The Day Joy Hurt
Theo had everything he could ask for. A quiet home in the clouds, weekly check-ins with his emotion dietist, and an endless supply of synthetic feelings. Red for joy, purple for calm, brown for confidence.
Ever since the Emotion Regulation Act passed a generation ago, unfiltered emotions were labeled dangerous as they are too unpredictable and too disruptive to social order. To maintain productivity and safety, especially among the elite, society turned to synthetic injections to regulate feelings.
Each morning, Theo pressed a vial into his neck and watched a smile stretch across his face. He grinned at breakfast and nodded politely at meetings. But inside, it was just hollow. At night, silence settled like fog in his apartment. His mind kept racing but his heart never responded.
He remembered a bird once. It had flown straight into their apartment’s glass balcony. It flapped, wild and confused, then hit the barrier and fell. His mother had calmly disposed of it. He couldn’t have been more than six. But the sound had stuck with him: a thud, then nothing.
“Emotion makes you crash.” He couldn’t remember whether it was his mother who said that or a little voice in his mind.
His dietist mentioned a rumor during their weekly check-ins. Something about a serum that could reset a person’s emotional system.
“It’s unstable,” she said. Her eyes flicked to the security monitor behind him. “A few claimed to feel something raw. Then they passed out. One never woke up.”
She paused. “You’re not curious, are you?”
Theo smiled politely. “Of course not.”
But something in his chest tightened.
After that, the world around him started to feel off.
Every smile froze too long. Laughter sounded looped, like a sound file on repeat. In the news, a building had collapsed. Seven dead. The news anchor’s expression didn’t change.
At home, his parents didn’t talk much. They just took their calm injections and ate in silence.
He tried skipping one of his doses. By noon, someone noticed. “Hey,” a classmate whispered. “Are you okay? You seem off.”
“Just tired,” Theo said.
But everything felt louder. Laughter from across the room felt like a siren. The flickering light above his desk bothered him. He couldn’t stop tapping his pen.
At the end of class, his teacher slipped a note onto his desk.
“Adjust your balance.”
Theo felt like a puppet. Inject, smile, respond, repeat. And that reset serum didn’t sound reckless anymore. It sounded like the only path out.
Late one night, on an anonymous forum, he found a thread about people living “naturally” in the Lower District. No injections. Real emotions. It sounded like fiction. And yet, he couldn’t let it go.
He put on ripped jeans and a plain hoodie and took the transit down. Past the glass towers and polished hallways, into the streets most people like him pretended didn’t exist. The Lower District, where people lived with little access to injections.
The air changed. It smelled like engine smoke and fried starch. Music roared from cracked windows. People shouted, argued, laughed with their whole bodies.
No one moved in sync. The world wasn’t balanced here. It was alive.
As he wandered through, someone shouted behind him.
“Hey, little prince! You lost? Or here for the thrill?”
Theo turned. A guy, maybe a few years older, leaned against a dented bike, smirking.
“What did you call me?”
“Little prince,” the guy said, stepping closer. “You scream Upper District. That shoe’s brighter than my future.”
Theo glanced down at them. “I’m just walking.”
“Sure you are,” the guy said, clearly amused. “I’m Alan. You?”
“Theo.”
Alan squinted at him. “You ever felt anything without a needle?”
Theo blinked. “I don’t know.”
Alan let out a low whistle. “That’s a sad answer. Come on. Let’s fix that.”
He led Theo to a rooftop where a group of people danced around a crackling speaker. Someone tripped, and they all collapsed in a pile of limbs.
Theo stood at the edge, unsure whether to laugh or leave. These people were messy, loud, and free.
He pulled Alan aside. “You used to inject,” Theo said. “I saw the scar behind your ear.”
“Yeah. My mom made me do it when I was twelve. Thought it’d help me get into a better school.”
“So why’d you stop?”
Alan’s smile dropped. “Because it was like living underwater. Everything was dulled. So, I stopped injecting and waited to feel something again. It hurt like hell but at least it was mine.”
Theo didn’t know what to say.
That night, he skipped his scheduled joy injection again. His stomach twisted and his skin felt tight. But he remembered Alan’s face when he laughed. So he went back. Again, and again.
Alan showed him how to fix an old radio, how to make pancakes without scanning a tutorial, how to feel music by pressing your hand to a speaker.
Slowly, something started to shift in Theo. He laughed. Not perfectly. Not cleanly. But honestly.
One evening, Alan led him up to the top of an old building.
“Is this safe?” Theo asked.
“Probably not,” Alan said. “But the view’s good.”
They stepped onto the roof. The city spread out below in chaotic geometry.
The sun was beginning to set, melting gold and orange across the sky.
Theo walked to the edge. “Wow.”
Behind him, Alan didn’t move.
“You’re not coming?”
