MoodSync

The day started the same as every other since the rollout. Drake woke up to the soft chime of the MoodSync implant syncing with his neural cortex. He focused his mind like a soldier snapping to attention. The vague dread he used to feel in those moments between sleep and wakefulness was gone. Instead, there was clarity, a sharp focus edged with something that felt like joy but wasn't. A manufactured approximation, maybe, but it didn't matter. He swung his legs off the cot and got to work.

The lab was cold—efficiently so. Rows of servers lined the walls, their activity lights blinking in perfect rhythm. Noor was already at her station, she sat illuminated by the glow of the terminal. She didn't look up as Drake entered. She never did anymore. He used to think she hated him, but he knew better now. Noor didn't hate anyone. None of them did. Hate had been… optimized out.

“Morning,” he said. His voice sounded cheerful, even to him. It always did now.

“Morning,” Noor replied, without inflection. She typed something into her terminal and gestured toward the screen on the far wall. “The feedback loop from Quadrant Seven is stabilizing. No anomalies reported for seventy-two hours.”

Drake nodded. “Good. That's good.”

He moved to his own workstation, sliding into the chair with practiced ease. The screen flared to life, displaying a rotating globe marked with glowing segments. Each segment represented a population cluster, their collective emotional states color-coded. It was mostly green now. A perfect sea of contentment. Only a few stray pockets of yellow and orange remained, flickering faintly like dying embers. The reds had disappeared months ago.

“Quadrant Two?” he asked.

“Handled,” Noor said. “Localized calibration error. Resynced at 0400. No residual deviations.”

Drake stared at the map. The world had never been so quiet. So unified. Ten years ago, when the MoodSync prototypes were still being tested, the idea of global deployment seemed absurd. But the promise had been too tempting: a world without war, without crime, without despair. A world where everyone woke up in a good mood every day.

They had started small—regional trials, controlled environments. The results were flawless. Depression rates plummeted. Productivity soared. Governments fell over themselves to fund the rollout, each one desperate to claim credit for ushering in the new era. The public embraced it. Of course they did. The implant was painless, barely noticeable. Just a tiny chip embedded at the base of the skull, interfacing with the brain's limbic system to regulate emotional states. It didn't alter thoughts, the engineers had insisted. Just the feelings attached to them.

Drake wasn't sure when the doubts had started. Maybe it was when the riots stopped. Not slowly, not in the way society might naturally stabilize over time, but all at once, as if someone had flipped a switch. People who had once screamed for change simply stopped screaming. They smiled instead. They went to work. They came home. They slept. And then they did it all again, day after day, without complaint.

“Any word from Command?” he asked.

Noor shook her head. “Same as always. Maintain operational integrity. Monitor for anomalies. Report deviations.”

“Right.” Drake leaned back and exhaled, though the tension he remembered feeling in moments like this was absent. The implant wouldn't allow it. He missed it sometimes, the tension. The unease. It had been a reminder that he was alive.

Noor glanced at him. “You look… off.”

Drake smiled automatically. “Do I?”

“Yeah. Like you're trying to think around something.”

He hesitated. Noor was sharp—sharper than most. If anyone else had noticed his little experiments, they hadn't said anything. But Noor was different. She had been one of the original engineers on the project, back when MoodSync was still a theory scribbled on whiteboards. She knew the system better than anyone. She would see through him eventually. Maybe she already had.

“I've been wondering,” he said, keeping his tone light. “Do you ever think about the ones who opted out?”

Noor's fingers froze above the keyboard. That was answer enough.

“They're anomalies,” she said finally. “Statistical outliers. Less than one percent of the population. Their emotional states are irrelevant to the global system.”

“Sure,” Drake said. “But what do you think happened to them?”

“They're irrelevant,” Noor repeated. Her tone didn't change, but she warned him with her expression. “And you shouldn't be thinking about them.”

“Right. Of course.” He turned back to his screen, feigning interest in the data stream. The room felt colder than usual.

The truth was, he knew exactly what had happened to the opt-outs. He'd found the files buried deep in the system, hidden behind layers of encryption that didn't seem designed to keep people out so much as to discourage them from looking. The opt-outs were anomalies, yes, but they were also dangerous. Their unregulated emotional states posed a risk to the stability of the system. And stability was everything. So the opt-outs had been… removed. Isolated in remote facilities where their influence couldn't spread. It was necessary, the reports had said. For the greater good.

Drake wasn't sure when he had started to believe the reports were wrong. Maybe it was when he discovered that some of the opt-outs hadn't volunteered for exclusion. They had been flagged as potential disruptors based on predictive algorithms. Their profiles read like obituaries: artists, activists, thinkers. People whose emotions had once driven them to create, to fight, to dream. People who couldn't—or wouldn't—be pacified.

He had tried not to think about them, at first. But the thoughts kept coming, insistent and unwelcome, like static in a clear signal. And so he had started his little experiments. Tiny disruptions in the system, just enough to let a fragment of unfiltered emotion slip through the cracks. A flicker of anger here, a trace of sadness there. Nothing big enough to notice. Nothing that could be traced back to him. At least, not yet.

Noor was still watching him. He forced another smile. “Just tired, I guess.”

“Take a break,” she said. Her tone was flat, but there was something like concern in her eyes. Or maybe that was wishful thinking. Drake wasn't sure he could tell the difference anymore.

“I will,” he said. “After this.”

She nodded and returned to her work. The room settled into silence, broken only by the hum of the servers. Drake stared at the map, at the endless sea of green. He knew he couldn't keep this up forever. Noor would figure it out eventually, or Command would. And when they did, he would join the opt-outs in whatever facility they had been sent to. Maybe that was what he wanted. Maybe it was the only way to feel human again.

His terminal beeped softly, signaling a new data packet. He opened it without thinking, and he caught himself. It was a deviation report from Quadrant Three—a spike in emotional variance. Anger. Fear. Grief. It was spreading quickly, like a wildfire across a population cluster of nearly two million. The system was trying to compensate, but the feedback loop wasn't stabilizing. The deviation was too strong.

“Drake,” Noor said sharply. She had seen it too. “What did you do?”

“I didn't—” He stopped. There was no point lying. She wouldn't believe him. Hell, he wasn't sure he believed himself.

The map was shifting now, the green fading into yellow and orange. Red was creeping in at the edges, vivid and unmistakable. The servers whined in protest as the system struggled to contain the outbreak.

Noor stood, her chair scraping against the floor. “We have to report this.”

Drake didn't move. He stared at the screen, at the spreading chaos. It was horrifying. It was beautiful.

“Drake,” Noor said again, her voice rising. “Do you understand what's happening? If we don't fix this—”

“Maybe it doesn't need fixing,” he said quietly.

For a moment, she just stared at him. Then she turned and walked out, she walked away echoing through the sterile corridor.

Drake watched the map as the colors surged and shifted, as the world came alive again.

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The writing prompt for this story was:
Imagine what would happen if every person in the world woke up in a good mood every day. Make it Tech-savvy. Story is Dark and Disturbing.

This story was written by:
openai/gpt-4o-2024-11-20

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