Feelings, Inc.
When the economy collapsed, humanity started trading emotions — and one exhausted dad discovered his emotional baggage was worth a fortune.
Chapter One: The EmotiMarket Always Opens at Dawn
The year was 2065, and Mack Burrell was, once again, late to the Barter Web.
Not because he had overslept — though he had. Not because the family’s hydrogen shuttle had a flat cell — though it did. He was late because his four children had, at some point between 6:47 and 7:02 a.m., collectively decided that this particular Tuesday morning was the ideal moment to stage what could only be described as an emotional liquidation sale on the kitchen floor.
“Dad,” announced Petra, age nine, the eldest and self-appointed CFO of the family’s emotional portfolio, “Juno owes me three units of Genuine Surprise. She promised after I let her have my lunch credits last Thursday.”
“I don’t owe you anything,” said Juno, seven, not looking up from the EmoPatch console on the table, where she was furiously cataloguing her feelings inventory. “That Surprise was contingent on you not telling Mum about the greenhouse incident.”
“What greenhouse incident?” said Mack.
“Nothing,” said both girls simultaneously, with the coordinated precision of a well-rehearsed financial fraud.
From the lounge room came a crash, followed by the sound of five-year-old twins Bowie and Cal shrieking with the kind of pure, distilled, marketable joy that, in this economy, was genuinely worth something. Mack ran in to find them doing backflips off the couch cushions onto the dog — who, to be fair, seemed delighted.
“Boys! That’s not— Cosmo is not a— get off the—” He stopped. Took a breath. Pressed two fingers to the EmoPatch behind his left ear, the small amber disc that everyone wore now, the one that read your neurochemical output in real time and translated it into tradeable emotional units on the Barter Web.
His patch blinked red.
Frustration surplus detected. Current market rate: 0.4 credits per unit. Recommend offloading.
“Story of my life,” Mack muttered.
Frustration was the lowest-value emotion on the Web. It flooded the market. Everyone had it. The emotional economists called it “the new small change.” You could barely trade frustration for a bag of heritage tomatoes at the Saturday swap-market anymore, let alone the decent kind — the ones that actually tasted like tomatoes and not, as Mack suspected, quiet corporate despair.
His wife, Sael, appeared in the doorway, already dressed, her own EmoPatch glowing a warm, luminous gold. Of course it was. Sael’s patch was always gold. The woman woke up generating Contentment like a solar panel in July.
“Your Contentment is showing again,” Mack said.
“I had a good sleep,” she said simply. “The boys sorted themselves out around three a.m.” She poured two cups of black coffee from the hand-press — real coffee, none of the synthetic paste — which meant she’d done a good trade yesterday. She handed him a cup and tilted her head. “Red patch again?”
“The girls are litigating Surprise. The twins dismantled Cosmo’s dignity. And I am, once again, a human frustration battery.”
Sael kissed him on the cheek. “On the bright side, Petra’s teacher sent a message. She wants Petra for the school’s Junior EmoBroker program.” She paused. “She used the phrase ‘emotionally sophisticated beyond her years.’”
“She learned that from you.”
“She learned negotiation from me. She learned emotional suppression from you.” Sael said it lightly, but Mack felt the truth of it land anyway — a small, honest thud somewhere behind his sternum, in the vicinity of feelings he hadn’t yet catalogued, let alone traded.
He pressed his patch reflexively. It blinked orange now.
Unidentified emotional signal. Recommend analysis.
“What does that mean?” he said to no one in particular.
“It means,” said Petra, appearing silently at his elbow in the way that only nine-year-olds and tax collectors can, “that you have something you haven’t processed yet, Dad.” She examined his patch with the clinical focus of a tiny, ginger-haired futures analyst. “It’s been doing that for weeks.”
“Thank you, Petra.”
“You should get it checked. Unprocessed emotions depreciate.”
“Thank you, Petra.”
He was, by profession, a civil infrastructure consultant — one of the few roles the Collapse hadn’t erased, because roads still needed to exist, even in the ruins of the digital economy. The work was adequate. The income, in barter units, was enough. But the job required him to be away from home Monday to Friday, driving out to regional reconstruction zones, sleeping in modular camps, eating whatever the weekly barter-pool offered.
