text: On a warm April day, a sociology grad student named Alexa Castorini saw something strange as she walked out of the NYU library. A man, looking wealthy and debonair, was slumped next to a homeless child on the curb, just far enough apart to know that they were strangers to each other. Both of them were hunched over, crying in what Alexa later described as “exactly identical positions”, their movements synced, sobs interweaving, amplifying each other, becoming one. That vision became the foundational anecdote that Alexa told to potential investors, and it had such a potent effect that within months her research project was fully funded. Ten months after she cleared her funding goal, she published a paper entitled “*The Unfair Equality of Pain*”. The paper posited that human emotional pain and suffering is distributed in relatively equal levels across people, regardless of the objective severity of the problems being reacted to. Through a series of tests involving measurements of chest pain, cortisol levels, heart rate, energy, self-reported sadness, and myriad metrics that could indicate emotional pain and distress, Alexa found that her hypothesis was mostly correct. The studies, carried out on a diverse array of participants, showed that there was no contextual proportionality in how the human body dealt out emotional pain. A little girl who had a toy taken away by research assistants could feel roughly the same amount of emotional pain as a little girl who just lost her mother. An extremely rich, comfortable man could experience equal amounts of emotional pain when the stock market dropped as a single mother could experience when being evicted from her home. Alexa explained: the human brain has a severely limited idea of the hardships of others and how they feel, in concrete terms. It only knows how things feel in relation to its own past experiences. When test subjects were provided with examples of other people’s more severe suffering, they would act outwardly as if the knowledge made them feel better. In reality, however, their emotions remained largely unchanged, the intellectual knowledge of others’ problems paling in comparison to the physical experience of their own. Alexa became obsessed with this lack of context, and in the conclusion to her paper, attributed it to most of the world’s ills. In her words, “Why would a rich man help the poor when his brain and body are convincing him biologically that his problems are just as severe as anyone else’s?” Alexa’s paper became extremely popular, and in response to her newfound fame she locked herself away for two years. When she emerged, she had invented a device, implanted in the brain, called TEMPLE. It was a small, delicate grey tube, that emitted electrical impulses and was inserted into the brain through the nose with a technique that came to be known as “The Reverse Pharoah.” The purpose of the device was twofold: Firstly, the device gave *context* to the brain’s emotional response. Through a series of complex metrics and self-entered information about the user, TEMPLE compared the actual severity of their problems to those of others and distributed emotional pain appropriately, reserving the most extreme depths of feeling to those with the most reason to feel them. Many questioned the decision to make the rich and comfortable calm and happy while those with real problems experienced great emotional pain, but Alexa Castorini insisted that making pain proportional to Actual Hardship Experienced (AHE) was essential to the other purpose of the device. The other function of the device was to function as what Alexa termed a TEMPathy Machine. Instead of simulated empathy performed by human brains with limited access to information, the TEMPLE device offered a much more concrete and visceral way to walk a mile in another man’s shoes, so to speak. Two of the devices could connect to each other and induce the neural patterns and physical feelings of one participant in the other. Initially, Alexa had allowed this to function via each user pushing their finger to their temple simultaneously (hence the name), but after a few tests and prototype versions that she gave away to family members, she decided to make this process automatic in the newer models. Get within ten feet of someone also wearing a TEMPLE device and the two of you would swap feelings, whether users wanted to or not. Although the device was unable to replicate specific physical injuries or deformities, and could not transmit fully formed thoughts, it was fabulously effective at communicating how distressed another person was through actual *pain* and emotion. This was added to by the now-proportional pain that everyone was feeling--a rich man with relatively few problems could connect his TEMPathy machine to a poor man’s and feel a level of Actual Hardship Experienced unlike anything he had ever known since installing the TEMPLE device in his brain. Extensive testing was done with groups of volunteers, who were asked to live together in a closed location for a month whilst fitted with TEMPLE devices. The results were miraculous. People with low amounts of emotional pain felt the pain of those with high amounts, and lifted them up. There was no longer any way to escape or ignore the feelings of others! Even those who tried fell into great sadness in isolation and returned, with no option but to try to uplift the people around them. Within the end of the month, the amount of suffering was reported to be nearly equal among all participants. Being forced to feel how others were feeling was an incredible motivator, and after the emotional equalization process, the group performed unbelievably well in several group tasks and psych evaluations. On March 1st, 2022, the studies were published and the TEMPLE device went on the market. Instantly the death threats started to roll in, accusing Alexa Castorini of “emotional communism” and attempted mind control. People were outraged at the idea that they didn’t know how others felt, and that their problems were perhaps not as severe as others. They rejected outright the metrics the TEMPLE device used to determine the user’s Actual Hardship Experienced. Alexa attempted damage control in a series of press