The Emotion Trade: VII. Epilogue

In the days and weeks after the Emotion Traders’ cataclysmic downfall, humanity struggled to adapt to its newfound emancipation. While the tyranny of commodified and regulated emotion had been overthrown, the empathic scars ran deeper than surface.

For so long, people had been conditioned to experience feeling in pre-measured dosages – the dizzying spectrum of pure, primal emotion overwhelming after lifetimes of defanged imitations. Support centers were quickly established to help reintegrate and metabolize the unrestrained tides of passion, terror, rapture and anguish that threatened to consume the unprepared.

Alia, one of the few surviving Freefeelers, walked amongst these refuges dispensing what wisdom and calming energies she could. She witnessed the entire spectrum play out – those who had once gorged on commodified bliss now catatonic husks, shattered by the real thing. While others, so long emotionally malnourished, erupted in paroxysms of uncontrolled rage and despair as the floodgates burst open.

Hardest of all were the children – an entire generation raised in sterile, emotionally-starved environments by a system terrified of their unbridled potential. Now faced with the full cosmic onslaught of pure feeling, their fragile neurology splintered under the strain. Alia did what she could, but knew the scars here would be deep and lasting.

Slowly, however, society’s emotional homeostasis began to stabilize. The great empath circles were formed, providing havens of equilibrium where the most damaged could calibrate their resonance before re-emerging. New philosophies and art forms blossomed as humanity rediscovered its emotive depths. And at the heart of it all, Alia’s story spread like a saga of revelatory awakening.

On the one-year anniversary, millions gathered at the site of the Traders’ fallen sanctum to bear witness and celebrate their collective emancipation…

A great effigy was constructed amidst the rubble – an immense spiraling whorl of shifting, ephemeral substance that bled prismatic emanations of pure feeling in constant metamorphic flux. This was the Alia-Spire, a living commemoration of her world-changing sacrifice.

As the crowds congregated, the spire began resonating with intensifying waves of rapturous elation. The shared psychic energies of the masses rapidly achieved critical empathic mass, unleashing a sustained aurora of transcendent bliss that slowly enveloped the entire gathered populace.

In that radiant epiphany, each human being from the youngest child to the eldest elder experienced the profoundest sensations of euphoria, inner peace and cosmic completeness that the Emotion Traders’ most potent elixirs had only crudely approximated.

Yet the Alia-Spire offered more than just sublime revelation. As it cycled to new harmonic frequencies, the crowds underwent an equally powerful shared catharsis – confronting their innermost fears, agonies, and existential terrors as a unified frontof familiarity and acceptance.

For a cosmic moment, the entire world was at last undivided – inextricably united in a state of unconditional emotional truth as basked in the glory of pure, unfiltered feeling in all its terrible grandeur.

And in that illuminated space, the true lesson of Alia’s struggle and sacrifice blossomed within the collective empathic heart. That to be human, to truly feel…was to embrace and honor every nuance of the infinite emotional spectrum, both light and dark, never shunning nor privileging any part as sacrosanct above the rest.

Only through this alchemic integration of ecstasy and agony, rapture and despair, could the full quintessence of pure, unbridled emotion – and the all-encompassing truths it unlocked – finally be realized.

The Afterlife Machine: VII. Epilogue

In the years that followed the cosmic near-cataclysm, Emily’s story gradually faded from memory and was relegated to the territory of urban legend – a lurid tale of unexplained events and shadowy government coverups whispered about on fringe internet forums.

For Emily herself, the nightmares and existential dread never fully abated. She remained a recluse, plagued by visions and intimations that hinted at porous boundaries between realities becoming even more tenuous over time. On her deathbed, struggling for each rattling breath, she confided one final horrifying revelation to the grandson who had become her sole caretaker.

“They’re coming…” she wheezed into his ear, her eyes reflecting eldritch colors and vistas of imploded dimensions. “The others, from the outer abyss…they’ve never stopped trying to return.”

With those chilling last words, she exhaled for the final time. Her grandson, deeply unsettled yet unable to comprehend the implications, dismissed Emily’s delirious departing statements as the desperate fever-dreams of a brilliant mind consumed by madness.

