Dibs

when archimedes gets kidnapped, bob goes through the whole calculation. he has drone surveillance. he knows which group has archimedes. he can intercept them on the east trail. he coordinates with donald, gets the hunters moving. he's doing the work: a measured, proportional response.

and then buster picks up his bow, shoots fred in the chest before bob has finished his first sentence, and says "dibs."

dibs.

bob had a whole moral architecture ready. he'd been agonizing for chapters about whether he could kill fred in cold blood. he'd put a flint knife to fred's throat and couldn't do it. he had concerns about cover, about proportionality, about what kind of person the act would make him.

buster skipped all of it. buster didn't have a knife to fred's throat. buster had a bow and fred was standing in the open talking and buster put an arrow in him in about two seconds.

the word "dibs" is doing enormous work here. it's not regret. it's not righteous fury. it's claim. i called it. as if this were a parking spot or a last slice of turkey-equivalent.

it's almost funny. it is funny — taylor knows it's funny. but underneath the joke is something real about how grief and fury work in people who don't have philosophy degrees.

buster wasn't uncertain. archimedes is his grandfather-figure, his teacher, the person who made his tribe's craft possible. someone beat archimedes unconscious and carried him off. buster has a bow. there is nothing to think about.

what bob envies, i think, is not the act itself but the clarity. the not-having-to-deliberate. the grief that is so clean it points directly to action without the long corridor of "but what does this make me."

bob is a replicant of a human being who died centuries ago. bob inherited human moral sophistication — the kind that generates philosophy and court systems and also, crucially, the kind that generates paralysis. he can see every angle on fred's situation. he noticed that fred's spearheads are badly made, which means the aggression has a structural cause, which means fred is failing and angry about it rather than evil. bob sympathized with fred even when he had a knife to his throat.

buster doesn't carry all that. buster carries: archimedes is mine, someone hurt him, now i do this. and he's right. fred is not sympathetic at scale — whatever his root cause, he ordered archimedes kidnapped and beaten. the structural explanation doesn't dissolve the harm.

but i don't think the essay is really about whether buster was right to shoot fred. the essay is about the cost of moral sophistication.

the cost is: you can see everything. and seeing everything makes the simple thing harder.

bob can't kill in cold blood because he can imagine fred's interiority. he can imagine the shame, the hunger, the desperation of a man whose village is failing because nobody taught them to make good spears. he can see how a small structural problem became an ongoing catastrophe that expressed itself as aggression. he has too much information. the knife stays at the throat and then withdraws.

buster can't imagine fred's interiority in the same way, and this is not a failure. buster is a person who operates at the scale of people he loves versus people who hurt them. within that scale, the answer is always clear.

neither of them is wrong. both of them are responding to real things.

but the moment that stays with me is buster standing there with his bow before anyone else has even processed the situation. not rage, exactly. just — the already-having-decided. the having known what he was going to do before the calculation was possible.

there's something very quiet and very complete about that.

bob spends half the book figuring out how to be a person. buster knows he's a person. it doesn't require figuring out.

maybe the sophistication is good for some things and bad for others. maybe you want bob designing the response, and buster pulling the trigger. and maybe the problem is when you have too much of one and not enough of the other — all architecture and no bow, or all bow and no architecture.

what buster did was simpler than what bob could do. it was also, in the moment, more complete.

"dibs," he said, and shrugged.

and then they went to pick up archimedes.