One man's choice

“If this isn’t up by 6:00pm, there will be consequences" My boss says through gritted teeth as I nod without taking my eyes off the monitor. The deadline for Project Nadia is in an hour. The project, however, has been finished for two weeks. 

My head is throbbing as I hover over the papers, pretending to work. Outside, I can hear the crowd already gathering for the launch announcement. A massive conference bustling with ambassadors, CEOs, even a president or two. My boss, Mr. Roberts surely has his grand speech prepared, and he’ll be counting on me for the live demo. I’m just trying to hear my own thoughts over the blood pounding in my ears.

Project Nadia began as my breakthrough. A cheap, universally adaptable smart polymer designed to replace every single synthetic material on Earth. The disposable coffee cups people drink out of every morning, the clothes they wear, the screens of the phones they stare at all day. It would be self cleaning, recyclable, and supposed to end the global waste crisis overnight. 

The short-term demos we did for testing were promising, there were no immediate side effects to the product. It would be decades before the toll truly began to weigh on the population. Because what the short term testing didn't reveal is how Nadia's molecular structure degrades when exposed to years of human body heat and sunlight. In about two decades, the items people touch everyday will begin shedding synthetic dust. The landfills will empty and the oceans will be free of garbage, but the air will become filled with microscopic shards that rapidly damage the lungs of every breathing creature who relies on aerobic respiration, suffocating most of Earth’s species, including the human race.

I discovered this flaw three weeks ago, when I was just about finished with Nadia. I couldn’t bring myself to not finish her, after seven years of work. But as soon as I was done I felt a dreadful feeling on my stomach. I took her apart twice, trying to bypass the flaw, trying to come up with a contingency plan, but all the numbers led to the same answer. I even tried bringing it up to Robertson, citing long-term problems and begging for an extended phase to try and fix it. He practically laughed me out of his office. The company isn't going to spend another billion dollars into solving a problem that won't surface until long after the board members have retired.

These past weeks, as I’ve lied to my boss and my team about a critical bug that popped up out of nowhere, I’ve actually been visualizing the ways in which this could play out over and over again. I’m not so young anymore, so I probably won’t see the worst of it. By the time awareness arises I’ll be in my seventies, enjoying the money that will set me up for life with this deal. My wife will get to work until she wishes to stop. Maybe she’ll write that book she’s been talking about for years. My kids will get a good education, and their kids, and if they’re careful, their kids’ kids as well. Except probably not, because by the time my kids' grandkids reach college, they’ll have bigger things to worry about than their SATS. And I will die knowing the worst is yet to come. So what even is the point?

If we launch, I can't just sound the alarms. The company owns the data, the testing models, and the NDAs that bind my entire career. If I tried to warn the press, their legal team would bury the evidence and me with it. I predict it will be about twenty-five years until the media starts blaming users for buying in the product, telling them their behavior is killing our planet. The movement against the usage of Nadia will start to grow and about two years later it will be the plastic straws debate all over again. But as people protest, share infographics on social media, and exhaust themselves trying to boycott a material that is already a part of everything, I would know exactly who was to blame. Me, and the 82 people who work in this building. 

I stare at the blinking cursor on my terminal. One command. That’s all it would take to wipe the repository, to kill the prototype before it ever sees the light of day. I could stand up right now, walk out of this room, and let Project Nadia die.

I know the math on that, too. Robertson would ruin me. I’d face corporate sabotage charges, perhaps political treason, depending on which presidents are sitting in the front row. The money I was promised would disappear. My wife would have to keep working her shifts and her book would remain unwritten. My kids would inherit my debt instead of my wealth. I would be branded a madman who cracked under the pressure of his own genius.

I have contemplated suicide as well, of course. Over these past few nights when the darkest thoughts have crept in. They come mainly in the early hours of the morning, after sleepless nights where all I crave is for this to be over. And all I wish is that I’d never left my old job, never had accepted this position. Hell, I start wishing I studied English like I originally wanted to instead of engineering. So, eventually I start blaming my father for all of this. And it starts feeling like an inescapable prophecy that I would have to endure this choice, with no way out but to put an end to my life. It’s around that moment that exhaustion usually takes over, and when I wake up three hours later, I’m taken aback that my mind even went there. It wouldn’t fix anything, I’d only be leaving my mess to my family.