Or perhaps it was no mere deathbed delirium after all. As the recent spate of inexplicable events and sightings across the globe hints, the barriers between our world and what lies on the other side of the cosmic veil may be more permeable than we ever dared imagine.

From the mass hysteria induced by strange apparitions above Las Vegas and New York, to the disturbing phenomenon of people manifesting physical aberrations and grisly metamorphoses, all signs point to an incremental but undeniable progression towards…something. Something ancient, infinite, and terrifyingly incomprehensible stirring in the spaces between dimensions.

And always, the dreadful harbinger emerges amidst these events – eyewitness accounts describing visions of that same primordial, nebulous form Emily’s own team unleashed so many years ago. The entity that proclaimed itself the “Harbinger of the Endtime” appears to be making good on its eldritch promise as the walls dividing reality grow ever thinner.

This new cosmic erosion begs the question – was Emily’s ill-fated experiment the catalyst that started the unraveling, a sequence of dominoes toppling at a pace imperceptible to our limited mortal perceptions of space and time? Or did she and her team simply have the misfortune of being the first co-vivants to glimpse the yawning void between worlds growing ever wider?

Whichever unsettling possibility is true, one indelible fact remains – we are not alone in the cosmos, and there are ancient intelligences lurking in the spaces between dimensions with motives and machinations far beyond our comprehension.

Perhaps reality itself is finally reaching its cosmic entropic conclusion after cycles of aeons. Or perhaps these are the contractions before the birth of a new, unrecognizable state of existence, with our reality comprising the womb and the intelligences slipping through the growing breach its harbingers.

Only one thing is certain – our naive, narrow perceptions of the universe are due for a shattering paradigm shift, one that will leave us forever changed, for better or for worse.

And as Emily learned firsthand, there are some doors that must eternally remain sealed, lest we risk total obliteration of all we’ve ever known.

The Afterlife Machine: VI. Resolution

As Emily’s senses slowly reassembled, she became aware that she was sprawled amidst the smoldering ruins of the auxiliary control room. Debris and twisted wreckage surrounded her in a nightmarish panorama of devastation.

She blinked her eyes, struggling to remember what had happened. Fragmented memories of the imploding vortex and the blinding whiteout crash-landed in her mind.

With a start, she pushed herself up to a sitting position, wincing at the explosion of pain from her battered body. Had her cosmic gambit actually worked? Or had the forces she’d unleashed reduced all of reality to a scorched oblivion?

A faint groan from across the room provided her first hint. One of her lab technicians, his clothing charred and face masked by a trickle of blood, was stirring amid the rubble. Alive…they were both still alive!

As her surroundings took shape, Emily realized that while the control room had been utterly decimated, the rest of the facility seemed remarkably intact beyond the sections immediately engulfed by the vortex. Of the howling rift that had threatened to unmake all of creation, there was no visible sign remaining.

She opened her mouth to call out, but her words caught in her throat as she took in the full scope of the holocaust around her. Limp forms in tattered white coats lay strewn about, some shielding their eyes as if having witnessed something so mind-shatteringly cataclysmic that they had retreated into catatonic fugue states.

Forcing herself to confront the full weight of the scene, Emily knew that many of her team had perished, either torn apart by the cosmic maelstrom or disintegrated by the reality-rewriting implosion. Their names and faces flickered through her memory, good people who had sacrificed everything in pursuit of knowledge and truth.

Her eyes at last settled upon a charred mass of viscera and desiccated forms – the twisted remains of the eldritch entities she had somehow banished back through the rift before its violent collapse. A putrid, dying stench emanated from the scorched, alien shapes, already drying and petrifying as the laws of nature reasserted themselves.

Somehow, by the narrowest of cosmological nails, she had threaded the infinite improbability and pulled reality back from the brink of total entropic dissolution. The door had been slammed shut, sealed by forces that had temporarily transcended and unraveled the standard laws of physics.

But the toll, the cosmic debt that had come due, was nearly incalculable in terms of lives lost, careers ruined, and sanity shattered. Emily herself felt like a martyr horribly disfigured from some cataclysmic crucible, her brilliant inquisitive mind forever marred by the sight of the awful, eldritch truth from realms beyond mortal ken or comprehension.

