one word on the board—JUSTICE—and drew a set of tracks.
“Five workers,” he said, “one lever, and one life on the side line.”
Most hands rose when he asked if it was permissible to pull the lever and save five.
When he asked about pushing a stranger off a bridge to stop the trolley, the room went quiet.
Jamie felt her stomach tighten, because the math stayed the same while her instincts changed.
Reed called it the clash between outcomes and duties, between Bentham and Kant.
He warned that philosophy was dangerous because it made normal people doubt their certainties.
Jamie didn’t smile, because she could feel her own certainties slipping.
After class, she went to her internship at the Chicago Transit Authority, a compliance desk buried in safety memos.
She wasn’t an engineer, just a second set of eyes who checked whether policy matched reality.
That week, she kept seeing the same phrase in reports: “rare event,” repeated like a charm.
At home, her dad asked why she looked drained, and Jamie said, “We argued about who deserves to live.”
He said the world didn’t work like thought experiments.
Jamie wanted to believe him, but she’d learned the world still had levers.
Two days later, Reed assigned a real case: sailors who killed a cabin boy to survive after a shipwreck.
Jamie read the court’s answer—necessity is not a defense to murder—and felt both relieved and unsettled.
Relieved, because lines mattered, and unsettled, because desperation didn’t.
On Thursday, she stayed late, scanning track-maintenance waivers that quietly loosened safety rules.
A supervisor breezed by and said the overnight crew would “manage like they always do.”
Jamie underlined the waiver date and wondered who “always” protected.
At 11:19 p.m., her phone buzzed with an internal alert meant for operations staff.
Runaway maintenance cart reported near Roosevelt junction, workers on the line, switch control available.
Jamie stared at the message, realizing the trolley problem wasn’t a drawing anymore.
She ran to the control room as alarms echoed through concrete corridors.
A dispatcher shouted that five workers were clustered ahead of the cart, and one worker was on the side spur.
Jamie’s hand hovered over a real lever as the screen counted down seconds, and she wondered what justice demanded when blood replaced chalk.
Jamie pulled the lever.
On the screen, the cart’s indicator line snapped onto the side spur, and the main-track cluster scattered into safe pockets.
A single figure on the spur didn’t move in time, and the impact hit with a sound that made Jamie’s ears ring.
Operations rushed in, and a supervisor grabbed her shoulder as if she’d set the cart loose herself.
Paramedics flooded the tunnel, while five workers sat shaking against the wall, alive and blinking in disbelief.
Jamie watched the stretcher roll past and saw the victim’s work badge: ELLIOT CRANE.
By morning, the story was everywhere, because Chicago loved a moral drama dressed as a commute disruption.
Headlines called it “THE REAL TROLLEY PROBLEM,” and cable panels argued whether Jamie was brave or reckless.
Elliot’s wife told reporters, through tears, that her husband was “not a math problem.”
CTA leadership released a statement praising “quick thinking,” then quietly placed Jamie on administrative leave.
The same supervisor who’d told her crews would “manage like they always do” wouldn’t return her calls.
Jamie sat in her apartment staring at her class notes on Bentham, feeling the ink turn into accusation.
Professor Reed didn’t gloat when Jamie showed up to class with bruised shadows under her eyes.
He simply rewrote the trolley diagram, then asked, “Now that it happened to someone you can name, do you still pull the lever?”
The room’s answers changed, and Jamie heard her own silence louder than anyone else’s.
Reed introduced Bentham’s idea of utility as if it were a tool and a temptation.
Then he introduced Kant’s line—treat people as ends, not merely means—and looked directly at Jamie.
Jamie felt the split inside her: she had saved five, yet she had used Elliot’s death as the price.
That afternoon, an investigator from the city’s transit oversight office asked Jamie to walk through the sequence again.
When she said she wasn’t trained for emergency switching, he raised an eyebrow and asked why she was at the console.
Jamie didn’t know how to answer without confessing something uglier than guilt: the system put unready people in charge.
Two weeks later, the Cook County State’s Attorney announced a grand jury review.
The prosecutor, Dana Kline, said on camera that “choosing to kill is still choosing,” no matter the motive.
Elliot’s family sat behind her, holding a photo of him in a hard hat with a toddler on his shoulders.
