“First off, I am sorry you all had to endure this, but most citizens don’t realize how much that unauthorized emoticon use has increased lately or the damage they cause. My sympathies also on the loss of your engagement, as well as your physical prognosis. I will do all I can to protect your rights, at least until you reach your majority. After that, we will hopefully have a plan that will let you live a useful life within the necessary restrictions.

You have all gone through a lot, and I’m going to prescribe you all a mandatory grief recovery regime. You will begin with a Green Annoyance, then a Green Anger, followed by a Purple Distress, then a Blue Depression, and finally, an Orange Contentment.

I know it sounds strange, purposely leading your emotions all the way to Purple. It is like fighting fire with fire, burning out the negative pressures, and then applying a salve in anticipation of a full recovery. And this includes you, Jake. You may have a lack of full sensitivity, but you do not have immunity from your feelings. Ok, let’s go over the do’s and don’ts of your new status.”

~o0o~

Jake finished high school, but no college would accept him due to social and safety concerns. Furthermore, his father could not hire him directly since his company occasionally bid on Gubmint contracts, which required background dossiers on all employees. The best he could do for his son was to help him register as an independent research and development company, which consisted of a basement filled with second-hand equipment from his father’s facilities.

Jake took as many non-credit remote classes as he could find. He educated himself with enough technical knowledge to become useful on small projects that his father’s company found easier to outsource. This usually involved atomic-scale molecular “machines” that repaired post-natal genetic sequences.

The micro-machines worked well but were closer in nature to chemical reactions than actual robotics. The scale meant no current technologies could remotely program them, so each was a custom manufactured one-off application.

Jake had the opportunity to explore unlikely avenues that larger firms could not justify, which brought him a reasonable income and provided a sense of participation in society despite his isolation and rejection.

During his off-time, Jake became obsessed with the physical condition that had caused all his problems. Surprisingly little research had been done, so Jake used himself as the test subject in his own investigations.

~o0o~

Three generations before Jake’s birth, the world had been teetering on the edge of social disaster no matter what form of local government any particular country chose. Leading theorists had eventually blamed instant global communication for societal breakdown, as everyone compared others' lives with their own.

This skewed psychological development began in childhood, as it was human nature to focus on the negatives in their daily lives and accept others' highlights as the norm.

From full-scale war to school-house bullying, every social ill, from domestic abuse to sexual predation, was blamed on emotional imbalances. The super-nations declared national emergencies and aimed vast resources towards solving the problem.

Within ten years, the major pharmaceutical companies developed drugs that targeted specific emotions, but it took another fifteen before unlocking the secret of purposely tuning these receptors. Not everyone saw this as a beneficial and necessary next step in human evolution.

Those who protested most violently were the first ones forced to undergo the treatments to “fix” their behavioral aberration. After all, their defective emotional processes were not seen as their fault but rather a genetic malfunction left over from the caveman days.

There may still have been resistance if the entire procedure resulted in the simple removal of emotions, but the adjustments were much more subtle. The capsules gave the ability to “dial-in” the positive emotions and allow negative ones to be directed. Harmful actions were thereby expunged in a safe, controlled manner. The results motivated enough volunteers that mandatory treatment was soon implemented for the small fringe of protestors.

Crimes of passion became unknown, as did violence due to mental breakdown. The criminal court system was replaced by psychiatric panels that prescribed rehabilitation treatments, including aversion therapy consisting of compulsory negative emotional experiences for the more recalcitrant cases.

The risk of emotional pharma abuse eventually became a temporary social problem. Strict controls over access and installation of remotely staffed pharmacon stations in every bathroom facility, public and private, mostly addressed that problem.

There always would be a few deviant individuals who would try to profit off illicit emoticons. Given that overall crime declined, sufficient resources were made available that such attempts were always interdicted sooner than later.

~o0o~

Jake was investigating the use of minuscule carbon-fiber strings that he attached to his micro-machines. He developed a unique method that stretched and tuned the controllers on a molecular level using specific sub-sonic vibrations.

His ultimate goal was to change the individual machines' programming remotely, but the early stages of the experiments simply investigated whether such an approach was viable.

He developed a repeater targeting the micro-machines that he controlled from a hand-held transmitter. The basic concept proved workable as the strings vibrated at the same frequency as the repeater. The response had as much fine control as a sledge-hammer, but it worked.

During the first major test run, Jake chose a frequency near the expected optimum range. He switched the power on and watched his monitors as each step in the process daisy-chained into the next. The system worked perfectly, and Jake experienced a spike of intense pleasure.

When he turned the power off, his emotional peak dropped like a rock. Looking back, he was puzzled at how strong the feeling had hit him. After all, every step went as expected, with everything planned out after weeks of methodical work. There was more to his emotions than felt natural, and Jake was not one to let such a glaring anomaly go unexplained.

Jake turned the power on again, and his feelings responded in the exact same way. He turned the power off, and his emotions abruptly dropped to minimal. He made a note of the frequency, then stepped it down a few micro-hertz and turned the power back on. He felt an overwhelming loathing that colored every thought. He slapped off the power in extreme irritation and disgust. Once again, within seconds, he felt emotionally stable.

He lowered the frequency even further and programmed an automatic cut-off at the one-second mark. His attention to detail and forethought proved wise as he experienced a second of absolute horror that made him seek a dark place and hid behind a cabinet.

He would never have been able to fight through the artificially induced emotion to manually turn the generator off. If, as experts had explained to him, he was genetically incapable of feeling the full force of emotions, he could not imagine what that particular setting would do to an ordinary person.

None of this made sense in light of Gubmint's propaganda. Such frequencies should have no effect on the brain’s emotional regions. Supposedly, emoticon capsules contained artificial biochemicals that mimicked the natural receptors that doctors “burned” out with caustic drugs shortly after birth.

Jake had no macro biochemistry expertise, but his research was cutting-edge in molecular genetics and micro-mechanical designs. He injected his own body with mapping sensors and compared his brain structure to general norms.

He found no differences whatsoever. He reached an investigatory brick wall, but that was far from unusual in his line of work. He made a list of other approaches, even those extremely unlikely to produce results, and set to work.