[ WP ] You wake up to find yourself in a room with 5 doors . They are labeled 'peace ' , 'honor ' , 'truth ' , 'power ' and 'fortune ' . Which door do you choose to open and what happens ?

A day for every door, so five in total. My water was running low, as much as I'd tried to conserve it. My gear was in a pile in the corner, because there was nobody down here for the camo to hide me from. 
 Five days I'd been here, staring at five doors, and an entrance blocked by a rock slide that kept me from the door back to the outside, which is the only one I was really interested in. 
 
 I'd thought a long while during those five days about which door to go through if it came to that. There was a door marked Power, a heavy, iron thing with shiny brass hinges. There was a door marked Truth, plain and unadorned like I think truth ought to be. There was one that read Peace, and it looked like the white door to my grandmother's farmhouse. There was one for honor, a copper door that shone in the light of my flashlight. And there was fortune, a glittering gold door that made the copper of Honor pale in comparison. 
 
 I had power. It lay in the rifle I'd discarded, in the knife and pistol strapped around my waist and in my own body. I had fortune, thanks to a generous grandfather who had passed away six months ago, two months after I'd been shipped out. I had truth, or at least a pretty solid understanding of how the world worked. I had honor. God, I hoped I had honor. 
 
 But what I did n't have, and what the world did n't have, was peace. On my third tour here, to this land of sandstorms and a thousand years of warfare, the steady popping of the mortars was only noticeable when the militants stopped to re-load and the background noise stopped. Every day I'd watched a stream of refugees trod along a winding road with laden pick-up trucks choking on the dust and donkey carts packed to the brim with the most precious things they could carry. Behind them lay the smoking ruins of a village their ancestors had been driven out of ten times before throughout history and before them was just a U.N. camp without nearly enough resources to accommodate them all. It wore a body down to pick through one of those burned-out villages and see the corpses laid out in a line. I'd watched a good buddy take a bullet to the back and he's never going to walk again. And it kept going. Day after day of gunfire and the dead, of maneuvers and orders and rockets and bombs with no end in sight. 
 
 So you bet your ass I walked through that peace door. 
 
 Things looked different on the other side. There was just the one door, instead of the five, and the entrance that had been blocked on the other side of the door lay wide open and clear on this side. 
 
 Outside, it looked the same as the landscape I'd just left, except the village in the distance was standing. I squinted. Scratch that – it was standing and it was bustling. Even from here I could see people moving in and out of its walls. Their voices carried over the sand and I was startled to realize the reason I could hear them so clearly was because there was no mortar fire covering it up. 
 
 Up close, the buildings were taller. The streets were wider. I nearly got run over by a car – a nice car, not a beat-up pick-up but a silver sedan – when I stopped in the street to look at the Muslim Mosque and the Jewish temple side by side. Down the street I could see the spire of a Christian church. 
 I walked around dazedly, feeling drunk. There were no raised voices, just smiles everywhere. I watched humanity press together, but there were no thrown elbows, no high-pitched protests one someone bumped into another. The walls were smooth. Not a bullet-hole or a shell pockmark to be found. 
 
 “ Are you lost? ” someone asked behind me, speaking – it sounded like Arabic, but there was a strange accent to it – almost a Yiddish undercurrent. I turned around. There was a woman standing there, smiling beneath her hijab. Her smile widened when she saw my pale skin. 
 
 “ American? ” she asked. I nodded. 
 
 “ Five doors? ” 
 
 I nodded again, feeling overwhelmed. She stepped forward to take my hand. 
 
 “ You have questions, ” she said in stilted English. “ We will talk. ” 
 
 I followed her to a sidewalk cafe and we had tea together. Her name was Farah and she'd gone through the door herself five years ago after her husband had been executed by extremists. 
 
 Peace sounded – amazing, when she told me about it. No conflicts, no skirmishes. No World Wars. No atom bombs. No thousands of years of conflict in the Middle East. No murderous gangs in Central America, no conquering by conquest of Africa or South America. No slave trade. Apparently the American West was still predominately populated by Native Americans. 
 
 And because of that, there was trade. Cultures grew and flourished. Greek, Chinese, and Arabic were 
 the dominant languages, though each of those had mingled with other languages through trade and intermarriage. That explained Farah's accent. 
 
