“Crime,” Anne said, sticking her head out the window, looking out at the ocean as they drove down A1A, “rhymes with rhyme, which is odd. Crime. Rhyme. Time. Words that rhyme with rhyme are ironic, I think. Or maybe that’s just Alanis Morissette’s version of irony, that always confused me. Crime. It’s a weird word. And a weird thing, too. Criminal. Criminals. What rhymes with criminal? Liminal? Subliminal? Submarine? Wait, submarine obviously doesn’t rhyme with criminal.”
Realizing that she’d been rambling, Anne stopped talking for a few moments. She wore a guilty look on her face, though she tried to hide it by facing away from Shade.
“Yeah,” Shade said, hands on the steering wheel, “your point being?”
“I just never really felt like a criminal before,” Anne said. “Feels… I don’t know. Weird, maybe.”
“You drove a death robot through half the city,” Shade said. “How is that not criminal?”
“That was mad science,” Anne said. “Temporary insanity. This is different, more deliberate. Crime with a capital C.”
“And what are your thoughts on that?”
“Honestly?” Anne said. “I kind of like it.”
She felt that should worry her — the excitement that came with the idea of cracking a safe, which she supposed wasn’t actually all that different from the excitement that came from driving a death mech through the streets.
Thing was, she wasn’t worried. She felt kind of bad, but she didn’t feel bad about being bad. In fact, when it came to being bad, she felt kind of good. What made her feel bad was the fact that it felt good to be bad.
A smile spread across her lips, breaking through the worry.
It feels good to be bad, she thought to herself.
MEGAPULP 
I wonder how much of this emotion is a desire to feel good about something, anything. I also wonder if Anne got a reduced sentence for “temporary insanity”. I think psychologists would have a field day with her. …. She’s scaring me.
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Ohhh! Okay, so maybe that’s why David started talking to her: Anne hadn’t gone completely to the dark side yet and all of her crazy inventions were firmly on the gray side of things – ’cause they evened out through things like military support and special scholarships. This is gonna be interesting. I wonder if the taste of crime’ll stick.
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