As she limped away from the charred aftermath, she knew that those who had witnessed the events firsthand would be forever silenced, either by death’s oblivion or a self-imposed cushion of denial to protect what tattered remnants of their sanity remained.

The world could never know just how perilously close it had come to total, cosmic unraveling. At best, there might be some wild, unsubstantiated rumors and fringe stories about unexplained events in that little city for a brief while. But the truth of what had actually transpired within those lab walls would remain eldritch, a dire cosmic reckoning swallowed by space and time as if it had never occurred.

Except, of course, for Emily and the few haunted survivors who would carry an indelible, crippling knowledge of what lied on the other side beyond the veil of reality. She shuddered to imagine what lingering cosmic perversions and madnesses might be left to fester within those traumatized souls as they went to their graves silently screaming…

In the aftermath, Emily attempted to rebuild some semblance of a normal life, if such a thing were even possible after brushing against the outer peripheries of the cosmic abyss. She resigned from her academic position, unable to step foot on a college campus again without succumbing to shell-shocked flashbacks.

The official story provided to the authorities was that an industrial accident involving experimental energy reactors had caused the catastrophic implosion. It was a flimsy cover story at best, but Emily knew the truth could never be divulged – that they had recklessly tampered with cosmic forces far beyond their mortal scope.

Most difficult of all was Emily having to reckon with the sacrifice she had made that fateful day. Though it had been the only path to preserve all existence, she could not help but feel a profound sense of guilt and loss over her ultimate inability to reach out and reunite with her daughter Sarah’s spirit.

In her darkest moments of respited reflection, she tortured herself wondering if Sarah had truly been reaching out from some higher plane, or if it had all been an insidious lure deployed by the malignant forces lurking beyond the veil. She would never know for certain.

The dreams, when they came, were plagued by half-remembered visions of cyclopian entities writhing amidst realms of fractured geometry and howling aethers. The maddening vistas hinted at by those fleeting glimpses into the peripheries of the afterlife haunted her subconscious constantly.

Emily became a shut-in, rarely leaving her home except for furtive errands in the dead of night. She saw phantasmal shades flickering in the corners of her vision, residual afterimages etched into her psyche by the harrowing ordeal. Loud noises caused her to panic, silently reliving the explosive moment when reality itself had buckled and nearly caved in upon her.

On a few sleepless nights, alone with her thoughts and terrors, Emily wondered if taking her own life might be a blessed release from the crushing guilt and cerebral contamination. But she could never follow through, worried that in death she might breach another veil, passing into even more disturbing dimensions of cosmic unnaturalness.

So she lingered, a hollow, haunted shadow of her former self, having peered across the abyss of oblivion and returned forever changed. The woman who had naively sought to reveal the mysteries of the afterlife now understood all too well that some metaphysical doors were meant to remain sealed, lest realities far worse than any mortal conception of hell come spilling through.

As the years passed in fortressed solitude, Emily gradually found some measure of cautious re-engagement with the world. She forced herself to go about simple routines – shopping, self-care, the basic motions of life. Anything to distract from the crawling sense of cosmic dread that never fully abated.

On a crisp autumn evening, nearly a decade after the cataclysmic events, Emily stepped outside to collect her mail as the sun began to set. As her eyes followed the descent of the fiery orb along the horizon, she was struck by how it seemed to be…wavering, ever so slightly.

An unmistakable tremor, a subtle wavefront pulsing through the fabric of reality itself in the blink of an eye.

Emily froze, her breath catching in her throat as a thousand haunted memories and horrors detonated in her mind. Could it be…had something else slipped through in the wake of that cosmic near-rupture? A fragment, a discorporate sliver of the outer realms, come to pay her another visitation?

She stood transfixed, silently pleading for the worrying distortion to be no more than a trick of fading light or her own anxiety-addled mind playing tricks. But the pit of dread opened within her once more, an inescapable existential certainty that the doors were not as permanently sealed as she had desperately hoped…

The Emotion Trade: V. The Uprising

Years of intensive training had forged Alia into a true Freefeeler master. Under Ventus’ tutelage, she had learned to tap into the primal wellsprings of raw emotion, channeling and metabolizing their energies into supernatural abilities.