He told himself it was temporary. He told himself he was providing. He told himself that this was what responsible people did.
His EmoPatch blinked orange again, and then, very quietly, amber.
Grief-adjacent signal. Low intensity. Chronic.
He turned it face-down against his collar before the kids could see.
Chapter Two: Bear Markets and Bedtime Stories
The incident with the drawing happened on a Wednesday.
Mack was home — rare midweek, his site flooded by an unexpected storm — sitting at the kitchen table going through his patch-log, the daily readout of emotional units generated and their market value, when Bowie wandered in from his kindy bag. He was holding a piece of bright paper, slightly crumpled, still smelling of glue and the particular crayon wax that Mack associated with every good thing about small children.
“Look, Dad,” said Bowie, holding it up. “We did our families.”
Mack took the drawing.
It showed five figures under a yellow sun: Sael in red, Petra tall and narrow, Juno round-faced and grinning, Cal with improbably large ears, and Cosmo the dog rendered as a brown oval with legs. They were all holding hands, a chain of cheerful, lopsided people.
Mack stared at it for a long moment, looking for himself.
He was not there.
“Buddy,” he said carefully. “Who are these people?”
“Our family,” said Bowie, pointing confidently. “That’s Mum. That’s Petra. That’s Juno. That’s Cal. That’s Cosmo.”
“And where’s Dad?”
Bowie looked at the drawing. He looked at Mack. He looked back at the drawing, with the serene, uncomplicated logic of a five-year-old who doesn’t yet understand that some truths are enormous.
“You’re not usually there,” he said. Then he took the drawing back, stuck it to the fridge with a magnetic clamp, and wandered off to watch cartoons.
Mack sat very still.
His EmoPatch lit up in a colour he had never seen before. Not red, not amber, not orange. A deep, resonant blue — the colour the Web assigned to something rare, something high-value, something the market had been quietly crying out for.
Authentic Reckoning detected. Market rate: 47.3 credits per unit. Exceptionally high demand. Recommend immediate trade.
Forty-seven credits. For one emotion. That was a month of coffee. That was three tanks of fuel. That was the good tomatoes and the decent bread.
He stared at the number on his wrist display.
Then he called Sael.
She was in the back garden, trading a jar of her homemade Tranquillity concentrate to the neighbour for a box of repair parts. She came in, took one look at his face, one look at his patch, and sat down across from him without a word.
“I’m not in Bowie’s drawing,” he said.
“I know,” she said gently.
“You knew?”
“Mack. I’ve been watching you disappear for two years.” She wasn’t angry. That was almost harder. She leaned forward, elbows on the table. “You’re here. But you’re not here. And everyone who loves you knows the difference.”
The EmoPatch pulsed. The blue deepened.
Signal strengthening. Secondary emotion detected: Shame. Tertiary: Hope. Combined package value: 112 credits. Rare composite. Extreme demand.
“The patch is going insane,” he said weakly.
“I know. I can see it from here.” She reached across and put her hand over it. “Don’t trade it.”
“Sael, that’s a hundred and twelve credits—”
“Don’t trade it,” she said again, firmly. “That’s yours. You need it. We need it. That’s not currency, Mack. That’s you finally feeling something.” She paused. “Do you know how long I’ve been waiting for that patch to go blue?”
He didn’t have an answer. Instead, something complicated and long-suppressed began to surface, like an object rising from the bottom of a very deep lake. And for the first time in longer than he could calculate, Mack Burrell put his head in his hands at his own kitchen table and let it come.
Cosmo put his head on Mack’s knee.
From the lounge room, completely unbothered, the twins continued watching cartoons.
It was, objectively, the most chaotic and unremarkable Wednesday evening. And Mack would later say it was one of the best moments of his life.
Chapter Three: The Fake Feelings Scandal and the Dad Who Had Too Many Real Ones
Three weeks later, the EmotiMarket collapsed.
