Here's my latest attempt at short story writing, this one reflecting on Climate Change and a desperate attempt to deal with the problems of political inaction, selfishness, greed and other obstacles to making sound policies before it's just too late to prevent catastrophic outcomes. Thanks for reading!
The Empathy Enhancement
The
helicopter banked left over
what had once been the Upper West Side, and Dr. Sarah Ross pressed her
face to the window. Nine stories below, murky brown water lapped at the
facades of buildings that had once housed millions. Makeshift boats
drifted between submerged traffic lights and street signs, their
occupants—former New Yorkers who'd had nowhere else to go—paddling
through what had been Broadway with pieces of debris. Disease was
rampant down there in the toxic soup of floodwater, sewage, and human
desperation. Sarah, as she often did, looked in desperate agony at the
faceless vagrants below, wondering how many of them she recognized
from her old neighborhood, and if any of them might in fact be her child
who had gone missing during the floods and was presumed dead. Her
husband, eminent climate scientist David Ross, seemed almost oblivious
to the squalor below.
"Approaching the UN building, Dr. Ross," the pilot called back. "Landing on the roof in two minutes."
Below them, the East River had
merged with the Hudson to create a vast inland sea that stretched from
the Bronx to Brooklyn. The United Nations building rose like a modernist
lighthouse from the waters, its glass facade streaked with mold and
water damage. Only the top fifteen floors were habitable now. This was
where the world's remaining functional governments had relocated their
most urgent climate negotiations—and where Sarah spent her days trying
to provide therapy to leaders whose minds had been systematically
destroyed by the very technology meant to save humanity.
The Adirondack Mountains, where
she and David had relocated after the floods, seemed like another
planet from up here. Clean air, dry land, functioning infrastructure for
those wealthy enough to escape. But even there, the weight of what was
happening pressed down on her like the humid air that never seemed to
lift from the drowned city below.
The helicopter touched down on
the UN's rooftop helipad with a metallic thud. Sarah gathered her
briefcase—containing files she wasn't supposed to have, psychological
assessments too damaging to ever see daylight—and stepped out into the
oppressive heat. The smell hit her immediately: mold, decay, and the
faint chemical tang of whatever they were using to keep the building's
upper floors minimally functional.
The Ross's took the elevator down to
Conference Room 4, the same space where six hours from now these same
people would gather for what she optimistically called "therapeutic
intervention." The mahogany walls were warped from moisture damage, and
she could hear the distant hum of industrial dehumidifiers fighting a
losing battle against the pervasive dampness.
As the
power couple at the center of post-catastrophe World Government entered,
other key scientists and political leader already there greeted them
anxiously. Dr. Amanda Wilson, the Secretary-General's chief
climate advisor; Dr. Chen Wei from Beijing's Emergency Climate
Authority; Maria Santos from Brazil's Relocation Ministry; and James
Morrison, representing what remained of the U.S. State Department's
climate division. The most brilliant minds from the world's major
powers, gathered to make decisions about the forced relocation of three
hundred million climate refugees. And every single one of them was
cognitively incapable of the task. Soon the banal routine of incoherent
exchanges took shape as it always did there-- institutionalized
madness.
"Look, Maria," David was
saying, irritation and condescension dripping from every word, "with due
respect, that idea is quite poorly thought out. Let's be serious here."
Maria's face flushed. "David, I
happen to recall that this idea was YOURS. I actually got it from the
policy brief you wrote last month!"
David blinked, the aggression
flickering like a short-circuiting light. "Oh yeah, I wrote that,
but..." He turned to his wife Sarah, a renowned climate psychologist, with the expression of a student asking for
help on a test. "Wait, Sarah, didn't I change my position on that one?"
Sarah felt that familiar ache
behind her ribs. "No, David. Maria is correctly noting your own
position, one you have not disowned. You have been questioning it, but
it was your idea, and you have mixed feelings about it now." She forced
her voice into therapeutic mode. "This is a good time for all of us to
discuss mixed or conflicting emotions."
Mixed feelings, she thought, is exactly what I have about my marriage with David. He's completely out of touch with himself. I can't bear it anymore.
She glanced around the room at the other members of their morning
policy session. All of them watching this exchange with the detached
fascination of people observing an interesting psychological phenomenon
rather than witnessing the dissolution of two decades of professional
collaboration—and with it, the dissolution of humanity's last
coordinated response to civilizational collapse.