“I don’t do edges,” Alan muttered, sitting down a few feet back.
“You’re scared of heights?”
“Terrified,” Alan said. “But I like the sky.”
Theo looked down at him. Alan’s arms were wrapped loosely around his knees.
“I thought you weren’t afraid of anything.”
Alan smiled. “Everyone’s scared of something. I just don’t let it stop me from climbing.”
Theo sat down beside him. They watched the sun vanish behind the buildings. It wasn’t quiet. A car alarm blasted in the streets. Someone was yelling about soup. But for a moment, it felt like peace. And Theo wanted to stay in that moment a little longer than he should have.
The next few days blurred. Theo skipped more doses. His sleep came in fragments. He smiled at people and didn’t know why. He felt too much, and then not enough.
One night, he passed by his father’s office after sneaking back from the Lower District. There was a biotech researcher with a small black case, arguing with his father.
“It could work,” the researcher insisted. “A full emotional reset. Neural receptors reignited, synapses rewired. The real thing.”
“It won’t sell,” his father replied flatly. “Real emotions are dangerous. What people want is control. We’re not funding a liability.”
The conversation ended, and the researcher left in frustration. As he slammed the door, a small vial slipped from his case and rolled across the floor. Theo picked it up and held it in his hand. It was warm. It felt like it was humming. Like it was waiting.
He didn’t inject it. Not yet.
He wanted to tell Alan about it first. Maybe show him he was serious about change. Maybe he just wanted Alan to say he was proud.
But when he returned to the Lower District, he found Alan laughing with someone else. The two sat close, heads leaning in, sharing a sandwich between them.
Theo froze as Alan threw his head back in laughter at something the other person had said.
A sharp, unfamiliar sting bloomed in Theo’s chest.
Then another, sharper still.
Something hot twisted under his skin. He didn’t have a word for it. Only that it hurt, and it didn’t stop.
He found Alan later, leaning against a wall outside the radio repair shop.
“You and whoever that was. Looked close.”
Alan narrowed his eyes. “Are you serious?”
“I just thought…” Theo’s voice faltered. “Never mind.”
“No, say it,” Alan said. “You came all this way to sulk?”
“I’m not sulking.”
“Then what are you doing?”
“I don’t know!” Theo snapped. “I didn’t take my dose. Everything’s a mess.”
Alan’s voice lowered. “Theo…”
“You said you wanted me to feel.” Theo’s voice rose. “Well now I do. And it sucks.”
Alan went still for a second. “Did you inject something else?”
Theo looked away.
“Theo.”
“I just needed it to stop. Or start. I don’t even know anymore. I thought maybe if I showed you I was trying, maybe you’d — ”
He stopped.
Alan took a step forward. “Theo, talk to me. What’s going on?”
“I just need to be alone.”
He turned and walked away, fast, before Alan could say anything else.
Theo stumbled home and reached for his usual joy injection, hoping it would press down this aching, unnamed thing.
But something went wrong.
After years of synthetic feeling, suppressed longing, and withdrawal, the injection misfired. The chemicals raged inside him, twisting into confusion, irritability, and desperate jealousy.
He couldn’t breathe. He smashed whatever was in his hand to the floor, shaking.
The serum.
It was the only thing left.
His hands trembled as he uncapped the vial and injected it into his neck.
Suddenly, everything surged.
It started like a spark in his eyes, then rushed through his chest. He gasped, as if surfacing from years underwater. His chest tightened. His breath hitched. His pulse roared in his ears.
It wasn’t synthetic. It wasn’t labeled joy or confidence or calm. It was raw and real.
And for a second, he understood.
This was what they had taken from him. This ache in his chest. It was grief and wonder and terror and hope, all colliding at once.
He was the bird now. Flapping wild, chasing something real. The glass rushed closer, and still he chose to fly.
A sound escaped his throat, half laugh, half sob. His knees gave out. He collapsed to the floor, crying so hard his ribs ached. But it wasn’t sadness. It was everything.
He was feeling. He was alive.
He thought, this is what it meant to be human. And I almost missed it.
Then something shifted. His breath grew shallow. His chest began to slow. His thoughts blurred.
And still, the smallest smile touched his lips.
He had felt it. All of it.
Even if just for a moment.
He died feeling alive.
The news the next morning was brief.
“Theo Caelen, age seventeen, found unresponsive in his Upper District apartment. Cause of death: illegal serum use. Emotional system failure. No revival possible.”
Alan caught the headline flashing on a screen at the market.
He didn’t say a word. He turned and stared at the vending machine, the one that offered color-coded peace to kids in the Lower District for a few dollars.
He pulled back his fist and punched the glass. Then again. And again.
His knuckles split open, blood dripping down his wrist.
Behind him, the screen kept looping.
Theo’s smile, fragile but true, glowed one last time before fading into nothing.
