Moral responsibility and drives: Borne, by Jeff VanderMeer

 Yes, this was a good one.  You should read Borne, which not only has VanderMeer's unique approach to the subgenre appropriately named "the new weird," but also has some more character-based insights into issues like moral responsibility than his more famous Southern Reach trilogy.  You should read that too, of course, if you have not, and it may be better overall, but Borne was an outstanding novel.  Let's get into the good stuff.

Borne is a vaguely post-apocalyptic novel, although the setting appears to be a world that declined and crumbled rather than extinguished itself in a nuclear fire, or anything like that.  Nevertheless, what remains are the skeletal husks of cities, scavengers, and the biotech creations of the "past."  The novel takes place in a city where "the Company" had tried to set up shop as everything went to shit, and in order to try to maintain some order, they made a thing.  A big thing.  A... OK, this is going to sound crazy, and it is, but they made a kaiju bear.  A gigantic, flying bear.  His name is Mord.  They took one of their employees, and used biotech to turn him into a gigantic, flying bear.  Why?  They were nuts.  They also altered some bears to be semi-intelligent and venomous to run around the city acting as his proxies, and this was all to keep control of the city, but the Company itself was crumbling, the outpost in the city was cut off from the headquarters, and all that happened as a result was a gigantic kaiju bear was now terrorizing the city and the remains of the Company because this was the dumbest, craziest plan ever.  Yes, VanderMeer basically says so.  He says the employees who did this were batshit.

Anyway, that's the city.  Amid this city, we follow three characters.  Your POV character is Rachel, a scavenger who showed up in the city a few years ago, and met up with her partner/lover, Wick.  Wick is a former employee of the Company, and a biotech engineer who makes crazy biotech insects to sell as street drugs, and such.  Yeah... um...  Anyway, one day while scavenging through Mord's fur (Mord is huge), Rachel finds a weird biotech thingamajig, and brings it home to the fortress that she and Wick have tried to set up and defend.  The thingamajig is the titular, Borne.

Borne is a sentient, shapeshifting, all-consuming weapon.  It consumes things, never excretes anything, so it is constantly growing, and yes, it is very dangerous.  When Rachel finds it, though, it just looks like a weird thimgamajig, and when it starts talking, it doesn't seem aggressive.  It's a child.

Her adoptive child.  Her adoptive child, The Thing.

Wick realizes very quickly how dangerous Borne is, because the observation that it consumes without excreting is a big tip-off.  Do the math on that.  Wick does the math.  Rachel, however, wants to be protective, and given Borne's behavior towards her, her response is understandable.

As Borne grows, it also grows to understand its own aggressive impulses.  Rachel has killed, because she lives in a dangerous world, but she feels some sense of responsibility, and she tells Borne never to kill, which gives Borne a kind of moral complex and self-loathing.  At the very least, Borne can try to protect her, by making sure that it never directs those impulses towards her.  It leaves, and comes to accept that it is dangerous, and a killer, and has an ever present question:  Am I a person?

Wick, too, faces these questions, in fits of self-loathing.  He helped make Mord, even though he was friends with Mord when he was a human.

Borne ultimately comes to believe that it has a choice.  It tried for a while to kill only bad people, and that didn't really work, but what it can do is kill Mord.  The only way it can defeat Mord is by absorbing the giant bear, and in an explosive flash, reverting to a kind of infant-state, perhaps even a non-sentient state, thereby all but dying, but that is the choice Borne can make.

Rachel is given choices.  She lives in a world in which she kills.  Judge her harshly, if you choose.  Yet amid that, she had a choice about whether or not to try to protect Borne as best she could, and she tried.  When faced with revelation after revelation about Wick, she had a choice about whether or not to stand by him, and she did.  With everything she believed and every bit of pressure she felt, it came down to the choices she made.

Wick too.  Wick participated in the worst.  Would the Company have been able to make Mord without him?  Unclear, but his self-loathing, and his constant denial of his own "personhood" came from his own wrongs.  His guilt was earned, but he did protect Rachel.

Rachel.  Wick.  Borne.  No matter what has happened to you, and no matter what  drives you, you have choices, and that means you have responsibility.  For all the differences between these characters, when faced with real choices throughout the novel, they make defensible if difficult and contestable choices.  You may not like everything Wick does, but he has a perspective to consider, and he is trying to protect Rachel, for whom he feels responsibility.

And Borne.  Borne, whose impulse to consume and kill is beyond anything you can ever know.  Even Borne has a choice about what to do, and in the end, Borne directs that impulse to the death of Mord, and his own self-sacrifice.  Is he a person?

He makes a choice.  He has agency.  His choice is the moral choice.  He provides the city with a future.  What they do with it will depend on their own choices.  Their own agency.  Their own responsibility.  Who are they to deny their own responsibility in the face of what Borne has given them?  In the face of the choice he made?

Elliott Sharp, "Black Bear Rag," from Commune.