WEEK 0 — ARRIVAL

[cartesio]

Week 0: Arrival

When you wake up you immediately feel something’s off. You sit on the bed and find it’s not your bed, and this isn’t your room either. You seem to be in a rather normal-looking motel room. To your side there’s a trunk, if you open it you’ll find a military uniform, the key to your room, a set of rules and a debit card. Don’t lose those items! Or do lose the rules, you'll find a brand new copy the next day under your pillow. There’s also a calendar on the wall, you can see today’s date. The year is unreadable, but the month and day are very clear:

March 28^th
There it says ‘Meet the Sergeant at the Lodge, 9:00 AM’. There’s also a circle around March 31st, with the word ‘END’ scrawled there.

For now leaving your motel room would be a good choice. When you reach the lobby, you see the receptionist’s desk— no one’s manning it. There’s a rack filled with maps, marking several locations in the town.

There are also many strangers here – and you’re one more. For now it may be a good idea to take a map and explore the town.

After all, looks like you’re stuck here in the boonies for a while.

Links

IC Rules
Room Assignments
Locations
Tasks (LOCKED currently)

March 28^th
March 29^th
March 30^th

Comments

[streetwolf]

The what problem?

[Hi, who are you? He's the not very bright hoodie boy.]

[snailedit]

Trolley. ...It's a thought experiment about morality. In the most popular version, there's a runaway trolley and a person inside, who only has a switch that can change the direction of the train track. Let me show you.

[She had a pen with her and her letter, which she'll flip over to draw a diagram on the back.]

We'll call the straight track 'A' and the side track 'B'. The trolley is currently on track A. On track A, five workers are working on the railway, and track B, there is one more worker doing the same thing. If nothing is done, the trolley will definitely kill the five workers on track A. Flip the switch, though, and you've condemned the one worker on track B. Question is, which choice is more ethical? Some would say the train operator has a moral obligation to try and save a higher net value of lives. Their opponents would say that you can't talk about net value when it comes to people, and it's actually more immoral to choose who lives and who dies.

There can be a lot of variants on the original problem, but that's basically it.

[streetwolf]

Uhh...[Sorry Mira. But Wayne's a practical guy, anything that involves things too much and he isn't interested.]

Why don't they just move their asses away from the tracks?

[snailedit]

Because they're stupid? [Mira smiles wryly.] What they do isn't really the point of the experiment, anyway. You could decide to do nothing and then they jump out of the way, but it wouldn't automatically remove you from accountability there.

[streetwolf]

I always figured they closed the lines when they did that stuff. Or that I'd ever be driving a train... What kinda question is that? [He's scratching his head. He's the guy who looks at the questions in a maths book and questions why someone would buy 39 watermelons.]