"We gave you back your life, man," Jovellanos said softly.
"We?"
"There's a few of us. We're kind of political, in a ragtag sorta way."
"Oh Christ." Desjardins shook his head. "Did you even ask me if I wanted this?"
"You would've said no. Guilt Trip would've made you. That's the whole point."
"And just maybe I'd've said no anyway, did you ever stop to think of that? I can kill a half-million people before lunchtime; you don't think it's a good idea to have safeguards in place? Maybe you remember the buzz on absolute power?"
"Sure," Jovellanos said. "Every time I see a Lertzman or a Rowan."
"I don't care about Lertzman or fucking Rowan! You did this to me!"
"I did it for you, Achilles."
He glanced up, startled. "What did you call me?"
"Achilles."
"Jesus."
"Listen, you're safe. The hounds will find Trip in your blood like they always have. That's the beauty of it, Spartacus doesn't touch the Trip. It just blocks the receptors."
"Spartacus? That's what you call it?"
Jovellanos nodded.
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Look it up. The point is—"
"And why now, of all times?" Desjardins threw his hands in the air. "If you were going to do this to me you couldn't have picked a worse time if you tried."
She shook her head. "Killjoy, you're up at bat and the whole world's hanging in the balance. If you ever needed a clear head, now's the time. You can't afford to be chained to any corpse agenda. Nobody can afford it."
He glared at her. "You are such a fucking hypocrite, Alice. You infected me. You didn't ask, you didn't even tell, you just stuck me with some bug that could get me thrown out of my job, or worse—"
She raised her hands, as if to ward off his words. "Achilles, I—"
"Yeah, yeah, you did it for me. What an altruist. Ramming Spartacus Brand Home-Cooked Autonomy down my throat whether I like it or not. I'm your friend, Alice! Why did you do this?"
She stared at him for a moment in the fading light.
"You don't know?" she said at last, in a cold angry voice. "The goddamned boy genius doesn't have a clue? Why don't you do a path analysis or something to find out?"
She spun on her heel and walked away.
Spartacus
"Achilles, you can be such a raging idiot sometimes I just don't believe it.
"You know what I was risking, coming clean with you yesterday. You know what I'm risking sending this to you now—it'll autowipe, but there's nothing these assholes can't scan if they feel like it. That's part of the problem, that's why I'm taking this huge risk in the first place.
"I'm sorry I stomped off like that. Things just weren't going like I hoped, you know? But I do have some answers for you if you'll just hear me out, okay? Just—hear me out.
"I heard what you said about trust and betrayal, and maybe some of it rings a bit more true than I'd like. But don't you see there was no point in asking you beforehand? As long as Guilt Trip was running the show, you were incapable of making your own decision. You keep insisting that's wrong, you go on about all the life-and-death decisions you make and the thousands of variables you juggle, but Achilles my dear, whoever told you that free will was just some complicated algorithm for you to follow?
"Look at bumblebees dancing some time. You wouldn't believe the stuff they talk about. Solar elevation, topographic cues, time-stamps—they write roadmaps to the best food sources, scaled to the centimeter, and they do it all with a few butt-wiggles. Does that make them free agents? Why do you think we call them drones?
"Look at the physics of a spider spinning its web. Hell, look at a dog catching a ball—that's ballistic math, my man. The world's full of dumb animals who act as though they're juggling third-order differentials in their heads and it's all just instinct, man. It's not freedom. It's not even intelligence. And you stand there and tell me you're autonomous just because you can follow a decision tree with a few dozen variables?
"I know you don't want to be corrupted. But maybe a decent, honest human being is his own safeguard, did you ever think of that? Maybe you don't have to let them turn you into one big conditioned reflex. Maybe you just want them to, because then it's not really your responsibility, is it? It's so easy never to have to make your own decisions. Addictive, even. Maybe you even got hooked on it, and you're going through a little bit of withdrawal now.
"I bet you don't even know what they took away, do you? I bet you weren't even interested. Sure, you read their cheery little leaflets about serving the greater good and you learned enough to pass the tests, but it was all just hoops you had to jump through to get into the next tax bracket, right? Jesus, Killjoy. I mean, don't get me wrong—you're a flaming genius with sims and nonparametric stats, but when it comes to the real world you wouldn't know a come-on if someone got down on their knees and unzipped your fly for you. I mean, really.
"Anyhow, what they stole, we gave back. And I'm going to tell you exactly what we did, on the premise, you know, ignorance breeds fear and all that.
"You know about the Minsky receptors in your frontal lobes, and how all those nasty little guilt transmitters bind to them, and how you perceive that as conscience. They made Guilt Trip by tweaking a bunch of behavior-modification genes snipped from parasites; the guiltier you feel, the more Trip gets pumped into your brain. It binds to the transmitters, which changes their shape and basically clogs your motor pathways so you can't move.
"That's also why you're so fond of cats, by the way. Baseline Toxoplasma turns rodents into cat-lovers as a way of jumping between hosts. I bet a hundred Quebucks you weren't in such pathetic servitude to Mandelbrot until you got your shots, am I right?
"Anyway, Spartacus is basically a guilt analog. It's got the same active sites, so it binds to the Trip, but the overall conformation is slightly different so it doesn't actually do anything except clog up the Minsky receptors. Also it takes longer to break down than regular guilt, so it reaches higher concentrations in the brain. Eventually it overwhelms the active sites through sheer numbers.
"That's the real beauty of it, Killjoy; both your natural transmitters and the Trip itself are still being produced normally, so a test that keys on either of 'em comes up clean. Even a test looking for the complexed form will pass muster, since the baseline complex is still floating around—it just can't find any free receptor sites to latch onto.
"So you're safe. Honestly. The bloodhounds won't be a problem. I wouldn't put you at risk, Achilles, believe me. You mean too—you're too much of a friend for me to fuck around like that.
"Anyway, there you go. I've stuck my neck out for you, and what happens now is pretty much up to you. If you turn me in, though, know this: you're making that decision. However you rationalize it, you won't be able to blame some stupid longchain molecule. It'll be you all the way, your own free will.
"So use it, and think about all the things you've done and why, and ask yourself if you're really so morally rudderless that you couldn't have made all those tough decisions without enslaving yourself to a bunch of despots. I think you could have, Achilles. You never needed their ball and chain to be a decent human being. I really believe that. I'm gambling everything on it.