David was looking at her with
that expression again—expectant, dependent, like she was his personal
memory bank rather than his wife. The helicopter ride from the mountains
that morning had been excruciating. He'd spent forty minutes asking her
what his agenda was, what his positions were, whether he seemed
optimistic or pessimistic about today's negotiations. She'd wanted to
scream: You're deciding the fate of three hundred million displaced people and you can't remember what you believe about any of it.
She
remembered when David used to light up over small discoveries—how he'd
appear at Emma's bedroom door with a piece of quartz or an interesting
fossil, his face animated as he explained its formation. "Look at this
one, Em," he'd say, turning the specimen in the lamplight. "See how the
crystals caught the pressure just right?" Emma would roll her eyes but
smile, and David would set the rock carefully on her windowsill with the
others. Now he couldn't even access whether he cared about the rocks
still sitting in their daughter's abandoned room.
"I'm having trouble following
this," said Dr. Wilson, raising her hand tentatively. "Could someone
remind me—are we for or against expanding the Mediterranean resettlement
camps?"
"We discussed this yesterday,"
Sarah said gently. "You've been advocating for them for months. You
called them 'humane transition facilities.'"
Wilson nodded seriously, as if
filing away information about a stranger. "I know I argue for them...
but do I seem to really believe that? Sometimes I feel like I just say I
support them because someone told me to. You're a psychologist. How
would I know the difference?"
This was the moment Sarah
always dreaded—when the fundamental impossibility of their situation
became too stark to ignore. How do you provide therapy to people who
can't access their own emotional states? How do you help them process
feelings they can't feel, resolve conflicts they can't understand?
***********************
The empathy implants had been
humanity's last hope. After decades of political paralysis in the face
of accelerating climate collapse, after the great floods of 2039 had
left coastal cities uninhabitable and displaced nearly a billion people,
the world's governments had finally accepted that traditional diplomacy
was inadequate. The technology was supposed to enhance mirror neuron
activity while suppressing self-referential processing—to make world
leaders more attuned to others' suffering and less trapped in their own
egos.
Initial trials had shown
unprecedented levels of understanding and compassion. The participants
could read others' emotions with startling accuracy, could sense
thoughts and desires across the room, could feel others' pain as
viscerally as their own. Surely, this enhanced empathy would catalyze
long-overdue action on the existential threats that had brought
civilization to the brink. The trials showed marked decreases in
self-centered and narcissistic thinking. Greed was apparently
attenuated, while attentiveness to others
over self was accentuated markedly.
What no one had anticipated was
that such highly concentrated sensitivity to others would come at the cost of any
coherent sense of self. The enhanced mirror neurons worked
beautifully—but they'd effectively severed these people from their own
inner lives. They could tell you exactly what everyone else in the room
was feeling, but had no access to their own emotions, judgments, or
values. This unintended consequence had inadvertently created yet
another existential threat: mentally incompetent world leaders making
life-and-death decisions about the planet's future.
Almost all politicians and
senior scientists in the major powers had been enhanced. The technology
had been voluntary, but the social pressure was immense—who would refuse
a procedure that promised to make them more compassionate, more
effective at global cooperation? Only a few had opted out, mostly
researchers like Sarah who needed to study the effects. Nobody knew if
these unintended side effects could be reversed.
Of
course, ordinary citizens
knew nothing about this. It was classified information in every country,
lest panic be triggered. Now the fate of the earth's population rested
on bizarre UN meetings and attempts at therapeutic intervention to
"reverse" the effects of the enhancements. Sarah Ross as the lead
psychologist behind the experiments, was now heading the effort to
"rehabilitate" the affected politicians and scientists-- including, of
course, her husband. He had been--and nominally continued to be-- one
of the most influential members of the Post Catastrophe World Government
that convened at the UN to make decisions individual nation-states no
longer could in a transnational crisis of such magnitude. The end result
was bizarre-- elite global technocrats without access to their own
feelings at meetings held in a city now
largely depopulated, with makeshift dykes and more helicopters than
cars, and more homeless people in boats than helicopters and cars
combined.
"Sarah," David said suddenly,
"am I angry about something? I feel like I should be angry, but I can't
tell if it's my anger or if I'm just picking up on Maria's anger."
"You seem frustrated," she
offered, though she knew it was pointless. He could sense everyone
else's frustration in the room, but couldn't distinguish it from any
feelings that might be his own.
