[John is a kinder person than he is. Again, if he had the option, he would make some distracting comment, talk in circles and obfuscate the issue until the subject had shifted, but he's aware there's no point in that now. Echo will extract some piece of him in this interaction, and what he thought as a sufficient offering will apparently not be so. A miscalculation he hadn't anticipated.]

...Do you remember a conversation we had, a few months ago? You asked me if a single person could be worth the lives of seven billion. I believe we will eventually find ourselves in the position of making choices like that, as long as Echo continues to maintain control over Etraya. That the purpose of forcing us into situations like this repeatedly is to make those choices ultimately more difficult by introducing an aspect of betrayal to them -- to see if you'll harm your new friends for the sake of billions of innocent lives.

[They've discussed the trolley problem before; if the person needed to be sacrificed to save the greater number of lives is connected to the person asked, that person is consistently less likely to switch the hypothetical tracks.]

What would you do, if you were asked for such a thing? I don't ask this simply to know the answer. I am going somewhere with it, if you'll trust me enough to humor the question.