Hate is the new oil

The commute home is the worst part of my existence. The residue of the time I thought I remembered from when I was a kid, or maybe when I was some other kid travelling with his parents, mum and dad always used to talk to strangers on the train as if they’d been old friends. The residue, which stirs a horrible soup of cognitive dissonance and shame. Nobody talks like old friends anymore and nobody cares that I’m left with this indescribably shaped hole, and the emptiness that blackens my mind and ruins everything, and makes it really hard to not do what everyone else does.

My eyes stop on a middle-aged man, his halo reads he’s 34, married, one child. “Married”. I get a flashback of the campaigns when divorce was made illegal to preserve an undepletable source of hatred – renewable energy, that could be harnessed and collected and refined into pure undiluted electricity. Too frightened to look into his eyes, not because I fear I might find depth or cognition but because deep inside I know that I created him, this pathetic, shivering jelly of a man, slouching on a seat, the perpetual lines of hate-harvesting deeply etched on his face, miles of lines, too long and deep, my parents didn’t have so many lines even in their 80s, but lines get deep and long quickly when you only live 40.

He closes his eyes and dozes off and I know what’s coming, how he’s boiling over in a second, a hate-flashback, and I make silly bets in my head that it’ll be his left foot first, which kicks and spasms as his body is immediately strapped into the seat, and five receptors appear from behind, and like mechanical umbilical cords connect to his five nodes to start harvesting.

I turn my head and feel sick, and I recall that message from earlier, the hollow praise for writing the most efficient hate-trigger of the month, and my award, a holiday voucher. My wife always wanted to go, but not at this cost. And with that thought, she’s back in my mind, occupying every though with her glance that strips my soul naked and I start to despise myself again, and I compare myself to her, which is impossible, she remained a saint when hate became the most valuable commodity and I grew part of the system. It hurts me so bad that I need to force myself to think of the praise from my bosses, people I’ve never met, and people I’m not even sure exist, and I’m suddenly overwhelmed by this strange urge for smugness for the artistically crafted sentences I engineered to maximise the outpouring of unfettered hatred, which is the easiest to mine and the one that has the highest energy-conversion rate.

The man stops spasming now, his eyes move rapidly, and every nanoparticle of his flashback is harvested, he’s being stimulated by the receptors to intensify the emotion, amplified dreams of horror and pain, and froth forming around his mouth, then he goes limp and the receptors and harnesses disappear back into the seat, and despite having seen it thousands of times I still feel uncomfortable sitting down so I stand holding on to a vertical rail and I can feel surveillance eagerly pasting the halo above my head for a sign of emotion.

“Earn 6.50 an hour.” The letters outside the station are accentuated by the blue hue of the hologram which rips into the night, with the sole purpose to create wants and needs and long queues that line up to trade four hours of harvest for a meal and the right to buy another day of hating to survive.

I walk past the queue and can’t force my head away from the large window and the dimmed lights inside, where arrays of men and women stand plugged in, abiding themselves to the harvest and giving all they have as they watch personalised footage of their own private chambers of hell crafted by artist like me reading into the deepest corners of their minds, or maybe their hearts – heartfelt hate is more effective than rational one.

l smile, and I make a mental note to go for the heart next time, and I get aroused by the thought of becoming hate-writer of the month five consecutive times – what will they give me next time? I think of the adulation, a perpetual source of justification to do the worst. I always keep the messages, something to reach back to, to placate my hunger for acceptance, to annihilate that nagging little monster of doubt, like a personal whack-a-mole of shame, slamming doubt every time it pops its ugly head up. All I needed to do was read my message, "congratulations, your writing generated the most hate in the last 7 days" and the approving reaction of the three people, which made it all worthwhile.

The image of my wife looked at me the way my childhood self looked at me, it was a familiar look, which left a bitter taste, but only on certain days, when the wind blew from a particular angle and made me bow in the same direction, seeking least resistance. She was still in her old wheelchair, not the new one I bought with all the tech but with hate-harvesting deactivated. One of the perks of being a writer, we could exempt ourselves from harvesting, maybe to keep our minds fresh, maybe part of another cunning ploy, maybe they realised that hate engineering flew more liberally from a calculating mind, or maybe they were feeding us something else instead. She refused the new chair, and that was as bad as her look and the residue of memories from my parents. I no longer knew if any of those memories were real, I could only feel a sensation which I couldn’t quite define. In my private moments my halo said it was guilt so I tried to hide it as much as I could, but every time I started doing something new it stayed with me, and I wished I was just a simple hater than to have guilt, which felt unbearable especially when radiated from those eyes looking up from the wheelchair.

The new day comes like any other, and that residue immediately descends on my brain to annoy me with memories of days that used to vary and not blend into an amorphous fog of nihil. I watch her lips as they formulate the words of her new poem of love and children, and that wound of my past is ripped open instantaneously but I have to listen because nobody else will, love doesn’t sell and that’s all she can write about.

The streets are busy, and the crowd moves with vicarious direction and purpose, and I slip into inspection mode and watch them, and hope, but see nothing. Nothing unpredictable happens anymore, and I wonder what writers of the future will do, those who grow up in this nothingness, without their past poisoning their oblivion. I'm still standing on the shoulders of those nagging giants of my past, they will have no one to stand on, but maybe hate-engineering will have developed into something autonomous, although it already felt like routine.

The mundanity of the routine lulls me into an elusive sense of security, as if every moment was there to justify my existence, and feed my confirmation bias, and let my ignorance grow beyond the point where one turns blind to the common good and succumbs to the fattening fields of individuality. I no longer care about the inequality, but she does, and I can still hear her words about Zipf’s law of hate, that a few get rich and the rest poor, and the more hate we churn out the further things skew, until it cannot be skewed any further. But has it ever been possible to stop skewing the fact that more and more feed fewer and fewer – will there only be one left at the end? She always had tears in her eyes by the end of her speech.

The old kiosk looks new, and I swipe and connect to download something I don’t already know, and that’s where I spot the photo of a man, younger than me, much younger, and there are flashing letters heralding that he is the new hate-mongerer of the month. The numbers next to his face are winding up faster than they have ever done for me, the bastards, I don’t know what those number had against me.

Now that I am history, I feel something build up inside, and I half-hope that it’s a new story cooking but I’m empty, filled only with hate, and I notice the drone that’s drawn near, sensing my emotion build up, and I close my eyes ready for the inevitable. I feel the receptors, and I let out a long sigh which I hadn’t done since I was last allowed to lay my head in my mother’s lap, and now it is my turn to know what I had always suspected.

The pleasant sensation of succumbing to hatred embraces, and everything looks simpler. The residue of childhood guilt is gone and with it the picture of my wife in my head vanishes, and is replaced by the sharp clarity of realisation that she never existed, it was something I made up, or someone else made up for me, but it doesn’t matter anymore. I no longer need to make an effort and be anyone else than what I am, a source of energy, a rechargeable battery until I cannot be recharged any more. Enslaved but freer than I’ve ever felt, liberated to only worry about how I vegetate rather than all those other pointless things, and I can now see why this is the only way, why so many people trade their worries to become a battery. Everything seems straight, no more doubt, and no more need to hold back hate, because, at the end, hate is a small price to pay for oblivion.