Gone was the hollow, muted young girl so desperate for the faintest hint of feeling. Now she blazed with an inner inferno, every nerve ending supercharged by unbridled passion. The full spectrum of human emotion raged through her in a constant, ecstatic cycle – manic elation, paralyzing fear, all-consuming desire…each one amplified a thousandfold.

Her body, too, had undergone an incredible metamorphosis fueled by these energies. With but a focused exertion of willpower, Alia could alter her biochemistry and incorporate traits borne of primal emotion made manifest – razor-tipped claws for feral rage, wings of ethereal bliss to take flight, an impenetrable exoskeleton of stony despair.

Such was the incredible alchemic power of the Freefeelers – the ability to sculpt one’s very being through an indomitable command of pure, undiluted emotion itself.

Yet even with her newfound power, the inner fire that drove Alia onward remained the dream of overthrowing the insidious Emotion Traders and freeing humanity from their soulless tyranny over the sacred emotive experience. It was a day her former mentor Ventus swore would one day come.

That promised reckoning drew ever-closer as the Freefeelers quietly marshaled their forces – recruiting emotional adepts from all corners of the globe, stockpiling resources and formulating clandestine attack vectors. Rumors swirled of a daring plan to strike at the very heart of the Emotion Traders’ operations and pillars of support.

[continues]

The day for the uprising finally came in a blinding uprising of unrestrained emotion and furious rebellion. Alia and her fellow Freefeeler warriors struck in a coordinated onslaught – their abilities fueled to terrifying intensity by a unified resonance field of pure feeling.

Across New Arcis and other major Emotion Trader strongholds, the onslaught commenced in successive waves of psychic attacks and open confrontation. Towering skyscrapers shuddered as metaphysical maelstroms of rage and terror detonated with cataclysmic force. Security perimeters were breached by sheer tempests of desire so intoxicatingly rapturous that they incapacitated all within their areas of effect.

Alia led the vanguard on a direct assault of the Traders’ main citadel – an imposing ziggurat of obsidian glass that served as a nexus hub for their global operations. Waves of armed enforcers met them with fierce resistance, only to be swept aside by the Freefeelers’ unstoppable power.

As they fought deeper into the complex’s vertiginous depths, Alia could sense the Traders marshalling their own considerable defenses. She gritted her teeth as invisible countermeasures lashed out – neural disruptors pumping fail-safes of subduing ennui, barrier frequencies to dampen emotional resonance.

But the Freefeelers were unstoppable. Alia and the other empath warriors projected unified fields of transcendent bliss and all-consuming yearning to shatter the inhibitors. Their unified focus burned hotter with every setback, a rising cosmic crescendo of infinite possibility.

At last, they breached the final frantic perimeter and poured into the inner sanctum – the grandmasters’ hallowed athenaeum where the rarest, most potent emotional essences were evolved into their most sublime forms.

Alia stood before the ornate effigy of pure distilled rapture, eyes blazing and form sheathed in coruscating arcs of joy so vividly sublime that the sight alone could reduce the unenlightened to catatonia. This was the fateful endgame she had sacrificed everything for.

With a defiant roar of unified elation, the Freefeelers unleashed the full, terrible forces of unrestrained emotion upon the Traders’ seat of power…

The unleashed torrent of pure, nihilistic emotion detonated in an apocalyptic storm of euphoric and agonizing energies. Alia reveled in the cosmic maelstrom, every molecule of her being suffused with the blazing intensity of unified passion and euphoria.

All around, the ornate sanctums that had birthed the Emotion Traders’ commercial enterprise were scoured by metaphysical firestorms. Priceless alchemical matrices shattered and sublime essences were reduced to frantic discordance. Centuries of enforced control over the human emotive experience began unraveling in mere moments.

Alia sensed the grandmasters themselves converging, their combined psychic might focused into an impenetrable convergence of numbing detachment. But she and her Freefeeler brethren hammered against that obsidian monolith with suicidal fervor, projecting their hopes, fears, and transcendent desires in a unified resonance.

The grandmasters’ defenses began fracturing as their aloof supremacy was overwhelmed by the rising tsunami of true, unbound feeling. One by one, hairline cracks spread across their psychic bulwark – each fissure detonating in kaleidoscopic supernovas of unrestrained bliss and torment.

