i want to make you sad

if you want yet more proof that the universe is an uncaring cunt, consider the following...

if you tell the same joke over and over again, people will eventually stop laughing at you, get angry, and cut out your tongue.

but if you show them something sad again and again, they'll weepweepweep until their eyes are sucked dry.

that's because good things, like pleasure, are finite. and there are only so many laughs to go around.

but misery and sadness... those the universe sees fit to supply in endless amounts.

now that warrants a hearty guffaw... and the universe can go fuck itself... i'll waste the chuckles.



he came back with another tray of something cheap and sat down. we helped ourselves to a drink.

'well?'

'so we had to make this place miserable again... for spiritual glory... for stemjockey freedom... for peace of mind and the stability of our lives... to liberate us from the yoke of capitalist oppression and deliver us to the paradise of self-governance...

none of that really mattered to me, as you well know. what did matter was that i needed to get back to my old life double fucking quick or i was going to start bleeding from my eyes what with all the nice floating around in here.

so the stemjockeys and i tried some brainstorms... harhar... which involved them rounding up random people from the station, latching on to 'em and making them come up with ideas to make this place less pleasant.

unfortunately that didn't work, because as soon as a loose stemjockey attached to one of them, they'd immediately get happy to, and not want to leave that brain, and definitely not want to revert this piece of shit to a bigger piece of shittier shit.

instead they'd come up with ways to improve it even further, so the place went from good, to great, to mind-bogglingly awesome...

fresh ivy and flowers cut from the greenhouse levels were grafted on to the clangy metal walkways and walls, turning common thruway into a lush, green, silent dream.

then someone figured out that they could graft weirdfruit on those vines... but even that wasn't a disaster... somehow the enzymes, or vitamins, or whatever the fuck it was that turned cosmoose's kind into psychotic investment bankers whose entire brains are just giant pools of dopamine with receptors lining their skull were stymied by the original vines... so there were no panics, no violence, no nothing. just civilized walks through the garden, chatting with your close friends, enjoying a perfectly ripe, deliciously juicy, fabulously strange weirdfruit.

even i was starting to see the appeal. but.. i promised the stemjockeys... we had a deal and a deal is a deal, unless i decide to reneg on the deal because there's a better deal around...

it was time to break this place of its happiness... for that, we'd need some despair. some misery. some nastiness.

something that would permeate every little amygdala and amygdala-analogue on the station, and turn it from cheery to soul-crushingly despondent.

we had to get right in to those brains, everyone's brains, and fuck 'em.. all at once.

we were going to have to broadcast pure grief, pure ennui, pure fucking agony wearing dolor cologne freshly douched with gloom and topped with a beret of pure melancholy.

well... we needed to find someone who wasn't happy.

and then that person was going to have to be made a whole lot more fucking wretched for this thing to work. so the plan was to get everyone to start treating this guy like absolute shit, to make him so fucking unhappy, so tormented, so sorrowful that he would become grief incorporated... then we'd strap an emography rig on him, and send his pain to the whole fucking station.

not a job anyone is going to volunteer for, as you might imagine.

so we tried kidnapping some people, but everyone who came to the station immediately became happy. no amount of prodding or brain surgery could prep them for the woe we needed.

we tried it with a robot, but that didn't work... even the bot got cheery.

we even tried re-animating a corpse... if you want to see a happy corpse dancing-about-thanking-everyone-for-bringing-it-back-to-life-and-yea-it's-ok-that-it's-mostly-rotten-and-wormy-but-don't-worry-about-it-because-this-was-way-better-than-being-dead-and-hey-it's-a-lot-of-fun-here-on-this-station-can-i-stay-a-while, then you should go down to the garden levels, its working as a gardener down there, pulling vegetables out of the ground... he said it was something about paying it forward

anyway... it was unclear what we were to do... nobody could be made sad enough to get that chain reaction of unhappiness we needed.

'but there was one person you hadn't tried it on, right?'

'you catch on quick.'

'it was you, wasn't it? you're the simp?'

'the idea of becoming pure negativity definitely had its appeal. and strictly speaking, the simp is the physical manifestation of all my negative emotions.

so we tortured me for weeks, with that fucking emograph on my head, pumping pure sadness and pure hate and pure cruelty and pure repulsiveness for 16 hours a day. when that wasn't enough, we jammed a wire into my amygdala and starting sending it into overdrive... basically we juiced it... pulling every drop of seratonin, dopamine, and phenethylamine out of my head... we turned my brain into a seething factory of anxiety, depression, grief, ennui, hatred, anger and  fear. every day, for weeks, draining me of every negative emotion possible.

and unfortunately, to capture those emotions, you have to experience them.'

'that must have been fun.'

'meh. eventually, the emograph was full, we had captured the equivalent of one thousand years of misery into what would effectively be a ten second broadcast. when we finally hit play, we expected everyone to feel pretty wretched for a bit, then go back to their normal selves... a kind of pendulum swing of emotionality.

instead, something much worse happened. it turns out quantum mechanics governs a lot more than just an endless zoo of particles... emotions are also quantized, and this rapid release of emotions caused them to take a physical shape... a sort of moving emotional field, in this case, of pure negativity. that's the simp.

so we got our wish... the station was sad again, but now we had this fucking simp on our hands, just making everyone miserable... from one extreme to the other. it was this presence, that turned everything to shit. that made everyone despair.

he was a real asshole.

sometimes you could hear him talking to someone, just trying to make them feel bad about themselves. he'd do it out loud, he'd do it in their heads, he'd do it any fucking way he could come up with, just to break a person down... sometimes he'd use the fucking pa system and announce, to the whole station, how so-and-so was ugly and stupid. he'd pick on everyone... and when he wasn't singling anyone out, he'd just create this low-grade ennui that made everybody mopish... a gigantic cunt, enabled by quantum-mechanics and my own misery, dragging this whole fucking place down.

i think we may have gone overboard with the brain-juicing.'

'which is kind of awesome.'

'agreed... but within reason... a little sadness is ok... you just don't want to be hit by falling bodies every time you try to take a shit or eat a sandwich. we couldn't keep up with the demand for the furnaces, with all the corpses we had... tourists may want some grit, but they don't want to be smooshed by a recently-sepukku'd robot stevedore. business was not getting better, and now everyone was just miserable instead of happy. so the stemjockeys couldn't sell, and we were back to where we were... just now with this asshole around.

we had to get rid of the simp.'

'i'll get this round. this is getting interesting.'

'i thought you might.'