Posit a man. He could be any man. She could be a woman. They could be any human being anywhere on the spectrum. The story would play out the same. This is, however, entirely the creation of a writer who has written plenty of formidable women, and so he exerts authority for this one time and says that this is a man, who may default to any description the reader chooses, in any home environment the reader pictures. Beyond this, the author takes no position. There is a man, an adult male and in his home environment, facing a stranger who has entered his home and placed a suitcase filled with money on the coffee table.

The man says, “No.”

Of the stranger, the reader can make any assumption that rings true. Let us say that he, too, is a man: a prosperous one, formal and polite, with features that default to a mild smile. He has sprung the suitcase open, revealing many arrayed bundles of crisp American hundreds. Put him in a suit, if you wish. Posit him naked as a babe, if you wish, though that is a detail a narrative intent on that image would have to devote considerable effort to justify. Fortunately, the author does not have to. There is the viewpoint character, a man, the intruding stranger, another man; the dynamic precisely and only that: one human being in his place of comfort, the intruder offering an alteration in the status quo.

The stranger says, “I haven’t told you what I want yet.”

“That’s okay. I don’t need to know. I refuse.”

“You’re an odd person.”

“I’ve been told this.”

“Nevertheless, you have to be curious.”

“Of course I am,” the protagonist of this story says. “I’m human. You show me a gift-wrapped present and I wonder what’s in it. In restaurants, I glance over at the next table to see what my fellow diners are eating. The desire to know is always a factor. The need to know is a lesser one, one tempered with the knowledge that I’m likely better off not knowing.”

“Don’t you want me to tell you, at least, how much money this is?”

“I can do the math. Those are bundles of hundreds. They are supposed to be five thousand dollars apiece. Assuming that the interior bills are not, let’s say, ones, and that the bundles are stacked in the quantity the space implies, that’s about a million dollars.”

“It’s more than a million dollars.”

“Can’t be much more.”

“It’s significantly more. We didn’t count out a million. We just filled the briefcase until the grouping was tight and the neat stacks wouldn’t bounce around in transit. That’s a factor of the interior dimensions, and by the time we were done, the cash totaled one million, one hundred sixty thousand. You benefit from our quartermaster buying a somewhat larger case for this negotiation. Lucky you. It could have been a smaller case, with a smaller sum.”

“That’s interesting, but my answer is still no.”

“May I ask why?”

“Sure.”

There is here a notable pause, the visitor waiting for the protagonist to volunteer information, the protagonist waiting for the visitor to give up and just ask already.

“. . . why?”

“Because I know the way it works. Nobody comes to somebody’s house with a suitcase full of money unless the conditions are illicit, unless they represent a substantial risk to the recipient’s life or freedom or unless the conditions of receiving the money are morally repugnant. I choose not to play the game.”

“I never said this was a game.”

“Everything’s a game.”

“This money is yours for agreeing to perform a task of our choosing.”

“Interesting, but no.”

“The terms are that you accept the money first, before the task is specified. If you find it repellent, you may refuse, in which case that option goes away and you are offered an alternative. Refuse that one and you must perform the third, or incur a substantial penalty of our choosing. More options will be presented, with increasing penalties for demurral, until you finally agree to one rather than take the penalties.”

“It certainly sounds like a game to me.”

“It would. Nevertheless, our key goal here is getting you to accept this money.”

“Too bad you’re doomed to failure.”

There is here another pause. It is punctuated by the sound of a ticking clock, somewhere else in the house. The sound is comforting to the protagonist, an increasing irritant to the visitor.

“You still say no.”

“Of course I do.”

“You are not in the slightest bit tempted.”

“I don’t need a million dollars enough to murder somebody for it.”

“I never said that murder was a possibility.”

“No, you didn’t. But it is, isn’t it? In the stories it is.”

“The tasks are entirely random. Some are value-neutral: like going into the next room and making yourself a grilled cheese sandwich. Or if you don’t have cheese or bread handy, going to a local diner and buying one. Others are more unpleasant, like giving yourself a paper cut in the web of your right thumb. These are minor inconveniences in exchange for a briefcase containing one million plus.”

“Yes, but the options don’t stop there, do they?”

“No. They do not.”

“Imagine my surprise.”