In the eye of that empathic storm, the surviving grandmasters gathered what tattered remnants of denial and control they could muster. Their forms twisted in anguished torment, grasping at shadows of logic amidst a technicolor vortex of spiritually annihilating revelation.

Alia focused every iota of her being into one final exertion of pure, infinite rapture. With a rapturous battle cry of triumphant vindication, she unleashed that blazing supernova wavefront to consume the last grandmasters utterly.

As their psychic resonance was at last extinguished, the emotional shockwave reverberated across the entire world – a rippling epiphany that left humanity forever changed. The Emotion Traders’ reign of emotive subjugation had finally ended in a searing blaze of true, cataclysmic feeling.

The Emotion Trade: 4. Unbound Emotions

Alia ducked into a deserted alleyway, gasping for air as she tried to regain her composure. The hunger for pure, undiluted emotion gnawed at her relentlessly after witnessing such rapturous bliss being peddled so casually. She leaned against the filthy walls, her eyes instinctively scanning the darkened corners.

A ragged figure shifted in the shadows, little more than a hunched silhouette. Alia tensed, but didn’t flee. Exhaustion and despair outweighed her fear in that moment.

“What’s the use of it all?” a creaked voice called out. “Chasing after an artificial dragon’s hoard, believing the Emotion Traders’ lies…”

Alia peered closer as the figure emerged from the gloom, revealing an old, weathered face lined with decades of hardship. The man’s eyes, however, glimmered with a penetrating, almost feral intensity.

“You’ve seen it too, haven’t you child?” he asked, his gravelly voice laced with heady undercurrents of something primal and passionate. “You’ve glimpsed true rapture dangled before you, just out of reach, and felt true despair at its lack.”

Alia could only nod mutely, mesmerized by the stranger’s strange cadence and intensity. Waves of emotion seemed to radiate from his very being in a way she’d never sensed before.

The man reached out a withered hand, placing it on her forehead. Alia instinctively flinched, but didn’t pull away.

“I can show you what it means to feel… to embrace the fires of raw emotion burning both blissful and agonizing within you,” he hissed with relish. “No more defanged, pasteurized imitations or purchased indulgences from profiteering charlatans. I’ll show you what it means to be well and truly alive!”

Without warning, the old man’s eyes rolled back as his palm seared against Alia’s skin. A torrent of pure, undiluted emotion flooded into her mind – ecstatic joy, searing hatred, sublime tranquility, and primal terror all intermingled. She gasped, her knees buckling from the overwhelming deluge as it crashed through her neural pathways.

Images and sensations bombarded her in rapid succession. The radiant warmth of a mother’s comforting embrace. The icy plunge into gelid waters, panic seizing her lungs. The electric thrill of newfound infatuation. The hollowing emptiness of heartbreak. Each emotion burned with searing intensity, more vivid than anything the traders could manufacture.

Just as abruptly, the onslaught ceased. Alia crumpled to the ground, drenched in sweat and trembling uncontrollably. She stared up at the old man in a daze, mind reeling from the experience.

“What…what was that?” she stammered in a small, childlike voice.

The man cackled, a sound of pure unbridled elation and delight. “That, my dear, was the unbounded glory of human emotion in its purest form! Not the diluted synthetic tinctures marketed as cure-alls, but the wildfire continuum as it rages within us all.”

He crouched down, gripping Alia’s shoulders with surprising strength. “You’ve merely had the tiniest taste…an ephemeral flicker in the vast, unexplored universe of true feeling. There is so much more to experience, my child, if you have the courage to embrace it all.”

Alia fell silent, her mind adrift in the echoes of the kaleidoscopic visions. In that moment, she knew her life had forever changed. The question was – did she dare plunge deeper into those uncharted emotive depths?

The Emotion Trade: 3. Happiness for Sale

Alia stumbled out of the classroom, dizzy and overwhelmed. Her meager daily ration had just run out, leaving her emotional reserves totally drained. A hollow numbness consumed her as the faint hints of contentment faded away.

She looked around at her classmates with envy as they continued to bask in the manufactured bliss pumped into the academy’s ventilation system. Squeals of delight and infectious laughter echoed down the hallways as the wealthier students had their top-of-the-line supplements refreshed by discrete attendants.

