, they felt perfectly responsive. In that case, what was this feeling? I kicked my leg to try to shake the feeling off, and that’s when I felt a sharp pinch. Then another pinch; the pinches were running up my arm. Shots of pain went straight through my nervous system to my brain. I screamed, but the countless pinpricks were covering my mouth and muffling the noise. I finally shook my head enough to clear my vision and looked down at my body. I was covered with thousands of spiders.
I gasped as my eyes flew open. It was a dream.
But what’s interesting about dreams is that they aren’t entirely internal. Of course, you could argue that the elements making up a dream are synthesized from lived experience, but the dream itself is often thought of as its own, disconnected world while it’s occurring. However, if something in the real world interacts with your senses, it may be incorporated into the dream. I looked down at my feet. They were crawling with tiny spiders, and these were definitely real. I shouted and tried to kick them off, but they wouldn’t leave me alone.
Behind me, someone or something was laughing at my predicament. A second later, there were words spoken so loud they hurt my ears. I turned around to see the giant spider right behind me. It lifted its leg to signal the smaller spiders and said, “All of you, you can leave her alone for the moment, but make sure you stay close by. You’ll follow her when she leaves on the expedition. If she doesn’t go, then you’ll follow someone who does.”
Finally being fully aware of my surroundings, I looked down at the plateau. I had fallen asleep on the field from thinking too hard, or maybe just from exhaustion. I turned to the giant spider and asked, “How much time do we have left? How long was I asleep?”
“Long enough. I’ll let you in on a secret—they’ve made no progress on any of the eleven doors. No additional clues to the offering either; I’m pretty sure you figured out what it is already.”
“So you know about the doors? I thought you weren’t the one in control here.”
“I can have eyes and ears wherever I want. Doesn’t mean I run the place.”
I gave the spider a final glance and dashed down the field of boulders to the Institute building. From just outside, I could faintly hear conversation. “Azarias, why won’t you explain why we’re still trying to explore Tuonela? We don’t have long until we have to depart; should we not be working on figuring out the tram mechanism?”
When I heard this, my brow furrowed, and I burst through the front entrance. “Azarias, you still haven’t told them? Is that why you let me sleep for so long? Don’t you realize it’s going to get harder and harder to do it in secret as the deadline approaches?”
Azarias wouldn’t meet my eyes. The other Explorers turned to face me, countless questions on their tongues.
I shook my head and pointed at Azarias. “No, I won’t explain; I’m not your leader. He is, and he’s being a coward.”
There was a brief flash of anger on Azarias’s face, but it instantly faded as he sighed and his gaze turned to indifferent ice. “Everyone, for each friend you have outside this group, raise a finger in the air.”
The group was confused, but did as he said. The end results were low for most of the group, with a few notable exceptions. One girl was even raising five fingers. It was Taika, the one who had fallen off the spider’s bridge on the first return journey.
I felt my heart sink. Hasn’t she been through enough already?
Azarias said, “Taika is going to make a great sacrifice for the good of everyone. But really, she isn’t the one we should be sad for. Taika, can you give me the names of four of your friends?”
Taika reluctantly listed four names I didn’t recognize.
“For those four, we should take a long moment of silence. But of course, I’ll explain first. Enza and I have been keeping something from you all, and I apologize greatly for it. We—well, the credit goes mostly to her—figured out how to make the tram start. At least, we’re pretty sure. We can’t say for sure that it’ll work unless we run a real trial. The requirements for a real trial are four living people, assuming we want a group of four to embark on the first expedition. We have to kidnap, and most likely we have to murder.”
The immediate reactions of the Explorers were entirely different from what I expected. They pretty much already knew what was going on. Their replies went something like: “Why didn’t you tell us earlier? What, you thought we couldn’t handle it, or that we wouldn’t believe you? You can’t bear knowledge like that on your own; it’s a burden. Why do you say that four of Taika’s friends have to die? The requirement simply calls for people who are friends of the Explorers, and didn’t specify that they all had to be one specific Explorer’s friends. The fairest thing to do is evenly divide the burden amongst each other. This isn’t as surprising to us as you probably thought it would be; a lot of us figured someone would be dying in the process of leaving. Nobody forgot the spider’s ominous message.”
