Work Text:
In the wake of the Hail Mary Launch, as the outline of the project and what it entailed was slowly released (or, more commonly, leaked) to the public in fits and starts, The Trolley Problem became the three words that haunted Eva Stratt’s narrative. They were the most trending google searches, used as keywords in what seemed like half of the academic journal articles released that year, even the ones that had nothing to do with philosophy or even the humanities at all; they were trending on every social media site. Eva wanted to scream and throw things and let herself have the meltdown she felt like she deserved at this point.
You know nothing about the trolley problem! The seething, raging beast inside of her wanted to snarl rabidly. You didn’t have to strap your best friend to the fucking tracks, and watch him let you do it only because he was convinced he was already dead. The most annoying fucking optimist on this dying rock, and he couldn’t be optimistic about this one thing, and I had to believe in him enough to know that I was driving the trolley to kill him even as I was holding his hand while he went.
She was sleeping in his stupid apartment in San Francisco that she’d kept paying the rent for during the whole project and nobody was brave enough to call her on it even though she didn’t blur the background on any of the zoom calls with the world leaders that she was apparently still in charge of, because nobody even had the fucking decency to put her in prison for her crimes and let her rot away in peace.
The walls were lined with photographs of him, smiling and healthy and strong with his students and his colleagues, in the classroom doing experiments and on field trips with chipper classes who looked smug and exhilarated to have gotten the cool teacher to chaperone their little group. There was a picture of him in the teachers’ lounge, deep into his marking, that one of his colleagues had drawn bunny ears on, and more little polaroids, yellow with age, of him in grad school with his little group of friends, three sheets to the wind in karaoke bars and shitty student living rooms, hands frozen mid-gesticulation as he speculated about the biological mysteries of the unknown universe.
Only Dmitri had questioned whether her new chosen base was perhaps not good for her, but she’d turned on him with such ferocity, teeth gnashing, and spat “I’m captain of this sinking ship and I’ll choose my own fucking cabin, Komorov,” with so much venom that she hadn’t heard from him since. Ha, she thought to herself, with bitter triumph, your anger even scares the Russians.
In the bedside table was the last letter he’d received from his mother- postmarked from a prison, because apparently they wouldn’t arrest you for abandoning your kid or making his life such a living hell that a youth’s homeless shelter was a better choice at sixteen, but they would arrest you for nicking booze from a Walmart of all places- asking for money for her commissary account. The page was tearstained and Eva knew Grace had only kept it because the prison records indicated that his mother had died of cirrhosis a month later.
Nobody bothered her about the trolley problem, Eva thought as she screamed into a pillow (because the apartment was cheap and the walls were too thin and the neighbors would hear). Throw your own kid to the fucking wolves, but that’s okay, she thought spitefully. It’s not as bad as asking him to die for the sake of the world. Guess that makes me the fucking villain, even though in any other universe in any other situation, I’d have torn the fucking trolley apart with my bare hands before I let Ryland Grace anywhere near it.
A knock on the door disrupts her from her maudlin musings, and she wants to scream again, because security is supposed to make sure she’s left alone, and Carl is good enough at his job that he shouldn’t be letting anyone in. She didn’t hear a scuffle, so that meant he was probably fine, and the most likely answer was that he was being less of an employee and more of a person with empathy (ewww) who thought she needed human contact.
Either that or it was a really silent assassin, and Eva found she wasn’t even bothered enough by the possibility to reach for her taser on the side table.
“What the fuck do you want?” she snapped, as soon as she saw Lokken at the door. She’d already used all of the diplomacy she could scrounge up for the day on a call with the Kremlin, to explain to them exactly why she wasn’t going to just ‘let them have Astrophage’ for the greenhouse farming project without sending some of her own people to supervise. She thought it was rather magnanimous of her not to mention the last time Russia had free reign over a massive agriculture project without involving specialists, but she had quite firmly told them to “quit stalling, I’m not changing my mind” taking advantage of her accent and twisting the word just the right way to almost sound like “Stalin.” Plausible deniability.
The astrophage-powered greenhouses had been a joint effort between LeClerc, Grace, and an agricultural specialist whose name she couldn’t be bothered to remember. Grace had been really passionate about it, and Eva’s original plan had been to put him as the administrative head as soon as he’d finished with chemo and recovered a bit.
Yes, she’d known he wanted to go back to teaching at his little middle school, but she hadn’t been about to let him run off, unprotected, after he’d been first officer of one of the most highly publicized and highly controversial projects since the post-war era. He could give guest lectures on zoom as often as she could reasonably arrange, but he was staying by her side, dammit!
Or, that had been the plan, until the quarter master had ruined it with his negligence. Officially, he was serving a life sentence in a Chinese prison. In reality, he hadn’t survived the journey. It brought her a vicious satisfaction and was the one bit of pettiness she’d allowed herself once she realized what had to happen- what she had to do- due to his mistake. But nobody knew about that except her and the Cantonese assassin she’d arranged it with, so she put it out of her head and kept glaring at Lokken.
“Dimitri said we should give you space, but he’s an idiot,” Lokken replied, unintimidated by the rude reception. She spoke English, because Stratt had, even though they both spoke fluent German.
