Behemoth (21 page)

“I doubt they're any worse than the ways you've already fucked with the palette,” Desjardins said.

Her face fell. A twinge of remorse flickered in Desjardins's throat. He swallowed, absurdly grateful for the feeling. “Just don't mix them with axotropes,” he added, more gently.

“Thanks.” She took the olive branch with the drug, popped a cherry-red marble into her mouth. Desjardins could see her bracing herself.

“I was afraid you were never going to talk to me again,” she said softly.

If her hair had been any finer it would be synthetic.

“It would have served you right.” He let the words hang between them. He imagined knotting that jet-black ponytail around his fist. He imagined suspending her by it, letting her feet kick just off the floor …

No. Stop it
.

“But I think I understand why you did it,” he said at last, letting her off the hook.

“Really?”

“I think so. You had a lot of nerve.” He took a breath. “But you had a lot of faith in me, too. You wouldn't have done it otherwise. I guess that counts for something.”

It was as though she'd been holding her breath since she arrived, and only let it out now that her sentence had been read aloud: Conditional discharge.
She bought it,
Desjardins thought.
She thinks there's hope
—

—while another part of him, diminished but defiant, insisted,
Why does she have to be wrong?

He brushed her cheek with his palm, could just barely hear the soft, quick intake of breath his touch provoked. He blinked against the fleeting image of a backhanded blow across that sweet, unsuspecting face. “You have a lot more faith in me than I do, Alice. I don't know how warranted it is.”

“They stole your freedom to choose. I only gave it back to you.”

“You stole my conscience. How am I
supposed
to choose?”

“With your
mind,
Killjoy. With that brilliant, beautiful mind. Not some gut-instinct emotion that's done more harm than good for the past couple million years.”

He sank onto the sofa, a small, sudden pit opening in his stomach. “I'd hoped it was a side effect,” he said softly.

She sat beside him. “What do you mean?”

“You know.” Desjardins shook his head. “People never think things through. I kind of hoped you and your buddies just—hadn't worked out the ramifications, you know? You were just trying to subvert the Trip, and the whole conscience thing was a—a misstep. Unforeseen. But I guess not.”

She put her hand on his knee. “Why would you
hope
that?”

“I'm not really sure.” He barked a soft laugh. “I guess I thought, if you didn't
know
you were—I mean, if you do something by accident that's one thing, but if you
deliberately
set out to make a bunch of psychopaths—”

“We're not making psychopaths, Achilles. We're freeing people from conscience.”

“What's the difference?”

“You can still
feel
. Your amygdala still works. Your dopamine and serotonin levels are normal. You're capable of long-term planning, you're not a slave to your impulses. Spartacus doesn't change any of that.”

“Is that what you think.”

“You really think all the assholes in the world are clinical?”

“Maybe not. But I bet all the clinicals in the world are assholes.”

“You're not,” she said.

She stared at him with serious, dark eyes. He couldn't stop smelling her. He wanted to kiss her. He wanted to hug her. He wanted to gut her like a fish and put her head on a stick.

He gritted his teeth and kept silent.

“Ever hear of the trolley paradox?” Alice said after a moment.

Desjardins shook his head.

“Six people on a runaway train, headed off a cliff. The only way to save them is switch the train to another track. Except there's someone else standing on that track, and he won't be able to get out of the way before the train squashes him. Do you reroute?”

“Of course.” It was the greater good at its most simplistic.

“Now say you
can't
reroute the train, but you can
stop
it by pushing someone into its path. Do you?”

“Sure,” he said immediately.

“I did that for you,” Alice pronounced.

“Did what?”

“Most people don't accept the equivalence. They think it's right to reroute the train, but wrong to push someone in front of it. Even though it's exactly the same death, for exactly the same number of lives saved.”

He grunted.