Chen Wei was staring at David
with a mixture of confusion and something like grief. "David, we've
worked together for fifteen years. We collaborated on the Beijing
Protocols. Our families have vacationed together." His voice cracked
slightly. "But I have to ask—do I actually respect you as a colleague?
Because right now, honestly, you seem like kind of an arrogant ass."
"You've
never said that to me before, so it's probably not what you actually
think," David returned, before turning to Sarah and asking, "But Sarah,
would I be able to tell if people found me arrogant, but never said so?
What would that look like?" He seemed disturbed by the possibility, and
after a few moment added earnestly, "Sarah, am I an arrogant ass?"
The other group members were
taking notes—not about their own psychological insights, but about what
others were saying about their personalities and beliefs. They'd all
started keeping journals based entirely on external reports, trying to
construct some sense of identity from secondhand observations. Sarah had
watched brilliant minds reduced to this: desperate, dependent creatures
who could analyze everyone else's mental states with scientific
precision but couldn't access their own.
She excused herself and walked
to the window. Outside, nine stories below, a small armada of makeshift
boats navigated between the skeletal remains of yellow taxi cabs, their
roofs just visible above the waterline. These were the former residents
of Manhattan—teachers, shop owners, office workers—who had become boat
people in their own city. Many were sick from the contaminated water.
Many more had simply disappeared in the chaos of the floods, like her
daughter Emma.
Emma. Nineteen years
old, studying art at NYU when the levees broke. She'd been somewhere in
the Village that day, but no one knew where. The water had risen so
fast, and the cell towers had gone down almost immediately. Sarah had
spent weeks searching evacuation centers, refugee camps, makeshift
hospitals. David had helped at first, but after his enhancement
procedure, he'd lost access to his own grief. He could remember that
they'd had a daughter, could recite the facts of her disappearance, but
couldn't feel the devastating loss that consumed Sarah's every waking
moment.
"Do I seem sad about Emma?"
he'd asked her just last week, apropos of nothing. "I know I should be
sad, but I can't tell if I am."
That night, alone in their
Adirondack cabin while David attended another pointless video
conference, Sarah had taken her first Xanax in years. Then another. The
bottle was nearly empty now.
The
conference room erupted in voices behind her. She turned to see Chen
Wei and Morrison arguing about agricultural zones, their faces red with
what looked like passion but was probably just reflected emotion from
others in the room.
"The Northern Agricultural Zones can't possibly accommodate another fifty million relocations!" Morrison was shouting.
"Really?" Chen Wei shot back,
"Didn't you warn in a report that overcrowding in the other zones might
necessitate just such relocations?"
Morrison, both annoyed and
perplexed said, "I wrote it, but I have no evidence that I believed it
at the time. We were all under great pressure at the time. Right Sarah?"
"Gentlemen, I wasn't inside
your heads when you wrote those documents, and I can't retroactively
psychoanalyze your motivations," Sarah answered, adding, "Mr. Morrison,
if you can't trust your own documented analysis, how can we make any
policy decisions? Dr. Chen, you're asking me to interpret whether you
believed in your own work. This is exactly the problem we're here to
address."
She closed her eyes. This
happened every day now. The world's most urgent policies being debated
by people who couldn't trust their own expertise, their own documented
conclusions, their own moral frameworks. They treated their past work
like archaeological artifacts they were trying to decode, constantly
asking her to interpret their own former convictions. Meanwhile, outside
these windows, boat people were dying of dysentery and cholera in water
that reached the second floors of what had once been their homes.
That evening, after the day's
"policy session" had dissolved into the usual confusion, the same
conference room was cleared of documents and transformed into what Sarah
called a therapeutic environment. The UN flag hung limply in the
corner, a symbol of an institution that had become a psychiatric ward
for the world's most powerful people.
"I need to ask you all
something," she said, looking around at their expectant faces. "How many
of you, when you're alone at night, feel like you're missing something
essential? Something that used to be there but isn't anymore?"
Every hand in the room went up.
"Something without which decision-making becomes all but impossible?"
The hands stayed up.
Sarah thought about the
classified file in her briefcase. The psychological assessment reports.
The documentation of cognitive decline among world leaders. The
pre-implant scientific analyses showing what competent policy work had
looked like. The communications documenting the UN leaders' efforts to
hide their condition from other government networks. The recommendations
for immediate disclosure that had been buried by the same leaders who
were too impaired to understand what they were burying.
