4338.209 · July 28, 2018 AD
Flexible Ethics
Paul's camp is haemorrhaging people, and the ones who stayed are bleeding. Walking to the Portal with a mental spreadsheet of disasters, he does what any desperate man would — he stops managing the crisis and starts weaponising it. A woman with a Portal and a taste for action just needs the right word. Not errand. Not favour. Mission. But the moment you start treating moral compromise as logistics, the questions you should be asking have a way of going unanswered.
The camp behind him has shrunk to canvas and dust. Ahead, the Portal shimmers with the only advantage Paul has left — a doorway between worlds and a woman who doesn't sit idle. Beatrix has already delivered more supplies than he expected, and she's barely been a Guardian for a day. She acts, she moves, she doesn't wait for consensus. All she needs is direction.
Paul gives her one. Not a request — a mission. The framing is deliberate, the language chosen with the precision of a man who spent years in boardrooms learning that people respond to purpose more readily than obligation. What he's asking her to do would have horrified him a week ago. Now it feels like the only honest answer to a world that offers nothing on its own.
But pragmatism has a cost, and Paul can feel himself paying it in real time. A question about Duke gets deflected and he lets it slide. A wounded man stands at the Portal pretending his leg isn't failing. And somewhere beneath the grim satisfaction of solving the shelter problem, a voice that sounds uncomfortably like Claire's asks what kind of man he's becoming out here.