“Conscience isn't
rational,
Achilles. You know what parts of your brain light up when you make a moral decision? I'll tell you: the medial frontal gyrus. The posterior cingulate gyrus. The angular gyrus. All—”

“Emotional centers,” Desjardins cut in.

“Damn right. The frontal lobes don't spark at all. And even people who recognize the logical equivalence of those scenarios have to really
work
at it. It just
feels
wrong to push someone to their death, even for the same net gain of lives. The brain has to wrestle with all this stupid, unfounded guilt. It takes longer to act, longer to reach critical decisions, and when all's said and done it's less likely to make the
right
decion. That's what
conscience
is, Killjoy. It's like rape or greed or kin selection—it served its purpose a few million years ago, but it's been bad news ever since we stopped merely
surviving
our environment and started
dominating
it instead.”

You rehearsed that,
Desjardins thought.

He allowed himself a small smile. “There's a bit more to people than guilt and intellect, my dear. Maybe guilt doesn't just hobble the
mind,
did you ever think of that? Maybe it hobbles other things as well.”

“Like what?”

“Well, just for example—” he paused, pretending to cast around for inspiration—“how do you know I'm not some kind of crazed serial killer? How do you know I'm not psychotic, or suicidal, or, or into torture, say?”

“I'd know,” Alice said simply.

“You think sex killers walk around with signs on their foreheads?”

She squeezed his thigh. “I think that I've known you for a whole long time, and I think there's no such thing as a perfect act. If someone was that full of hate, they'd slip up eventually. But you—well, I've never heard of a monster who respected women so much he refused to even
fuck
them. And by the way, you might want to reconsider that particular position. Just a thought.”

Desjardins shook his head. “You've got it all worked out, haven't you?”

“Completely. And I've got oodles of patience.”

“Good. Now you can use some of it.” He stood and smiled down at her. “I've gotta go to the bathroom for a minute. Make yourself at home.”

She smiled back. “I will indeed. Take your time.”

*   *   *

He locked the door, leaned across the sink and stared hard into the mirror. His reflection stared back, furious.

She betrayed you. She turned you into this
.

He liked her. He loved her. Alice Jovellanos had been his loyal friend for years. Desjardins hung onto that as best he could.

She did it on
purpose.

No.
They
had done it on purpose.

Because Alice hadn't acted alone. She was damn smart, but she hadn't come up with Spartacus all by herself. She had friends, she'd admitted as much:
We're kinda political, in a ragtag kind of way,
she'd said when she first broke the news of his—his
emancipation
.

He could feel the chains in his head crumbling to rust. He could feel his own depravity tugging on those corroded links, and grinning. He searched himself for some hint of the regret he'd felt just a few minutes ago—he'd hurt Alice's feelings, and he'd felt bad about it. He could still do that. He could still feel remorse, or something like it, if he only tried.

You're not a slave to your impulses,
she'd said.

That was true, as far as it went. He could restrain himself if he wanted to. But that was the nature of his predicament: he was starting to realize that he didn't
want
to.

“Hey, Killjoy?” Alice called from down the hall.

Shut up! SHUT UP!
“Yeah?”

“Mandelbrot's demanding dinner and her feeder's empty. Didn't you keep the kibble under the sink?”

“Not any more. She figured out how to break into the cupboards.”

“Then wh—”

“Bedroom closet.”

Her footsteps passed on the other side of the door, Mandelbrot vocally urging them on.

On purpose
.

Alice had infected him ahead of schedule, to clear his mind for the fight against
β
ehemoth—and perhaps for more personal reasons, conscious or otherwise. But her friends had set their sights a lot higher than Achilles Desjardins; they were out to liberate every 'lawbreaker on the planet. Lubin had summed it up, there in the darkness two weeks ago: “Only a few thousand people with their hands on all the world's kill switches and you've turned them all into clinical sociopaths…”

Desjardins wondered if Alice would have tried her semantic arguments with
Lubin
. If
she
had been tied to that chair, blind, pissing her pants in fear for her life while that murderous cipher paced around her in the darkness, would she have presumed to lecture him on serotonin levels and the cingulate gyrus?

