Unspent

Everyone gets one legal kill. Once. Ever. No motive required.

Fifty-two years ago the world reached a compromise: since no government could hold a monopoly on violence, violence would be handed out one dose at a time. At eighteen, every citizen receives a chip and a government-issued pistol - one round, biometrically locked to their own hand, welded shut forever after it fires. No war has come close to the last one since.

He's an insurance underwriter. For eight years he's calculated the odds that a client will die by someone else's hand, and turned those odds into numbers on a form. He's never once thought about his own unspent right - until a Tuesday, when a stranger walks into a conference room and spends his on the coworker our narrator has had lunch with every week for six years.

The police close the case in a day. The right was exercised lawfully; the law doesn't ask why. But in the dead man's things, there's a flash drive. On it: a code that exists in no official record, and ninety-three deaths too similar to be coincidence.

And his own name, filed as number ninety-four.

What he finds is a company that has spent decades finding the desperate and the unspent, and quietly making sure the two meet. People who've cut off their own trigger fingers rather than ever hold that choice. A detective who's spent seven years certifying deaths with a signature that isn't fully hers to give. And, eventually, the ninety-three-year-old man who wrote his own legal immunity into the original treaty - and still believes, completely, that he did the right thing.

Unspent is a novel about a world where the worst violence never looks like violence. It looks like a form, filled out correctly, by someone who was only doing their job.

Fans of Fight Club's voice and Black Mirror's cold, one-premise-taken-seriously dread will recognize the DNA - but the monster here isn't a mob or a machine. It's a compliance department.