“The tasks are determined by an algorithm reflecting millions of possible choices. Chances are well over 99% that the first one assigned to you will be benign. If it is unacceptable and you choose to hear an alternative, the odds are virtually astronomical against you receiving another you must refuse; like finding one individual grain of sand in the Gobi against receiving a terrible option on your third try.”

“Yes. And having to murder somebody is still on the list, somewhere, right?”

“The point is that of the millions of options available, representing quadrillion-to-one odds against having to do something your conscience would refuse, evil acts are so sparsely represented that there’s virtually no shot of you finding yourself irrevocably stuck with one.”

“I agree.”

“You might be required to spend some Saturday volunteering at a local food bank.”

“And that sounds nice enough, but on a philosophical level would be pretty horrible. Me doing something nice like that and getting all the kudos that go along with being a nice person, when I only did it because I’ve been offered a million dollars.”

“The point is that the task picked for you will almost certainly not be evil.”

“No. The point is that if your algorithm asks me to do a nice thing, it won’t mean I’m a nice person, and if it asks me to do a terrible thing, and I surrender to the necessity, it does make me an evil person.”

“But the odds—”

“The odds don’t matter. If I agree to play this game—”

“I repeat, I never called it a game.”

“If I agree to participate in this activity, I am saying that the certainty of receiving a million dollars plus justifies the possibility however remote of being required to do something evil, like kill somebody, or rape somebody, or kick somebody’s crutches out from under them. I am saying that the million dollars, plus, makes participation in evil an acceptable risk. Even if I say I agree to this and the required task proves to be no more noxious than that grilled-cheese sandwich, I still accept the money knowing that I will still spend my life aware that that having to commit a great crime like murder was a risk I found acceptable. I say no, which is why I’ve been saying no since the very beginning. I don’t need the million dollars, plus, that badly. I prefer to keep what I have.”

“You are not a gambler.”

“I sure as hell am. I play poker with my friends. I go to the casino, sit at the Blackjack table or press buttons at the slot machine. But the key element of that game, the one that the casino management posts in prominent places to help ameliorate their own responsibility for taking advantage of people with gambling addictions, is that I go with the pocketful of money that I know I can afford to lose. Regardless of what the task I receive turns out to be, I lose much more just by agreeing to participate than I will ever gain by taking whatever that million-plus is supposed to pay me more. You come here and place that briefcase on my table, at the bare minimum you are tempting me in some way, and so I am not tempted, and that is why I am saying that from the beginning.”

“You’ve thought this out.”

“Never at all before today. I’m just a fast thinker.”

“You may not have all the angles figured.”

“More than you believe I do. For instance, would I take your offer if you quietly whispered that you’re working on a quota and are falling behind on the number of people you needed to entice today? If you quietly showed me a card guaran-damn-teeing the algorithm would pick a harmless option for me? If I knew, going in, that all I would have to do in order to grab that million-plus was pluck ten blades of grass from my lawn?”

“I assume that you’re about to tell me that you would say no.”

“You assume correctly.”

“And for god’s sake why? You would be guaranteed no culpability for evil acts.”

“I would sure as hell not be. You, and whoever funds you, remain in the picture. You are still offering a million-plus at a shot, to total strangers, in exchange for performing an act yet unspecified. Mine might be harmless, and the same might be true for the task provided for whoever comes after me, and for the poor schmuck after that, and the one after that. But the tally is not, No harm done. The tally is, inexorably using up the number of harmless results by chance, before someone is finally asked to go after a neighbor kid with a power drill. Even a guaranteed positive result still feeds whatever ungodly satisfaction you and your people derive from doing this thing, and that supports the weight you put on the next person down the line, and, again, the one after that. It is only by refusing to participate in any way that I avoid supporting the eventual evil act. And again, only by refusing that I wind up ahead. So, no thank you.”

“That’s a firm no, then?”

“You’re a slow learner. Are we done?”

“No.”

“I was afraid of that.”

“It is a key element of our business model that in the rare cases where people do say no and won’t stir from that position, we assuage their curiosity and tell them what task the algorithm would have chosen.”

“I’m not interested.”

“Even now?”

