"Listen," he managed to say, "I really don't have any choice."
"I know, Ken," she said softly. "It's okay."
"I don't," he said again, almost whimpering.
"Sure you do," boomed a strange voice in his ear.
What was—
"Alice?" came Desjardins's voice from around the corner.
"You're a free agent, Kenny boy, " the voice said. "You don't have to do anything you don't want to. Take my word for it."
Lubin tapped the bead in his ear. "Identify yourself."
"Alice Jovellanos, senior 'lawbreaker, Sudbury franchise. At your service."
"No shit," drifted from the living room.
Lubin tapped his bead again: "We've got a breach on communications, someone going by Alice Jovellanos—"
"They already know, big man. They were the ones who patched me through in the first place. I gave them the rest of the night off."
Lenie Clarke stepped back from Lubin, turned toward the darkened living room. "What—"
"This is a restricted channel," Lubin said. "Get off."
"Fuck that. I outrank you."
"I gather you haven't been on the job very long."
"Long enough. Killjoy, is Lenie Clarke there?"
"Yeah," Desjardins said. "Alice, what—"
"She got a watch? I've got Lubin's channel and your inlays—boy, I can't wait until they slide a set of those into my head—but nothing on Lenie—"
"Lenie," Desjardins said, "hold your watch away from your body."
"Don't have one," the dark shape said.
"Too bad," Jovellanos said. "Lubin, I wasn't kidding. You're a free man."
"I don't believe you," Lubin said.
"Killjoy's free. Why not you as well?"
"We never met. No opportunity." But he was back beneath the waves in Lake Michigan, not killing Lenie Clarke. He was in debriefing afterward, pretending he'd never had the chance.
"It's an infection," Jovellanos said. "Real subversive. We made sure it was airborne, packed it inside an encephalitis jacket although you'll be relieved to know the contents aren't quite so lethal. It's spreading through CSIRA even as we speak.»
All he had to do was open the door. Even if this Jovellanos wasn't lying about ordering the crew to stand down, they wouldn't have had time to pack up yet. Someone could just tap an icon and Alice Jovellanos would be jammed. Another, she'd be traced. The situation wasn't even close to out of control.
He could afford a few moments…
"The Trip's been weakening in you ever since you shared air with Killjoy there," Jovellanos was saying. "You're calling your own shots now, Ken. Kind of changes things, doesn't it?"
"Alice, are you completely—" Desjardins sounded almost in tears. "That's the only leash he ever had."
"Actually, that's not true. Ken Lubin's one of the most moral men you could ever meet."
"For God's sake, Alice—I'm fucking tied to a chair with my face caved in—"
"Trust me. I'm looking at his medical records right now. No serotonin or tryptophan deprivation, no TPH polymorphisms. He may not be a fun date, but he's no impulse-killer. Which is not to say that you don't have a few issues, Ken. Am I right?"
"How did you—" but of course she'd be able to access his files, Lubin realized. It was just that any normal 'lawbreaker wouldn't be able to justify such an intrusion to Guilt Trip, not in the course of a normal assignment.
She actually did it somehow. She freedme…
He felt like throwing up.
"What was it like all those years, Ken?" Jovellanos purred in his ear. "Knowing she'd got away with it? All those nifty childhood experiences that made you so right for the job—of course you thought about revenge. You spent your whole life fantasizing about revenge, didn't you? Anyone would have."
What am I going to do?
"You say it's an infection," he said, trying to deflect her.
"But you never once acted on it, did you Ken? Because you're a moral man, and you knew that would be wrong."
"How does it work?" Don't respond. Don't let her play you. Keep on target.
"And when the slip-ups started, those were just—mistakes, right? Inadvertent little breaches that had to be sealed. You killed then, of course, but there wasn't any choice. You always played by the rules. And it wasn't your fault, was it? The Trip made you do it."
"Answer me." No, no… control. Relax.
Don't let her hear it…
"Only it started happening so often, and people had to wonder if you hadn't found some way to have your cake and eat it, too. That's why they sent you someplace where there weren't any security issues or mission priorities that could set you off. They didn't want to give you a choice, so they sent you someplace you wouldn't have an excuse."
His respiration rate was far too high. He concentrated on bringing it down. A few steps away, Clarke's silhouette seemed dangerously attentive.
"You're still a moral man, Ken." Jovellanos said. "You follow the rules. You won't kill unless you don't have a choice. I'm telling you, you've got a choice."
"Your infection," he grated. "What does it do?"
"Liberates slaves."
Bullshit answer. But at least she was out of his head.
"How?" he pressed.
"Complexes Guilt Trip into an inactive form that binds to the Minksy receptors. Doesn't affect anyone who isn't already Tripped."
"What about the side-effects?" he said.
"Side effects?"
"Baseline guilt, for example," Lubin said.
Desjardins moaned. "Oh, shit. Of course. Of course."
"What's going on?" Clarke said. "What are you talking about?"
Lubin almost laughed aloud. Regular, garden variety guilt. Plain old conscience. How would they ever get into play, now that their receptor sites had been jammed? Jovellanos and her buddies had been so busy tweaking the synthetics that they'd forgotten about chemicals that been there for aeons.
Except they hadn't forgotten. They'd known exactly what they were doing. Lubin was sure of it.
All hail the Entropy Patrol. The power to shut down cities and governments, the power to save a million people here or kill a million somewhere else, the power to keep everything going or to tear it all to shreds overnight—
He turned to Clarke. "Your fan club's been throwing off the shackles of oppression," he said."They're free now. Not slaves to Guilt Trip, not slaves to guilt. Untouchable by conscience in any form."
He raised a hand in the darkness, a bitter toast: "Congratulations, Dr. Jovellanos. There's only a few thousand people with their hands on all the world's kill switches, and you've turned them all into clinical sociopaths."
"Believe me," Jovellanos said. "You'll hardly notice the difference."
Desjardins was noticing, though. "Shit. Shit. I wouldn't even be here, I mean—I just picked up and left. I threw everything away, didn't care about the world going to pieces, I just—for one person. Just because I wanted to."