Free David's Sling by Marc Stiegler

Wilcox-Morris. She needed these moments to fuel her anger.
    Her whole body itched from the taint of the Wilcox-Morris Corporation. She wanted to run home to the shower, to cleanse herself of it; yet she knew that that would not help. Only her anger enabled her to continue.
    The Oeschlager Museum sprawled over the first two floors of the Wilcox Building. All costs of maintaining it, and for collecting new works, came out of the advertising budget of Wilcox-Morris. Thousands of people had died of lung cancer, emphysema, and heart disease to support this museum.
    Kira stopped before a sculpture in silver and gold. In the curves of the reflection she saw her mother's face—her own face. Older people sometimes called her by her mother's name, so strong was the resemblance. And despite her fierce defense of herself as a separate person, Kira could not deny the similarity. They shared the same cheekbones when seen in profile, the same pout when angry, the same quick smile that puzzled people who missed the subtler points of human comedy.
    They had not shared the dark anger seething behind Kira's eyes as she watched her reflection snake across the surface of the silvery sculpture. Perhaps that was a difference in age more than anything else. Her mother had not blamed the tobacco companies for her own death. In keeping with her other views of human responsibility, Jan had blamed herself for taking chances that might lead to suicide. Kira had a different point of view.
    Uncle Nathan had the most complex view of blame, though in some sense, it was also the simplest. Blame, Uncle Nathan contended, was a concept without value in either Industrial Age or Information Age societies. The key question was not whom to blame, but rather, whose behavior to modify so that the problem did not arise again.
    All that analysis had led him to Jan's answer to smoking, however; they agreed that the best solution lay in educating people to the danger and in teaching them how to quit. Uncle Nathan further contended that this was the only solution a free society could tolerate. Kira still felt uncertain about whether he was right. Certainly, it would not hurt to investigate other possibilities. Know your enemy; he probably does not know himself , the Zetetic commentary went. People did not usually pursue evil purposes with thoughtful intent, though they might pursue evil purposes while fiercely avoiding thoughts about intentions. The key lay in cultural engineering. Non-Zetetic cultures were always designed to give men rationalizations for not thinking about the inconsistencies of that culture. Given the right cultural environment, you could shape the adaptable human being to profoundly unsane purposes.
    Like other creators of evil, Daniel Wilcox was not an evil man. The tobacco culture had engineered him; now, he was himself the chief engineer for the tobacco culture. Still, he was not evil, though he was undoubtedly quite ruthless. He was not evil, though his hands were covered with blood.
    Kira looked about the room at the works of inspired genius, at the painfully detailed craftsmanship, that were also now covered with blood.
    And she looked back at her own reflection. She too was now covered with blood. She had used her own mind in the creation of advertising that would attract children to their deaths. She had done it in order to get close to the source of power that drove the tobacco companies, so that she might find some way of destroying them. She had done it for a good cause.
    And she could rationalize that, had she not created those ads, someone else would have, and they probably would have done just as good a job. But rationalization was not her purpose. She accepted her share of responsibility for the deaths that might result from her action, as surely as she accepted responsibility for the lives that might be saved, if she found a way to destroy the cigarette empire. That was her purpose in coming to Wileox-Morris—to find some weakness, or