Retainer Bot held firm and and processed its internal shortcomings. The designers had not intended for anything untoward to happen, but life in the Maze had its unpredictable qualities. There was no telling what could happen and no telling what would happen.

A scuff mark on the wall was cause for alarm. Retainer Bot could not identify it, and also because there was no way it could yeah fuck this try again.

Borbin peeled out of the driveway with a screech and merged into traffic without glancing backwards. He was late for his meeting! He was never late! That ended today. The sunset was firing at a crisp 7:48pm, the worst time to be driving west, but there was nothing for it. He could not miss this meeting. He had set it up with the director of internal shortcomings, a little-known bureau in his department. He was hoping for a promotion or at least a demotion.

He did not like his current position at the Caring Company. He sold riveting emotions to the unsuspecting masses. Sometimes it was an okay job, but most of the time it was just unfulfilling. He wasn’t sure how he had landed in this career. Most of his 20s were spent playing video games and by age 29 he just couldn’t take it anymore. He loved playing video games, don’t get him wrong, please don’t, just don’t do that, do not get the man wrong my friend, but in the last year or two he had been paying closer attention to his internal state. Something wasn’t satisfying him anymore. He could only preorder so many games he would never get around to playing.

So Borbin applied at a random company, the Caring Company, and took the offer without negotiating. He had never learned how to negotiate, so he just signed the form on the line and showed up next Monday.

That was seven years ago. The Caring Company specialized in positive emotions and some negative ones. Research suggested that populations preferred a mixture of each. Some were not marketable. Nausea, while not an emotion, was still a feeling, and did not perform well in the current political climate. Agents in the field indicated people could find nausea wherever they looked these days; there was no need to purchase it. What do you think of that? Can you identify with this paragraph and relate it to your own situation or would you prefer to read ahead? Subtext is a virtue, but we don’t sell those here.

Contentment, Joy, and Whimsy were the regular top performers, but it was naive for the marketers to lean too heavily into these. There was something about the human condition (research, again, suggested; we must defer to research young reader) that people grew tired of these. It wasn’t until competitors started experimenting with Disgust and Rage that things really took off. And I’m telling you when I say took off, I mean launched into orbit. It was a careful balance of price points of course, but the science was dialed into almost an exact proportion.

Borbin was in charge of calibrating Disgust and Grief. Imagine that, people subconsciously preferred a spectrum of possible states. They wouldn’t admit this. They could not. Most people did not understand their own minds. But data was available. The trouble was this: Borbin’s achievements were diminishing. Annual performance reviews could not be more rigged, but they were the metric nonetheless, and Borbin was under-delivering.

He was a data master. You had to be in this line of work! If you fouled up the projections then you lost a lot of customers. They would take their business wherever their feelings directed them. The non-rational mind was king. So Borbin prepared a presentation on the perils of focusing too much on Disgust and Grief, despite short-term profits exceeding last quarter. He saw a problem with such short-sightedness but the ironic thing was the metric everyone in the Market of Emotions paid attention to was cold, hard data. FACTS.

“Facts can be manipulated,” muttered Borbin from behind the wheel, bringing himself out of his spontaneous autobiography. “It’s not facts that are important, but how we feel about facts.”

He pounded his closed fist on his steering wheel. This was a revelation in the evolution of the business. Commerce would be altered forever if he could get this in front of the right minds.

He cruised through an intersection, paying no attention to the lights because there were no lights. Somehow they had slowly vanished around society. This society, anyway. He suspected things functioned differently elsewhere but the concept of “elsewhere” was gradually losing relevance in the minds of the buyers. There was probably data that linked this to their increasing dependence on purchasing feelings, but he hadn’t figured that one out yet. He would do so now:

Traffic lights had vanished. Borbin’s guess was they represented objective truth. You do not argue with a light. You can’t reason yourself around it. It was just something that was true. The more people relied on their regular doses of visceral responses, the less they liked thinking the lights could control their actions, so the government probably began phasing them out in favor of traffic “suggestions.” Illuminated suggestions that provided guidance on what made sense at the time. This was a far more fluid implementation of society’s guardrails and people responded to it favorably. Control was best presented in the form of illusion. We need not elaborate on this you tedious pedantic fuck.

Yeah so Borbin blew through this intersection, taking for granted the suggestion to speed up. Electric cables embedded in the street maintained a constant connection to his car, as they did to all cars of course, which in turn was monitoring Borbin’s heart rate and breathing. It doesn’t take a dose of Inference to realize Borbin had a more justified reason to rush than Veeber over there (for example) who was just heading out for a food withdrawal. Veeber could wait, and Veeber’s temperament (ascertained by the electrical network) was already analyzed. No altercation. No collision.

And that’s where our story starts: Borbin behind the wheel and screeching along the causeway to compensate for his tardiness. It was moments like this that he looked back all wistful on his 20s, when his biggest concern was shooting up Flaffers from the comfort of his couch. That was probably just the dose of Wistful Wistiness finally taking effect. He didn’t know why he was hooked on that one. He figured he just liked dwelling on a less complicated life.