 There were discoveries through science, though there was a lot I was used to seeing in my world that had never been thought of here. War drives innovation, after all. But joint-space exploration and worldwide collaboration had more than made up for it in other areas. 
 There were still disagreements between people – there were still hurt feelings and arguments – but very rarely did they rise above a raised voice. 
 
 “ Why? ” I asked, my voice cracking just a bit. “ What convinces people to react like that? ” 
 
 Farah shrugged. “ They realized there was n't a need, I think, ” she said. 
 
 I asked about religious conflicts. She showed me a Bible and a Koran. Every mention of war was gone. In Genesis, Cain killed Abel. God saw that there was wickedness in the hearts of men and so He strove to teach them a peaceful path so that the Cains of the world would learn to stay their hands and not harm the Abels. No story of Noah, no flood. No Samson and the Philistines. No Joshua and Jericho. 
 
 It was hard to adjust. Farah helped. Waking up next to her every day helped. It had taken her awhile to get used to things here too, but she was so much happier than she'd ever been back in our world, where she worried every day that some harm would befall her family until the day that it did. 
 
 The weeks turned to months, and still I could n't believe it. It was all just too – perfect. Every dystopian movie and novel I'd ever read or seen floated through my head each night. The Giver. Brave New World. 1984. Serenity. Even those stupid Divergent books my niece used to read. 
 
 And I remembered the lesson from each. Human beings are incapable of peace unless the thing that makes them human is removed. Peace does not come without a cost that is greater than the reward of peace. 
 
 So I purified my water as it flowed from the tap. I would eat only foods that I or Farah grew in her rooftop garden. I switched the soils out too, just in case there was something in those. I could n't guard against the air, though. I do n't know if they put anything in that. Farah humored me, even though I could tell my paranoia worried and irritated her. I could n't help the feeling, though. Something was wrong about the place. It was fundamentally off and I could n't even say why. 
 
 A year to the day I had stepped through the door, I went back to the cave where I had emerged. Farah did n't want me to go but she did n't stop me. She had sadly said goodbye and watched me walk out the door in the direction I'd come. 
 
 “ You can never come back, if you go through, ” she warned me quietly. “ We're only allowed once chance at peace. ” 
 
 “ Come with me, ” I begged. “ There's something wrong about this place. ” 
 
 She raised an eyebrow at me. “ There's something wrong about the place where we came from, ” she countered. “ My husband should never have died at the hands of another because he believed something different than they did. ” 
 
 And so I left alone. I went back to the cave and back into the room. I did n't even hesitate when I walked back through the door. 
 
 The room on the other side was the same, but the Peace door had disappeared. I did n't expect it, but I felt a sense of loss when I'd looked at the place where it had been. I was n't in love with Farah, but her presence had been a comfort to me, and I'd been the same to her. 
 
 This time, I opened the Truth Door. I wanted it, simple and unadorned. 
 
 It opened into a quiet bar. I'd been expecting another cave, but this looked like a bar in London or New York, some place I'd go with my buddies after a long day and we were tired of army bullshit and we just wanted to talk. 
 
 “ Come on in, ” the bartender said. “ You ai n't the first person to walk through that door and you wo n't be the last. ” 
 
 I shuffled in, taking in the neon sign in the window and the dark night beyond the pub doors. 
 
 “ Is this where I find truth? ” I asked quietly. 
 
 The bartender shrugged and put a glass down in front of me. “ Truth is subjective, ” he said. “ That's your first truth right there. But we get as objective as we can. ” 
 
 “ Tell me about the Peace door, ” I said. “ What was the secret? They had to be putting something in the water or the air, right? Something in the soil? Soylent Green is people? What were they doing? ” 
 
 The bartender looked surprised, and then he turned around to grab a bottle of bourbon – the real good stuff. He turned back and poured me way more than the two fingers you're supposed to. 
 
 “ Son, ” he said finally, “ you walk through that door and you waste questions on a question like that? ” 
 
 “ Tell me, ” I insisted. “ Something about it was n't right. ” 
 
 The bartender poured himself a glass and nodded at mine. “ Drink up, son, ” he said. “ They did n't do a goddamn thing to make people peaceful, except decide that everyone would be happier if they did n't fight. The only thing wrong about peace is in your own goddamn head because you do n't think people are capable of it. Drink up, idiot. You just left the only peace you'll ever find behind. ”