Azarias replied, “I accept the ways in which I’ve failed in this situation. For more context on my idea about Taika, I figured it would be best to concentrate the burden of the emotional pain in one person and then repay that person however we can in the future. That would mean nobody else had to get hurt, at least when considering the Explorers.”
What kind of insane idea is that? What’s wrong with him?
The others echoed my thoughts and rejected Azarias’s suggestion. Perhaps they would have agreed wholeheartedly if Taika were someone they didn’t like.
Another person interjected, “Don’t you think it’s unfair to place the burdens of death on the people not exploring? Theoretically, all the damage could be contained within our group.”
This idea was immediately shot down, and when I thought about it, I immediately understood why. Our small group had collectively assigned a status to ourselves. We had put ourselves on a pedestal above the rest, perhaps without consciously realizing it was happening. This internal dynamic only contributed to our social isolation; naturally, our desire to act selflessly toward the others was lessened. Even though our task was meant to be for the good of everyone, was that supposed to make us automatically self-sacrificial? On the contrary, we had turned our mandatory role into a symbol of pride that only we could possess.
We were to be both saviors and killers. All that was left was to make a selection; everybody understood the situation. Even those who would have been most concerned for the lives of others earlier were feeling the pressure. When power is granted, and self-preservation is on the line, morality disappears. A deadline only exacerbates this: three hours remained.
On the topic of power, we only had the power to make the choice to act, not the power of overwhelming strength. We had agreed on a group of four, as it was the max capacity of the tram. We figured that if expeditions had such a cost to perform, then getting as much as we could out of the first one was our best option. Perhaps we’d only have to do one.
So that meant we had to kill four people—no, not just kill them, but kidnap them, alive. There were many logistical problems with doing that beyond the mere morality, and now, since we had procrastinated so much, those logistical problems were thrown right into our faces. There were around 30 in our group total, but the other group had hundreds. Sure, they were all looking to us to get going and save them from the spider right now, but I predicted they would turn on us if we suddenly revealed the Explorers would be permitted to kill people in order for exploration to begin. I imagined they would forget that it was preservation for everyone and focus on the morality of those doing the killing.
With the three hours we now had, there were two broad paths we could take. We could immediately reveal the offering requirement to the others, or we could do everything possible to take four people in complete secret.
We headed to the playground while we refined our plan. We agreed that the first thing to decide on was who would die. Since we had rejected Azarias’ earlier proposal of making it be all the friends of one person, we had to think of a way to make it fair. Teresa suggested the idea of randomness. She pulled out a small cube she had carved from black stone. Each side had a number of indents.
Azarias looked surprised as he swung back and forth on the swing set, which blew back his sandy hair. “How did you think to make that? Tell me, what would you call it if you gave it a name?”
“It’s a die. You throw it into the air, and there’s roughly a one-in-six chance it lands on any particular side.”
Azarias smiled lightly. “Interesting what is preserved, and what is not…”
Teresa said, “It’s about as fair as it gets. No person should have to have more than one friend die, at the maximum. If we need four people, that’s one per person. We can do a reverse tournament; each person here goes against another with dice rolls until only four are left. In this tournament, the winners will be the losers. Not everyone here will enter the tournament, only those who made friends outside the group. Also, I think that the four losers don’t necessarily have to be the four who go on the first expedition. That should depend on qualification.”
We silently agreed to Teresa’s proposal with shadowy expressions. The tournament happened shortly after that, and took even less time than I expected. In the end, the losers had been narrowed down to four people I didn’t know very well or have a personal interest in. I felt grateful, but also guilty for feeling grateful.
The four losers didn’t react much. As the tournament proceeded, they probably began to resign themselves to the possibility that it would be them. And everyone was thinking something else: the ones whose friends were selected didn’t have nearly as much of a right to feel bad as the friends themselves.
Aleksi walked to the edge of the hill and asked the four to point out who their friends were. After they did, he started making carvings on a boulder with only his fingers. His hands dashed and cut line after line, and within minutes there were four photorealistic images. Everyone took turns memorizing their expressions.
Two hours and thirty minutes remaining. With the event of the tournament, we had once again lost time to morality. We had lost time to fairness.
Maybe the tournament was just our way of mentally delaying the inevitable. Now that it was over, there was no getting around it: the hard part was here. To make matters worse, it was the middle of the day; nobody would be sleeping anytime soon.
Was there any way of hiding what we were about to do?
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