That was an unfortunate, arbitrary call. The whole piece is filled with good lines, and somehow they need to be trimmed out to the minimum necessary to convey the idea. There are some other borderline sections that I might swap out for it, but honestly they probably need to be removed to begin with. (Specifically, the line about the cows and wolves - that can be skipped over to the line about humans. But evolution is a recurring theme for the night as well [An Alien God is also getting abridged. Very seriously abridged] and I'd like to keep that tied in.)

I may be underestimating how long people's attention span is, but I'd prefer to risk overshooting the trimming process. But I'll try reading it with and without and see if it feels too long. If I were to include it, it'd be trimmed something like this:

And if the Khan tortures people to death, for his own amusement? They might call out for help, imagining a God. And if you really wrote the program, God would intervene, of course. But in the what-if question, there isn't any God in the system. The victims will be saved only if the right cells happen to be 0 or 1. And it's not likely that anyone will defy the Khan; if they did, someone would strike them with a sword, and the sword would disrupt their organs and they would die, and that would be the end of that.

So the victims die, screaming, and no one helps them. That is the answer to the what-if question.