Three hundred million climate
refugees were waiting to learn their fate—whether they'd be resettled in
facilities that these leaders couldn't remember supporting, allocated
to agricultural zones they'd forgotten designing, or simply left to die
in camps they were no longer capable of properly managing. And every day
of delay meant more irreversible climate damage, more tipping points
crossed, more of the planet pushed beyond recovery.
Her phone buzzed. A text from an unknown number: Sarah,
it's Tom Chen from the old Columbia team. We need to talk. There are
more of us than you think. Mountain View Inn, Route 73, tomorrow at 7.
Come alone.
Tom Chen. She remembered
him—one of David's former colleagues who'd refused the enhancement
procedure. He'd disappeared from academic life after the floods, and
she'd assumed he was dead. But apparently, he wasn't alone.
More of us.
For the first time in months, she felt something that might have been hope.
The Mountain View Inn sat on a
wooded hillside thirty miles from their cabin, far enough from the
flooded valleys to feel like the old world still existed. Sarah arrived
early and sat in her car, watching the building through a light rain.
Her hands were shaking—withdrawal from the Xanax, or nervousness, or
both.
When she finally walked inside,
she found them in a back room: eight people gathered around a rough
wooden table. Tom Chen, looking older but alert in a way she'd forgotten
was possible. Dr. Elizabeth Harper, formerly of NOAA's climate modeling
division. Two engineers from the old Army Corps, a former EPA
administrator, a tech entrepreneur she vaguely recognized, and two
others she didn't know at all.
All of them unenhanced. All of them still capable of coherent thought.
"Sarah," Tom said, standing to embrace her. "Thank god you came."
"How many?" she asked immediately.
"More than you'd think. We've
got networks in twelve countries now. Scientists, engineers, policy
people—everyone who refused the enhancements or wasn't considered
important enough to get them." He gestured to the others. "We've been
organizing."
"Organizing for what?"
Elizabeth Harper leaned forward. "To do what the enhanced can't. Make actual decisions about climate intervention."
Over the next three hours, they
laid out their alternative vision. Not the paralyzed global cooperation
of the UN, but a distributed network of competent regional authorities.
Scientists and engineers who could still think, working with the few
remaining functional national leaders who understood their specific
challenges. Immediate deployment of radical geoengineering—solar
radiation management, stratospheric aerosol injection, massive
atmospheric interventions coordinated by computer networks rather than
bureaucratic institutions.
"It's extremely risky," Tom
admitted. "These interventions could have catastrophic unintended
consequences. We could trigger weather pattern disruptions, ecosystem
collapses, effects we can't predict. But we're past the point of safe
choices. Every month the enhanced spend in paralysis is another month of
irreversible damage."
"The enhanced don't even
understand what they're looking at," said Harper. "They can see the boat
people outside the UN, but they can't process the moral urgency. They
know refugees need relocation, but they can't feel why it matters. They
can't access their own judgment about what's worth risking."
Sarah thought of David asking
her how he should feel about their daughter's death. Of Wilson
forgetting her own policy positions from day to day. Of Morrison
dismissing his own expertise as potentially insincere. Of three hundred
million people waiting for decisions from leaders who had lost the
capacity to make them.
"What would you need from me?" she asked.
"Access," Tom said simply. "You
have files, contacts, infrastructure. Pre-implant scientific analyses
that show what competent policy work looks like. Documentation of the
enhanced leaders' cognitive decline. Evidence of their efforts to hide
their condition from other government networks. And you're the only
person in that building who can still think clearly about what's
happening."
"David," she said quietly. "My husband. He's enhanced."
Tom's expression softened.
"Sarah, I'm sorry. But you know better than anyone—he's not really your
husband anymore. None of them are really themselves."
She closed her eyes and saw
David's face that morning, asking her whether he seemed to care about
agricultural policy. Felt the familiar ache of trying to love someone
who no longer existed in any meaningful sense.
"If we do this," she said, "if
we expose what's happening at the UN and provide evidence to the
remaining functional governments, David and the others... what happens
to them?"
"Probably psychiatric care,"
Harper said gently. "They can't be allowed to continue making decisions
that affect billions of people. But maybe, away from the pressure of
governance, some of them might recover partially. We don't know."
Sarah looked around the table at these faces—tired, worried, but fundamentally present
in a way that David and the others no longer were. People who could
still access their own convictions, their own moral frameworks, their
own sense of urgency about the crisis they were facing.
