>You miss the point - he felt guilty about killing an innocent
>bystander. In the Big Fire training, your concern about non-Big
>Fire (or lower level Big Fire) people is supposed to be 'nil. They
>want to create psychopaths who don't care about anyone. They thought
>they'd done that with UF-Geoff, but they were wrong. He was capable
>of feeling remorse, and that's exactly what Big Fire indoctrination
>tries to crush.

Yes, indeed. He was a loyal member of Big Fire, in line with the indoctrination, and then one hit that just didn't fit the others - cleaning up a witness, in the way it happened (as we saw back in "Locard's Exchange" - upset his stacks, causing a flaw in the BF worldview he had. (I'm sure if there was a telepath poking around it, they'd have found the amount of brainwashing he'd had to be too much.) Then they said 'go kill your childhood crush' and, well, damage to the load-bearing brainwave became too much.

I'm tempted to go back and do a prequel story, showing how very broken he was at that point before turning up on Barsaan, but I'm not sure how to address it.

>So not a fluke - but a long, unaddressed trauma that needed a
>catalyst. If it was dumb luck UF-Geoff would have gone back to
>killing the innocent without a qualm after he found a way to resolve
>his brief, uncharacteristic, bout of conscience.

The catalyst here is simple: all his other hits had been from a distance, or with the subject unaware. The woman he killed that set off his concience was the first time he had to face, unadorned, just what he was doing. If they hadn't tried to send him on another mission so soon, he might have gotten over it.

Instead, he now spends his days dodging bullets and sometimes failing, kicking arse in the name of the Lord, doing the job of an SA7 agent. It's very similar, except that every day he's happy to wake up and face it, because Big Fire is, as noted, very cutthroat, and the IPO has given him collegues, friends, and in a way a sibling (well, not really, but Konoko has a Daodan, so they have that in common genetically). It's a better life.

(Now I need to work on the new story some more. At which point a piece of art a friend of mine did can be released.)

--
Geoff Depew - Darth Mephron
Haberdasher to Androids, Dark Lord of Sith Tech Support.
"And Remember! Google is your Friend!!"