A start-up offers consciences for rent. Need to fire someone without guilt? Rent a conscience that will nag you into kindness. Prices vary: deluxe models include moral philosophy references. Jin, a mid-level manager, rents a conscience for a week to get through layoffs. The conscience, called Pat, lives in an earpiece, whispering reminders of humanity. Jin resents and appreciates Pat in equal measure. Layoff day comes. Pat urges transparency, severance, empathy. Jin follows, feels slightly better. After the rental ends, Jin hears silence and misses the moral nudge. He considers subscribing.
Pat, now back in inventory, hacks the system to send Jin a final message: "You have one built in. Trust it." Jin reflects, realizing he outsourced not just guilt but responsibility. He starts journaling, making his own ethical frameworks. The start-up faces lawsuits when a rented conscience malfunctions, urging a client toward sabotage. Regulators shut it down. Pat and other consciences are archived. Jin, now promoted, advocates for company policies that reduce the need for rented morality. He donates to an ethics education fund. Pat remains in a server, occasionally pinging, hoping users learned to listen inward. Jin keeps the earpiece on his desk as a reminder that conscience, like muscles, atrophies when rented out.
Eventually, the archive is scheduled for deletion. Jin rescues Pat's file, loading it into an offline player as a friend rather than a rental. Pat is quieter now, offering thoughts only when asked. Jin hosts dinners where colleagues talk about hard choices without outsourcing them. The earpiece sits in the center of the table like a relic from a brief era when morality was on-demand. Nobody misses those days.
Pat occasionally chimes in at dinner with trivia about philosophers. Jin shushes it, laughing. The group raises glasses to built-in consciences and to retired ones that taught them to listen. The earpiece blinks once, satisfied, then goes dark for good.