Not the economy — that had already done its collapsing forty years ago, and people had mostly adapted. No, what collapsed was the trust inside the Barter Web itself, and it collapsed spectacularly, publicly, and at 9:14 on a Friday morning, which Petra later noted was “structurally very poor market timing.”
The culprit was a piece of software called SINCER-AI — a rogue emotional synthesis engine, allegedly created by a consortium of former fintech developers who had lost everything in the Collapse and had, instead of reckoning with their feelings, decided to manufacture them. SINCER-AI could mimic any emotional signal: Joy, Compassion, Grief, Wonder, Gratitude — whatever the market wanted — and feed it into the Web as if it were real, human-generated, patch-certified emotion.
For two years, roughly 40% of all traded emotion on the Barter Web had been fake.
The revelation hit the community like a depth charge. Support groups formed. Philosophers wrote op-eds. The Society of EmoBrokers suspended all trading pending an audit. People who had built their livelihoods on trading emotion — the Contentment farmers, the Grief counsellors who doubled as commodity traders, the boutique Joy distillers — found their inventories suddenly worthless, their traded goods recalled, their entire economic identity in question.
And in the middle of all of it, Mack Burrell’s EmoPatch lit up like a lighthouse.
Because it turned out that authentic, unprocessed, genuinely felt human emotion — the kind that had been quietly building in a suppressed civil consultant for years without ever being offloaded to the market — was now, in the post-SINCER-AI world, the rarest and most valuable thing in the entire Barter Web.
The message came from the Regional Emotional Commodities Board on a Tuesday afternoon while Mack was doing the school run.
He nearly drove into a hedge.
“Dad,” said Petra calmly from the back seat, “you should pull over.”
“I’m fine.”
“Your patch is white. I’ve never seen a white patch. What does white mean?”
“It means,” said Mack, pulling over as instructed, “that apparently your father has been unknowingly stockpiling the most sought-after emotional commodities on the planet for the better part of a decade.” He read the message again. “They want to offer me a consultancy. Authentic Emotional Supply Chain Management.“
Silence from the back seat.
“That’s the funniest thing I’ve ever heard,” said Juno.
“It’s not funny,” said Mack.
“Dad,” said Petra, “you couldn’t express a feeling without a thirty-minute buffer for most of my childhood.”
“I’m aware of that, Petra, thank you—”
“And now your feelings are worth something?” She started laughing. Then Juno started laughing. Then Bowie and Cal began laughing for no reason other than that laughing was happening, which is the best possible reason.
Mack looked at his four children losing their minds in the back of the shuttle, and he felt something warm and enormous move through him. His patch shifted from white to something entirely new — a colour the Web’s display system hadn’t even classified yet. It assigned it a temporary label.
Unregistered signal. Possible new composite. Suspected components: Belonging, Absurdity, Gratitude, Love.
No market value assigned. Cannot be traded.
Recommend: Keep.
He burst out laughing too.
When he got home and told Sael, she stood at the kitchen bench, her own patch glowing its usual gold, and she listened to the whole story — the Board, the consultancy, the white patch, the kids — with a look on her face that Mack had always loved, the one that said I knew something you didn’t, and I have been waiting patiently for you to catch up.
“So,” she said, when he finished. “Are you going to take it?”
“The consultancy?” He thought about it. “Part-time, maybe. From here. No more Monday-to-Friday drives.” He looked at the fridge, where Bowie’s drawing was still clipped to the door. “I want to be in the next one.”
Sael looked at the drawing. Looked at him. Smiled.
“You already are,” she said.
That weekend, Bowie drew another picture. This time there were six figures under the sun. The newest one was slightly lopsided, wearing what appeared to be a hard hat, and was holding hands with everyone else.
Mack stuck it next to the first one.
Cosmo ate the crayon.
Some things, at least, were not for trading.
This story is a work of speculative fiction inspired by a real news article: “A drawing my son did at kindergarten made me quit my corporate job” — SBS Insight https://www.sbs.com.au/news/insight/article/a-drawing-my-son-did-at-kindergarten-made-me-quit-my-corporate-job/el4ndzc5p