Captain Reed—who suddenly felt less like a professor and more like a trial coach—met Jamie at a diner near campus.
He told her necessity defenses were slippery in American law, and juries hated slippery.
Then he slid a photocopy across the table: Queen v. Dudley and Stephens, highlighted in yellow.
Jamie read the lines again: hunger, desperation, a dead boy, and a court insisting murder stays murder.
Reed asked, “If survival doesn’t excuse killing, does prevention excuse it?”
Jamie stared at the question like it was a mirror that refused to flatter.
At the next class, Reed layered new dilemmas on top of her reality.
He asked whether an ER doctor should save five moderately injured patients over one critically injured patient.
Most students said yes, and Jamie felt her throat tighten because she’d already lived the answer.
Then Reed asked the transplant question—whether a surgeon may kill one healthy person to harvest organs for five.
The room recoiled, and students who had praised utility suddenly sounded like Kantian absolutists.
Jamie understood the pattern: people liked arithmetic until the arithmetic required their own hands.
Dana Kline subpoenaed CTA records, and the case stopped being about one lever and became about a culture.
Emails surfaced showing repeated warnings about runaway carts after budget cuts delayed brake replacements.
One message, from Jamie’s supervisor, read: “We can’t afford another shutdown, keep it moving.”
Kline still focused on Jamie, because prosecutors preferred a face to a spreadsheet.
She offered Jamie a plea deal framed as mercy: reduced charges in exchange for admitting criminal negligence.
Jamie refused, because admitting negligence would protect the people who wrote “rare event” like a spell.
Elliot Crane’s brother confronted Jamie outside the courthouse after a preliminary hearing.
He didn’t threaten her; he simply asked, “Did you see him as a person when you pulled it?”
Jamie tried to answer, but the words broke into fragments, because the truth was unbearable either way.
Reed advised her to tell the whole story, including the part about inadequate training and ignored safety flags.
He warned her that truth could still lose if it sounded like excuse-making.
Jamie practiced saying, “I chose the least death,” without sounding like she’d chosen death at all.
On the first day of the evidentiary hearing, the courtroom was packed with commuters, union reps, and reporters hungry for moral blood.
Dana Kline opened by calling Jamie’s action “intentional homicide dressed as heroism.”
Jamie’s defense attorney, Luis Navarro, countered that Jamie acted under emergency necessity to prevent multiple deaths.
Kline played the control-room audio, and the jury heard the dispatcher scream, “They’re on the line, they’re on the line.”
Then she paused the recording on the moment of the switch click and asked the witness, “Who did she choose to die?”
The question hung over the room like smoke.
When it was Jamie’s turn to testify, she walked to the stand with legs that didn’t feel like hers.
She described the countdown, the screaming, the lever, and the instant she realized a single man was on the spur.
Kline approached slowly and asked, “Ms. Park, did you mean to send that cart toward Elliot Crane?”
Jamie swallowed, because she could see Elliot’s wife in the second row clutching the toddler’s hand.
Kline leaned in closer and asked the question that turned the room into Reed’s classroom again.
“If you had been above the tracks,” she said, “and the only way to stop it was to push one person onto the rail, would you do it?”
Jamie looked at the prosecutor and answered in a voice she barely recognized.
“No,” she said, “I wouldn’t push someone, and I didn’t ‘choose’ a death like a prize.”
Then she added, “I diverted a runaway machine away from five bodies, and I begged the system for a safer option I didn’t have.”
Dana Kline pounced on the word diverted, because language is where trials are won.
“So you admit you redirected harm toward Mr. Crane,” she said, “and you knew a person was there.”
Jamie nodded once, because dodging facts would make her look like a liar.
Her attorney, Luis Navarro, stood for redirect and kept his questions simple.
“Did you create the runaway cart?” he asked.
“No,” Jamie said, and the courtroom finally heard the difference between cause and response.
Navarro asked whether Jamie had time to warn the spur worker, and Jamie explained the countdown and the dead radio channel in the tunnel.
He asked whether the spur was designed as a safety outlet, and an engineer testified it was, on paper, for emergencies.
Then Navarro asked why an intern was in the control room at all, and the witness box turned toward management.