She might have, at that. After all, she and her friends were
political
—
in a ragtag kinda way
—and politics made you stupid. It made you think that human decency was some kind of Platonic ideal, a moral calculus you could derive from first principles. Don't waste your time with basic biology. Don't worry about the fate of altruists in Darwin's universe. People are
different,
people are
special,
people are
moral agents
. That's what you got when you spent too much time writing manifestos, and not enough time looking in the mirror.

Achilles Desjardins was only the first of a new breed. Before long there would be others, as powerful as he and as unconstrained. Maybe there already were. Alice hadn't told him any details. He didn't know how far the ambitions of the Spartacus Society had progressed. He didn't know what other franchises were being seeded, or what the incubation period was. He only knew that sooner or later, he would have competition.

Unless he acted now, while he still had the advantage.

Mandelbrot was still yowling in the bedroom, evidently dissatisfied with the quality of the hired help. Desjardins couldn't blame her; Alice had had more than enough time to retrieve the kibble, bring it back to the kitchen, and—

—
in the bedroom,
he realized.

Well,
he thought after a moment.
I guess that settles it
.

Suddenly, the face in the mirror was very calm. It did not move, but it seemed to be speaking to him all the same. You're
not political,
it told him.
You're mechanical. Nature programmed you one way, CSIRA programmed you another, Alice came along and rewired you for something else. None of it is you, and all of it is you. And none of it was your choice. None of it was your responsibility
.

She did this to you. That cunt. That stumpfuck. Whatever happens now is not your fault
.

It's hers
.

He unlocked the door and walked down the hall to the bedroom. Live telltales twinkled across the sensorium on his pillow. His feedback suit lay across the bed like a shed skin. Alice Jovellanos stood shaking at the foot of the bed, lifting the headset from her skull. Her face was beautiful and bloodless.

She would not have been able to mistake the victim in that virtual dungeon for anyone else. Desjardins had tuned the specs to three decimal places.

Mandelbrot immediately gave up on Alice and began head-butting Desjardins, purring loudly. Desjardins ignored her.

“I need some technical info,” he said, almost apologetically. “And some details on your friends. I was actually hoping to sweet-talk it out of you, though.” He gestured at the sensorium, savoring the horror on her face. “Guess I forgot to put that stuff away.”

She shook her head, a spasm, a panicky twitch. “I—I d-don't think you did…” she managed after a moment.

“Maybe not.” Achilles shrugged.”But hey, look on the bright side. That's the first time you've actually been
right
about me.”

It made sense, at last: the impulse purchases routed almost unconsciously through anonymous credit lines, the plastic sheeting and portable incinerator, the dynamic-inversion sound damper. The casual snoop into Alice's master calendar and contact list. That was the great thing about being a 'lawbreaker on the Trip; when everybody knew you were chained to the post, nobody bothered putting up fences around the yard.

“Please,” Alice quavered, her lip trembling, her eyes bright and terrified. “Achilles…”

Somewhere in the basement of Desjardins's mind, a last rusty link crumbled to powder.

“Call me Killjoy,” he said.

AUTOMECHANICA

T
HE
first round goes to the corpses.

A rifter by the name of Lisbeth Mak—kind of a wallflower, Clarke barely even remembers the name—came upon a corpse crawling like an armored cockroach around the outside of the primary physical plant. It didn't matter whether he had a good reason to be there. It didn't matter whether or not this constituted a violation of quarantine. Mak did what a lot of fish-heads might have done regardless; she got cocky. Decided to teach this dryback a lesson, but decided to warm him up first. So she swam easy circles around her helpless and lumbering prey, made the usual derisive comments about diving bells with feet, called loudly and conspicuously for someone to bring her one of those pneumatic drills from the tool shed: she had herself a crab to shell.