The story had me for most of it but I'm pretty disappointed by the very end. Protagonist seems to have unequivocally become the bad guy at that point. I don't think I would be confident enough in my understanding of consciousness to do that until I spent a lot more time understanding the situation, assuming it wasn't a self-defense emergency by that point. I get being angry but remaining in reflexively unthinking action hero mode rather than administering a battery of Turing Tests just seems wildly uncalled for. Maybe it's supposed to read as morally ambiguous, but like many readers here I am biased towards the Drangerian perspective and find the dilemma unsympathetic.