“What’s with the shades?” I ask Tuoz as he walks towards me across the row of still empty seats, his eyes concealed by large, thick sunglasses I’ve never seen him wear before. “It’s not even sunny out,” I add.

Sitting down in the seat beside mine, Tuoz tells me, “Oh, these glasses help me develop my empathic capacity.”

“How?”

“Here, try them on,” he says, taking off the glasses.

He hands them to me. I put them on, first surprised that they don’t darken the scene before me, then stunned that through them Tuoz looks like me. Just his head. His clothes remain unchanged. Continue reading →

“Man, the weirdest thing happened to me this afternoon,” Ruod says as we pull weeds.

“Weird in a good way?” I ask, wiping sweat from my brow with my sleeve.

“Strangely enough, I think so. But tell me what you think,” he says, then launches into his recount of this thing.

“So I was walking down the street by the water treatment facility,” he begins. “When out of nowhere this lady suddenly confronts me. She’s masked with a bandana and wearing something like ski goggles, demanding in a low, assertive voice that I open my mind. ‘Open it, now,’ she was practically hissing at me. Continue reading →

My cousin comes to visit me during her mandatory vacation this season. I pick her up from the local train station after her overnight train ride through the vast expanses of prairies and forests between where we grew up and where I live now. Carrying her luggage, I walk beside her at a pace that matches hers, one noticeably slower than those of the passersby on this bustling urban street; her strides are unhurried by the fatigue of travel and the flow of life where she’s come from, this gait fitting for the cool air and warm sun about us.

“Wow, it’s really spacious here,” she says as we enter my apartment.

“Yeah, you’ll even have your own bedroom while you’re here,” I tell her, leading the way down the short hallway to the music/guest room.

“Fantastic! I thought I’d be sleeping on a sofa,” she says as we enter the room. “Nice, there’s a zonkoriaphone too,” she observes, pointing to the instrument sitting on its stand. “I can practice.”

“Yeah, I had to have mine shipped over. They cost a modest fortune here,” I tell her placing her luggage by the door, then suggest, “So, shall we eat something?”

“Sure. I slept through the breakfast service on the train.”

“Okay, I’ll get something ready.”

I head to the kitchen to prepare a simple brunch, and she goes into the artroom to freshen up.

As I’m slicing bread, she asks from down the hallway, “Why is the poetry pressure so low in this place?” Continue reading →

“So if someone is about to do something destructive or hurtful to you or someone around you or even to his or her self,” I explain, holding up the little spritzing bottle. “You spray this empathy dispersion on that person. In particulate form, the empathy readily permeates the psyche, inducing a change of heart. The person you’ve just sprayed will then readily relate to whoever was going to get hurt and reconsider. Even if some malice has already been inflicted, the spray can still be effective because once sprayed, the wrongdoer will identify with the wronged party, and thus, the wrongdoer will be moved to change his or her behavior.”

Jozine smiles and says jovially, “Great! So when can we put this into production?”

“That’s the problem. You can’t produce empathy. Not with existing technology. You can only cultivate it.” Continue reading →