A senior operations manager claimed Jamie “volunteered” to help, but emails told a different story.
Navarro displayed the maintenance waivers Jamie had underlined, signed off without proper review.
One waiver listed “temporary staffing coverage” on the night of the incident, with Jamie’s name typed beside it.
Professor Reed sat in the back row every day, not as counsel but as a steady witness to Jamie’s unraveling and rebuilding.
Between sessions, he explained Bentham and Kant the way a medic explains two different bandages.
“One stops the bleeding fast,” he said, “and one prevents infection later, but both matter if you want the patient to live.”
On the fourth day, a transit mechanic named Roland Pierce testified under subpoena.
He said he’d reported brake failures on the maintenance carts for months and was told to “stop writing doom emails.”
Then he admitted he’d kept copies, because he’d seen how “rare event” language erased responsibility.
The court listened as Roland read a message from an executive director.
“Do not trigger a shutdown,” the email said, “we cannot take the political hit this quarter.”
The jurors shifted, because suddenly the lever looked less like Jamie’s choice and more like a trap set by people who would never touch it.
Dana Kline changed tactics and argued that system failures didn’t erase individual duty.
Navarro agreed, then asked the question that cracked the case open: “Whose duty was it to keep the emergency system staffed by trained operators?”
When the manager answered, “Mine,” the courtroom went so quiet it sounded like snowfall.
At closing, Kline told the jury that Elliot Crane was dead and someone must answer for it.
Navarro told the jury Elliot deserved justice, but justice was not scapegoating the nearest person to a broken machine.
Jamie listened to both and realized moral philosophy was not a game; it was how society decided who carried pain.
The jury deliberated for two days.
Jamie spent the nights walking the lakefront with Reed’s class notes folded in her pocket like a talisman.
She kept replaying Elliot’s badge name and wondering if saving five could ever feel clean.
On the third morning, the foreperson stood and read the verdict: not guilty.
The room exhaled, but Jamie didn’t celebrate, because acquittal didn’t resurrect a father.
Elliot’s wife left the courtroom without looking at Jamie, and Jamie understood that verdicts end cases, not grief.
Outside, cameras swarmed, and Jamie said one sentence and refused the rest.
“I’m grateful the jury saw the full truth,” she said, “and I’m sorry a man died while the system pretended it was normal.”
Then she stepped away, because turning tragedy into a soundbite felt like another kind of harm.
A month later, CTA leadership faced a civil inquiry and federal workplace-safety review.
Roland’s emails triggered disciplinary actions, budget reallocations, and a public report that named negligence without hiding behind euphemisms.
The union demanded training reforms, and the city finally funded brake replacements that had been delayed for years.
Professor Reed invited Elliot’s family to a closed meeting with Jamie, no press allowed.
Jamie didn’t argue outcomes or principles; she just listened and said Elliot’s name out loud.
Elliot’s brother didn’t forgive her, but he nodded once and said, “Make sure nobody else gets forced into that lever.”
Jamie changed her career plan after that.
She and Navarro started a small clinic for transit workers and public employees who reported safety threats and got punished for it.
Reed volunteered as faculty advisor, insisting philosophy mattered most when it protected real people.
In the first semester of the clinic, Jamie met a rookie dispatcher who confessed he’d been told to “follow the script” even when alarms sounded wrong.
Jamie taught him the lesson she’d paid for: procedure is a tool, not a shield, and conscience is not optional.
She didn’t teach him to break rules lightly; she taught him to document, escalate, and refuse silence.
On the last day of Justice 101, Professor Reed drew the trolley again, then erased it.
He told the class that moral questions never stay on paper, because the world builds tracks everywhere.
Jamie looked around and saw students who now understood that confidence without humility can kill.
That evening, Jamie stood on a platform above Roosevelt junction as new safety barriers were installed.
A worker handed her a hard hat sticker that read END MEANS, with a small arrow pointing to the word MEANS.
Jamie laughed for the first time in months, because it felt like Elliot’s lesson had become policy.
She went home, hugged her dad, and told him the world didn’t run on thought experiments, but it did run on choices.
He nodded, then asked if she was okay, and Jamie said, “I’m not the same, but I’m here.”
Outside her window, trains kept moving, quieter now, as if the city had learned to breathe again.
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