Once upon a time, her German had been better than her English. Now though, after so long using English as a lengua franca with the Hail Mary team, it seemed like even her thoughts were in English instead of her native Norwegian. She didn’t know how to feel about that. She didn’t even know how much of it was work related and how much of it was because of all the nights she laid awake in bed allowing herself the impossible fantasy that maybe Ryland would give her a reason to use English after the project had ended. That maybe he wasn’t actually against romance in general, but that he just hadn’t met the right person, and that that was the reason he politely tried to hide his discomfort whenever DuBois discussed ‘sexual congress.’ That maybe she could be the right person, and that they’d have playful arguments about the Goldilocks zone in front of little faces with his ridiculous hair and her steely eyes and rapid minds like both of them.
In the dreams, she ignored how irresponsible it would be to bring children into the world they were in. She ignored the fact that Ryland thought they were- as he put it in rather juvenile terms- ‘frenemies’ at best. And she ignored that she could never hope to change his nature.
She was so pathetically infatuated that even the rumors about ‘sexual congress’ with Stratt gave her hope, because that would at least have meant that he could feel the sort of things that she did, even if it wasn’t with her (yet). It was all so hopelessly, stupidly sappy and American of her, and she hated herself a little for it.
She had never gotten on with Stratt. She wasn’t sure how much of it was the fact that she’d been basically drafted onto the project, how much of it was the natural similarities in their personalities clashing against each other like pushing two of the same type of magnets against each other, and how much of it was jealously over the man whose ghost was currently haunting both the apartment whose threshold she was standing on and the woman whose eyes she was glaring into.
She didn’t care to know. What she cared about now was that she was devastated and angry and she wanted someone else to be devastated and angry with. Or maybe devastated and angry at.
“You should have sent the Paraguayan,” she said, in lieu of sharing any of these thoughts.
“Jesus fucking Christ, don’t you think I wanted to?” Stratt replied, finally moving aside to let her into the apartment. She briefly checked the paper schedule taped to the wall (because she was very traditional that way), and, apparently finding it satisfactorily free of meetings, grabbed two bottles of something. The labels were in Russian, which Lokken couldn’t read. But it was clear, so she could guess, and she took the one Stratt offered her silently.
“I was so close, too,” Stratt admitted, a second and an eternity later. It took Lokken a second to remember what they were talking about, as she forced herself not to cough as the aggressive burn of the vodka slid down her throat and settled in her chest. “I thought to myself, ‘well, he’s sick, nobody would blame me if I sent her instead. It might even seem logical,’ and I wanted to, but I just couldn’t.”
“Why not?” Lokken challenged.
“Because it would have been selfish, and when I was thrust into this, I promised myself I wouldn’t ever be.” There was a heaviness to Stratt that hadn’t been there even during the longest, most uncertain days of the project. Lokken would have said that it was because she lacked purpose, but she didn’t- even now, even against what Stratt herself had expected- she was still in charge of the world. She was still the Atlas that no-one had asked for but that everyone demanded all the same.
“Selfish to save a man’s life?” Lokken pushed, pointing the bottle aggressively towards Stratt and only then noticing that she’d definitely drunk too much too fast. Her head spun. “Selfish to let a qualified volunteer go instead?”
“She wasn’t qualified!” Stratt nearly roared back, fire in her eyes. “She just had a degree that was, in the most generous of terms, tangentially related, and she had the right genes! But Ryland was the most qualified person on the fucking planet and it’s the world’s blessing and my fucking travesty that he had the damn gene too!”
“He was dying, Stratt,” Lokken hissed. “Wasting away before our eyes. You should have sent him away the second Dr. Lamai diagnosed him.”
“Don’t you think I know that?” Stratt snapped. “I wanted to- you cannot possibly imagine how much I wanted to! But nobody else could do it like him! Nobody thought like him, and nobody on that damn carrier could bring people together like him either!”
“Or you’re selfish after all and just wanted to keep him close,” the other woman accused.
“Oh, like you can talk, with your pathetic little crush,” Stratt laughed bitterly. “Trust me, I may have wanted him close, but I wanted him safe more. If I was selfish, I would have done whatever it took to keep him here and keep him alive. If I was selfish, I wouldn’t be the fucking dictator of the world in the first place. But they asked me, because nobody else was willing to do what was needed despite what it would do to them, and despite the way the world would look at me afterwards.”
“Oh, don’t martyr yourself,” Lokken sneered, digging her fingers into the couch cushion beneath her.
“Trust me, I’m not. People like martyrs,” Stratt replied. “I know where I stand. But don’t call me selfish. If I was even a little bit selfish, I’d have resigned by now and let myself mope away the rest of my days in a prison somewhere where people would just leave me the fuck alone! But I’m not selfish. I’m so fucking altruistic that I’m destroying myself from the inside out to make the choices nobody else will, which included launching the only person who ever cared about me for who I was and not what I could do 12 fucking light years away!”
“Who are you now?” Lokken asked quietly, startling Stratt.
“What?” she asked, still breathing heavily but confused enough that her voice was slightly softer than it had been.
“You said Ryland was the only person who ever cared about you for who you were. So who are you now?”
Stratt was silent for a long time. Lokken began to think that she would leave and that Carl would be here any second to escort her out. But finally, Eva spoke, almost too low to hear.
“I’m the fucking trolley.”
They drank in silence for the rest of the afternoon, and then Lokken got on a flight to Oslo and privately decided that Dmitri was right and that he’d just realized sooner than she had that Eva Stratt wasn’t selfish, but they were. They were too selfish to share her burden, and that they’d sat by and turned a blind eye while she made the hard call to shoot the only person who’d been willing to do so into space.
Fucking altruistic, indeed.