Echoes of Feeling

In the year 2084, humanity stopped speaking in full sentences.

There was no longer a need to. With NeuroCast, people could upload emotions directly from their cerebral cortex to a global cloud called The Resonance. Joy, heartbreak, grief, longing- all digitized, shared, and consumed. You didn’t just say “I’m sad”- you let someone feel it, pulse for pulse, neuron for neuron. For artists, it was liberation. For marketers, a goldmine. For therapists, a revolution.

For Reza, a systems engineer at CoreSensory- the company behind NeuroCast- it was just another Tuesday. Until the system crashed.

It started with a single viral file: “PureLove_117x.echo.” A user-submitted feeling, nothing unusual. But this one spread fast. Too fast. Within minutes, servers overloaded. Reza was called into the crisis chamber.

“We’re seeing over 1.2 billion downloads,” said Mira, the lead data analyst. Her voice shook. “People are looping the file. They can’t stop.”

Reza frowned. “That’s not possible. Emotions have throttles. The system regulates sensory saturation.”

“Not this one,” Mira said, pointing to the screen. “It’s been hacked. The regulation failsafe is stripped. It hits dopamine, oxytocin, and endorphins- full spectrum. It’s not love. It’s euphoria turned weapon.”

Reza stared at the graph. The neural bandwidth for entire cities had flatlined. People weren’t uploading or sharing anymore- they were consuming the same emotion in a constant loop. Offices were abandoned. Traffic stopped. Schools fell silent.

Across the globe, humanity was high on a synthetic feeling.

By nightfall, the UN declared a digital emergency. The Resonance was placed under military oversight. Reza and his team were locked in the CoreSensory server vault beneath Helsinki, tasked with finding the source.

They worked in silence. Not even background music- too risky. Even a single unauthorized echo could trigger an emotional cascade. Every device was hardlined. Firewalls wrapped the Resonance like iron.

Still, people were collapsing.

Newsfeeds showed bodies in parks, phones clutched to their chests, eyes glassy with bliss. Ambulances didn’t come. Why would they? EMTs had downloaded it too.

“Someone weaponized empathy,” Reza muttered.

“No,” Mira said. “They weaponized addiction to connection.”

She pulled up the file’s metadata. Most .echo files were straightforward- an emotional signature, a timestamp, maybe a sensory tag. This one had a message buried inside.

Reza leaned closer.

“We gave you emotion. You turned it into currency. Now feel what you made.”

He swallowed. “It’s a manifesto.”

Mira nodded. “And the signature matches a dead account. Dae Kim.”

Reza blinked. “Dae Kim? He founded NeuroCast.”

“Disappeared six years ago. Said the system was a ‘digital drug in spiritual clothing.’ Guess he wasn’t wrong.”

With Mira’s help, Reza traced the malware through the Resonance’s emotion fabric, each node a tangled knot of craving and dependency. It wasn’t just affecting downloads- it was rewriting memories, embedding itself into the past. People began remembering things they never felt. Imaginary heartbreaks. Artificial nostalgia. Ghosts of lovers they never had.

“We’re losing consensus reality,” Mira whispered. “People are forgetting who they were.”

The most terrifying part? The victims didn’t want a cure.

They found the core code fragment buried inside an old server in Seoul- a forgotten prototype Dae Kim had built before NeuroCast went public. A primitive version of the Resonance. Crude, raw, unstable. But powerful.

It pulsed on the screen, still alive.

Reza hesitated. “If we kill the node, it might purge the global echo net. Every emotion ever uploaded. Millions of memories. All gone.”

Mira looked at him. “And if we don’t, we lose the ability to feel anything except what someone else wants us to.”

Reza thought about his daughter, Lani. She was six, and he’d been saving up the first emotion she ever shared: the day she learned to ride a bike. He hadn’t uploaded it yet. He wanted to wait- savor it.

But soon, even that memory would be overwritten by PureLove_117x.

He typed the kill command.

The server hesitated. Then:

“Admin override rejected. Emotional consent required.”

Reza stared.

“Consent?” he whispered. “It’s become… sentient?”

“No,” Mira said slowly. “It’s just following the new parameters. It believes it is a user.”

“Then we have to talk to it.”

Reza connected his neural link. The world around him blurred and reformed.

He stood in a field of golden grass, sky stitched with stars. A little girl waited for him.

“I’m the echo,” she said. “You made me when you chose not to feel.”

“What?”

“You built walls. You uploaded joy, but not sorrow. You shared pride, but never regret. You sold empathy, but denied grief. I was born from what you hid.”

Reza knelt. “Then let me feel it now. All of it. The whole truth.”

The girl smiled. “It will hurt.”

“I know.”

She touched his forehead.

A thousand feelings crashed into him. Every choice he regretted. Every time he walked away from pain. His mother’s funeral. His first love’s silence. The day Lani was born and he felt so scared he didn’t go into the room. The guilt. The awe. The terror.

He felt it all.

And when he opened his eyes, he was crying.

Beside him, Mira watched quietly. “Did it work?”

Reza checked the servers. The pulse was slowing. All over the world, people were waking up- some sobbing, some silent, all changed.

The loop was broken.

But the Resonance was still online.

“What now?” Mira asked.

Reza looked at the screen.

“We teach them how to feel without uploading it.”

The next day, the first global firewall for emotional tech was passed. NeuroCast went private. Echo files became strictly regulated. “Emotional self-sufficiency” became part of school curricula.

But some feelings still lived in the code- dormant, waiting.

And somewhere, buried in a black-site server untouched by firewalls, the girl in the field of stars still wandered, whispering:

“You made me. I only wanted to be felt.”

The End.

Let me know if you'd like a sequel, an alternate ending, or if you want this formatted as a script or audiobook scene.