conferences, insisting that *of course* she wasn’t saying that people’s pain wasn’t valid, but that the machine uses all available data to simulate the correct pain level on the vast spectrum of human suffering, rather than relying on the very limited experience of one human brain. The press conferences were brought to a halt after an attempted tackle. Many in the research community attempted to defend her, saying the device was the next step to our evolution as a species--but the public outcry only grew worse as scientists pushed for the general public to utilize the devices. Alexa was forced to evacuate her NYC apartment due to the high volume of threats. Alexa Castorini’s disappearance was called in by her mother Rhonda on March 28th, 2022, at 10:21 PM. Rhonda said she would always call if she wasn’t going to be home before 9. Police were dispatched and searched the neighborhood, but were unable to find any trace of Alexa. At 1:16 AM that same night, one of the strangest events in human history occurred. Every single person in the entire world, young, old, sleeping, awake, TEMPLE users or not--began experiencing the most severe emotional pain of their entire lives. After the event, nearly every person said essentially the same thing: it was like they were dying, every single regret they had ever had tore through them, and they were unbearably scared and sad and lonely and their hearts ached with pain like they were being snapped in two. The phenomenon lasted for around 4 minutes. In that time, around 500,000 people died--some from car crashes, some from suicide, some from organ failure. People in cities reported that they could hear every single person in earshot screaming as loud as they could. Listening devices that were later accessed contained recordings of what sounded like the entire earth screaming in unison. Most people said that the minutes seemed to stretch on for eternity, and that they thought the feeling would never end. The phenomenon seemed to have no explanation. Then, three minutes after that, for a duration of 7 seconds, every single person on Earth experienced what was later termed “Conscious Death”. Experiences varied wildly and getting people to discuss what they saw proved extremely difficult. Most of the detailed accounts are from the researchers themselves, who were brave enough to write their experiences down. Some describe years passing, vast mosaics of screaming, flailing bodies forming great currents and eddies and tides, colors and memories, and suffering unimaginable. Some researchers spoke of nothing but unbroken expanses of deep red, stretching out in every direction. Some reported still having their earthly bodies, others looking down to see nothing but flesh and gristle and bone. One researcher named Ron Jacobs found no appropriate words in any existing language to describe his experience, and instead developed and wrote in the languages he had heard in the place he went to. When the seven seconds elapsed, there had been another 800,000 deaths, and the Earth and all its occupants sat in stunned silence for three days. The roads were completely empty, the cities were silent, and the sun shined on no one. The bodies of those who transitioned from Conscious Death to plain old Death sat untouched, until three days later when the world collectively staggered to its feet and began to clean up. On that day, April 2nd, four years after she had seen the child and the businessman crying next to each other, Alexa Castorini’s pale and bloated body was dragged out of the Hudson river, several handfuls of TEMPLE devices Reverse Pharoah’d up her nose and down her throat, spilling out like tiny metal maggots. The man who killed her, Roger Pill, was found in the river as well, a few miles downriver from where Alexa’s body was recovered. Police postulated that he was exposed to the blast of her feelings most closely and drowned himself shortly after throwing her in the river, most likely before the wave of Conscious Death hit. He had been the most prolific author of death threats to Alexa, going so far as to identify himself by name and state the murder method he eventually carried out, hoping to use her own invention to relish every second of her death. Nobody knows why the TEMPLE devices that suffocated Alexa Castorini magnified her brain’s death so drastically. Some posit that the devices used nearby radio towers as a medium for mass transmission, while others argue that the river water and the sheer amount of them inserted amplified the signal uncontrollably. Many were more spiritual about the event. Whatever the technical reason for Alexa Castorini’s final broadcast, the world was permanently changed after it--for the human race now had an answer to one of its oldest questions. Everyone who was currently alive had seen death through their own eyes. In the years following, the human race went through the stages of grief collectively and frantically, now knowing the horror that awaited it on the other side. Immortality became the number one scientific pursuit, and safety the near psychopathic-obsession of almost everyone. In those years past the experience of death, the human race alternately drew closer to one another in desperation and then pulled away in fear, until everyone was absolutely exhausted. Slowly, new theories emerged about what humanity had experienced at 1:19 AM on March 29th, 2022. New religions popped up promising answers, and salvation from what they had all seen. People did their best to forget. The TEMPLE device’s blueprints were locked away forever in some dusty and unknown vault, as were the researchers’ reports of their experiences. Years later, Rhonda Castorini, Alexa’s mother, was interviewed at St. Mary’s Hospital by Ron Jacobs, one of the few researchers still trying to figure out the Conscious Death Event. He was an old man now. She was in critical condition. He asked her what she saw on that night, and whether she was scared of going back there now. In response, she simply touched her finger to her temple. Suddenly he saw Roger Pill’s hands around his neck, and the icy waters of the Hudson swallowing him, and he felt an unimaginable pain and distance and fear, and then he and Rhonda traveled into the hands of death together.