A cave in occurs while you and a stranger are in a concrete room deep in a mine shaft. Before the phone goes dead, you learn the entire mine is sealed and the air hole being drilled will not reach you for 30 hours. If you both take sleeping pills from the medicine chest, the oxygen will last for only 20 hours. Both of you can’t survive; alone, one of you might. After you both realize this, the stranger takes several sleeping pills, says that it is in God’s hands, and falls asleep. You have a pistol; what do you do?

What kind of twisted game is this? Did the killer from Saw set this up? This entire situation is incredibly elaborate. How in the world would I end up in a concrete bunker deep inside a mine with only one other person, a complete stranger?

None of this makes any sense.

You know, assuming this stranger didn’t take all the sleeping pills, I guess I’d go ahead and take a few myself. But I’d wait. I don’t want to go to sleep right away, then wake up in 12 hours only to suffocate while wide awake once the oxygen runs out. No, I’d wait until there was about four hours of oxygen left, then go to sleep and just never wake up.

I’m certainly not going to murder the stranger just so I can survive.

That said, I do know that survival instinct is definitely a thing. Maybe the stranger would wake up after I’d taken my sleeping pills and would decide to use my own gun against me while I snooze. Maybe I do kill the sleeping stranger with a point blank bullet to the head. I’m sure I’d be super conflicted about it.

What would you do? Given this Twilight Zone plot, how would you play it out? Let me know in the comments below!

*The Question of the Week can be found in The Book of Questions by Gregory Stock, Ph.D.

Featured photo by Blake Cheek on Unsplash