A Happy Society

An exorbitantly wealthy scientist once wished to create a perfectly happy society. Genetic engineering would be its key. The first batch of people all died during infancy. The tolerance levels for the poisons that their brains had been programmed to release with negative emotions were simply too low. As soon as an infant began to cry, it would die. After the sixth batch or so, the strategy was perfected. Sadness, anger, and other “negative” emotions would cause severe pain or even death. The scientist created a perfectly happy society.

Every year there are inevitably a few dozen deaths, mostly children and adolescents. If a person can make it twenty years or so without slipping into a fetal depression, they tend to keep the healthy habit of happiness up for life. Those who are not so brave, or so cowardly, die a slow and painful death. Poison secreted from their brains creeps down the veins in their arms and back, chilling the tips of their fingers and toes. They die a lonely death, clenching groin and buttocks. A tear-stained corpse will be found shortly after on a hard street or a soft bed.

Only one murder has been committed since emotional conformity was actualized. The science was killed in cold blood. Nobody stopped the murderer, there were no police because there was no crime. Some expected the assassin to die there next to its maker, but the assassin simply walked away. Apparently the perpetrator not of a crime of passion, but one of simple necessity.

Two generations after the assassination the trait still persists, a cursed cancer of the heart. One can only hope that their descendants will be truly happy.

Psychic Sponge

Jef was born with a peculiar type of autism. Jef’s autism rendered him vulnerable to whatever psychic noise filled his environment. Jef never developed any emotions of his own. He simply, intensely, absorbed and reproduced the emotions that were emanating from the people around him. Often he would reflect others’ emotions more clearly and more vividly than they themselves would. Occasionally he would find himself trapped in emotional feedback loops with others as they witnessed their own grief or joy or embarrassment leak out from their hearts, into, then out of the boy.

Jef committed suicide at age twelve while in the presence of a bereaved Japanese businessman.