“Especially now. You tell me that it was something harmless, like changing the oil in the car, or doing fifty jumping jacks, and I am intended to stare after you in forlorn sadness, thinking about all the money I lost by being a moral prig, unwilling to take a small risk for a large reward. You tell me that it was something horrible, like murdering my next-door neighbor, and I get a jolt to my ego underlying a sneaky belief in my own infallibility. I am not at all interested in the post-mortems. I am much better off thinking that I probably dodged a bullet, and if you don’t mind leaving, I’ll just—”

“Sorry. We are not yet done.”

“It must save you time when some greedy bastard just says yes.”

“It does. What would you say if I told you that all this has been a divine test, and that you have passed with flying colors, thus establishing you as one of the ninety-nine truly virtuous people known to exist in all the world?”

“I would say that’s pretty nice, and that you can still leave with that ringing in my ears.”

“What if I said that only people who pass the test get the briefcase?”

“I would say that’s also nice but then repeat that I don’t want it.”

“Why?”

“Because, even if all that were true, I cannot know it. You have already established yourself as a liar. It doesn’t matter whether you’re lying for good or evil. You’re still lying. The possibility that this is still some kind of manipulation, that you have evil purposes in mind, remains significant. I cannot accept the money with that remaining a possibility.”

“What if I provided you absolute proof and left you no doubt?”

“You mean, what if you could absolutely guarantee, leaving no doubt whatsoever, that this money was always meant for someone who cleared all your moral hoops and that accepting it would have no calamitous repercussions even by distant association?”

“Yes. And if I also proved to you that the money is yours and that you have responsibility for it?”

“Is this the case?”

“Yes.”

Flummoxed for the first time, the protagonist licks his lips and glances at the stacks of pretty, untouched cash. If there is a moment anywhere during this negotiation where he is tempted, it is this one. He is not a wealthy man. He has debts he cannot pay. We establish for the first time that while he has been firm, he has not been unwavering. He could sure as hell use this money. He knows that and now, so do you. He is just confident in one thing: that his integrity matters more.

For a hellish interval, he rationalizes. It is his money, after all. He gets to choose how to spend it. Of course, taking it is now a compromise, and possibly a deadly one.

The word charity crosses his mind, but it is still self-aggrandizing, still a possible pitfall, and it falls aside and is replaced by the quality that rhymes with it, clarity.

And so he says, “Where do you go after you’re done with me?”

“To the next person on my list.”

“How long is this list?”

“As long as the entire population of human beings. It happens to be true that my associates and I have been bringing this proposition to your kind throughout all known history, but it also happens to be that our own numbers are not infinite and that we do not keep up with your mortality stats. The results we obtain are however statistically significant and stand in for all of you.”

“Determining what? Whether the species is damned or allowed to survive?”

“Nothing quite that dramatic. But it does help mold the . . . let us say, allocation of resources toward your well-being.”

Our protagonist smiles. It is a nice smile. This is a thing you need to know about this man, who is one specific human being even if in this instant he represents us all. A smile like that can make you think that maybe, just maybe, the world doesn’t entirely suck, that things aren’t entirely pointless, and that with all the cruelty and nastiness that our kind gets up to, there might still be hope.

And he says, “Then I designate this money to the next . . . player, contestant, candidate, whatever you call us—”

“Participants.”

“Yes, that. I designate the money as a strings-free, pre-emptive gift to the next person you tempt with your offer. Tell that person that they get a million if they agree to gamble on evil, and also get it if they decide not to play; the same million, making the choice a fair one. Tell them that if they want, they can also refuse it for themselves and pass it on to the next participant and that if they can keep this going they can help prevent some kind of evil from being committed for as long as possible. Maybe even indefinitely. If they do the right thing, tell them that the guy who went before them gives them a thumbs-up. And that they can pass it on. Is that okay and are we done?”

“We’re done,” the visitor says.

He stands. He shuts the briefcase with an audible thump, making smaller but still sharp sounds as he engages the clamps. He grasps it by its handle, nods at the man who has refused him, and turns to go—but just before he leaves, he turns back and smiles again. Our protagonist realizes that it is not the polite default smile this man has worn since his arrival, but a broader and more benevolent thing, a gratified and even proud thing.

With this smile, he speaks his final words before departure.

“You don’t know her,” he says, “but she gives you a thumbs-up.”