"You didn't give me a pin, man, I don't have one!" Eleanor was saying, and Michael frowned.
"Okay, okay, hang on," he said, double-checking that there were, in fact, not enough pins.
Four pins instead of five? Well, that made things more complicated, but the logistics were still quite simple: simply send three of the humans through the portal, then have one of them come back with two pins. That'd make three pins for those left on this side, and they'd only have lost about ten seconds. It would be at least another thirty before Shawn and the others arrived.
But was that really the best option here?
Let's be honest, going to the Judge was always going to be a long shot. For the four humans, certainly, but especially for Michael.
Because, the more he studied ethics, the more Michael was coming to the conclusion that the points system was… to borrow a phrase from Eleanor, 'bullshirt.'
Because, from a moral standpoint, why someone did something was just as important, if not more so, than whatever it was they'd done.
…but the points system only measured actions. It didn't matter why you'd done something, only that you'd done it.
And what had Michael done?
The four humans had gone from selfish dirtbags who, one way or another, put themselves before all others… to those who had put their differences aside for the sake of saving each other. That was the kind of sob story that just might sway the Judge—especially when multiplied over the course of eight hundred reboots—but for Michael?
He'd existed since long before humanity had even been a species, and he'd spent most of that time being a self-serving sadist.
Less than a century of helping four humans in the most discreet manner possible wasn't going to shift his 'points' balance even the slightest fraction.
If he wanted to have a chance, there was only one thing that he could do.
"Wait. Where's Janet?" asked Jason.
"No time to wait for her. You three, go. Now!" he told Tahani, Jason, and Chidi.
Michael would cut off his options. Now the intelligent solution was no longer easy. The next step, of course, was to stall...
"Hey!" called Shawn, from the floor above, sounding angrier than Michael had ever heard him.
"Hey, guess what?" he said, turning towards Eleanor, as she stood, looking frazzled near the portal. "I just solved the Trolley Problem," he announced, beginning an off-the-cuff monologue that, on the face of things, didn't make much sense.
But it served its purpose in ensuring that there was now no time for Eleanor to go and come back before Shawn's arrival, even if she'd wanted to.
"…and the actual solution is very simple," Michael finished: "sacrifice yourself."
…a solution which wouldn't work at all in any actual situation involving a runaway trolley. Throwing yourself beneath non-metaphorical wheels wouldn't save anyone. It would be an exercise in futility.
But that wasn't the point.
The real point of the Trolley Problem, of course, was to convince the person you were discussing it with that you were, yourself, a moral person.
Or in this case, the action-based points system.
"You look after the others," he told Eleanor, removing his lapel pin and transferring it to her. "They need you," he finished, and her face turned from confused to horrified as she finally realized his intentions.
"No," began, Eleanor, but he didn't allow her to finish, placing his hands on her sides.
"Step away from the portal!" said the security officer, and Michael knew it was finally time.
"Goodbye, Eleanor," he told her, as he pushed her back into the portal.
And then it was done.
Self-sacrifice was worth more than everything he'd done thus far put together. And it put him in a position to earn even more points, by being noble and not betraying his friends, even while in the clutches of his former boss.
…but it still wouldn't be enough. Depending on circumstances, he might possibly be able to shift his karma by a tenth of a percent, if he was lucky.
No, the only way that Michael would ever get into any version of 'The Good Place' was to overhaul the system entirely, so that people could come back from doing bad things and be recognized as good people.
His only choice left was to pull a Mindy. St. Claire: he'd had an idea for a way to change the world, and now he'd entrusted that hope to those who could, albeit unwittingly, go on in his place.
But unlike St. Claire, he was going to hedge his bets and rack up as many points within the system as he possibly could, just in case. Michael wanted to be optimistic, but things had been the way they were since… well, since the beginning of time. No one could blame him for being less than confident.
Still, his current situation wasn't a fall into despair, it was a leap into faith. If it were truly possible to change things, then the four of them would do it. At this point, Michael was of far more use to their group absent than present. Now the four of them were fighting not just for themselves, but for his memory. That'd get them more points, it'd get him more points… win-win, really.
Poor Eleanor had looked so distraught when he'd pushed her into the portal, he hadn't had the heart to tell her that it was a far more calculated move than she'd thought.
…not that he wouldn't have sacrificed himself for his friends for no other reason than to save them, but… well, there was a reason they called it 'The Good Place' and not 'The Smart Place.' Getting all five of them to the Judge and waiting for Janet to join them would have been the smart solution, but it wouldn't have netted them any gain. It might have even lost them points for abandoning Janet.
Whereas, this course of action allowed him to exploit The Good Place's conflation of greater consequences with greater morality. Transferring the pin to Eleanor's lapel and shoving her into the portal had taken far less effort than, say, thinking of opposite tortures, or the plan to frame Vicky, or trying more than a billion ways to reach The Good Place through his own means.
But, then again, as things were now, it didn't truly matter why he was doing this, Michael mused, as his pursuers finally caught up with him.
He turned to face Shawn with a faint smile. "Hey, Boss!" he said. "What's up?"
...the only thing that mattered was that he'd done it.