"The interventions you're
proposing," she said. "Solar radiation management, atmospheric
engineering—these are planetary experiments. We can't predict all the
consequences."
"No," Tom said. "We can't.
We're essentially gambling with the planet's future. But the alternative
is watching it burn while enhanced leaders debate policies they can't
understand. At least our gambles would be made by people capable of
weighing risks and making informed decisions."
Two weeks later, Sarah stood in
the same Conference Room 4, carrying two briefcases. One contained her
usual therapy notes. The other contained copies of
everything—psychological assessments, cognitive evaluations,
communications from the unenhanced networks, documentation of the
enhanced leaders' complete inability to govern, and most crucially,
evidence of their systematic efforts to conceal their condition from
other government networks.
The morning policy session was
already underway. David and the others were debating refugee allocation
numbers with their characteristic blend of passion and confusion,
arguing for positions they couldn't remember taking, defending policies
they couldn't understand.
"Excuse me," Sarah said,
interrupting a heated exchange between Morrison and Santos about camp
conditions. "I have an announcement."
They turned to her with the
polite attention they gave to all interruptions—another symptom of their
condition. Enhanced empathy had made them exquisitely sensitive to
others' emotional states but incapable of prioritizing or filtering
information based on their own judgment.
"This will be our last session," she said. "Effective immediately, this governing body is being dissolved."
"Dissolved?" David asked, looking confused. "By whom?"
"By people who can still think."
For the next hour, she
explained everything. The psychological assessments documenting their
cognitive decline. The existence of unenhanced networks in twelve
countries. The complete breakdown of decision-making capacity among the
world's enhanced leadership. The alternative governance structures
already being established by competent regional authorities. The
evidence that would be presented to remaining functional governments
showing that the UN enhanced leadership had systematically concealed
their impairment.
They listened with the same
polite attention they gave to everything else, taking notes on
information they wouldn't be able to process or act on.
"So you're saying we're fired?" David asked when she finished.
"Yes, David. I'm so sorry, but—"
"Well, I doubt I'd like that,"
he interrupted. "I mean, you know me well. Does that sound like
something I'd like? I have good reason to think I'm not happy with this.
Should I feel upset?"
Sarah felt the déjà vu of
living with an emotionally coreless husband for over a year—someone she
couldn't share feelings with, someone who'd become a stranger wearing
her husband's face. At moments like this, she could forgive herself for
the torturous decision she'd made.
"Yes," she said quietly. "You should feel upset. You all should. But you can't, and that's exactly why this has to happen."
Outside the conference room
windows, the boat people continued their endless navigation of the
drowned city, waiting for decisions that would never come from leaders
who'd forgotten how to lead themselves. But forty miles north, in the
Adirondack Mountains, competent people were already coordinating
interventions that might slow the planet's heating—or might trigger
cascading effects no one could predict.
The enhanced leaders might be
saved, placed in care, possibly recover some measure of their former
selves away from the impossible pressures of global governance. The
planet might be saved by desperate geoengineering gambles implemented by
people still capable of weighing terrible risks against worse
certainties. Or the interventions might fail catastrophically, creating
new forms of environmental chaos.
But at least the people making
decisions would be capable of understanding what they were deciding. At
least someone would be able to access their own judgment about what was
worth risking when there were no safe choices left.
Sarah picked up her briefcases
and walked toward the elevator. Behind her, she could hear David asking
the others whether he seemed upset about being fired, and whether anyone
could tell him what upset was supposed to feel like.
The helicopter was waiting on
the roof to take her north—toward the mountains, toward people who could
still think and feel and choose, toward the uncertain hope that
competent desperation might accomplish what enhanced paralysis never
could.
As they lifted off over the
drowned city, Sarah pressed her face to the window one last time,
looking down at the boat people navigating between the ruins of the
world that had been. She didn't look back at the UN building. There was
nothing left there worth saving.
But ahead, in the clean air of
the mountains, people were taking enormous risks to build something new
from the wreckage of what had failed. Whether they would succeed was
unknowable. Whether their interventions would help or harm was
unpredictable. Whether it was already too late regardless of who was in
charge was unanswerable.
But for the first time in over a
year, Sarah felt cautiously hopeful that at least some degree of
efficacious action—however dangerous, however uncertain—might finally be
possible.