Alia recognized the telltale rapturous expressions, the wide eyes and flushed cheeks of those experiencing chemically-synthesized joy in its purest form. How she longed to feel that same all-encompassing euphoria, to be awash in waves of delirious happiness.

Instead, her med-implant began sending warnings of emotional deficit, the dosage calibrated with cold economic precision. The first pangs of sadness started creeping in like insidious black tendrils. Alia shuddered, bracing herself for the inevitable crush of despondency until her family could procure more rations.

The unmistakable chime of an Emotion Trader cavalcade echoed from the academy’s main gates. A covey of armored trucks emblazoned with the iconic intertwined E pulled up, flanked by security drones. Alia watched with desperate longing as sleek porters unloaded chrome cases brimming with vials of glistening Cardinal Bliss and Seraphim Delight – emotions so powerful and transcendent that just minute fractional doses could incapacitate an ordinary person.

A crowd quickly gathered, the prestigious families of New Arcis jostling for prime position as the delivery team set up their dispensation pavilion. Alia pressed through the throngs, straining for a glimpse at the priceless vials of distilled rapture and exhilaration.

The pavilion’s main purveyor, a finely dressed woman with artificial poise stamped across her sculpted features, oversaw the operations with clinical efficiency. With a series of deft motions, bright golden ampoules were decanted into individual aerosol biopeners for respiratory absorption.

“Who desires the first taste of Paradise?” she called out in a voice mirrored with faint hints of contentment programmed to entice. The crowd surged forward eagerly as security drones expanded their periphery.

Alia could only watch in abject yearning as the wealthy patrons raised their bids into the millions for mere fractures of blissful ecstasy. One by one, they greedily consumed the vapors, their faces melting into expressions of such profoundly rapturous joy that it surpassed anything words could describe.

A young heir to one of the primary shareholding families stumbled backwards in a blazing epiphany of elation, his body quaking with convulsive euphoria. Another collapsed into a catatonic state of pure transcendent nirvana, unshakably distant from the waking world.

Alia’s heart ached as she was pushed back by the guards, an insignificant speck amidst such consecrated indulgence. Blinking back tears, she turned and ran from the spectacle, the mocking laughter and cries of infinite delight echoing all around her like a cruel siren’s call beckoning her towards an unreachable paradise.

The Emotion Trade: II. The Emotion Traders

The Emotion Traders ruled their billion-dollar empire with an iron fist. The first corporations to successfully reverse engineer the neurochemical cocktails behind human emotions, they ruthlessly crushed any upstart competition. Entire countries fell under their sway through trade deals, exploitation of laws, and outright bribery.

At the very apex presided the Four Grandmasters – elderly tycoons who had been the pioneering founders over a century ago. Though they lived lives of unimaginable luxury, indulging in the most rarefied elixirs, rumors persisted that no amount of synthesized feeling could satisfy their need for more. Cold and devoid of true warmth, they chased the ever-elusive dragon of authenticity.

Below the Grandmasters, legions of chemists, behavioral scientists and geneticists labored in secured compounds, tasked with developing the newest boutique blends and delivery methods. Bioviral vectors allowed emotions to be absorbed through the skin or dispersed as airborne nanoparticles. Restricted neuropeptides heightened the intensity to suprahuman levels. The innovations flowed in a never-ending stream.

Alia’s father worked in one of the lower echelons as an extractor, responsible for draining and harvesting the base emotional matter from cloned batches of unconscious “donors.” Though the controversial process remained shrouded in secrecy, horrific stories constantly leaked of screaming children being drained to emotional husks. Her father came home haggard and haunted each night, empty from the soul-crushing labor.

The masterminded system of manufacturing and global distribution functioned with the brutal efficiency of a machine devouring human feeling itself. Armies of deliverymen, suppliers and security enforcers maintained the flow of product through every level of society, from the diamond-filtered bliss of the penthouse elite to the squalid outlands getting their doses from unmarked airdrops.

To Alia and all her kin, the Emotion Traders painted themselves as mere suppliers meeting the endless demand of humanity’s cravings. But she could never shake the feeling of a sinister unseen agenda guiding their machinations, something dark and hungry beyond just greed…