I push away from the desk, the wheels of my chair scraping against the floor and startling the other ten engineers that have been not so subtly looking over at me for the past days. The anxiety that I might fail to finish this is written plainly in their eyes.

“Hey boss, if there’s anything you need just let us know” Johnny, my newest intern, says timidly from his desk.

I drag my hands down my face and focus on the lab’s ventilation grate overhead. Johnny’s twenty-two, eager for a full time offer, and blissfully unaware of the dangers of this project. He thinks I’m just struggling to fix a last minute issue that I haven’t had the time to explain to my team. He won't realize what we've actually built until maybe a year from now, when he finally gets promoted and granted clearance to the long term biometric simulations. 

The senior engineers sitting behind him are facing a much more nuanced dilemma, because they already know everything I know. Marcus refuses to meet my gaze, suddenly focused on a particularly interesting excel sheet, and Sarah has been twirling her hair for so long I think it might fall off. We all ran the same degradation models three weeks ago. We all saw the molecular shedding projections, the three decade countdown until the air starts turning into synthetic glass. The difference is, Marcus and Sarah don’t have any real authority to make decisions around here. So, while they were perfectly happy to argue with me over the thermal thresholds of the curing vats, they’ve decided to leave this one to me.

If I wipe the drive right now, it doesn't end here. Robertson won't kill the project, he’ll just pivot. He’ll gracefully handle the disappointment of postponing tonight’s launch and reassign the repository reconstruction over to Marcus or Sarah. And it’s one thing to stay quiet and let something like this happen, but would they actively rebuild Nadia from scratch, knowing exactly what it will do to the atmosphere? I look at Marcus, whose son has a heart defect that the remuneration from this launch will easily cover. I look at Sarah, who is drowning in student loans. Even if their conscience overrode their needs, Robertson would just fire them, going from one desperate PhD student to another until he found a team willing to look the other way.

I reach out, resting my fingers against the keyboard. I just have to press the key.

But then again, how many years am I really buying the planet? How many years will it take Marcus, Sarah, or whoever replaces them to replicate my code? Two years? Three? If I kill Nadia today, I won’t stop the apocalypse, I’d just be delaying it. And I will see the exact same fate through, except I’ll be watching it broke and unemployed while someone else takes the credit. 

And even if they can't replicate it and all of this magically goes away, killing Nadia just means letting the world rot on its original schedule. This generation has already sentenced the planet. We have proven, year after year, that we are incapable of stopping our own destruction. Without my polymer, the landfills will continue to overflow. Microplastics will finish poisoning the water, and the toxic waste from our consumption will choke whatever is left of the atmosphere. We’re already suffocating under our own garbage. 

Nadia will heal the Earth. It will be a miracle. Even if just a temporary one. I will be regarded as the savior of the modern age. For thirty, maybe thirty-five years, it will be a golden era of clean consumption. Right up until the coughing starts. By that point, the burden will belong to a new generation. I’m hoping someone else would’ve already realized this and come up with a contingency plan that actually works. A better biochemist than me, perhaps.

“It's time!” Robertson shouts, popping his head inside the lab and breaking the heavy silence. Marcus, Sarah, Jon and the rest of the engineers look over at me. Directly, this time. Their eyes fixed on me, as expectant as damned souls on judgement day.

My eyes stay locked on the terminal. The cursor pulses beside the command that would end this, at least for tonight. Right next to it is the hard-drive, waiting to be ejected and presented to the world as their salvation. I listen to the muffled roar of the auditorium beyond the wall. They expect a miracle today. I could give it to them. Or I could back down, killing the dream and forcing humanity to face the problem we've already created and for which we have no solution. My fingers stay frozen in the space between the two choices. No man should have to choose the fate of the world. And if one does, it will not be me. We have already failed to save the Earth from our own garbage, but maybe the people of tomorrow will be smarter. Maybe filtering synthetic dust from the air will be an easier puzzle to solve. It’s a terrible gamble, trading one doom for another, but at least it gives them a chance to try. And thirty years is a long time.